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 18th. 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.
