After the swarm

On 15 October 2012, I signed the Edinburgh Agreement with David Cameron to secure the independence referendum of September 2014.

On the same day Peter Kellner of the polling company YouGov wrote one of his condescending commentaries from London dissing any hope for the Yes campaign.

“However, from Salmond’s point of view, it is about the only thing going for him. Indeed, were he to be given a truth drug, he might well curse the fact that the SNP won last year’s Scottish elections outright, and thus found himself in a position to keep his promise.

He would surely have been much happier remaining the leader of a minority government, unable to get his independence legislation through Holyrood. Then he could have railed against the Scottish satraps of the Britain-wide parties for silencing the voice of the Scottish people.

Instead, by winning an outright majority, he has shot his own fox. Rather than shed crocodile tears for his inability to call a referendum, he must now put the issue to the test.

As a shrewd and intelligent man – indeed, one of the shrewdest and most intelligent in British politics – he must know that his mission is impossible, that in two years time his country will vote to remain part of the United Kingdom, and that far from being achieved, independence will be deferred for at least a generation.

All YouGov’s evidence from the past four years is that independence is a minority passion north of the border. Even as the SNP was surging to victory last year, Scots told us by two-to-one that they wanted to remain within the UK.

The SNP won because most Scots thought it had governed their country well, because they liked Salmond, and because they thought the Scottish Labour Party was useless – not because they wanted to sever links with London.”

Kellner’s view was almost universal, and not just among the London pack of journos and politicians. Most, if not all, of the Scottish media agreed with him.

However, by September 2014 things looked very different.

The No camp’s lead, which had been 33 points, was down to 6 points. Prime Minister Cameron had taken to phoning a variety of heads of state – Obama, Putin, Merkel, Hollande, Abbott – begging for support. As we know from his own autobiography he worried greatly about going down in history as the biggest Prime Ministerial loser of imperial territory since Lord North.

Three things closed the gap.

Firstly, the grassroots Yes campaign, which had taken time to fire, finally sprung into life in August, particularly in the afterglow of the Commonwealth Games. They were gloriously multifarious and their campaign Bible was the Wee Blue Book.

And if anything, it helped the status of that publication that some in the Yes hierarchy were deeply suspicious of it and its author.

Secondly the BBC referendum debate of 26th August in Kelvingrove between Alistair Darling and myself was highly influential. A hugely-watched television event, it trended globally on social media. The ICM poll awarded it 71-29 for Yes, with every category – Yes, No, Undecided, young, old, women and men – supporting that verdict.

(My revisionist SNP detractors like to focus on the STV clash of three weeks earlier. But that was much less of an occasion with much lower viewership. In any case, ICM judged it only 56-44 for No at a time when Yes support was under 40%. That debate didn’t even slow down the Yes momentum, but the Kelvingrove one moved it through the gears. The Daily Telegraph were reduced to accusing the BBC of a conspiracy – they were right, of course, but got the direction of the conspiracy wrong.)

Third was the summer Yes campaign decision to focus on the NHS as a key issue, in particular that it would not be safe if left to the tender mercies of Labour/Tory funding. It was the only “negative” lead in an overwhelmingly positive Yes campaign but it carried the ring of truth, as indeed the last decade has demonstrated.

Even the celebrated and successful Yes poster “Scotland’s future in Scotland’s hands” – a fundamentally positive, hopeful message – carried with it the undertone that safety and security lay in a Scottish solution.

So why didn’t we win? Well, we were coming from a very long way back. We were locked in a battle where the mainstream media (far more powerful than now) were in phalanx for the Union, save the lone, tiny voice of the Sunday Herald. The Sun did not defect to Yes in the final days. Our response to “The Vow”, the regrouping of the British establishment in the last week, was not our best effort of the referendum.

Could we have won with a flawless campaign? Perhaps. However, no campaign is perfect and, at the end of the day, I think 18/9/2014 was just a “bridge too far”.

But the Scottish people awarded us a posthumous victory. Within days of the poll it was obvious that the winning side were losing and the losing side were winning. In November 2014 I left office with independence in the lead, the SNP’s Westminster rating at 55% and positive personal ratings of near +50. I thought it virtually nailed-on that Scotland would be independent – or as near as makes no odds – within the decade.

If I had had access to a crystal ball and foreseen Brexit and Johnson, then I would have considered it an absolute certainty. Mind you if I had access to that fortune telling then I would have delayed our referendum to the autumn of 2016!

The point is obvious. We know what we did right. But if you want to understand why we are not independent then we must try to understand the last 10 years, the years that the locusts have eaten.

And it would be remiss of me not to mention that that’s something we’ll be discussing in Glasgow in a few days’ time, because the next 10 years – the restoration of the abundant harvests of the independence movement – can’t start without it.

I hope to see you there.

Tickets for The Scottish Independence Referendum: 10 Years On, at the Glasgow Science Centre on Saturday 14 September, can be bought here.