Just how solid is Scottish Labour's list vote?

Amid all the process and horse race stuff in this Holyrood election, there is one rather important question going conspicuously unasked: just how solid is Scottish Labour's list vote anyway? 

All the mischief has focused on the loyalty of folk likely to vote SNP in the constituencies. Will they stick with "Nicola Sturgeon for First Minister", or split their tickets, lending support to some other party for the regional calculation? This is all well and good. But the endless, circular conversation about the virtues and vices of #BothVotesSNP overlooks the fact that it is Kezia Dugdale's party whose fate will largely be determined by the d'Hondt calculations and the weight of support she can command on the regional ballot. 

And Scotland's electoral history being what it is, I wonder if Scottish Labour aren't more vulnerable to - potentially catastrophic - leakage in regional support than we've generally noticed. As countless commentators have pointed out, for years, in the wake of devolution, Labour didn't have a second vote strategy - they didn't need a second vote strategy - being comfortably returned to office on the back of the first-past-the-post constituencies and their reliable confrères, the Liberal Democrats.  

In this model, if Scottish Labour's electoral fortunes were to improve, you'd expect this to express itself in constituency gains rather than regional progress. But if the Holyrood map broadly follows Westminster's this election, the whole basis of Labour support will have been rearranged on a regional basis. In fairness, Scottish Labour are pushing their own #BothVotesLabour message. I'm sure old time Labour supporters who have stuck with the party will heed this and maintain a disciplined ticket. But the party aren't going great guns with the message. Which seems a decidedly strange thing, considering how critical a solid, loyal regional ballot is for the party's standing in the next parliament. 

Look at this historically. Take 2011. Alex Salmond's SNP secured 902,915 constituency ballots, and 876,421 in the regions. We shouldn't understand this as a straightforward 26,494 drop. The regional tally will include a decent whack of folk who voted for other parties in constituency contests. My favourite 2011 illustration of this dynamic was Ayr. A straightforward SNP vs Tory runoff, Conservative candidate John Scott secured 12,997 constituency votes, and a 1,113 vote majority over his SNP opponent. But in the region, the folk of Ayr gave the Tories only 8,539 votes, a drop of 4,458 on their constituency figures - and the SNP were the obvious beneficiaries of the Tory regional slump. Chic Brodie took 11,884 constituency votes, but Ayr's regional tally gave the Nats 14,377, an increase of 2,493 which put them 5,838 regional votes ahead of the Tories who'd routed their constituency campaign.  

So what about Labour? In 2011, Iain Gray took 630,461 constituency papers and just 523,559, losing over 100,000 votes between ballot papers. Like the SNP picture, we shouldn't oversimplify what was going on under Labour's grand totals. It almost certainly wasn't a tit for tat drop. Voters will have moved in, and out of, Labour's constituency and regional columns. But this was a discernibly squishier performance than the Nats in a closely contested campaign. In the event, Labour holds in constituencies in their traditional heartlands staved off some of the harsher consequences of this "voter promiscuity" in 2011. But if all does not go well for the party in its constituency battles in Glasgow and elsewhere - a gap of anything like 100,000 people is seriously going to hurt. And this, before we get into questions of differential turnout.

Part of me wonders if the electoral map in 2016 doesn't encourage an awkward dynamic for Kezia Dugdale, likely to encourage opponents of the SNP to lend her their constituency ballots, while distributing their regional votes elsewhere.  

Imagine you are a Labour voter of what we'll call the Alex Massie tradition. You voted No in 2014. You don't much care for the Nats. You live in a constituency where the Tories or the Lib Dems cannot prosper, where they're not even in the running. What do you do? Option One: damn the arithmetic and vote for what you believe in. If the local Tory or Liberal Democrat gains only a couple of thousand votes? Well, you salute their efforts. Alternatively, you might consider Option Two: use your constituency vote tactically vote for the Labour candidate most likely to frustrate the SNP. In Leith, say, you might support Lesley Hinds. In Glasgow, you might take a punt on Johann Lamont against Humza Yousaf. 

If Option Two seems attractive to you, however, there is a snowball's chance in hell that you're going to stick with the Labour party in the regions. You might also have a soft spot for one of the smaller parties who are only really in contention in the regional list. Perhaps you favour Brexit, and want to see a David Coburn, rolling around Holyrood, blaggarding the European Union. Perhaps Patrick Harvie seems like a sound character, and you want a decent Green delegation in Holyrood, advocating environmental concerns.  In local elections in areas in which they do well, the Greens are pretty transfer happy from a curious range of sources, including Scottish Tories. Perhaps you'd like RISE, modestly, to rise.

Given the parts of the country where Labour remains strongest against the SNP, I'd suggest the calculating anti-Nat and the floating, unpartisan, split-ticket voter is far more likely to cast a - perhaps doomed - constituency ballot for them rather than the vital, life-giving regional support Dugdale needs to survive. In fairness, recent polls suggest Labour's performance across the two ballots is pretty solid, at a (dismal) 18% to 19%.  A squishy list vote may be the least of her concerns. Time will tell.

More Than A Shrug

It is a delicate thing, writing about someone else's sexuality, with many pitfalls and opportunities for bumptiousness and embarrassment. I approach the whole thing gingerly, and I hope, humanely.

As many of you will have noticed, this week, Kezia Dugdale told the Fabian Review that she is in a relationship with a woman. “I have a female partner. I don’t talk about it very much because I don’t feel I need to,” the Scottish Labour leader said, in the midst of a wide-ranging political interview, which has gone on to cause her trouble for different reasons. 

The public reaction to Dugdale's personal aside has been overwhelmingly positive and supportive, which is a grand and excellent thing. No doubt some dismal Free Church minister is boiling away on the hob about it -- but most folk will be quite content to judge Kezia Dudale on her relative political and personal merits, and not her sexuality. Good. This is a historical achievement -- but still, something about how the story has been reported makes me a little uneasy.

First, the background.  The truth is, it has taken Dugdale a substantial period of time to come out to the general public, although all the hacks and the political world have known about her domestic circumstances for a lengthy period of time. Hell, even I'd heard tell. As hawk-eyed folk might have noticed, Telegraph Scotland editor Alan Cochrane carelessly - and I assume, quite accidentally - outed the Scottish Labour leader some months ago, by muddling up the number of LGBT leaders in Holyrood, and clumsily incorporating Dugdale into his copy. This faux pas went by, unremarked, but not unnoticed.

To be absolutely clear - I mention this as no criticism of Kezia Dugdale. She is entitled to expose as much - and as little - or her personal life to public scrutiny as she cares to. But it is an eloquent illustration of how much times have changed, that the Holyrood press pack - with only a little befuddlement about the delay - left it to the Scottish Labour leader to come out to the country, in her own terms, at her own time.

But I wonder if we aren't doing Ms Dugdale some kind of injustice, to say that her terse, carefully coordinated and long-germinating public profession of her sexuality should attract only a general shrug. I'm reminded of Alex Massie's essentially kind and humane thoughts, on David Mundell's public recognition of his sexuality (which like Kezia's, came after a lengthy period of speculation, in that odd space, between the public and the private). Massie's slogan was; "so what?" And "so what" indeed.

