Some of those who queued outside the Cineworld multiplex in Edinburgh for this morning’s Yes for Independence launch found it hard to contain their chortles. There, hanging above the door through which Alex Salmond was due to arrive was a huge poster carrying just two words — The Dictator.
And if that ad for Sacha Baron Cohen’s new movie wasn’t enough to send the First Minister into a fury with his PR team, there was more inside. One poster for the film Prometheus carried the tag line: “The Search For Our Beginning Could Lead to Our End,” while a series for the new Ice Age movie proclaimed: “Cranky and Clueless”, “Wild and Woolly” and “Mean and Mischievous” — any one of which could be used to describe at least some of those who took to the stage to launch the Yes campaign in Edinburgh today.
So even before the start, then, there was a feeling that the normally slick SNP press machine had got things ever-so-slightly wrong — an impression that would only deepen as the event went on. The most important part of a launch like this is credibility and while all the actors, musicians, poets and songwriters leant the event emotion and passion, it really felt as if it was that crucial element of political competence that was absent.
Everyone in Scottish politics agrees that the Nationalists have several important advantages over their unionist opponents: money (they have more than £2 million in the bank), leadership (Salmond is way ahead of his rivals politically) and strategy (they know where they are going and have planned every step). But what was also assumed was that the Nationalists had found a message which would succeed in attracting wavering voters to their cause: a message that was moderate, comfortable and British in all but name. After today’s launch, it is now clear that the Nationalists have got this one, crucial, part of the package wrong.
The message which rang out from the auditorium was extraordinarily one-sided. The speakers were either current left-wing politicians (Salmond and Patrick Harvie, the co-leader of the Scottish Greens), former left-wing politicians (former Labour MP Dennis Canavan and former trade union shop steward Tommy Brennan) or left-wing actors (like Brian Cox who used his time at the podium to berate Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, the Iraq War and everything in between). There was nobody from the right or centre right on the stage, no business people got to speak and nobody, absolutely nobody, dared mention the monarchy or anything remotely connected to it.
The odd thing was that some right-wingers were invited to the launch. Historian Michael Fry, who used to be a libertarian Conservative but who now supports independence, was there, as was Peter de Vink, another Tory who has moved — out of exasperation — to the independence cause. But they were kept away from the platform presumably because they might induce the left-leaning audience to boo.
Sir George Mathewson, the former Chairman of RBS and now a supporter of independence, was allowed to deliver a short message on a recorded video but he wasn’t on the platform at the end while Colin Fox, the leader of the Scottish Socialist Party, was.
One senior Scottish Conservative could not stop smiling afterwards. ‘We were really worried about this launch,’ he said. ‘They could have done things really well, they could have been modest and moderate and that would have caused us real problems. But what did they do? They went all left-wing. That’s great. It couldn’t have gone better for us.’
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