Far from being delighted with the prospect of independence, it seems the majority of Scots remain unpersuaded that it really offers them a better deal
It’s not going to plan. With 15 months to go before the referendum, the Yes Scotland campaign had hoped that, by now, Scots would be embracing independence – that Scots voters would be dismissing the unionist scare stories about losing jobs, EU membership, the pound and even giant pandas in Edinburgh zoo if they vote for independence. But it isn’t happening. Week in, week out, the Scottish press is filled with warnings about pensions, benefits, immigration and debt levels in an independent Scotland.
The Scottish Government dismisses it all as the gurning of the unionist press, and Alex Salmond says he no longer bothers to read papers like the Scotsman because he believes they are biased. But media coverage is only going to get worse from the point of view of the Yes campaign. This is because the UK press has hardly begun to engage with the issue. Once militantly unionist papers like the UK Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph get started in earnest, the Nationalists are in for a torrid time.
The problem is not bias as such, although that clearly exists, but the susceptibility of Scots to negative stories about independence. Many have yet to be convinced that they need to leave the UK in order to improve Scotland’s economic prospects. There are too many imponderables, uncertainties, unknown unknowns. Independence is a very novel concept for most Scots, as I was reminded while researching and writing my book, Road to Referendum, which STV presented on June 4, 11 and 18.
Scotland is not like Ireland, where there was a century of political nationalism before the Easter Rising of 1916 and the subsequent civil war that led to Ireland’s departure from the UK.
Not only was political nationalism absent from Scotland, the Scots were enthusiastic British nationalists until very recently. In the 19th century, Scots regarded themselves as junior partners in the British Empire. They fought Britain’s wars, kept the books, ran the colonial administrations and evangelised the natives. Scots’ sense of national identity did not diminish after the union with England; it continued in a different form. Paradoxically, being a Scottish patriot became a part of being British.
This commitment to the Union reached its zenith after the Second World War. The only party that has ever won a majority of seats and votes in Scotland was the Scottish Unionist Party in 1955. Even under the rule of Margaret Thatcher and her poll tax in the 1980s, Scots expressed their dissent not by voting SNP, but by voting Labour in huge numbers. It was Labour that initially benefited from the creation of the Scottish Parliament in 1999.
The Nationalists were going backwards, electorally, as recently as the 2003 Scottish parliamentary elections, and it was only the return of Alex Salmond in 2004 from self-imposed exile in Westminster that led to the 2007 breakthrough. The SNP landslide in 2011 wasn’t a vote for independence as such, but a reaction against Labour’s poor performance in Holyrood. So, it is hardly surprising that the Scots have difficulty coming to terms with the idea of independence – they’ve not had to think about it until very recently.
This doesn’t mean that the Yes campaign has lost the referendum. But it does help explain why the Nationalists are having such an uphill struggle. This is not Czechoslovakia in 1993, or even Catalonia today, where passionate nationalists take to the streets in huge demonstrations against rule from Madrid. Scots want a better deal, but not at the expense of a messy divorce.
The Yes campaign is going to have to refashion its message if it wants to persuade a doubtful Scotland that theirs is the right road.
Iain Macwhirter is political commentator on the Sunday Herald. His book Road to Referendum is published by Cargo in conjunction with STV. This column was first published in the July/AUgust issue of Public Finance magazine