In one sense, this emancipated public indifference to the personal lives of our politicians is much to be wished. Who cares? But let's not overlook the emotional trouble - the heartsick struggles - which it may have taken for both Dugdale, and Mundell, and Davidson and Harvie before them, publicly to avow these aspects of their personal lives.

As recently as the early 2000s, the Daily Record disgraced itself, spearheading Brian Souter's vile, sleazy and neurotic campaign against informing young people in schools about the realities of LGBT sexuality. Give the self-appointed spokesmen of God an inch, and they will still say the most remarkable, illberal things. Just this year, I had my young law students read through what the Kirk and the Scotsman had to say in the 1960s, when the decriminalisation of same-sex relationships was first proposed in the United Kingdom.

Their horrified reactions about the rigidly righteous moral judgements of their ancestors remains one of the most memorable moments of 2015. My band of thoughtful 20 year olds simply couldn't contemplate that their parents and grandparents had adopted to cramped, so illiberal, so unimaginative a point of view. They looked at the past with naked, almost universal, disbelief. While England swept away the great part of its discriminatory law in the late 1960s, Scotland continued to criminalise the great part of ordinary homosexual activity until the 1980s. This was before I was born -- before my students were born -- but only just.

If your inclination is to shrug about Kezia Dugdale's considered aside about her sexuality -- I salute you. But spare a moment to salute her too. For her courage. For her strength. For her indefatigability. Even in Scotland's now more open political culture, it is no mean thing that she, and Ruth Davidson, and Patrick Harvie, and David Mundell, have done. They deserve - all of them - more than just a shrug.

"Labour is coming home. Come home to Labour..."

Since the Labour conference in Brighton, I've been trying precisely to pin down why I found John McDonnell's "come home to Labour" riff so irritating. Alex Massie captures some of the reasons in his stinging Spectator blog. My article in the latest edition of the Drouth harps on a similar string. But the sense of Labour entitlement implicit in the phrase "come home" has always been vexing. It was, after all, common enough currency among Scottish Labour's old guard. Celebrating the party's stonking 2010 general election win, Douglas Alexander gushed: 

"Right across Scotland, people have come home to Labour. We've never taken Scotland for granted, we've worked for every vote this evening and we've enjoyed success as a consequence of a great deal of hard work."

And in pursuit of victory in that election, Gordon Brown repeated, again and again:

"At this moment of risk to our economy, at this moment of decision for our country, I ask you to come home to Labour."

A quick search on LexisNexis turns up a mighty 196 news articles which use some variation of the phrase. Entertainingly, one of the earliest instances emanated from one Anthony Charles Lynton Blair.  In his keynote address to 1996's October conference in Blackpool, the Labour leader told party delegates:

"I don’t care where you are coming from; it is where your country is going that matters. If you believe in what I believe, then join our team. Labour has come home to you, so come home to us. Labour’s coming home! Seventeen years of hurt never stopped us dreaming. Labour’s coming home! (Applause) As we did in 1945 and 1964, I know that was then, but it could be again – Labour’s coming home. (Applause) Labour’s coming home. The people are coming home."

And a mere nineteen years later, one of Blairism's most inveterate foes in the parliamentary Labour Party is giving it precisely the same "come home" patter? How's that for eternal recurrence? As seems increasingly to be the case with his efforts, the speech did the job for Blair in 1996, but today is nigh unreadable. This political message has been brought to you by the Simpsons' Nelson Muntz and the phenomenon of AWOL daddies who've just nipped out for a pint of milk and a packet of fags. Come home, papa. Come home. *sniffle* 

I'm conscious that gags about flipping political real estate may be regarded as being in poor taste at the moment - but we can only assume that the Labour party has moved neighbourhood in the intervening period. That said, it seems apt - or at least divertingly ironic - that both the inception and the death of the Blairite project in the Labour Party are being announced and celebrated in precisely the same terms. Labour is coming home. Come home to Labour.  Any number of wise clichés suggest themselves here: in my end is my beginning; and "history repeats first as tragedy then as farce."

But it isn't even this which really irked about McDonnell's presumptious, previous declaration that "Labour is now the only anti-austerity party" and that the Plain People of Scotland should biddably "come home". I couldn't quite put my finger on the real source of my disgruntlement, until I read Iain MacWhiter's bit in the Sunday Herald, and the thought suddenly crystallised. 

Labour's new left leadership are running two distinct and incompatible strategies which together conspire to make McDonnell's "come home" schtick simply unendurable. Across the UK, the new party leadership are currently all honey and amelioration and consultation. Shadow cabinet members have been unshackled by anything approaching collective responsibilty. To describe Labour Party policy as incoherent at present would be charitable: it is motley. I appreciate honest policy disgreement as much as the next fellow - more than most, in fact - but there is simply no coherent political expression to be plucked from this mangled policy haystack. You name it. Trident renewal, tuition fees, budget discipline, railways, energy, "people's quantitative easing": it is a boorach.

And worse, the leadership seems isolated and listless rather than fighting its corner within the fractuous and divided ranks of the parliamentary party. Whatever calculations the Corbyn-McDonnell axis are making behind the scenery, on policy, the spirit of left capitulation seems general, sacrificed on the altar of party unity. Consultation is the watchword of the day. And Jeremy seems more preoccupied with facilitating party democracy than he does with securing the victory for his own viewpoint. 

The impression may be unfair and mistaken -- but Mr Corbyn seems prepared biddably to assent to whatever policy compromise his party is prepared to yield up to him. As a saintly democrat - this all may be perfectly commendable - but if you wanted an invertebrate to lead the UK Labour Party, Andy Burham was already on the ballot paper. 

But in Scotland? In Scotland we are invited to conclude that only the views of the party's new leadership are in any sense consequential, however few followers Mr Corbyn and his vicar on earth actually command on their own Commons benches. We are invited to forget awkward memories of recent votes on the Welfare Reform Bill, which propelled Corbyn to the front line in the leadership contest. "Labour is now the only anti-austerity party".

In every other context, we are encouraged to believe that the new leader has a frail and self-depracating democratic voice - one among many, many of whom disagree with him. But in Scotland? In Scotland, only the sentiments of this isolated and embattled leadership matters. Come home to Labour. I'm reminded of King Richard the II's melancholy reflections on a Welsh beach, in Shakespeare's play of the same name. "For God's sake," said King Richard:

"... let us sit upon the ground And tell sad stories of the death of kings. How some have been deposed; some slain in war, Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed; Some poison'd by their wives: some sleeping kill'd; All murder'd: for within the hollow crown That rounds the mortal temples of a king Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits, Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp, Allowing him a breath, a little scene, To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks, Infusing him with self and vain conceit, As if this flesh which walls about our life, Were brass impregnable, and humour'd thus Comes at the last and with a little pin Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!"

There will be no monarchizing from Jeremy. No fear. No killing looks. As Iain MacWhirter lays out, it is difficult to find the policy issue where Corbyn hasn't tacked and trimmed, compromising and accommodating himself to his many deprecators in his own party. But in Scotland? In Scotland, we must think on the increasingly hollow crown Jeremy wears, enjoy its glitter, and "come home" to Labour like good bairns. And so farewell, king.

Do we really understand English politics?

One of my favourite, counterintuitive political facts is that Oxford has fewer Tory councillors than Glasgow.  The Edwardian stone, the tweedy dons, the unselfconscious wearing of straw boaters - in the Scottish public imagination, you might expect the educational centre of the British establishment to be true blue, all the way. Not so. Oxford wards return precisely no Conservative representatives, while Pollokshields yields up Glasgow's solitary Tory. 

