Frankly, p.22
Frankly, page 22
Much has been written since the referendum about how unpleasant and divisive it was. My experience, exemplified by these public meetings, was the opposite of that characterization. However, I know I didn’t make enough effort at the time to appreciate what it was like for those on the other side. It wasn’t until the Brexit vote that I fully understood how it felt to face the prospect of having part of my identity, in this case my European citizenship, taken away. Even so, I view it as an achievement of Yes and No supporters alike that the contest was, in the main, positive and good-natured.
In early 2014, it seemed that almost everyone who was changing their mind on the independence question was going from No to Yes. Clearly worried, the No campaign decided it was time to bring out the big guns.
On 13 February, the Chancellor, George Osborne, flanked by Ed Balls for Labour and Danny Alexander for the Lib Dems, pitched up in Edinburgh to emphatically rule out a currency union. It was a clever move on the face of it, as it meant that all three potential parties of government were singing from the same hymn sheet. It was a flat no. I happened to be in London that day and ended up fronting the media coverage for the SNP. Alex stayed out of view at home in Strichen, attracting some media criticism in the process.
My most bruising encounter of the day was an interview with Andrew Neil on the lunchtime BBC Daily Politics show. Armed with the Osborne/Balls/Alexander currency veto, he skewered me. I clung to the argument that since a currency union would be in the interests of the rest of the UK as well as an independent Scotland (a proposition that was arguable either way), minds at Westminster would change in the event of Scotland voting Yes. The fact that I genuinely believed this to be likely didn’t make it sound any less fanciful in the moment.
One of the other meetings I had in London that day was with BBC network editors. As I sat around a boardroom table in Broadcasting House, I remember feeling shocked by how illinformed they were about the nuances of a debate which by this point had been underway in Scotland for two years. They genuinely seemed to think that their entry into the fray marked the start of the campaign. I was showered in condescension about currency in particular. When I asked if they had read the Scottish government’s Fiscal Commission report on our proposals, I got the sense that most of them weren’t even aware of its existence. This metropolitan arrogance on the part of some London-based journalists, especially in the BBC, and the shoddy reporting it often gave rise to, posed problems for the Yes side throughout the campaign.
I am certain that the No side saw the currency veto as a killer blow. I worried that they might be right, but, a week later, a poll in the Daily Mail showed a six-point leap in Yes support. It led John Curtice, the doyen of political polling, to say:
‘The poll’s headline findings suggest that, if anything, the “no” side’s stratagem has not only failed to deliver any immediate boost to the Unionist cause but has actually backfired.’
It was the Project Fear effect writ large. The tactics of the No campaign were being increasingly seen in Scotland as bullying. People felt that the country was being insulted. If there was no respect for Scotland within the Union, no recognition of our contribution to the UK’s success, no acknowledgement of shared assets, then surely that bolstered, rather than undermined, the case for independence?
There was another unanticipated boost for the Yes campaign in late March, when the Guardian broke an explosive story, with quotes from a senior UK government source saying that in the event of a Yes vote, a Westminster government would of course agree to a currency union. This gave credence and credibility to our assertion that UK ministers were bluffing on currency.
As 2014 progressed, it was the Yes campaign with the spring in its step. The mood over that summer was electric. The staging of the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, a triumph for both city and nation, added to the festival atmosphere. There was a growing belief in our camp (delusion, perhaps) that victory was possible. The flipside of this was an even greater sense of responsibility, and perhaps it was because of this that there were simmering tensions in the hierarchy of the SNP over the final weeks. I found it all a bit bewildering. For reasons that I found hard to fathom, it was also me who seemed to bear the brunt of it. It felt unjustified and unfair.
Despite the early creation of a centralized, top-heavy organization in Yes Scotland, the campaign had grown organically, and slightly chaotically, from the ground up. The grassroots dynamic was a strength, but it posed challenges for those of us schooled in more traditional methods of campaigning. Perhaps because I was so immersed in the community effort, through the public meetings and other events, I found myself embracing it reasonably easily. Others weren’t so sanguine.
