Independence Debate

I think Kevin McKenna hit the right note with his article in The Observer on the latest developments in the referendum campaign.

First off, I agree that the First Minister's media adviser has committed some grave offence by pointing out that one of the ordinary, everyday Better Together supporters, Clare Lally, was also a high level political activist having recently been co-opted on to Scottish Labour's national executive committee.

Now I've been involved in countless disciplinary situations over the years, some of them very serious potentially, but believe me Campbell Gunn's actions do not remotely fall into the category of 'high crimes and misdemeanours'.  

So this 'baying mob' approach doesn't impress me in the least, but it does demonstrate a certain shallowness that so many people tried to get someone sacked over such a trifling matter.

But as the latest opinion polls suggest none of this seems to have done Project Fear any good with vote now poised at 48% in favour of independence and 52% against.

It's getting more and more exciting by the day - intoxicating even.


The referendum campaign's not toxic, but intoxicating

As the Scottish independence vote nears, Better Together is getting desperate – and making embarrassing mistakes

By Kevin McKenna - The Observer

Alex Salmond, pictured in the Scottish Parliament last week, faced demands to sack adviser and political spokesman Campbell Gunn over the Claire Lally email row. Photograph: Ken Jack/Demotix/Corbis

Fewer than 100 sunsets now until dawn breaks on Scotland's fateful day and the campaign has just become reassuringly and pleasingly poisonous. It has been a rather splendid couple of weeks in the independence referendum campaign. If this sort of momentum and tone are maintained for the next 93 days, I shall be sorry to see 18 September come and go. Indeed, I'm almost tempted to urge a no vote so that we can gather together the circus, strike up the band and do it all over again. The campaign hasn't got toxic at all; rather, it has become intoxicating.

We first had Gordon Brown galumphing around Scotland, purporting to love the country in ways that were not apparent during his wretched time in office at Westminster. This was a period during which Brown steadfastly refused to even talk about more devolution for Holyrood.

Now, though, he wants us to soar with extra new powers… just so long as his old chums in London hold the purse strings. Brown was once known as the Iron Chancellor, but only by his then newly acquired friends in the banking sector, who stood to gain most from his sickening efforts to appease them. If Scotland votes to become independent, Brown will have played a significant part in the triumph; he is proving to be a major asset to the yes campaign.

The entertainment really started at the beginning of last week, with events on either side to mark the 100-day countdown to 18 September. Last Monday, Better Together had another of its Keystone Cops days, when it turned the spotlight on normal, everyday people who desired to speak up in support of the union.

One of them was a mother of two called Clare Lally who spoke about the NHS and what it had done for one of her sick children. The admirable Ms Lally was passionate and eloquent about her support for the union, but in seeking to portray her as an "ordinary housewife", the Better Together campaign was guilty of misleading the public. Ms Lally had recently been appointed as a lay member of Johann Lamont's shadow cabinet and the Labour leader had introduced her on stage at a rally.

Campbell Gunn, senior media adviser to first minister Alex Salmond,sought to point out Better Together's little sin of omission in an email to the Daily Telegraph. Within 24 hours, a firing squad was being assembled with its sights trained on Gunn, a widely respected former political editor of the Sunday Post and recipient last year of a press lifetime achievement award. The Telegraph, possibly drunk on the exciting possibility of actually breaking a Scottish story, sought to portray Gunn as a vile cybernat who had unconscionably attacked an ordinary wee housewife with a sick child. He had instead merely been doing his job.

In the artificial firestorm that followed, Salmond forced his adviser to apologise, in a meaningless move by the first minister aimed at appeasing the mob. He knew as well as anyone that Gunn had done nothing for which to apologise.

The rise of the cybernats has added greatly to the gaiety of this campaign. They are depicted as a sullen assortment of foul-mouthed social misfits firing off profane tweets and blogs to anyone who supports the union. The crushing reality, though, is that they don't really exist beyond the febrile imaginings of Better Together chiefs and Alistair Darling. The social networks attract all manner of semi-literate knuckle-draggers and visigoths who are free to inveigh anonymously on any issue. What some of Scotland's top football writers, such as Graham Spiers and Tom English, have had to endure on Twitter these past few years far eclipses in volume and intensity anything encountered in the referendum campaign.

The absence of anything resembling a proper campaign by Better Together has forced it into the realms of fantasy and this is one of them. In its desperation, it now portrays any criticism of the unionist cause as "vile cybernat abuse".

This was embarrassingly apparent in the lamentable television appearance last week by John McTernan, a former Labour special adviser in its bottomless department of special advice. McTernan was talking about some of the abuse JK Rowling had received for donating £1m to the Better Together campaign. As he began visibly lose to all sense of reality, McTernan, who genuinely seemed to be in some distress, began blaming Gunn for the billionaire author's online ordure.

Fortunately for the rest of us, Iain MacWhirter, a real journalist, was on hand elegantly to eviscerate McTernan. Joanne Rowling got off lightly compared with some of the stuff that was being written about Colin and Christine Weir, the Ayrshire lottery winners who have given £4m to the Yes campaign. Much of this was rooted in old-fashioned Tory class elitism, of the type that dictates that bad things happen when you give poor people too much money.

Behind all the online frivolity and gloriously manufactured sense of outrage, there is a serious warning for Better Together, and one that it needs to heed quickly if blue is to remain in the union jack. The unionists need to be aware of the consequences of constantly seeking to portray the Scottish nationalists as goggle-eyed brigands with personality disorders, as is the case with their ill-judged "Project Fear" campaign.

As more voters in Scotland begin to encounter Yes volunteers on their doorsteps, they will discover that they are, of course, as polite, well-mannered and passionate about their country as the Better Together activists. This dissonance will chime with them and they will be resentful at being sold another lie by Better Together.

Last Wednesday, the Daily Record, Scotland's main unionist paper, carried the results of an opinion poll that revealed that the gap between Yes and No is once more a mere handful of points. It further revealed that the prospect of a Conservative election victory in 2015 would deliver a resounding Yes vote.

Better Together needs to think much more carefully about its tactics from now on until the death, because this campaign is slipping away from it.