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.