Assumptions We Make About No Voters

There are assumptions that some people in the pro-independence movement are making which I think will stall the movement’s progress unless they are more closely examined.  People are projecting onto those who voted No their own motivations, but clearly No voters didn’t share all the motivations of Yes voters, or they’d have voted Yes.

If the pro-independence movement gets the motivations of No voters wrong, and keeps trying to push buttons that actually don’t work, then the achievements of the referendum will never be improved upon.

The assumptions 

First, pro-independence people assume that many No voters would have voted Yes had they only known that the No camp weren’t to be trusted on more devo powers.  Second, it is assumed that No voters are kicking themselves now that they see the NHS, for example, was not Better Together. 

How do we know? These are assumptions stemming from a pro-independence mind-set.

The Vow

I was recently speaking to some friends who had voted No, and they were quite clear that they knew the last minute devolution promises weren’t to be trusted.  That Vow played no part in their decision to vote No; they were going to vote No anyway.  For them, more devo was neither here nor there: they wanted the UK to stay united. 

Until there is better research done on people’s reasons for voting No, we can’t know how many of them are simply Unionists who want Britain to stay whole.  Why assume they were in fact duped potential independence supporters?  Why not face up to the possibility that many – perhaps all – of the 55% who voted No were simply Unionists?

The answer of course is that pro-independence supporters don’t want to believe that. It’s easier to believe that at least a proportion of that 55% were hoodwinked into casting their No votes – perhaps even enough to have given Yes a majority.

There has, after all, been a majority against independence for as long as polls have been taken on the issue, going back decades.  

Austerity, the NHS, the Welfare State

The second assumption is a little harder to unpack.  It is allied to the first in the minds of pro-independence supporters, but what about in the minds of No voters?  Does it follow that if people had been even mildly convinced that the NHS was safer with independence they’d have voted Yes?  I had assumed so, but I underestimated the weight given by many to identity because for me there is no identity reason at stake. My identity is not dependent on where a government sits. But I have talked to people who said my reasons for voting Yes were flippant and facile reasons for breaking a 300-year Union.  For me, that’s nonsense – the instrumental trumps such emotional, irrational nationalism every day.  The chance to get rid of Trident vastly outweighs attachment to the idea of government sitting in one city and not another, notions of Britishness that necessitate rule by a particular parliament, and 300 years of things having been done that way. 

And yes, that would work the other way too.  Were Scotland independent, I wouldn’t hesitate to dump that independence if I believed it meant getting rid of Trident and saving the NHS. In order to truly understand the No vote, pro-independence people need to pose themselves that thought experiment – would that apply to you, too?  Would you vote to relinquish Scottish independence if you thought there’d be instrumental benefits?  Because if you answer No to that, then perhaps you have just understood the No vote on September 18^th.   How strong do the reasons for ditching your identity need to be?

Not convinced

No voters just weren’t convinced that voting Yes was best for the economy, for the NHS, or as a way to tackle austerity.  But that doesn’t necessarily mean they thought staying in the UK was bulwark against austerity.  Nor does it follow that they were just Tories and were voting for austerity.  Perhaps they hate austerity and don’t believe Westminster’s course can be altered, but neither did they think independence was a viable alternative; perhaps for them it was an additional risk, one that would be added to the problems of austerity rather than mitigating them, and therefore not a risk worth taking.  And maybe many were just Unionists anyway, and had an emotional attachment to Britain staying whole which outweighed hypothetical instrumental benefits, benefits they were neither disposed to believe, nor thought warranted breaking up the Union.  And despite the slow death of the NHS in England, most No voters are still not convinced independence would have helped.

Change You Won't Notice

I think one of the problems we had was the SNP’s strategy of change without change.  The question that that obviously begs is: if there will be no real change, why bother?

Perhaps the best example of that is the currency issue.  For most of the campaign the SNP tied itself in knots over that, and those of us outside the SNP had the difficulty of explaining a policy we didn’t support.  For me it seems obvious that to make a difference, an independent Scotland needs an independent currency and its own central bank, albeit one without interest rate setting powers – that function must be retained by government. We wanted to make a difference, didn’t we?

Tipping Point

We were asking people to overcome an emotional attachment to Britain for something that we were saying wouldn’t change that much; change you won’t notice. Despite that strong attachment to the UK - which we underestimated - there is still going to be a tipping point where that emotional attachment is outweighed by compelling instrumental reasons to break away.  In the event, it seems that many decided what was on offer wasn’t worth the trouble.  Ironically, seeking to portray the change as minimal was in fact a high risk strategy.  It ran the risk of people not seeing the point, and in the event, not enough did.