In fairness, the city is a speck of red in the surrounding blue: Banbury, Henley, Witney. Labour are entrenched in east Oxford. The Tories snatched Oxford North and Abingdon in 2010 and held it comfortably after the Liberal Democratic collapse of 2015. But when I first learned this small statistic, it made me wonder: did I really understand English politics as well as I thought? Was I projecting onto, rather than really appreciating, the complexity and ambivalence of the political ideas and identities of the folk who lived around me? 

There is a tendency among Scottish political obsessives - and I count myself among them - to imagine that we understand English politics because we keep abreast of what happens at Westminster. But just as what goes on on the green benches is a poor guide to the constituencies we live in, so too, the Commons feels a million miles away from the sleepy back streets of Oxfordshire, or the noisy conurbations of the midlands and the north. Logical consequences follow. You'll have heard the old gag about the United States and Great Britain being "two countries separated by a common language." The shared language in which American politics is transacted creates an illusion of accessibility. But as we listen to Clinton drone on, or try to follow Trump's latest quackery, you gradually realise that we really miss and misunderstand as much as we appreciate. 

When I moved to the south of England, I also came to realise - a bit guiltily - that was I interpreting the politics of my English colleagues and neighbours using a series of very crude, roughcast ideas. And often as not, my stock characters proved dead wrong. They were false friends. There was the medieval historian - a picture of crusty reaction - who radiated social snobbery but who was a Labour man to his fingertips. His politics recalled the establishment of the old Labour Right: Healy, Wilson, Smith.  A conservative figure - make no mistake - but with only scorn for David Cameron's Conservative government. 

Then there was the bluff College porter who was a dyed in the wool Tory. Not a Scullion, but a tough-minded and conclusive kind of character, satisfied with his lot. Even stranger was the delightful, kind-hearted and subversive old dame who seemed to support little in the party manifesto but who had also voted Tory all her days. Still more perplexing were the floating voters who had ping-ponged unselfconsciously between Labour and the Tories for decades.

It seemed to me like Beowulf voting for Grendel's mother, and vice versa. I struggled even to begin to compute the idea of politics which made these choices seem reasonable and understandable. James Meek did a power of work for UKIP in the same vein in the London Review of Books -- but somehow the idea of a Labour-Tory voter remains elusive. The only two I can think of are Alex Massie and Chris Deerin -- hardly a representative sample of what is a commonplace character in English constituencies. We struggle to take off our Scottish political goggles, and too often, they distort our vision and our understanding.

The political passions of others you met were more obvious. The bumptious former city trader with army affectations might have come from central casting or Tory central office. The young, highly-educated precariat, preoccupied by questions of social liberalism, who once voted Liberal Democrat, but now cast ballots for Labour without much enthusiasm, or tacked Green. The North Oxford Liberal Democrats - wealthy, worthy, perjink - who couldn't vote Labour out of social snobbery, and declined to support what they saw as the vulgar, worldly Conservatives for much the same reason. This mortgaged, property-owning tribe were entirely unmoved by the 2010 coalition and continued to return local Liberal representatatives with thumping votes. Theirs was a liberalism of the polite centre.  

But having spent a number of years living south of the border in growing suspicion -- more and more, I find my own prejudices a poor guide to English politics. Perhaps they always were. But the political conversation north of the border has now diverged so significantly from the experience south of it, I now acutely mistrust my own impressions. In Labour politics, the importance of these issues and judgements are now acute.

If Jeremy Corbyn wins the UK Labour leadership, can he carry the country in 2020? Will England warm to him, disappointing his many detractors who cry him "unelectable"? Or is Liz Kendall right - that only tough medicine will do and that Labour must make further concessions to Osborne's vision of Britain to win again? Judging this correctly is critical for Labour's future. A couple of weeks back, SNP spinner Erik Geddes posted this fascinating table on Twitter. Based on research by YouGov, it asked what folk thought were the most important reasons for Labour's defeat in 2015.

The divergence between the explanations giving in Scottish and English samples are revealing.  The preoccupations which drove Labour's disastrous showing in May north and south of the border are fundamentally different. They are seen differently. Andy Burham is, I think, dead wrong to argue that Labour's route back to power runs through Glasgow. 2015 did not represent a temporary blip, but a generational shift in political allegiances north of the border. It wasn't a sudden change, but the logical consequence of decades of Labour decline. It only completed the process which has been chipping away at the party's electoral performance for years.

To put it at its harshest, if UK Labour's route to victory runs through Glasgow, then Labour is going to continue to lose to their Conservative opponents for the foreseeable future. Finding a winning strategy for England is essential. I have no idea which of the four candidates - if any - is best placed to do so. However, in striving to identify that winning strategy, they'd be well-advised to ignore the advice of their Scottish comrades, critics and fellow-travellers. We just don't get it.

Keeping the doing of British government in hand

I recently met a die-hard English unionist who was worried about the dearth of Scottish students attending the great British public schools and to be found in the ornate halls and cloisters of Oxford and Cambridge. At first blush, these anxieties seemed highfalutin and even comical, but what my interlocutor was really worried about was what he saw as the emerging lack of Scottish corporate solidarity with British elite experiences and values. It was essential, he thought, for an admittedly tiny, but he judged, potent minority of young Scots to be enrolled in the stoutly British public sphere not just educationally, but in ineffable common experience, sentiment, and friendship.  

"Give me the child and I'll give you the man" is an old Jesuit boast, and hardly an original insight, but something about his idiosyncratic disquiet and his equally idiosyncratic solution struck me forcibly. Here was a fellow with a sense of the deep crisis of British unionism revealed by the referendum campaign, trying to think longer term, trying to think strategically about how political ideas can be produced, how they are popularised and how they (perhaps even inadvertently) are enfeebled and dissipate. The idea that the Union can be preserved in the longer run by Vows, Commissions and Scotland Acts alone is fanciful. His choice of solution and objects may be peculiar, but he understood this clearly.

After the heart-stopping anxieties of early September, only a remarkably complacent unionist would now think their work complete, and their initiatives, concluded. To see the ongoing political struggle for a popular, winning, organic unionism only in terms of tactical voting against the perfidious separatists in May is colossally to miss the point. The Better Together parties looked deep into the eyes of the Scottish people, and found dealer's eyes peering back at them, unsentimental, commercial, counting the pennies, weighing the odds. 

For pro-union writers such as Alex Massie and Hugo Rifkind, to conduct constitutional debates as double entry accounting was to neglect the urgent, emotional register of continuing union, but the official No campaign essentially conceded the mercurial loyalties of the electorate, accepting the disturbing provisionality of Scots' attitudes to the Union, and piling in with numbers and arguments likely to pique the interest of a canny, and cautious investor. 

That was an effective strategy for the 18th of September 2014, but securing loyalty through anxiety is not a sustainable device for securing continued Union in the longer term. Machiavelli may have judged that it was better to be feared than loved, but folk often forget, he recommended that the prince should aspire to be loved also, and thought "merciful, faithful, humane." The Union may have been temporarily saved by resort to fearful measures, but unless Scots can once again be persuaded to identify emotionally with the British state, none of the policy autonomies granted to Holyrood will be worth a clipped farthing. 

