This is the second of two articles explaining why our current model for achieving independence cannot work. Last week I pointed out that countries don’t get given a procedural path to their independence before there is strong majority support among the public. Consent then process, not process then consent.
This week I want to argue that a wholly political campaign is a terrible idea. Most shifts in public opinion are not led either by politicians or result from a political process.
Yet still we’re stuck with the idea that until politicians either create a mass shift in public sentiment themselves or they secure some sort of referendum process, the rest of us just need to wait.
This has sidetracked us into another daft debate about whether politicians should be cautious (to not scare off the wavering voter) or bold (to energise the public). It stops us from asking whether they’re the right messengers in the first place.
They’re not. An Ipsos poll from December 2023 gets to the point. It lists over 30 professions and asked the public who they trust most. Politicians came bottom with fewer than one in ten people saying they trust what a politician says.
By contrast, nurses pilots, librarians, engineers, doctors, teachers and professors are all trusted by more than three out of four people. We’re sending out our least effective message carriers and refusing to deploy our most effective advocates. Wavering voters trust civic voices much more than political ones.
Politics is a crucial part of this process – political parties are partners in a civic campaign, not least because we all have to be on the same page and follow the same strategy. But having politicians front and centre is not our most effective formation.
This is why, of all the acts of self-harm the independence movement has inflicted over the last decade, none has been more destructive or more counterproductive than the closing down of Yes Scotland as a cross-and-no-party means of communicating to the public.
There are many other problems with the politics-only model. If you accept the ‘we must have strong support’ argument then success or failure rests on the next ten per cent of the population that gets us from 50 to 60 per cent.
Hardly any of that group of people has ever voted SNP. The SNP has never achieve 50 per cent of the votes cast in a general election in its existence. Why are we targetting our key voters with a political party they have serially refused to support?
On top of that, there is one thing worse than a politician to send out to win over voters, and that is a politician from a party which has been in power for an extended period of time.
You cannot disentangle those politicians from the track record of their government. A politician may well want to talk to a voter about independence, but the voter may well want to talk about schools, or hospital waiting lists, or ferries.
We have explored every avenue of how to skip the consent-building phase and jump to the legislative process stage through party politics and we’ve not found a way to do it
Plus there is always a good electoral reason for a political party to not promote independence. Remember when, in 2019, the SNP clearly decided that ‘stopping Brexit’ was a bigger vote winner than arguing for independence? That will always happen.
Once again, this isn’t an anti-SNP thing. There are very, very few instances of single parties getting majority support in multi-party parliamentary elections, any party would have a built-in self-interest in not promoting independence at some point or other, and it’s not that the SNP’s politicians are uniquely unpopular, it’s that they are just normally unpopular.
There is virtually no civic movement left. We don’t have prominent leaders in their professions or communities who regularly act as public advocates of independence. The power-hoarding of the politicians has resulted in the long, slow death of the 2014 coalition. It will need to be rebuilt from scratch.
We’re stuck because we’ve been saying that we won’t convert the public to independence until after someone gives us a referendum and that we’re going to get that by making independence a politicians-only zone.
Both pillars of this argument are false, yet those have been to sole terms of debate for a decade now. We have explored every avenue of how to skip the consent-building phase and jump to the legislative process stage through party politics and we’ve not found a way to do it – because there isn’t a way to do it.
It means we didn’t do an autopsy on the 2014 defeat because it wasn’t politically expedient – so we’ve learned nothing. It means we haven’t examined the views of voters – so we don’t know our audience. It means we haven’t communicated to voters in a meaningful or consistent way – so all they’ve heard is politicians on the BBC.
In these two articles I have not set out my strategy for Scottish independence – you can find that in detail in my book Sorted. Sadly, we’re still pretty far from a credible discussion of strategy. I fear we will waste another year until after the Scottish Election.
Because frankly, if we’re really in a phase where a political party polling at about 30 per cent demands a vote of over 50 per cent as a condition for progress, we’re not a serious proposition. It didn’t work when the SNP was at its peak and it certainly won’t work now.
This is all maddening. There is compelling evidence that our target voters are increasingly ready to listen to a fresh pitch on independence. If so, the timescale for getting from 50 to 60 per cent support is not long.
Then, if we had 60 per cent of public support, lots and lots of possible avenues to independence open up, with a referendum only being one of them.
So what are we going to do? One more shot at finding a loophole in the rules that will let us escape the UK without winning over the public? Two more shots? Or something different? We’ll have to choose soon.