Angus Robertson, who was the SNP campaign director (and a friend, both then and now), started complaining that there wasn’t enough ‘science’ behind the campaign. By this he meant that we weren’t conducting focus groups regularly enough so that we could then tailor messages in a more granular way. The clear implication was that this was my fault. It is certainly one of the things I have reflected back on. Would more ‘science’ have made a difference? Back then, though, I felt aggrieved at the backbiting. I was giving the campaign every ounce of physical and emotional energy I had and it felt unfair to be on the receiving end of so much snash.
It all came to a head in mid-July when Angus and I had a spat about the scheduling and agenda of a campaign meeting. Alex sided with Angus. It was probably a sign of exhaustion, but I had a childish strop, telling Alex that I wasn’t prepared to play silly games and that if he was going to undermine me, he could take charge of the national campaign and I’d just concentrate on touring the country, speaking at meetings.
He dropped in to see me at home on 18 July, on his way back from a Commonwealth Games oversight meeting. We had a good chat and cleared the air between us. Or so I thought. This was also when he told me that if we lost the referendum, he would stand down as First Minister. To be frank, I didn’t take him seriously. By this time, I was starting to believe we would win. And even if we didn’t, I assumed he would change his mind. He loved being First Minister. I couldn’t see him giving it up easily.
The chat with him didn’t resolve the strange dynamic that existed between us in the final stretch, something I never really got my head around. Sometimes I thought he felt guilty about not engaging sooner and was trying to make up for lost time. We certainly had to listen to plenty of pontification from him about what we had got wrong while he had been missing in action. At other times, I detected a resentment on his part towards me. Did he think I was getting too much attention, hogging the limelight? I felt I was only doing the job he had asked of me and filling a vacuum he had created.
It might have been possible to dismiss all of this as a figment of my increasingly tired imagination, had it not been for the circumstances around the first televised leaders’ debate. Two debates had been scheduled to take place between Alex and Alistair Darling, the ‘leader’ of the No campaign. The first would be hosted by STV on 5 August and the second by the BBC on 25 August. These debates were hugely important for us. We had momentum but we were still behind in the polls, and the debates were amongst the final opportunities we would have to change the game.
I had assumed I would be involved in Alex’s preparations. Given the number of debates and key interviews I had already done, my sense of the most potent lines of attack from the No side, how best to rebut them and what arguments worked best to promote our own case was probably more honed that anyone else’s. It didn’t occur to me that this insight would not be fully utilized. But that is precisely what happened.
Alex froze me out completely ahead of the first debate. I wasn’t in the room for a single one of his prep sessions. The message was clear: he didn’t want me there. I was a bit hurt and also confused, but more than anything I was angry.
On the evening of the first debate in the Royal Conservatoire in Glasgow, I was in the spin room. It was packed and the atmosphere was tense. I had no idea what Alex’s strategy or pitch was going to be. I told myself that he was an experienced debater and that he would do just fine.
It was a disaster. Darling was sharp and incisive. Within a few minutes it was obvious that he had prepared well and intended to strike hard at the weaknesses of the independence case. Alex on the other hand looked tired and uneasy, and it quickly became clear that whatever preparation he had done had been inadequate. He waffled. He floundered on currency. Most bizarrely, when he had the chance to put Darling on the spot, he missed the mark spectacularly.
Instead of pointing out the consequences of continued Westminster governance compared to the opportunities of independence, for example on pensions, levels of poverty or EU membership, he indulged in obscure debating points. He had obviously decided to try to puncture the absurdity of the Project Fear attacks. This was not a terrible idea, and had he picked his examples more wisely, it might have worked. Instead, he started talking about aliens. Some peripheral figure on the No side had made the claim that Scotland, with independence, would be more vulnerable to attack from outer space. It was so ludicrous that it had passed most people by, and yet here was the First Minister of Scotland, the leader of the movement for independence, majoring on it on live TV. It sounded ridiculous and deeply unserious.
