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.