Nigel Farage was in Glasgow yesterday, about as welcome a sight for no campaigners as... the 10,000 members of the Grand Orange Lodge of Scotland, who are due to march in Edinburgh today. If you’d asked Alex Salmond to name the image of the United Kingdom he’d most like to stick in the minds of wavering Scottish voters in the final days before Thursday’s independence vote, he might have named either Ukip or the Orangemen. He’d surely not have pushed his luck by suggesting both — within 24 hours of each other.
But while the loyalist parade will be steeped in history and the past — especially as the marchers will now be remembering one of Orangeism’s giants, Ian Paisley — the Ukip event is a harbinger of the future. For whatever the result in Scotland, the referendum there offers a foretaste of the ballot that could be coming to whatever remains of the United Kingdom in 2017: the Tories’ promised plebiscite asking whether we stay in or get out of the European Union.
The connection between these two events is already intriguing. If Scotland votes yes, it’s possible that Scotland will be knocking on Brussels’ door, asking to come in, just as the rump UK is heading out. An independent Scotland could rest its application on having been part of a state already in the EU, only for that state to void its claim by leaving.
Maybe such speculation is premature. But even without knowing the result, the Scottish referendum has already changed the landscape for any EU vote in 2017. The rule book that might have applied has just been shredded.
For decades it’s been assumed that cross-party consensus is an asset. Look at 1975, the first and last time Britons were balloted on membership of what was then the Common Market. The political establishment closed ranks, calling on the country to say yes to Europe. True, Labour was divided, but the Conservatives, Liberals and a good chunk of Labour’s front bench were pro-Europe, along with the press and big business. No was left to figures easily cast as mavericks: Enoch Powell on the right, Tony Benn on the left. They were crushed by more than two to one.
In 2017 there may be an attempt to forge a similarly united front. The Tory right will be noisy, as will the papers, but the assumption is that David Cameron would — after talks billed as a successful renegotiation of Britain’s EU membership — lead a campaign to stay in. Joining him would be Labour and the Lib Dems and the titans of finance and industry. That would once have seemed an unassailable combination. Until Scotland.
Now such an alliance seems as much liability as asset. Indeed “liability” is the word one senior Labour figure uses to describe Cameron, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg campaigning in unison this week in Scotland. “The establishment ganging up together has been a gift for Salmond,” he admits. As it would be for Farage in 2017.
Forty years ago, when deference was not yet dead and the governing classes had not yet discredited themselves through, among other things, an economic crash, an expenses scandal and a despised war, the mere fact of consensus was persuasive. If all these wise heads agree, ran the thinking, then this must be in the national interest. Now such unanimity, in the hands of a Salmond or Farage, is evidence of the very opposite: “It’s a stitch-up, if not a conspiracy, by the Westminster establishment, who have more in common with each other than they do with you.” To be an outsider in 1975, a Benn or a Powell, made you unreliable and eccentric. Now it makes you a fearless truth-teller, uniquely deserving of trust.
And cross-party cooperation — which doubtless seemed such a good idea when Better Together was formed — will not be the only technique of the past that could backfire. Another, currently tested to destruction in Scotland, is the business intervention.
The logic here is simple: politicians may be dismissed as liars, but bankers and grocers will surely be listened to. This week they have made their move, threatening to relocate to London or increase prices if Scotland breaks away. Some polling suggests that might be working, giving a boost for no. But if yes wins on Thursday, that plank of the 2017 strategy will have to be rethought, if not thrown out. It will no longer be safe to assume that a stern warning of lost jobs from Nissan or Honda will be enough to scare voters to stay in the EU.
There will be a thriving cottage industry in similar lessons learnt from Scotland, rendered applicable to a Brexit vote. Some will be simple. Do whatever it takes to word the question in your favour: “Should Scotland be an independent country?” was always going be tough to oppose. (“Should Scotland remain in the United Kingdom?” would have been easier.) Try to be the campaign for yes rather than no.
Avoid being the voice of gloom and pessimism, prophesying the disasters that will befall the country if it votes to break away. Somehow craft a language that goes beyond cold-blooded accountancy and speak to the heart as well as the head. Do not let yourself become Alistair Darling to Farage’s Salmond, trying to fight emotion with reason. That’s a fight you will never win.
If no prevails, some will draw the opposite conclusion. Rick Nye, managing director of the pollsters Populus, believes referendums of this kind remain “transactional” affairs, focused fundamentally not on abstractions such as identity but tangible self-interest: jobs, pensions, taxes. His starting point is that most Britons would like to leave the EU, just as most Scots would like to be independent — so long as there was no risk. So the task for opponents is to show what would be lost and what would be risked. If that requires balance sheets rather than poems, so be it.
Besides, he adds, there is hardly an emotional case to be made for the EU. “The euro is not the pound; the common agricultural policy is not the NHS; Jean Claude Juncker is not Prince William.” For Nye, even if 2014 has touched on matters of identity, that will be much less true of 2017.
I’m not so sure. Salmond has shown the power of blaming a faraway “other” for a society’s problems — Westminster for him, Brussels for Farage. He has demonstrated that in an age when other allegiances have faded, national pride can fill the void. We will discover just how strong those sentiments are this week. But if we think they are confined to Scotland, we could not be more wrong.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