I have never had a more excruciating experience in a spin room, ever. I had to keep a poker face and comment positively to the media about his performance, all the while crying inside. The snap poll afterwards recorded a win for Darling. It felt, in that moment, that our campaign might be over. Surely there was no surviving a performance as poor as the one I had just witnessed.
The debate debacle did not actually lead to a haemorrhaging of Yes support, but it did cost us. We knew that the onslaught on issues like currency, and our inability to get decisively off the ropes on them, was acting as a brake on our momentum. Too many of the people we still needed to convert from No to Yes were being held back. The debate had been one of our last remaining chances to build confidence and increase the flow of support to our cause. It was an opportunity squandered.
Stung by his mauling on currency, Alex flirted with dumping our commitment to a currency union. He called John Swinney and me into Bute House one Sunday evening. We were in the Cabinet room when he dropped the bombshell. He wanted to shift to a position of ‘sterlingization’, using the pound but not as part of any formal arrangement. John and I looked at each other in horror and told him in no uncertain terms he could not do that. This was no longer about the pros and cons of a currency union versus an alternative position. We were past the point of no return. To have changed now, weeks out from the vote, would have made us look utterly unhinged. It was classic Alex, though. A gambler to his fingertips, he was always ready to risk disaster for the chance of winning big. It had served us well on many occasions, but it would have proven calamitous this time. Thankfully, he didn’t pursue it.
I was brought into the final prep session for the next debate, giving me the opportunity to try to influence Alex’s approach to the encounter. The second debate was hosted by the BBC in Kelvingrove Museum on 25 August. In my view, Alex still wasn’t at his best, but he performed much better than first time round. He was livelier and much more focused on making the points we needed to hammer home. He also articulated the currency position much more effectively. Crucially, the post-match polls gave him the win.
There was more of a swagger in his step afterwards and, whilst we knew we still had a mountain to climb, we entered the final four weeks in good heart. Our thoughts were turning to what would happen if we pulled it off. We had assembled a full civil service transition team. It was situated in St Andrew’s House and was ready to get to work immediately if Scotland voted Yes. The prospect was both thrilling and terrifying.
On Saturday, 6 September, I was in the campaign hub in my constituency when Kevin Pringle, our head of communications, called to tell me that the next day, the Sunday Times would publish a poll showing Yes 2 points ahead. I was ecstatic. The poll was embargoed so I had to be careful about who else I told. There was no way I was ever going to contain myself though, so I pulled my trusted election agent, Mhairi Hunter, into the back office and shared the secret with her. We did a wee jig around the room.
By the time I got home later that afternoon, the euphoria had started to give way to the reality of the likely consequences. The onslaught this would trigger from the No side would be more ferocious than anything that had gone before. We were still almost two weeks out from the vote. Could we withstand the pressure? We quickly came to believe that it would have been much better if the poll lead had come a week later. By then, it might have been too late for No to turn back the tide.
As it was, our opponents immediately mobilized. David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband took the joint decision to cancel Prime Minister’s Questions on 10 September and hit the campaign trail in Scotland instead. We staged our own show of unity as a counterpoint. All of the various political strands that made up the Yes coalition came together for a photocall in Edinburgh. Alex and I even linked arms with Jim Sillars, the long-time armchair nemesis of SNP leaders.
Perhaps we also made a blunder that day. We characterized ourselves as Scotland United against the might of the London establishment. The description implied that anyone who wasn’t an independence supporter was somehow not part of Scotland. I doubt it made much difference to the final result, but, from the perspective of trying to persuade those who were still nervous about our proposition, it wasn’t the best tone to strike.