Only a vanishingly small segment of pro-union opinion seems alive to this wider context, and the fundamental challenges it discloses. The Prime Minister has declared the Scottish question, answered. Jim Murphy has shed his unionist skin altogether.  But behind today's news that big infrastructure projects are to bear plaques with Union flags and "Funded by the UK government" labels, we can perhaps detect the beginning of an attempt, as Alistair Carmichael put it, for a "greater presence" of the Westminster government in Scotland after the No vote.  The move has obvious echoes with the now muted, and taken for granted, but significant and symbolically powerful rebranding affected by Alex Salmond's first administration in 2007.  

But it is still about the cold hard cash. And it still does not answer the deeper, more ineffable concerns of my old unionist about how to build the British solidarity found wanting in the run up to last September - and how to retrench Scotland's position in the union using softer, more sentimental means that the hard nuts and bolts of primary legislation and institutional reform. It also reminds me of something I wrote when the Smith Commission's proposals were revealed. Plastering the Union flag across these big projects is a material expression of the idea that the Union must keep large parts of the doing of British government in hand:  

"For all of the panicked focus in the rest of the United Kingdom of the end of the Union as we know it, the Smith proposals are, essentially, a conservative restatement of the idea that the Union must do things and be seen to do things. Big things. It cannot be an empty vessel within which an autonomous Scotland is contained, and set at liberty to pursue its own priorities. A disinterested lender of last resort, or an organiser of armies and navies with no real interest or say in the domestic affairs of Scots. It must be a state with a purpose, with a mission. To characterise this as an unprincipled "fudge" is fundamentally to misunderstand the political thinking undergirding it.  

For Smith, the Union cannot be conceived a loose confederation of mutually uninterested parties, pursuing their own distinct political priorities. There must be Union dividends. It must pay you back in cold, hard cash. It is a single market in which the worker must be at liberty to float freely, and in which the worker can expect the same minimum wage whether she labours in Cumbria or in Aberdeen. Where her pension is paid from the same pot as her cousin in Kent. A union which builds homes, sustains communities, builds ships, heats pensioners. A Union which secures your fealty, not out of fellow feeling, or a dim sense of identity, but by keeping hold of the purse strings. By keeping significant parts of the doing of British government in hand.  

You may no longer work for state-owned corporations. Ravenscraig may have closed. But the Union justifies its existence by being a force in the life of every person in this country, more and less happily, more and less forcibly. Bugger the abstract calculations: Unionism must remain a matter of self-interest. The UK parliament and government must be felt to be a force in the land."

All of that, in a wee flag.

The faltering Old Music...

It is all getting a bit fraught. It was always going to, but you can feel it, the pot simmering as we get close. It has never been more important for folk on all sides to keep the heid, but also, perhaps, to remember a human faculty which has sometimes been neglected in this process and is most at risk in its dying days: empathy. 

Put away the caricaturist’s sketch. Don’t be tempted by the grand generalisation. Yes or No, win or lose, in the course of this campaign I've met countless good people of goodwill on both sides, explaining the world as best they understand it, balancing complex values, doing what they think best.

We've got to keep hold of that, as the temperature rises, and our perspective wobbles. If there is one lesson of the narrowing polls, it is that the boundaries between us are porous. This isn't a moment in which you're going to hear a lot of ambivalence articulated on the airwaves and on telly, but many of the folk I've met, out and about this weekend, embody this swithering sense precisely: even those who've made up their minds to vote Yes and No.

“The independence referendum: my journey into indecision.” The confessional has arguably become the characteristic genre of referendum literature as we hurtle down the slope towards Thursday’s final big decision. In a religious sense, confession is an opportunity to own up to your weaknesses. In Scottish politics, however, this superabundance of confessions characteristically explain unexpected conclusions, often reached by Damascene routes, often in convoluted archaeologies of self, unearthing surprising discoveries and ambivalent feelings. They have more in common with the psychiatrist’s couch than the cleric’s box. Most of these confessions are written with a certain sense of surprise about their contents. This appeals to me.

In the street last week, I bumped into an acquaintance, a lady from a working class background in Leeds who has, with considerable reluctance and surprise, finally hopped into the Yes column: someone who never imagined that she’d participate in a vote on Scottish self-determination, never mind endorsing it. In Glasgow, I encountered the Spectator’s Fraser Nelson, in newsboy’s jaikit, dishing out free copies of his magazine, calling on Scots to reject independence. The gaucheness and sincerity of the scene made me feel quite fond of him, despite our political differences. It’s a funny old referendum.

The poll, in a public sense, represents an attempt at a major conversation about public and political goods in Scotland and the UK. But for many folk, it has been a public process driving a personal dialogue – and private process of clarification – about their own feelings, commitments and priorities. If there is one lesson to be taken from the Guardian’s recent polling, the two campaigns have to a great extent talked past one another, peddling their preferred frames of political reference. 

For many, I know this has sometimes felt like hard, uncertain digger’s work, trowelling away in the murk, slowly clearing away the sediment, till you strike home hard on a point, till you snag on something solid. I’ve seen these processes at work in my own family, all Yessers, but the sense of conviction has undoubtedly intensified, as the day approaches. I’m reluctant to describe this as being radicalised, given the problematic freight that term now carries, but it represents a gradual and unexpected realisation about what your political priorities are and the intensity of your feelings about them. 

Clarified may be a better way of putting it. My friends have swithered. Like most folk’s friendship circles, there are sceptical folk inclined to vote Yes and No, hardened proponents and opponents of independence, whether on grounds of identity or politics or perceived economics. But the referendum process has undoubtedly focussed minds, the doing of it gradually illuminating what folk care about, and why.

Many have found themselves swayed towards independence, quietly, despite themselves, by the character of the campaign and the quality of its arguments. The No campaign and its new wave of advocates are still talking about Scots needing to “wake up”. They allege that the impulse to vote Yes is an expression of “anti-politics” rather than clear-sighted understanding, that it is rooted in a flip or childish reaction, rather than a well-considered conviction, born of political self-education, consciousness of the risks, challenges and opportunities of independence. That's not my experience.

And most of us are large enough to contain multitudes, to see some of the logic and feeling on the other side, and share in some of their ideas and affections. Massie gets this precisely right in his recent affirmation of his intention to vote against independence on the 18th, surprised by how much Britain means to him, moved by sentiments sloshing around, unclarified once, once undetected, suspected perhaps, but never brought out full out into the open – until now.

Yes, it is also about perceptions of risk and opportunities, political, economic and social, about doability and desirability. But without sounding too much like an economist, in reaching a decision, for most folk, it is about which compromise to strike. Yes, I feel a bit British, but how do I want to be governed? Is there any realistic chance of realising the politics I want to see within the current constitutional set up? Sure, the way the UK works at the moment is dismal, but I want to stay part of it, somehow. Shouldn’t we give it another chance? I don’t want to be governed by the Tories, but is an independent Scotland going to be able to pay its way? Which sets of values and concerns should I privilege, come the day? For some folk, one or other of these views with have a diamond hardness. Over the weekend, I met another old soldier who was a British patriot to his bootstraps, and not to be persuaded. I didn't try. But most folk I encounter see far more shades of grey.

