Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Project Fear and the grim legacy of Scotland’s ‘no’ campaign

A year ago today, Britain woke up to find the union saved – but only just. In 10 Downing St, the 45 per cent voting ‘yes’ looked like a victory, and the whole issue closed. I was in my hometown of Nairn that day, in the Highlands, where things looked rather different: after visiting pupils in my old school I wrote that, far from being closed, the debate had just begun. It wasn’t just the depressing closeness of the result, but the way the ‘no’ campaign had relied upon relentless negativity to make its case. As Joe Pike puts it in his fascinating account, the campaign ‘left a kingdom united, but a country divided’

The case for the United Kingdom, the greatest alliance of countries that the world has ever seen, was reduced into a few cold-hearted (and, often, barely-credible) arguments that Scotland was too small or too poor to survive as an independent state. That we’d lose the pound, business would evacuate – that it’d be the death knell for jobs, pensions, the EU, public services. This argument, dubbed ‘Project Fear’, was poison: strong enough to damage the enemy and (just) win the referendum. But it made the case for the Union seem appallingly weak, and based on scaremongering. That poison has been swirling around the bloodstream of Scottish politics ever since.

The negativity of that campaign, and the abject failure to make the positive case for the Union, set the scene for the subsequent quadrupling of SNP membership and the party taking 56 out of 59 seats. The Battle for Scotland has begun anew, as I argue in my Daily Telegraph column.

And where is David Cameron? He genuinely has a deep emotional commitment to the Union – and his is the politics of optimism. He’s teased for it. So why did he allow this poisonously negative campaign? The Scottish Unionists, at the time, blamed Andrew Cooper, his then chief strategist.

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