THE key to achieving Scottish independence will be to "reach out to a wider public" and not to "stick by traditional nationalism", former First Minister Henry McLeish has said.

Speaking on the Alex Salmond show, McLeish said he does not believe "you can get to a Yes vote" by relying on "nationality issues".

READ MORE: Henry McLeish – Scotland has changed forever and will not return to the days when it was just another part of Britain

The Labour grandee believes there will be a debate "over the next few months or few years" about the way the UK is governed, "about our politics and our democracy".

Salmond pointed out that the former First Minister is symapthetic to the independence cause and McLeish said: "When you look at those [governance] issues, you may want to come to a different conclusion about Scotland... than you did before".

READ MORE: McLeish says Scottish Labour should back First Minister over Tory ‘power grab’

McLeish helped steer the Scotland Act, which re-established the Scottish Parliament, through the House of Commons when he was devolution minister in the 1990s.

He said some of the great points in Scottish politics have been free tuition fees, banning smoking in public places and and minimum alcohol unit pricing, policies he said "would never have happened at Westminster" because it "hasn't moved on much".

"Lots of Scots are telling me that they are looking at Westminster and they can't believe that this can carry on into the future. So I think there's a reappraisal in Scotland... we're part of a pantomime that just cannot continue", he said.

"To suggest that the conservative party is now doing well is just a bit of a joke", he continued, "I think things will change that people will look beyond Brexit now and [wonder whether] they want to be in a UK where we have such turmoil... and we're about to be run by people like Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson."

Rees-Mogg took his nanny on the campaign trail in Fife in 1997 – and had to be saved from being beaten up by McLeish. Asked whether that made him "responsible for Brexit", McLeish joked that he was "responsible for Rees-Mogg in his current form".

However, McLeish also had a more serious commentary on Brexit, describing it as "an act of real stupidity" and said that the UK will "suffer and pay" for it.

"The way the government is going we're going to create a lesser United Kingdom one way or another. We've been humiliated abroad, we're diminishing Britain to Brits in the country so it's a sad, sad situation."

McLeish was at the top of Scottish politics at the time of the Maastricht debate and resigned over the expenses scandal, but on the current state of Scottish politics, he said: "I have never seen in my political life such – I'll pick my words carefully – such a farce, such a continuing fiasco.

"If the conservative party folds tomorrow I won't be too upset. If Britain folds tomorrow as a country that's respected in the world, as a country that has now started to dismantle itself, that worries me enormously.

"Somebody needs to put Britain first."

But he said he does not believe the Labour party is the answer to the current state of the UK and added "this is why it's a crisis".

"I believe passionately that Britain should remain in the EU... It's a great edifice... [that] we should be celebrating but instead, the [Labour] party has decided to look at the Brexit vote and be concerned about upsetting people when the nation is crying out for leadership," he said.