As I left Edinburgh this morning, en route to Inverness, I passed about four ‘yes’ activists cheerily wishing me good morning, asking if I have voted and would I like a ‘yes’ sticker if I had. It worked: on the way to Waverley, people were wearing the ‘yes’ stickers with nary a ‘no’ to be seen. If I were a ‘no’ voter heading for the polling station, I may wonder if I was actually on the wrong side of history. That a party was happening in one room, and I was heading to another – but that there was still time to change my mind.
You have to hand it to the ‘yes’ team: its discipline, messaging, voter targeting and morale have been a sight to behold. I suspect that, today, its get-out-the-vote operation will be nothing short of spectacular. Whoever wins the election, the ‘yes’ side has emphatically won the campaign.
It has outwitted the three main Westminster parties who spent so long worrying about their positioning, relative to each other, that they have forgotten about voters (as we argue in the Spectator’s leader this week). Hence the switch of frustrated voters – the ‘scorned and the scunnered’ to borrow a wonderful phrase from James Forsyth’s political column – to ‘yes’ and UKIP.
Ed Miliband has been fascinated by the rising tide of left-wing populism, and read books about it. But it is Alex Salmond who successfully harnessed it – invoking child poverty, inequality and the NHS as if he actually had great plans up his sleeve. It was a bluff, but he got away with it. Salmond has taken this new, leftist agenda, claimed it for the nationalists and shoved it up Miliband’s posterior, stealing his voters.
Salmond is not doing anything wildly original. He is simply serving up the kind of hopey, changey kool-aid that America drank so deeply when electing Barack Obama – which is an unkind way of saying that the SNP has mastered the politics of optimism. (As well as the art of mob politics) There is plenty of appetite for that, in a country where a large number don’t think they have much to lose. If it’s a ‘yes’ result tomorrow, then it will be the result of of first-class politics from the separatists and first-class incompetence from the unionists.
It is often said that Westminster has been captured by a professional political class. This Scottish campaign has shown how amateurish these professionals can be.
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