Gerry Hassan writes:-
- A second Scots indyref is likely but not inevitable. It will only happen when it is winnable, Yes is in a significant lead, and importantly, detailed work has been done to improve and make more credible than last time the indy offer. My Sunday column.(Gerry Hassan on a second independence referendum - 'A new vote on an independent Scotland must be economically honest - not based on fantasy oil prices writes GERRY HASSAN.')
- Nick Durie This is dishonest, and echoes the Unionist crowing with hindsight. The SNP's projected oil revenues relied on a price that was midway between the OBR projection and the Department for Energy and Climate Change projection. The Daily Record might lap up such Unionist sophistry but the facts say something different.
- Gerry Hassan Good to know you are thinking Nick; 'Unionist crowing' to point out as someone who voted Yes the limits of SNP indy offer and the complete lack of any post-indyref reappraisal. Yes lost and deserved to lose: welcome to reality.
- Nick Durie You claim that oil projections were a fantasy. Why were they less than those issued by the UK Department for Energy and Climate Change?
- Nick Durie The fact of the matter is that oil price projections were based on market trends and market fundamentals, and they did not anticipate that Saudi Arabia would flood the energy market to destabilise Russia and collapse US fracking. This was not something the British Government anticipated either, and claiming some kind of post facto foreknowledge while adopting an "It was rubbish" Unionist frame is not the same thing as providing a credible critque. Neither a Scottish currency, nor attempted accession to the Euro is without problems; furthermore neither of those two options does anything to reassure those worried that their savings and investments, denominated in Sterling, would be secure. That was afterall the whole point of the "You're not getting the Pound" frame - to terrorise that cohort that held savings and investments denominated in Sterling. Simply saying 'we won't have Sterling anymore' does not resolve or de-weaponise that attack line; it actually makes it stronger. People were not worried about the future of Sterling in Scotland because of some haivers about central banks. They were worried about their savings and investments.
- Gerry Hassan Everything about the economics of the indyref offer was a fantasy: oil price, economic projections, currency, Treasury/Bank of England straightjacket. And all only made sense in light of SNP leadership thinking they would lose and instead engage in a vote maximalisation strategy. Then late on they convinced themselves they could win.
- Nick Durie This is a media bubble argument which owes more to the self-congratulatory discourse of the Unionist commentariat than it does to any extant evidence. The currency strategy was determined by a council of economists, not politicians. The SNP chose simply to follow it; whether their political calculus determined it was good to follow it or not, that strategy was, as you know, written by some very globally notable economists. The oil price was essentially a UK government and Scottish government consensus. The shared central bank is a threat, a gun to the head of Whitehall, and a determination to give the spivs a golden bridge, rather than collapse the London banking centre by immediately denominating Scottish energy in another currency. To claim otherwise to any of that is to fail to engage with the evidence.
- Nick Durie "Yes lost and deserved to lose: welcome to reality."
This assumes that the YES offer was why YES lost. I don't think that's particularly materialist. In many ways YES did deserve to lose, but I would argue it lost because the formal YES and SNP campaign concentrated on public relations and fought a very good election campaign, but the depth of citizen engagement with the issue left that approach looking top down and shallow. Citizens were interrogating the question with a zealous seriousness that is not analogous to an electoral cycle contest. The wider mass movement of the YES campaign came to understand that, and had to make up for the shortcomings of the offical and largely corporate style campaign. Consider how much more seriously the Wee Blue Book took the reader than the official YES literature, Your Future, which notionally filled the same role. The latter was put together by a PR company. The former was written in a referenced academic style where the reader could go and check the footnotes. Yet YES HQ reacted to these on the ground efforts with umbrage, and often deliberately sabotaged the logistics of the on the gound campaign, purely to maintain the PR voice of the campaign
[In one notorious particular instance of this YES' point man for 'organising' of the YES movement, Ross Greer, got into a fight of his choosing with a local YES campaign group because they were distributing leaflets advertising Scotland's most popular, and pro-independence, political news website Wings Over Scotland; YES HQ continued to oppose the distribution of the Wee Blue Book, also produced by Wings Over Scotland, despite activists finding both that this was the single most effective written introduction to the arguments for independence, and the widespread desire of local YES groups to get more serious and comprehensive literature to the switherin voters because of the feedback they had been getting from these voters. It appeared that YES HQ ignored that feedback, because little was done to distribute non-PR based publications in this kind of format.
The pointless, and often apparently petulent, self-sabotaging of the actual YES movement by Ross Greer and others at YES HQ caused serious rifts within the campaign and damaged the credibility of the campaign centre among those it sought, wholly inexpertly, to direct. We now know from Greer that this petulence from the centre went further, and that, without any accountability, disciplinary procedure or published code of conduct, Ross Greer and Jonathan Mackie operated personal blacklists of campaigners they personally didn't like; we will perhaps never know the extent of this practice, but it typifies the strained relationship between the failing campaign centre and the more successful huge movement that had built up often in despite of it.].
To some extent the upbeat smugness of the PR campaign did however act as a late stage force multiplier on the late stage undecideds, but by this point the official campaign had already burnt many bridges with its actual on the ground logistics. It was the absence of these logistics that prevented YES from mobilising its own base, and saw many YES activists late on in the campaign do largely frivolous things. The infrastructure of the official campaign prattled on and castigated those people, but they were not plugged in to their official campaign precisely because it had been so incompetent at building and directing a peoples movement*, and had therefore totally lost the respect and capacity to mobilise its own potential logistics, nor did it have the vision to do so. This was why YES lost by 180,000 votes. It had little or nothing to do with the actual offer.
*[At no point did the YES HQ employ or seek the advice of professional trade union or community organisers with experience of building mass movements; there were a number of such people involved in the grassroots of the YES campaign, many of them with decades of experience in trade union organising drives, or community coalition building. Their skills were never called upon or utilised in any kind of systematic way. For those who have seen the effects of a trade union or community organising drive with a staff led organising component, this seems a serious ommission, and perhaps explains why following campaign "launch" events drawing in hundreds of potential leaders. in major towns and cities, often nothing happened as a followup to engage with this base for 12 months or more. The entire approach to the logistics of engagement played a less important role for Greer and others notionally tasked with organising the logistics, than the question of brand maintenance and PR, which in the end proved less significant to the result than the number of one to one conversations the actual movement was having, independent of any direction or cajoling from the YES centre, with undecided voters.]
