[Robin McAlpine Blog] Independence and the cry wolf problem

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Independence and the cry wolf problem

First published by The National

Two rappers in a feud makes for a great half-time show at the Super Bowl; two political commentators disagreeing with each other in print is tedious. So I’m definitely not responding to my friend and Common Weal Board Member Tommy’s Sheppard’s article on Monday – but it might look like it because I want to use the same issue to show that the independence movement is caught in a trap we created.

Tommy was arguing against a talk I did at an event run by the Scottish Independence Convention which, in the absence of much else to do, ran an all-day discussion to explore a policy agenda for the Holyrood election that might progress independence. Each contributor had to offer three ideas.

What I argued was that this was basically impossible. Of course good policy can change opinion. Similarly, alerting the village to approaching wolves can save the village. However, you may be familiar with the cautionary tale about the latter, and it applies to the former too.

On both policy and strategy, the Scottish Government has over-claimed and under-delivered. You can probably name the big ‘said but didn’t do’ policies, but that omits all the little ‘said but doesn’t feel like they did’ policies. People’s real-world experience hasn’t been change for the better.

At the moment the independence movement reminds me of a get-together of various boys discussing whether this time they should should shout ‘red wolf’ or ‘dire wolf’. We’re talking about policy our lead political party claims to have already delivered. We’re talking about political processes we’ve promised ten times over.

We’re discussing whether a set-up fight in which we blame Westminster might work when we’ve been doing it for a decade. We debate how to seem especially outraged by some democratic injustice or other as if no-one has given that a shot so far. We’re very last season.

Look outwith whichever meeting room, conference hall, letters page or Facebook group we’re discussing the phrasing of ‘wolf!’ in and take in the wider view. What do we see?

At its recent low-point under Humza Yousaf the SNP was polling down at about 28 per cent. Since that time the Labour vote in Scotland has collapsed and the SNP has changed leader – yet support for the SNP has risen by only two or three points. Confidence in public services is actually dropping. This remains the least trusted government in the devolution era.

From that distance you’d see us cheering about the opinion polls we like and then somewhere else in the picture you’d see unionists doing exactly the same thing with the poll from the previous week showing the opposite.

If people’s self-reported views on independence are swinging wildly, it strongly suggests they’re not thinking about it much

There’s a whole load of theory which explains what’s going on – if you want more detail then go and do a web search for ‘principle-agent problem’, ‘spotlight bias’, ‘halo bias’, ‘issue salience’ and any information on de-sensitivity towards false positives. But let me explain it in plain language.

Firstly, the polls on independence are erratic. When someone is thinking about an issue a lot they tend to form a settled opinion, and when they don’t, their opinion tends to be shaped by the context in which they are asked. If people’s self-reported views on independence are swinging wildly, it strongly suggests they’re not thinking about it much. That’s what the polls show. Our target audience is thinking about its immediate concerns, not ours.

Meanwhile we know rationally that neither the SNP or Scottish Government are popular just now but we still think voters will get over it because we think that voters who in any way hope for independence will view the Scottish Government in a sympathetic light. If I have to hear ‘but if they want independence they’ll have to vote for us’ again…

If they want independence and think it’s going to happen sometime soon and believe the SNP is actually going to deliver; under those circumstances they’ll ‘just have to’ vote SNP. But those ‘ands’ are carrying an awful lot of weight. About 30 per cent of the population either retains faith in or is willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the SNP; 70 per cent does not or will not. That means there is 30-odd per cent of Scotland who does or can support independence but not the SNP.

There isn’t is a more persuasive version of shouting ‘wolf!’ that we’ve not yet tried

We’re pushing on a piece of string and expecting it to move what is tied to the other side. We think independence is in the spotlight all the time but it isn’t. We think that everyone supports independence sees the SNP as well-meaning and is itching to give them the benefit of the doubt, which they don’t.

This is the trap. We think that those who are adjacent to us (softly pro-independence or willing to consider it) are behaving like us (willing to suppress our discontent for the cause) and see things as we do (the SNP is not perfect but is doing its best). For a third of our existing audience and all of our crucial target audience, this is not true.

In my talk to the SIC event I said I could give you a world of popular policy but that just saying it was no longer good enough, and waiting for it to all feed through to the public’s lived experience would take years. So I suggested that we could change the story and lean into anti-politics a bit. I suggested that a package of democratic reform which tipped the balance of power in Scotland away from the political classes and towards citizens was probably our best bet.

Will that deliver independence on its own? Of course not, but it is a recognition that we’ve been trying to bullshit our way to independence for a decade and continuing along that path is futile.

I know some of you will already be below in the comments saying ‘but Robin, what is your shortcut?’. I can only repeat that there are no shortcuts. A few months ago in The National I wrote that a very visible changing of the guard in the SNP was our best bet. Looking at the list of very familiar SNP figures who have uncontested nominations for seats, it looks like we’ll be waiting at least another five or six years for that.

The SNP isn’t responding to voter disenchantment because the split in the Tory vote and the collapse in Labour is going to return the party by default. For a party of devolution, that’s absolutely fine. For independence, that is taking the same damaged tool that isn’t working and trying to use it one more time. We’re the only people who think we don’t need to try something new.

I believe that ‘something new’ is an organised and united civic campaign working from proper target-audience data and using best-practice modern influence theory to run a structured peer-to-peer campaign orientated around sharp messaging and information provision (see my book Direction for more detail, available on the Common Weal website).

What there isn’t is a more persuasive version of shouting ‘wolf!’ that we’ve not yet tried. We’re in a trap where we think we can draw a line under the past and start afresh without our own baggage. We can’t. We’ve done what we’ve done and we need to live with it. Until we properly absorb that reality and plan from that starting point, this will all keep happening.

Source: Independence and the cry wolf problem