It may be difficult to detect in Better Together’s final deluge of negativity, attempting to relitigate the tried and tested question of whether an independent Scotland is even viable economically, but this commonness gives me great hope for us after the millions of ballots are assembled and counted on the night of the 18th of September. Much has been made about the referendum’s divisive and polarising effects. Some folk, notably the Scottish Labour Party, have felt this more keenly than most. I'm sure it has been difficult for some. But for me, the lesson of the last few years is that most of us have much in common, but we divide sharply on the means by which these common concerns should be addressed.

Although we will make a binary choice on Thursday, it is an incomplete story. Much distinguishes the many folk endorsing independence both tepidly and enthusiastically, and much unites those who will find themselves voting Yes and No on the 18th of September. For me, to vote No is unthinkable, and as a consequence, in a funny way, only thinkable. Unlike many folk, over the last four years, I’ve made no real constitutional journey. Because my ballot was cast in principle long ago, and I’d never seriously consider voting against independence, this campaign has been an opportunity, more than anything else, to consider the boundaries of this conviction. To try to work out why, beyond the rhetoric and the sloganising, the slick cases and the accepted terminology, I feel like I must etch an X in the Yes box on Thursday. 

And here, my heresies begin. As I have written before on the blog, I have a weight of family inheritance on the independence question. My ancient old great-grandfather pulled our family into the SNP from the party’s origins. The loyalty stuck. My granny went to her grave with an SNP symbol on the order of service. But that’s an ambivalent inheritance, and by no means a binding one. The dead have no say in tomorrow, however honourable or sincere their political feelings were, however much we benefit from their forgotten agitation and effort. We must make our own choices, today.

Intellectually, I'm sympathetic to the achievement of a multi-national state. The old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, even the Union: the principle that folk with different identities can cooperate strikes me as an attractive one, and a principle perhaps worth preserving. Some folk on my side of the constitutional fence argue that the “natural” state of a nation is independence, as if the stitchwork of the United Kingdom was Dr Frankenstein’s work: I disagree. There is nothing natural or inevitable about nations, or the desirability of their independence. Yes, Britain is a muddle, but I'm yet to hear a persuasive indictment of that muddlement, which doesn't amount to a Jetsonist tendency to laud some vague "modernity" for Scotland. I can't endorse independence on that prospectus.

We build nations. They are socially constructed. I don’t mean that in the flippant way in which the phrase is often used – that nations are a delusion, an illusion which sensible people have no truck with – but in the sense that we build and sustain them through social action and cognition: they don’t spring from our flesh and blood. We imagine them into life, generating their boundaries, porous or otherwise. They can do good and bad things, and all have brighter and darker sides and potential.

Some folk on the No side have argued that Scottish nationalism is a unique pathology, pushing the country along the road to authoritarian government and heaven knows what. This too is codswallop, elegantly nailed by Fintan O’Toole last week. The Yes campaign is normal, in the narrow sense that it articulates a basic, respectable desire for self-government and responsibility, a desire rooted in an idea of democratic decision-making and political self-organisation. It respects the fact that political ideologies are important, and can (and perhaps ought to) diverge, and those divergence could and (perhaps) should be given institutional expression.

This insight is also the kernel of the 1980s Claim of Right. The Yes campaign may amplify its logic further than some proponents of Scottish devolution are comfortable with, but the arguments for independence are cognate with those agitating for greater powers for Scottish democratic institutions. Yes voters take them a stage further – no quibbles from me on that score – but they spring from a similar place in principle. Yet in this campaign, the Labour Party have, very unsystematically, been laying political powderkegs beneath their own increasingly incoherent thinking on devolution. Indeed, the party have been stoking up a rich store of political problems which will outlast the result, come what may next week, but it has been striking how vigorously its key proponents have junked and scorned thinking central to the devolution project.

In their rush to toss around damning epithets, the No campaign often miss out the positive potential of nationalism’s Janus faces, playing the lawyer’s trick of relabeling that positive dimension “British patriotism”, and sinking the potentially unattractive dimensions of British nationalism into the permafrost of the unconscious. I have friends who are thoroughgoing anti-nationalists who reject any political thinking premised on nationalist concepts. I respect the coherence of that. What I cannot respect, however, is the refusal to reckon with what has become the No campaign’s primary positive case for the Union – British nationalism.

Some folk will think that messy combination of identities is worth preserving. In some ways, it appeals to me too – though I’ve never really felt British, and like my Irish pals, seemed to get on fine during the many years I lived in England being a plain Scotsman from the already-near-abroad, without sharing Westminster government and all that entails. But disguising this British nationalism as a sort of internationalism-in-one-country lacks any credibility. It is a neat trick, to conflate the multi-stranded identity Massie articulates with internationalism, but it isn’t a convincing one. It tries to get out of the conceptual bind which anyone making nationalist arguments ought to face up to: all nationalisms are integrative and disintegrative, premised both on inclusion and an exclusion. That’s unavoidable. For the selective anti-nationalists, Britishness is only redemptive and civic, while Scot Nattery represents only the bum end of nationalist thinking. 

As the force has gone out of the Labour-dominated Better Together campaign's instrumental case for the Union, this is what we're left with: with talk of foreigners. For me, a vote for independence isn't a vote against complexity, but for a different kind of complexity. It isn't about separatism but finding new, more functional, more satisfactory ways to work together. It isn't about a hard, self-contained conception of sovereignty, but about refashioning those valuable bonds and ties between us, on a more equal footing.

I've come to realise that I support independence with some regrets. Part of me wishes Britain was reformable and rescueable, but I'm profoundly pessimistic. It is, no doubt, an overstatement to say that its capacity to reinvent itself is "spent", but the omens don't look good. A radical renovation of the UK from the inside would put me in a sticky place, but there are few serious indications that such a transformation is attainable or desired without independence.

While you can understand the longing lying behind the Guardian and Scotland on Sunday editorials against independence last week, they have an deep air of unreality, preferring the magic primrose path to candyfloss castle, to any serious engagement with the realistically attainable and the possible.  Federalism is not an idea whose time has come, but a proposition without advocates, without support, with shallow political roots in a moment of panic.

It was difficult to explain, to English friends in Oxford, that it was nothing personal – quite the opposite. Alex Massie is happy to have that inchoate, beguiling feeling of muddled togetherness trump concerns about how Scotland and the UK is governed, and which parts of our society it serves. I am not, but I can understand where he’s coming from. In voting Yes, and voting No, we’re striking a different compromise.

The porousness of the boundary between the two has both confused and put the fear of God up Westminster, but it shouldn’t be surprising to folk who’ve been paying attention to this process in recent years. The two choices aren’t a million miles apart, but the either/or nature of the poll doesn’t admit of such subtleties. In these last few days of this campaign, we shouldn’t be overwhelmed by that simplicity, and forget the wider commonalities of sentiment and aspiration which this referendum has identified.

I can’t in good conscience say that sacrifices won’t have to be made if we vote Yes (and by some folk more than others). Part of me will feel profoundly sad for folk like Chris Deerin, Adam Tomkins and other articulate proponents of Union, if Scotland does vote Yes next week. No legerdemain about Britain being a geographical concept can or should soften the initial blow. We Nationalists should at least reckon with, and recognise that.

