Federalism, Scotland and Gordon Brown

There are now two pro-union campaigns being conducted in Scotland and they seem to be hostile to one another. The thrust of the main "Better Together" campaign for the closing stretch is emerging. The best hope they have is to maintain the sizable gender gap in favor of the union. The analysis seems to be that women in Scotland are more averse to the risk involved in independence and dislike the conflict involved in the debate. To that end there will continue to be a series of stories about nationalists as thugs, the assertion that everyone who is pro-independence is a nationalist, with the intimation, never stated, that nationalists are Nazis. This line is calculated to disenchant female voters from voting for independence. As it seems, though evidence on this is mixed, that the don't knows are breaking pro I'd expect to see efforts made to keep as much confusion in play as possible and a fairly sizable voter suppression effort. This is incredibly risky as it doubles down on the negative strategy and, more importantly, risks winning the vote without winning the argument. A slim pro-union vote on this basis would be a disaster for all sorts of obvious reasons.

The other campaign is Gordon Brown. Brown is trying to turn the independence debate into a wider conversation about governance in the British Isles, he is actually trying to win the argument. He has a book out next week, but the central contention has already been trailed in various  newspaper pieces. His argument is that the union has been the context for managing the risk involved in modern society and for solidarity in the face of financial disaster and poverty. It is the best version of the unionist argument, that the union offers a kind of universalism that transcends particular identities. This is not a defence of the political status quo and he is effectively in favor of completing Gladstone's project of home rule all around; federalizing the union. So this is a serious response to the dynamics that are the condition of the independence issue, not an attempt to win 51% of the vote.

I admire Gordon Brown and I've long thought that if he, rather than Blair, had been guiding the New Labour project then it would have been what was needed, a social democratic response to the changes  brought by Thatcherism, rather than a capitulation to them. But I fear that Brown is going to find himself a in a similar place on the independence issue. As Colin Kidd pointed out in his Guardian piece Brown has been trying to get reform of the union and democratization of the state taken seriously for the last twenty years, but without success. If his thinking about the complex relationships within the British Isles had real purchase on unionism then it would be flourishing. However the majority of the people who think like Gordon Brown on these issues are now in the pro-independence camp. They, we, think that the kind of progressive cosmopolitanism he endorses is best pursued through and by an independent Scotland. We have been here before. The Gladstonian project for reform of the union failed too.

Red and Orange

One of the continuing puzzles of the Scottish independence debate is the weak performance of the Better Together campaign. Much is made of the failure to make a "positive" case for the Union, but the case for the Union is obvious. The union offers a hedge against a series of risks, financial, military, economic and cultural. I suspect that what is meant when people complain about negativity is the complete absence of any shared project for the union. We know what it is for, in the sense of its function, but what does it do, what does it propose? There are all sorts of projects for an independent Scotland, and the utopianism that is very often decried by Unionists is, I suspect, the real advantage held by those in favour of independence.

Just why there seems to be no project for the Union among Scottish unionists isn't hard to understand. The Conservative and Unionist party cannot lead the campaign for the union in Scotland for the obvious reason, so it is left to the Labour party. However the Labour party is not a unionist party. It has all sorts of federalist and home rule roots (not as many as the Liberals) and is fully aware that the greatest electoral threat to working and lower-middle class support for the party has been unionism. You can be red or you can be orange but it is very hard to put those two identities together. In the unlikely event that Alistair Darling were to wrap himself in the Union Jack, plead with his fellow Scots to remember their loyalty to the Queen and remind them of their shared majority Protestant faith and commitment to liberty, he would actually be a Tory, a liberal unionist Tory, but a Tory nevertheless. So for obvious, structural reasons the Better Together campaign can't make a positive unionist case.

This would never have happened when Donald Dewar was around. The trap for Labour in Scotland was set when the Edinburgh Agreement excluded the "Devo Max" option from the referendum. This was initially seen as a bit of clever manoeuvring by Cameron as he forced Salmond to argue for an option that had only roughly 30% support at the time. At that point it looked like the independence issue might be taken off the table for a generation by way of a heavy defeat. However the real losers here were Labour since Devo Max was their natural equilibrium point so they ended up with the options of either supporting the Scottish Nationalist position or the Tory line, they had no option that they owned. I can't imagine Dewar, or Labour circa 1999 that still had serious Scottish representation around the leadership, would have allowed a question go the Scottish people that did not have a clearly Labour-branded option on it. So now, as the polls tighten enough to make it impossible to be semi-involved, Labour is driven to do the Tories' work for them in Scotland, and pretty much on their terms. This can get really odd and drive otherwise sensible people to say really daft things. I don't really believe George Robertson thinks that Western civilisation will collapse if Scotland votes for independence or that Alistair Darling really thinks there is any resemblance between Alex Salmond and Kim Jong-Il. These are the kinds of exaggerated statements people make when they are uncomfortable about their own positions.