SCOTLAND AND BRITAIN IN THE BALANCE

YOU DON’T win because you don’t
care enough.” The Ukrainian chess
player’s pithy observation in Allan
Massie’s fine novel A Question of
Loyalties resonates today where the
continent’s extremes meet, from the eastern
borderlands to the far northwest.
The violent political coercion in Ukraine is
in deep contrast to the peaceful, democratic
nature of the process under way in Scotland,
where Scots will vote on their country’s
independence on 18 September and therefore
decide also the destiny of the United Kingdom
state. Yet if the principles at stake in each
case – sovereignty, law, citizenship, belonging
– are similar, so too is the fact that those
seeking to change the status quo seem driven
by a far greater inner conviction than their
adversaries. (And this is true of both their
immediate adversaries and, in Brussels and
London, their more remote ones.)
Scotland’s chief twentieth-century poet and
controversialist Hugh MacDiarmid (1892–
1978) is more often quoted by scandalised
anti-nationalists these days, but his lines, “The
present’s theirs, but a’ the past and future’s
oors,” well conveys the confident ownership
of the independence argument by the “yes”
side, led by the Scottish National Party, or
SNP, government in Edinburgh.
Greatly aided by an ultra-committed
grassroots campaign (whose architect, Stephen
Noon, describes its mantra as “conversion
through conversation”), the “yes” side is
managing an extraordinary feat. It is making
“no” advocates resemble squatters in their
own land, unable to offer a coherent vision of
Scotland’s future as a nation in its own right.
The latter are aware of the danger; as Alistair
Carmichael, the Scottish secretary in London’s
coalition government (and a Liberal
Democrat), writes in the Scotsman on 16 May,
“[in] this crucial debate on the future of our
nation, we cannot allow the feeling to grow
that to be on the other side of the argument
from the SNP is somehow to be less Scottish.”
True, nothing is predestined in post-Calvinist
Scotland. And a feature of this long campaign
– launched in the early weeks of 2012 and
thus now well into its third year – is that the
anti-independence, or unionist, side has
enjoyed a consistent , if lately diminishing,
polling lead. It remains the favourite to win.
But atmosphere and momentum matter, both
in themselves and because they reflect what
both camps perceive to be happening on the
ground. With the winning post lying just
beyond a packed season of symbolic national
jousts – the Bannockburn battle anniversary,
its Armed Forces Day rival, the
Commonwealth Games, the Great War
commemoration – the youthful Yes Scotland
steed looks more sprightly than the Better
Together pantomime horse.
HE EARLY weeks of 2014 made the
contrast more marked, in two ways.
First, they provided fresh and vivid
examples of the political misjudgement
that has long gripped the wider case for
unionism in Scotland. A series of speeches by
the UK establishment’s economic A-team –
prime minister David Cameron, chancellor
George Osborne, Bank of England governor
Mark Carney – questioned the case made in
the Scottish government’s vast independence
prospectus : namely, that a post-UK Scotland
could expect to continue in a currency union
with the rUK (“residual” or “rest of” the UK).
The tone of the interventions varied according
to the persona and his position. Cameron’s
more placatory address (delivered at the site
of the London Olympics) was a don’t-forget-
Emeli-Sandé celebration of the United
Kingdom’s “intricate tapestry,” Carney’s a
nuanced outline of the concessions of
sovereignty that a currency union would
require (using the eurozone’s troubles as a
subtle code). Osborne alone, the cold strategist
to Cameron’s sunny-side-up act, exuded
genuine menace.
Such warnings were reinforced by statements
from several high-profile companies with
head offices or extensive interests in Scotland.
For them, the prospect of independence
raised potential risks and costs that in
principle might influence investment or
location decisions. The Confederation of
British Industry, or CBI, attempted to register
as a “no” supporter with the electoral
commission that governs the referendum
process; this would allow it to spend money on
advertising its views. In addition, UK
ministers from several government
departments continued to insist or imply that
matters in their field of competence – defence
and its contracts, pensions and their
guarantees, energy and its subsidies, security
and its intelligence sharing, the European
Union and its conditions of membership –
would turn out badly for Scotland if the
country voted “yes.”
Taken together – especially by a Scottish
public acutely sensitised to real or perceived
slights from a southerly direction, but even by
the non-aligned or mildly independence-
sceptic – the heavyweight barrage looked and
sounded intimidatory. An argument could be
had on equal terms, was the dominant feeling;
if the empire was striking back, though –
whether consciously or because it couldn’t
help itself – then it would be rebutted. The
Scots, amid the flurry, realised that the
political terms of trade between themselves
and London had moved, if not actually
reversed.
Indeed, the impact on the polls was the
opposite of what London’s schedulers
intended, for the ensuing weeks saw a
perceptible rise in “yes” responses – albeit by
different measures and without clarifying
voters’ many underlying uncertainties.
Moreover, fourteen leading Scottish
institutions, among them universities and
broadcasters, resigned from the CBI in protest
at its implied political stance. And in a
stirring editorial, Glasgow’s Sunday Herald –
whose weekday stablemate is considered,
alongside Edinburgh’s Scotsman , Scotland’s
only national broadsheet – “came out” for
independence (the phrase from the doomed
Jacobite rising of 1745 seems oddly, perhaps
ominously, apposite):
We believe that now is the time to roll up our
sleeves and put our backs into creating the
kind of society in which all Scots have a stake.
Independence, this newspaper asserts, will put
us in charge of our destiny. That being the
case, Scots will have no one to blame for their
failings, no one to condemn for perceived
wrongs. We will, for the first time in three
centuries, be responsible for our decisions,
for better or worse… What is offered is the
chance to alter course, to travel roads less
taken, to define a destiny… The prize is a
better country. It is, truly, as simple as that.
It’s too early to say that the first months of
2014 will prove a turning-point in the entire
campaign (a case Iain Macwhirter, the
Herald’s political columnist, argues with
characteristic verve). These developments do,
though, signal the exhaustion of the rhetoric
of command as a tool of intra-British
statecraft. The Scots, albeit helped by an
ingenious filtering of the top-dog aspects of
their past, have gone way beyond that. But all
is fair in love, war and Scottish politics. The
crucial question now is whether Better
Together has anything more convincing in its
locker.