The other day, when YouGov first reported a Yes lead, I was on the cusp of texting a Unionist pal telling him to “chin up” before realising how misplaced and odd that sentiment would be. The text went unset.  Yes, the idea of Britain isn’t exhausted by our shared political institutions, but nor is it entirely separable in the way some advocates of independence have suggested. The concept of the social union expresses an important and credible sense of how much we have in common with the other nations of Britain, and how little that is imperilled by independence.

But we need to reckon with the loss some of our citizens will feel. Nothing in that loss inhibits me for a moment, from urging folk to support independence for a better kind of democracy, winning the powers to tack our own course and set our own priorities, a responsible state and a politics capable of reflecting our ideals. The people will speak on that question, and have ample opportunity, if they wish, to strike a different compromise between their competing values. 

I never thought we would win this referendum. In my gloomier moments, I wondered if we’d even come close. Now and then, there have been flashes of optimism, as the No campaign let golden opportunities fly by, neglected critical lines of argument, even when the first clutch of Yes posters sprouted in windows across the south side of Glasgow. Silly, I know, but that visible sense of political comeradeship affords a wee lift. My pessimism throughout the campaign has been pretty overwhelming. To burst into the final, fretful week more or less eeksy-peaksy always struck me as improbable, yet here we are. We can do it. That's thrilling, and it is anxiety-pinching.

I’ve spent much of my life in institutions and environments, where support for Scottish independence was unthinkable, even ridiculous, a minority pursuit easily and unsympathetically caricatured. I know some folk on the No side are smarting right now, gripped by a sense of mortal dread. In that bewilderment, as the old certainties collapse, hard things will be said. Don't take them to heart. They're understandable.

But it isn’t our fault that the old music isn’t what it once was. It isn’t our fault that you’ve struggled to make the old sang shine, and all too frequently, can only remember a few attenuated bars. Nobody’s been stopping you from making that case; nobody has silenced you. You’ve clearly found your own authentic voice difficult to find, but that’s your problem, nor ours. I’m sorry you feel this way, but I tell you this: things aren’t as gloomy as you think they are, folk aren't nearly so far apart.

Two European Futures

There are many strands of contemporary UK policy which are, in their own ways, dismaying. One of the more underexposed in the independence debate is the frequently irrational spirit of anxiety gripping Westminster and Fleet Street about all things European. At times, it has shades of a persecution complex. Underlined by Douglas Carswell's defection to UKIP from the Tories last week, it has an obvious and ongoing European Union manifestation, but also touches on European human rights norms, and the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. 

These issues cannot be tucked away behind a safe little firewall from the constitutional debate in Scotland, to be considered at a later date. The No campaign has made much of the risks and uncertainties of an independent Scotland's EU accession. They have focussed not only on timeline and terms of an independent Scotland joining the other 28 member states: they couldn't resist overplaying their hand, recklessly drawing attention to their own weakest spot. Against almost all of the evidence and reasonable commentary, for months, Better Together have been stirring up the idea that Scotland would be pitched out of the EU into the north Atlantic cold. The game, it seems, continues with reports of their activists dishonestly telling Polish voters that their families would be uprooted if Scotland votes Yes next week.  

But a moment's consideration will tell you that this is a political boomerang for the No campaign, bedevilled by its own rich superabundance of risks and uncertainties about the United Kingdom's continued participation in the European Union and its legal recognition of your basic civil and political rights. In a piece for the Journal today - "Damned lies and bogus statistics..." -  I take a look at the facts and figures, lies and fictions, which currently dominate the UK airwaves and David Cameron's cabinet, on Britain's participation in these modest international schemes to provide some human rights remedy, some modest protection for your privacy rights, your liberty, your right to be free of torture, and not to be exposed to flagrant injustice or inhuman and degrading treatment.

It is a grim reminder of how precisely we are supposed to be Better Together. It isn't the whole story, certainly, but it is an important, urgent part of the wider UK picture. Amid the tempest of dross, there have been some wonderfully sensitive and nuanced pieces of writing in recent days from those who intend to vote No, with Chris Deerin and Alex Massie standing out for me, and I imagine, for others. I don't share their convictions on the constitution, or sense of British identity, but you can admire the graciousness of the prose and the evident thoughtfulness undergirding it. David Cameron asked a choice audience today not to "break his heart." That the campaign must have an emotional dimension always seemed to me entirely proper.

But we can't let these compelling night thoughts on the union sunset distract us from the real bother which a No vote drags us into, unavoidably. If we vote against independence on the 18th of September, there is every possibility that Scotland is going to crash out of the ECHR, on the basis of a fairy tale. And to adapt Tam Dalyell, we find ourselves set, by the raging fever gripping UK politics, on a motorway, with fewer and fewer turnoffs and exits, to a future outside of the European Union, whatever Scots might think either way.

Tossed into the steaming cauldron of the House of Commons, it makes for a potent combination: a witch's brew of misplaced anxieties, madcap delusions of victimhood, and an imperviousness to pretty simple facts. With independence and continuing union, there are opportunities and risks, costs and benefits. If you are inclined to weigh the stability of the status quo against the uncertainties of independence, put aside that misconception now. If you value the judicial protection of your fundamental rights, if you think that the European Convention represents a small, embattled achievement rather than the cartoonish abomination which the inner circle of Cameron's cabinet see, Scotland's place in the Union looks like the riskier option by far.  All you need do is vote yes to dispel the fairy tale.

Read the full piece here.

Yeah even unto the Middle Ages

I’ve always been interested in confidence, partly by dint of pure narcissism. When it comes to self-assertion, I’ve long felt like two souls in the same body, the one self-possessed, the other possessed by irrational, inadequate self-doubt. I will thoughtlessly take on challenges which would make many folk shiver and choke. I can stand up, noteless and half prepared in thronging rooms full of people, and put in a brisk oratorical turn. Somehow, perhaps sometimes misguidedly, I’m sure that I’ll put in a decent performance and that somewhere in my skull, relevant thoughts clatter about and will dutifully assemble themselves into something coherent at the indicated moment. 

If you and I met, or in company, I can be brisk, cheerful, inquisitive, intimate – but if the spirit of confidence deserts me, I find myself prey to irrational hindrances, unlyrical, stoppered, odd – even, or perhaps particularly, about small, unconscious acts and ordinary things. It is exhausting to be useless, and generally pointless. The source of one's inadequacies are rarely as formidable as they seem, when your mind spins off into gyroscopic anxiety. Over time, with a growing sense of myself, this doubleness has receded, but across my short life, this Jekyll and Hyde attitude to confidence has both tested and tended to confuse those around me: teachers, colleagues, friends. I find it confusing too. 

Folk often seem to assume that confidence is a zero-sum sort of calculation: either you are graced with it, or you are bereft: bumptious or a trembler. That’s not my experience. Teaching undergraduates in tutorials and seminars also opens a window into self-assertion's fickle ways. I've known students who you'd need a crowbar or a picklock to coax into speaking during the session, but who explode into vivacious little creatures as soon as the class breaks and the tutor's not-terrifically baleful eye leaves them.

A little flicker crosses the face of others - the cue that they've got something to say - but an encouraging prod is required if the thought, however cogent, is to be expressed. The heedless confidence of others outstrips their capacity. Being alive to this psychological dimension of the encounter is one of the unexpected, rewarding but challenging, parts of teaching.  This work has persuaded me, more than ever, that confidence isn't just a matter of personal psychology - it is structural. We build it up or leave it to atrophy in families and institutions. 