The pressure continued to build as the week progressed. First, our hopes of a Yes endorsement from the Sun newspaper evaporated. Alex had been courting Rupert Murdoch assiduously for months and we thought the efforts were paying off. Ironically, it was after the weekend of the bombshell poll, when Murdoch was actually in Scotland, that the mood music started to change.
Then, late on the evening of Wednesday, 10 September, news filtered out that the Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Banking Group were about to confirm plans to relocate their HQ operations to London in the event of a Yes vote. There was little doubt this was the result of political pressure. It was not as dramatic as it sounded. It would be a ‘brass plate’ move, not one that would affect jobs or the banks’ physical presence in Scotland. Alex actually managed to get the head of RBS, Ross McEwan, to say as much. The damage, though, was done, solidifying the fear in the minds of those already nervous that independence would lead to an exodus of jobs and investment. It also came hot on the heels of warnings about the costs and availability of mortgages should Scotland choose independence.
This, then, was the backdrop to our ‘one week to go’ press conference in the Edinburgh International Conference Centre on the morning of 11 September, which also happened to be the anniversary of the 1997 devolution referendum. On the stage were Alex, me and Anum Qaisar, a young Labour activist who had joined Yes and the SNP during the campaign and would later serve as the SNP MP for Airdrie & Shotts.
What unfolded at the press conference would later demonstrate Alex’s capacity to bear a grudge, long after most people would have let it go. His rage was still burning years later. The then political editor of the BBC, Nick Robinson, asked a question about the banks, to which Alex gave a lengthy and detailed answer. Different people would come to different conclusions about the quality of the answer, depending on their perspective, but Nick claimed in his news package later that day that Alex hadn’t answered the question at all.
There is no doubt that Nick was in the wrong, and to be fair he later conceded that he had made a mistake. It added to concerns we had harboured throughout the campaign about aspects of the BBC’s coverage. Alex was right to feel aggrieved but his reaction went beyond what was sensible. He gave tacit approval to Yes demonstrations outside the BBC HQ at Pacific Quay in Glasgow. In my view, attacking the BBC was a distraction and wrong in principle. I also feared that it would be counterproductive. Amongst the middle group of voters we had to persuade was a fear that an independent Scotland would be a one-party state, controlled for eternity by an over-powerful SNP. I was intensely worried that intimidatory protests outside the BBC would serve to exacerbate those fears.
On the evening of 11 September, I took part in the final big TV debate of the campaign. The BBC had brought 10,000 sixteen-and seventeen-year-olds to the Hydro Arena to hear me and Patrick Harvie make the case for Yes, and Ruth Davidson and George Galloway fly the flag for No. I had been really nervous about this encounter, as my memories of a younger George Galloway, as the MP for Glasgow Kelvin, made me think he might be a hit with the young demographic. I couldn’t have been more wrong. He pitched up wearing a hat, and came across as a weird, and deeply unpleasant, crank who understood little about modern Scotland. I have no idea why Ruth Davidson agreed to be his sidekick that evening.
The young people already committed to Yes were informed, passionate, enthusiastic. As the debate progressed, it was also clear that many of those who had come along as No supporters were swinging the other way, and it wasn’t me or Patrick swaying them but their peers.
The event filled me with hope, not just about the possible result of the referendum, but the future of Scotland more generally. To this day, I am convinced that it will be this generation, teenagers in 2014, now approaching their thirties, who will propel Scotland to independence and make a success of it.
My tour of the country drew to a close and I spent most of the last few days in Glasgow. My constituency was awash with Yes window posters. It seemed that almost everyone I passed in the street was wearing a Yes badge.
The mistake I made in that final stretch was to assume that the mood in Glasgow was reflective of the whole country. It sent me into polling day with an inflated and, for me, totally uncharacteristic sense of optimism. We had a final rally in Perth Concert Hall the night before the poll. It was a highly charged affair. As we were leaving at the end, Alex and I had one of our rare emotional moments. We hugged and wished each other luck. We knew that by the time we were next together, for better or worse, the world would have changed.
