A PROMISED increase in the allowance paid to carers in an independent Scotland will help some of the "hardest working people in society", Holyrood's public health minister said.
Michael Matheson spoke out as a new group, Carers for Yes, was launched in the run-up to the September 18 referendum.
The SNP has already pledged to increase the carers' allowance if Scotland votes to leave the UK, vowing to bring it up to at least the same level as jobseeker's allowance.
That could see carers receive £575 a year more in financial support, according to the Scottish Government.
A total of 120 carers signed a declaration backing independence and condemning the "daily attacks from a Westminster system which seems content to undermine people with disabilities".
They hit out at the reduction in benefits and the system of work capability assessments and added: "We want to play a full part in developing a new social security system which protects our families and those we care for; a system which values and pays carers and enables them to take part in the labour market or prepare for work in the future."
Mr Matheson said: "Scotland's carers do a fantastic job and deserve the right support. With a Yes vote, future Scottish Government's will be able to ensure carers are no longer seen as second class by a Westminster welfare system that doesn't recognise their hard work."
Former nurse Colleen Kelly, from Mintlaw, Aberdeenshire, who had to give up work to care for her son, said: "I am voting Yes because our own public healthcare system is significantly better than in other parts of the UK and independence is the best way to protect that."
But a spokesman for the pro-UK Better Together campaign said: "Those with the least would lose the most with independence. The impartial experts at the Institute for Fiscal Studies have said that a separate Scotland would face £6 billion worth of extra public spending cuts. These extra cuts would hit the most vulnerable people in Scotland."
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