Yesterday, Alex Massie tacked this post over at the Spectator, asking "Who cares if English commentators like or respect Scotland?" Confidence is at the essence of the piece, but Alex's argument is multi-pronged. Surely being desperately concerned about the good opinion of others isn't really an expression of confidence, but actually craven and a bit needy? Isn't it outsourcing your self-esteem to other folk, making your happiness and equanimity contingent on their good or bad conceits of you? But Alex doesn't stop there, taking a swipe at what he perceives as a tendency amongst Yes advocates to regard:

"... anyone voting No this September lacks confidence in Scotland. A No voter, you see, bears the mark of the Scottish cringe and if that’s not obviously or prominently displayed on his napper it surely scars his conscience."

I wonder though if Alex isn't at risk of conflating a few issues. I agree that seeking externally for approval is no expression of confidence, but the opposite. On the other hand, while I don't think voting No is necessarily an expression of lack of confidence, and some Scots doubtless feel perfectly chipper and self-assertive within the UK, I sit with the folk Massie criticises: for most folk, the decision to vote No won't a vindication of healthy, pith-helmeted British imperiousness, but an expression of lack confidence. As Massie rightly contends, you meet plenty of Scots who would would scratch their head at the idea that Scottishness is a wooden leg within the United Kingdom.

The theme of this Saturday's session of David Greig's All Back to Bowie's #indyref Fringe discussion is Tactful Cactus – Is There a Scottish Establishment? Having passed through private schooling in Glasgow, Edinburgh law school and Oxford, I'm familiar with the mindset of the folk Alex is referring to and to a significant extent participate in it.  These institutions generated and continue to generate folk, unawed and at home in cloistered corridors. You can still imagine many of these unselfconscious bluffers donning rifles and linen suits and setting sail to rule some luckless corner of the British imperial map. Such are the wages of privilege.

Visiting the National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, and then wander around the New Town, has a similar effect. I'm always struck by the continuity of feel. The faces of the periwigged worthies of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries easily transposed onto the bustling suits and polished shoes of today. Watching Edinburgh's bourgeois tribes clip confidently through the neo-classical architecture, I'm always reminded of the scene from Chris Mullin's Very British Coup, where the ancient establishment functionary explains to the socialist Prime Minister why the security services have conspired against his government. As Harry Perkins says, these are "people who remain quiet, behind the scenes, generation after generation, yeah even unto the middle ages."

Doctors, judges, bankers, Faculty men, Scotland Office mandarins, these well-heeled, black-coated gentlemen did and continue to do the British state some service. The pacts struck by the Ghost of Henry Dundas still commands allegiances. The High Court of Justiciary which convicted and transported Thomas Muir for sedition still sits, in some important sense. For most Scots, this is a bewildering world apart, but having encountered it, one cannot but be struck by its robust sense of self, and its unselfconscious confidence in the exercise of power. Quietly, behind the scenes, yeah even unto the middle ages.

The SNP have adopted the mantra that Scotland can, should and must be independent. For my money, the Yes campaign has made good headway with the idea that we should be independent, but we're still struggling to persuade people that we can. In bridging that gap, confidence matters. If we fail, the Yes campaign must bear the weight of blame. But for the overwhelming majority of folk, unsteeped in what can sometimes seem like the uncritical hive mind of the Scottish establishment, I struggle to believe that a No vote would represent a happy, dauntless vindication of Scotland's place in Britain. If this referendum has revealed one thing, it is that Scots allegiance to the British state is - perhaps disturbingly - provisional.

The Anatomy of Panic

The collapse of old, critically-unexamined certainties can be discombobulating. We've all got them - basic assumptions we make and generally don't question, that keep life toddling on undisturbed.  The sun will rise tomorrow. Labour will win any Glasgow election going. What I'm good at today, I'll be good at tomorrow: my talents and faculties won't desert me.

Often as not, we can afford to take these things for granted.  But when the ground falls suddenly away beneath you, you're generally unprepared for the landing. In my experience, your first reaction is almost invariably the wrong one.  The temptation to overreact, to panic, is acute.

For my part, the experience of working on a doctorate has been a serious salutary one in this respect.  The process of writing has always tended to come easily to me, even as a nipper.  I may run like a hirpling pygmy hippo.  My body may have the accumulated athleticism of an adipose sloth.  My character may be haunted by its share of weird anxieties and frustrating inadequacies. But I have always been confident, and have always enjoyed, turning a phrase in print. To find yourself tongue-tied, fretful, blocked and inarticulate - was seriously disturbing.

As people's troubles go, this is a fairly minor anxiety which I invite no particular sympathy for. But what rendered it dismaying was the discovery that an old immodest conceit was fundamentally mistaken. I am now, I'm happy to say, over the hump, but for a period, this confrontation with the unforeseen collapse in one of life's certainties curdled my spirits and demolished my confidence. I'm doubtless better off for it, but the internal resources had to be slowly worked up, to deal with it.

Why the confessional note, you might reasonably wonder.  In the referendum debate, recent weeks have seen a familiar existential panic grip sections of the Better Together campaign, particularly in Tory circles south of the border.  There are plenty of prudent reasons to be anxious.  The polls have narrowed.  The incoherences and disunities in the No campaign are proving increasingly difficult to manage privately, and are spilling out into acrimonious press briefings and backstabbings. Interventions supposed to have been decisive, warning of the perils of separation, have failed to stir up the animus against independence which was hoped.  

More fundamentally anxiety-provoking is the discovery that the positive case for the Union has proved disturbingly difficult to state lucidly or with confidence.  Folk like Hugo Rifkind, profoundly invested in ideas of Britain and Britishness, lament that "the fat-tongued, rubber-footed, cack-handed, tin-eared uselessness of British political discourse on Scottish independence is beginning to give me the fear." You don't have to be a wizard strategist to discern that this bag-of-ferrets strategy doesn't look good. 

In these unhelpful, public intra-Unionist anxiety sessions, the tone has been by turns hysterical and resigned. It's all Alistair Darling's fault, the dreary so-and-so.  No, that's not it at all. It's all these horrid Tory day-trippers, these coalition ministers with their hectoring tones and messages of calamity. That's not it. It's Labour's dereliction of duty when it comes to activists. Like Wellington at Waterloo, you can imagine senior Tories rattling around empty offices, crying, "where are the Prussians?"

All of which, for the independence-supporter, is fine larks and to be encouraged.  But I do wonder if the pitch of the panic tells us more about the gap which has opened between Scottish and Westminster politics, than it does about the likelihood of Yes carrying referendum day. I've written here before about the phenomenon of being talked at about Scottish independence in parts of England. Surely the idea of Scotland separating is disreputable, ludicrous, laughable, impossible, unthinkable. Surely no right-thinking person could possibly endorse the idea. Oh, if you must. Have your silly referendum, then. But it is a foregone conclusion, my dear chap.  Even explaining that a good chunk of the country had voted for the SNP twice did nothing to shift this basic conviction in those I talked to. I came to realise that our political imaginations occupied two different spaces, and they simply hadn't begun to take the possibility of independence seriously, or pondered why others might find it desirable or compelling.

