With
little over a month to go until the referendum, the No campaign is buoyant.
Alex Salmond’s unexpectedly weak performance against Alistair Darling in the
first televised debate has convinced unionists they are winning the argument as
well as the vote. The polls are consolidating in favour of the Union. The
currency issue is eating away at the SNP’s economic credibility. The Yes
activists I speak to are uncharacteristically downbeat as they begin to accept,
some of them for the first time in 24 months, that they might actually lose.
Amidst
the gloom, nationalists are telling themselves comforting stories. One is that
polling companies haven’t picked-up what’s happening "on the ground";
that the network of Yes groups in poor neighbourhoods will deliver a burst of
working class enthusiasm strong enough to propel independence over the line on
referendum day. Another is that the SNP has been in this situation before –
three years ago, as the last Holyrood election approached – and will turn
things around now as it did then.
We
won’t find out how credible the first story is until the vote itself, but the
second one just doesn’t stack-up. "The difference between 2011 and
2014", one senior Better Together figure told me recently, "is that
in 2011 [Scottish Labour] knew the fundamentals, like leadership and the
economy, weren’t on its side. This time we know they are." This is surely
right. At the end of June, 49 per cent of Scots said independence would make
them worse off, compared to just 27 per cent who said it would make them better
off. It would be difficult for any party to win an election battling against
these sorts of numbers, let alone a referendum on something as far-reaching as
national sovereignty.
So
where did it all go wrong for the Yes campaign, which only a few weeks ago was
fizzing with confidence? The left claims Yes Scotland and the SNP have spent
too much time trying to persuade voters that independence will be achieved
seamlessly, with little or no disruption to Scotland’s economy or its
institutions, when it should have been emphasising Scotland’s bleak prospects
as part of an austerity-bound UK. Had the SNP made September 18 a referendum on
the current state of Britain, rather than the future state of Scotland, Yes
support would be higher than it is now, they argue.
It’s
a legitimate point. The weakest feature of the SNP’s independence prospectus –
its plan for a post-UK sterlingzone – is also the centrepiece of the party’s
"continuity strategy" – the various triangulating gestures the SNP
leadership has made over recent years to reassure undecided voters that radical
constitutional change needn’t entail radical political change. But the public
knows, intuitively, that this isn’t true. You can’t sell a grand political
vision like self-determination with a series of (supposedly) pragmatic
compromises. Why bother with all the upheaval – and, for some, the trauma – of
creating a new state if it’s going to look just like the old one?
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