The perils of pessimism

AFTER the speeches were done, at a recent rally in Calderglen High School for “Better Together”—the cross-party campaign to keep Scotland British—there was time for questions. They were mostly the same. The inquisitors, typically retired and articulate, asked the assembled politicians—including a Conservative cabinet minister and a serving and former Labour MP—to make a “positive case” for keeping the 307-year-old union intact. “Why are we better together?” said one.

This was awkward. It was bad enough that the venue, in East Kilbride, on the southern edge of Glasgow, was cavernous and the audience small. It was worse that this mismatch had been occasioned by a sudden switch from a nearby community centre, after reports that nationalist hoodlums—campaigning to sunder the union at Scotland’s independence referendum in September—were planning to disrupt it. But what was most dismal, for Bagehot and the other assembled unionists, was the lack of a good answer to the question.

Justine Greening, the well-regarded international development secretary, from Sheffield and Westminster, appeared to have given it little thought. Visibly bothered by her failure to offer a bold defence of Britain as we know it, she roused herself, as the meeting was closing, for a last hurrah: “I don’t know why it works, like a wine (I don’t know, can you bottle it?), but somehow it does.” With that, she was up and off to the airport, trailed by brief applause.

It is Better Together that may, just possibly, be in danger of bottling it. Because the long-standing majority opposed to Scottish independence has started to shrink. Strip away the “Don’t knows” and the median polling is 56% in favour of the union and 44% against. That is still a solid-looking cushion for Britain. It is also true, as Better Together’s leaders note, that the Yes camp had been predicted to make gains around now, with many working-class Glaswegians among the undecided. So Britain is not done yet. All the same, the vote is starting to look uncomfortably close.

That need be no bad thing—unionist leaders have long recognised the danger of complacency. “Everybody needs to know that this is a serious contest, and one which it is not impossible that the nationalists could win,” says the Liberal-Democrat Scottish secretary, Alistair Carmichael. The question is whether Better Together can now raise its game, as it must, in particular by providing the more positive message demanded in East Kilbride.

Ever since it was formed, under the preternaturally unexcitable leadership of Alistair Darling, a former Labour chancellor of the exchequer, Better Together has been criticised for being too negative. Its leaders suggest this is because of a misunderstanding of their task. While noting the historical, cultural and other advantages of the union, the unionists’ urgent need is to expose the nationalist vision for Scotland as a bonny pipe-dream. In effect a promise of Scandinavian-style public services and American levels of taxation, it relies on numerous absurd assumptions—including earning twice as much from North Sea oil as seems likely and retaining whichever aspects of British nationhood, including sterling, the state pension and the BBC, would be convenient.

Mindful of Scots’ aversion to hectoring from Westminster, Mr Darling tends to cast grave doubt on such rosy predictions rather than demolish them. But in February the unionist campaign underwent a tonal shift when George Osborne, the Tory chancellor, and his Labour and Lib Dem counterparts, Ed Balls and Danny Alexander, all insisted that an independent Scotland must kiss goodbye to the pound. With reference to the troubles in the euro zone, their arguments against a currency union were sufficiently clear, if not incontrovertible, to cast doubt on one of the nationalists’ fundamental claims. Yet the onslaught, instead of clinching the unionist case, appears to have got right up Scottish noses—even to the extent of hardening the Yes vote.

Polling suggests that almost half of Scots did not believe Mr Osborne and his peers. That is not only because they hate Tories, though many do. It is also because the unionists’ relentlessly gloomy predictions for an independent Scotland are starting to strain credulity. Flashes of hyperbole do not help—as this week when Lord Robertson, a former Labour defence secretary, called the prospect of secession “cataclysmic”. Moreover, even if Scots are convinced by the unionists’ grim harping on their future indebtedness, welfare-dependence and scarce oil, suggests John Curtice of Strathclyde University, there is a risk they will consider this so demoralising as to vote for independence anyway. It could hardly, they might reflect, be much worse.

Enough dreariness already

Mr Darling needs to start rationalising the gloom a little. That does not mean easing up on the nationalists and their fantasies, which must be exposed. Nor, as Tory MPs want, should he ramp up the emotional case for the union—for that is ground on which Alex Salmond, the nationalists’ charismatic leader, cannot lose. Yet the unionists need one or two solid proposals to set against his wild promises. At the least, Better Together’s members should agree the broad outlines of the future devolution that most Scots want. It should not be too difficult. All the parties are committed to this in principle and there is little difference between the proposals already aired by Labour and the Lib Dems.

The danger is that this search for common ground leads to feuding. There are already signs of it. In Westminster, Tory MPs are busy sniping at Mr Darling’s dour leadership of the campaign; meanwhile Labour, which holds 40 of Scotland’s 59 constituencies, seems reluctant to throw its full weight behind it. Accompanying a Labour MP through his tough north Glasgow constituency, your columnist heard him make no mention of Better Together. This is not good enough. To be sure of victory, the unionist campaign must fulfil the promise of its name.