It was far too close for comfort. But Scots vote to stay in the United Kingdom
By Bagehot | GLASGOW
THE Union flag will still fly. By a margin of 55% to 45%, and on a vast 85% turnout, Scots voted to stick with the United Kingdom on September 18th. Thereby they ensured the continuation of the nation state that shaped the modern world, one which still retains great capacity for good. They also preserved the British identity which over a third of Scots, English, Welsh and Northern Irish consider of primary importance. Had around 200,000 more Scots answered “Yes” to the question “Should Scotland be an independent country”, these precious attributes would have been damaged, or destroyed, and Britain with them.
A rush of support for the Yes Scotland campaign in the fortnight before the vote had made that outcome eminently possible. A poll for YouGov had put the separatists in front; and though the latest polls pointed to a win for the No side, they suggested it would be by little more than the margin of error. As it turned out, the final result, though it would have seemed amazingly close only a month ago, was never in much doubt.
Beginning with tiny Clackmannanshire, a deprived fief of the separatist Scottish National Party (SNP) in central Scotland, which declared for the union at 1.30am, the No vote held up surprisingly strongly in most of Scotland’s 32 councils. The Gaelic-speaking, SNP-voting Western Isles delivered another early snub to the separatists. Dundee—dubbed by the SNP’s leader, and Scotland’s first minister, Alex Salmond, as the “Yes City”—gave him a rare victory, but on a relatively low turnout, of 79%, and by a narrower-than-expected margin. In Angus and Mr Salmond’s own Aberdeenshire, the Yes campaign suffered defeats in the SNP’s heartland. When, at around 4.30am, mighty Glasgow delivered only a modest win for the Yeses, with 53% of the vote, the verdict was clear.
As news of the early results filtered through to the venerable George Square in Glasgow, a gathering-point for the Yes camp’s most vehement supporters (“Our Tahrir Square”, some call it), a crowd wearing kilts and draped with the sky-blue Saltire hushed their chanting, but only a bit. They exuded the loyal defiance of a football crowd in adversity; it helped that the pubs were open all night, an arrangement that had caused local trepidation. “We know what’s happening in Glasgow tonight,” muttered a woman working at a supermarket checkout on the edge of the square, “A wild party or a riot”. It was a reasonable fear: a minority of Yes campaigners have behaved thuggishly at times during a protracted, two-year referendum campaign. Yet there were few incidents of violence. Perhaps few Scots, whether leaning to Yes or No, had any energy left for a fight.
The campaign had been gruelling, especially on the Yes side. Though designed and steered by the SNP, the Yes Scotland banner was carried by many different groups—including Radical Independence, Women for Independence and the Scottish Greens—many of them locally based, and all hugely motivated. By any measure, they outgunned the cross-party Better Together campaign, knocking on more doors, delivering more leaflets, placing more advertisements in newspapers and on billboards. In Dundee, Glasgow and even genteel Edinburgh, blue “Yes” stickers are everywhere; stepping in off a Glasgow street, your correspondent discovered two stuck beneath his shoe.
By contrast, purple “No, thanks” badges, advertising Better Together’s prim slogan, are hard to find. Yet on the day of voting, thousands of unexpected unionist volunteers were reported to have turned out, across Scotland, to help get out their vote.
This points to the likeliest of three possible explanations for the late hardening of the unionist vote: a determined rallying of unionists, startled by the previously unimagined possibility of a Yes triumph and costly bifurcation. They received additional encouragement from the second possible reason, a belated and tempestuous entry into the campaign by Gordon Brown, the former Labour prime minister.
Having previously played little role in Better Together, Mr Brown has emerged over the last fortnight as the charismatic, positive and forceful voice of unionism it had previously lacked. Whether lacerating the Yes side’s wishful, or mendacious, predictions for an independent Scotland’s economic prospects; or glorifying the benefits of scale and co-operation that lie in the current arrangement, often using Biblical rhetoric, Mr Brown gave a glimpse of a brilliance that was seldom evident during his time in 10 Downing Street. His final turn of the campaign, delivered to a packed-out Glaswegian audience, was the speech of his life.
The nationalists, he fulminated, without notes or teleprompter, were promising “an economic minefield where problems could implode at any time, an economic trapdoor down which we go, from which we might never escape.” Have none of it! he cried. Embrace, instead, “the Scotland of Adam Smith and John Smith, the Scotland of civility and compassion, the Scotland of comradeship and community.”
In addition, Mr Brown relayed a panicked response to the late Yes surge from Westminster, a promise of further devolution to the Scottish Parliament, which was the third possible explanation for the strengthened No vote. This also led to his successor, David Cameron, the Conservative prime minister, and his rivals, Ed Miliband, leader of the Labour Party, and Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats, scurrying north, in an emergency mission to promise these powers and protest their love for the Scots. Opinion polls suggest this made little difference to the vote; indeed, Mr Cameron’s hasty dash may even have done damage. Outside a polling booth in Inveraray, an 18th-century new town in Argyll, and seat of the ultra-unionist clan Campbell, one voter suggested she had been dissuaded from voting No because of it. “It made me think there was something funny going on,” she said. “It made me think Cameron was after something.” So thinks the Scottish street of distant, high-handed Westminster, a disdain that Mr Salmond has richly capitalised on.
Mr Cameron has sworn to begin cross-party negotiations on the promised new powers on September 19th, even as hangovers throb through the Yes and No camps. Already, all three party leaders have pledged to increase Scotland’s powers to raise income and other taxes, and it is hard to see how they could renege on this. That would be the death of their parties in Scotland. It would also turn the current clamour for independence into a deafening roar. Yet the outcome of the cross-party talks are unlikely to be so swiftly or easily deliverable as they made out, in their pledge to Scottish voters—not least because of the demands for new English powers, in Westminster and the regions, that it has elicited back home.
So the negotiations will be fraught; and new constitutional arrangements may not emerge, as Mr Cameron and the rest have promised, ahead of the next general election, due in nine months. But emerge they must, because Britain depends on it. A million Scots have just voted to quit the union, even in the knowledge that this would probably make them poorer. Only a strong turnout by Scottish pensioners—the only age-group thought likely to have voted mainly for the union—foiled them. This, on a night of huge relief for most Britons, is truly shocking. It means the British nation state has survived; yet it remains on life support.
