How Salmond came top in Scotland’s competitive fear-mongering

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/10/salmond-fear-mongering-pound-advantage-romance

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“Maybe it would be a mistake,” the tweed-jacketed man in the Glasgow bookshop told me as he surveyed the shelves dedicated to referendum literature. “But at least it would be our mistake.” I have heard more fervent statements of intent to vote yes next week but none that so deftly probes the limitations of the unionist campaign.

The spectre of the big mistake – the irreversible, job-shedding, wealth-shrinking bad call – has been central to the no campaign. The logic was simple: Scots with a strong emotional attachment to Britain were in the bag, and undecideds would not be won over by abstract appeals to cross-border kinship. Theirs would be a decision based on economic self-interest. They needed convincing that independence was a dangerous gamble with Scotland’s prosperity, and Alex Salmond could easily depicted as a chancer. As one Better Together strategist put it to me when sketching the assault on the credibility of his opponents: “It may not be pretty, but it works.” And it did work for a while. Then it stopped working.

The Better Together team was confident at the start of the summer that the bulk of pollsters’ “don’t knows” were ready to break for no. Their research found evidence of “shy no” voices in the undecided crowd, often expressed as resentment at being made to choose at all, or as dismay at the way new, hostile borders were being drawn – not between Scotland and England but between friends, across pub tables and families.

Above all, Better Together had been counting on the perils of independence to close the deal with doubters, and discharged its ammunition accordingly. What about the currency? The national debt? Pensions? EU membership? Nato? Did we mention the currency? But the no side failed to anticipate the potency of a counter-spectre conjured by the yes camp. This was the apparent peril of being shackled to England and the Conservatives in perpetuity; the risk to the NHS and the welfare state of David Cameron’s union.

The rebuttal that devolution already mitigates those dangers has not been getting much traction. In the game of competitive fear-mongering, the yes campaign is winning when it creates a feeling of equivalent risk everywhere, so that voters are made dizzy with numbers, their eyes glazing over at another data-laden argument about economics and institutions. Then the advantage goes to the campaign with romance on its side. Because if there are mistakes to be made either way, it feels right to take the path of indigenously Scottish mistakes.

That proposition only resonates because Better Together has failed to make this a campaign about two national visions – both patriotic, both equally Scottish, but one cut off from the UK and the other connected. Instead, Salmond has been free to insert his preferred subtext to the referendum, so to many Scots the ballot paper will now ask: “Who owns the future – us or them?”

Unsurprisingly, the polls have narrowed, striking unique terror into Labour hearts. On a practical level it is difficult for Ed Miliband to form a parliamentary majority without Scottish MPs. But there is a deeper dismay at being rejected by parts of the Scottish electorate that could once be relied upon to show tribal allegiance to Labour. It is disorienting for a party that has woven an electoral security blanket from regional hatreds of Tories to find itself cast as part of a Conservative-branded establishment, in league with the enemy.

The Tories don’t like being the bogeyman in Scotland but are used to it. They have also had more exposure to implacable anti-Westminster feeling because, in its English manifestation as Ukip, it has been ripping their party apart. Nigel Farage and Salmond are unalike in many respects, but they share the nationalist’s trick of fashioning every problem into an alien yoke, whether imposed by Brussels or England, that can be cast off in a single bound.

The potency of this type of politics lies in advocating leaps of faith. No one can say for sure that Britain would be worse off outside the EU, and no one can say for sure that Scotland would be poorer independent, because it hasn’t been tried. But if the people peddling gloom are the same politicians who brought you the MPs’ expenses scandal, the financial crisis and endless budget austerity, what have you to lose?

Rather a lot is the truthful answer, since turbulent global economic waters are more dangerous for a small nation than for one that unites with its neighbours. But that is the politics of caution, of cost-benefit analysis and evidence-waving enumeration of risk. Such considerations bounce off converts to the politics of place, identity, belonging and emancipation: power for us; freedom from them.

Scotland may well yet decide to stick with the union. But even a rejection of full independence will leave Britain fractured. With the no camp desperately offering more generous devolution terms – “the best of both worlds,” they call it – the status quo isn’t even on the ballot paper. The campaign has revealed the same language barrier between Westminster and voters that has been in evidence in every council election, by-election and European election this parliament. The proposition that business should carry on as usual has found very few takers in Scotland. No one should be surprised if in next year’s general election it turns out the rest of the UK feels much the same.

Twitter: @RafaelBehr