With the Yes campaign catching up in the polls, that cherished certainty has been annihilated. This is, I'm sure, profoundly disturbing and helps to explain the irrational and excessive alarm now gripping parts of the No campaign. Also in the Spectator earlier this week, Alex Massie was on perceptive form on this point, concluding: 

"Some people seem shocked that the race looks as though it will be a close one. I’m more tempted to be shocked by the fact people are shocked by this. It’s almost as if they’ve not been paying attention."

Crumbling certainties confuse and they upset. And the No campaign across the UK doesn't have the luxury of much time to recalibrate its emotional and intellectual resources.  The imaginative gap, alluded to by both Massie and Rifkind, separating the Westminster-dominated politics and the debate in Scotland, remains one of the Yes campaign's most significant structural advantages.

The best advocates always understand their audience, its quirks and assumptions and reactions.  They know which levers to pull, which switches to turn and which to leave well alone. Now and then, the talented amateur may get lucky, but it is a risky business. For the increasingly-anxious political actor, steeped in London-centric politics and hoping to have an impact on how Scots vote in September, the prevailing disunities within the UK make the job that much harder. For Better Together's supporters, they can but hope that none of their fretful, tinkering amateurs presses any big red buttons before September. 

Can Cameron lose a debate against Eck?

Should David Cameron participate in a debate against Alex Salmond before the referendum campaign closes? Will he? Today, a poll indicates that 67% of Scots are in favour of such a debate. To date, the balance of probabilities has seemed to suggest that no debate will take place.  

The script explaining why writes itself. The unpopularity of the Tory-led Westminster government represents one of the big challenges for Better Together across much (but not all) of the country.  If Yes Scotland can transform the Scottish anti-Tory coalition into a pro-independence coalition, the Union is stuffed.

By contrast, the overwhelming majority of Scottish Conservative voters can be solidly relied upon to reject the SNP's constitutional project, come what may. Without any disrespect to them, Better Together can afford to ignore this section of the electorate most of the time. Getting the vote out on polling day will be important, but convincing these folk isn't a priority.  While the Aberdeenshire, Perthshire or Borderer Tory might grouse about Cameron's cowardice in refusing to put himself to the touch in defence of the Union he believes in, this disgruntlement is profoundly unlikely to move them from the No to the Yes column. So who cares?

By contrast, making Cameron the late face and spokesman for the Union in a critical debate is calculated to alienate a vital, wavering section of the electorate who'd never dream of supporting him in their lifetimes. Tory money, Labour activism: that was the deal.  On this vision, the main virtue of the Conservative involvement in the constitutional debate is stealth.  Cameron's participation in any debate would blow that steady strategy to bits.  

An audacious, but risky gambit and one that Better Together may not be able to afford, if the polls narrow towards the end of the campaign.  Although the media love them, the evidence is rather more ambivalent about the impact of debates on voter behaviour. Do they change people's minds? Where one candidate or party wins by a landslide, we can afford to be a bit cavalier about the impact of such televisual events. Not so if the race looks remotely like coming down to a few percentage points one way or t'other.  All good, cautious reasons for Cameron not to debate against the Maximum Eck.

Largely sharing this logic, Alex Massie has nevertheless argued the all into the valley of death case for Cameron to debate the First Minister over the course of the referendum campaign. Surely it is pretty pitiful for a fellow to say that every fibre will be strained in the United Kingdom's defence, but demur from actually making that case yourself to your fellow citizens? It looks craven, and weak, and worse, it undermines a key plank of the Unionist project. 

As Dame Bella of Doily explained in her maiden speech to the House of Lords this week, the idea that the referendum is an issue for Scots only sits uncomfortably beside the togetherness espoused by those supporting a No vote.  In defence of Cameron's stance, various folk have suggested that Eck is attempting to transform the referendum into a snarling, ethnically charged battle between Scotland and England. A simpler explanation might be that the choice is, to some extent, between concurrent administration of the country by Prime Ministers and First Ministers, or Scottish politicians which we can peeble to our hearts content.  

I wonder, though, if there are other good reasons why Cameron ought to put aside his qualms and have a crack at Salmond. Given how low expectations are about Cameron's performance in an #indyref debate against Eck, can the PM really lose?

Reason one: the idea folk will conveniently forget that they are governed by Tories at the UK level if Cameron avoids putting his phizog on telly is ludicrous.  If that fact becomes salient for a significant section of the electorate in the referendum debate - and there are signs that it has already become so - the unpopularity of the Prime Minister and his colleagues can't be avoided. It isn't obvious that a debate could further decrease the regard with which the Conservatives are held north of the Tweed. Not debating seems to secure few advantages.

On the other hand, there is a reasonable worry that the debate would depict the constitutional choices in a way uncongenial to the Labour-dominated forces of Better Together. Although a number of pro-independence folk doubtless have their problems with the first minister, I fancy that the gap of sentiment if not of ideology separating Salmond from them is less than divides your pro-Union Labour voter from Cameron. In a calculated way, recognising this fact is doubtless a reason to refuse to participate. But pace Massie, it still looks pitiful.  People like a trier. 

Reason two: The received wisdom is that Eck would merrily pulp Cameron in any debate. I'm not so sure. And if those expectations of a pulping are not realised, the benefits break entirely Cameron's way. In the American scene, more practised in these sort of head-to-head arguments, they've become pass masters of managing expectations. Democratic spinners bigging up their opponent's credentials, Republicans emphasising the eloquence and experience of their opposite number. Why? Because if you go into these things as the overwhelming favourite, there's a serious risk that you underwhelm, your opponent does better than expected, and you end up with bad headlines, and their unexpected cogency becomes a "game changer". At least in the headlines, in the last days of the campaign.   

If the Salmond vs Cameron debate broke along these lines, you can imagine the copy: "We all expected a Salmond knockout. But the First Minister struggled to land the killer blow last night as the Prime Minister came out fighting in a well-prepared and well-pitched plea for Scots to "stay with us". "An assured performance from Cameron, which surprised many observers." "After a difficult week in Westminster, the Prime Minister has seized back the momentum this week in a commanding performance in Scotland, taking the battle to the separatist-in-chief Alex Salmond, leaving the Chief Puddin' red-faced again and again."  Etcetera, etcetera.  Expectations about Cameron's performance are so low, I struggle to see how he can lose.

Cameron would also want to take an off piste approach to preparing his lines of argument. Wargame unanticipated angles Salmond won't be prepared for. Mix it up. Unless truly calamitous, Cameron can rely on a sympathetic hearing from many of the nationals, who can be expected to leap on anything less than a wholesale Eckly demolition as a set-back and a calamity for the Nats. 

More importantly, perhaps, showing a bit of grit may be in Cameron's own domestic interests. The Prime Minister is getting a troubling reputation for invertibracy, a spammy quality. Giving Eck an even modest thwapping on his own turf can only play well in the London presses, which are still in the grip of the idea that "wily" Salmond represents some mystically forceful character.  There would be no point in debating anything with wee Johann Lamont.  If he comes out unscathed and unscarred against Salmond - or at least having dealt and earned a few scrapes - there's a bit of kudos in that for a plastic PM striving to give his gelatinous form more substance.   

And lastly, a debate between the two would be fun. Shouldn't constitutional politics be fun too? It would also represent an opportunity to bring the folk of these islands together, a set-piece moment for folk in England, Wales, Norn Iron and Scotland to hear and understand the arguments both for and against the idea of Scottish independence and continuing Union. Surely a good unionist should want nothing less.