Bill Jamieson: Beware the ‘c’-word, Mr Salmond

What unexpected force from the blind side might sabotage Alex Salmond’s plans for independence? He surely has little to fear from the centre-right. Scottish Conservatism is dead. Yet it may come from the very direction he least expects.

This week, from opposite ends of the blue spectrum – Brian Monteith, the former Tory MSP, and Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, the former Conservative solicitor-general for Scotland – came declarations that the party in Scotland a spent force.

“The party,” wrote Monteith in a forceful, ‘last straw’ article in The Scotsman this week, “is no longer Scottish, Tory, or Unionist… We are kinder to animals than we are to the Scottish Conservatives… As it writhes in its death throes, all of us who once cared for it should do the decent thing and put it out of its misery rather than wait on it dying a horrible death.”

“Is there a way back?” Lord Fraser asked this week in a pamphlet Divided We Stand published by the right-of-centre think-tank Politeia. “That is doubtful, even with a name change… In my view the Scottish question will not be settled on the basis of existing unionism, but that a change in direction is needed.”

It can hardly have made comfortable reading, either for the Scottish leader, Ruth Davidson, or for Prime Minister David Cameron. With sentiments like these openly expressed by two once formidable figures in its ranks, the official Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party looks to have about as much life as those skeletons suspended in the National Museum.

Yet here is the irony. For the greatest threat to Alex Salmond’s plans for independence may not be from the left, but from… Scottish conservatism.

How ironic that in a country where the formal Conservative cause has been reduced to near oblivion, Scotland remains one of the most small ‘c’ conservative areas in the UK. Thrift, prudence, caution, reserve, a respect for tradition and heritage, patriotism, a healthy suspicion of change and an instinctive recoil from a politicisation of everyday life still imbue Scottish attitudes.

The greatest danger for the independence campaign is to lose sight of these, in particular through a relentless unsparing drive to turn almost every aspect of Scottish life and its relationship with the rest of the UK into a battlefield.

Scotland’s social conservatism is diffuse. It has no collective organisation or voice. But it will start to weigh. Indeed, Alex Salmond is already seeking to placate it by balancing his declarations of sweeping change and a radical new future for Scotland with protestations of reassurance and continuance.

On independence we will apparently keep the monarchy, keep the pound, keep the social union and might even keep UK troops in Scotland and Scotland in Nato. Listening to him, it sounds like a play on that immortal line in Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change!” Salmond turns this upside down: “If we want things to change round here, they’ll have to stay the same!”

The problem is that he has now committed himself to two and a half years of an ever-more complex campaign.

This may prove a strategic error. If Scots are not already beginning to weary of it, by the autumn of 2014 they may well be scunnered. We are already subject to an almost daily crash course in constitutional reform, new configurations on defence, baffling proposals on finance post-independence, the starting of positions on the division of assets and liabilities – and complex voting procedures.

Yet we are only at the southern slopes, the mere foothills before we move on to the substantive definitions of what independence is, what devo-max is and what devo-plus is. At present, it is all a swirl of ambiguity, vagueness and confusion. Don’t take my word for it. Professor Iain MacLean, of Nuffield College Oxford, told Westminster’s Scottish affairs committee earlier this week that “as the terms of independence are being changed from week to week and day to day by the Scottish Government, there will be an element of a pig in a poke about independence”. And who in socially conservative Scotland will buy a pig in a poke?

Even at the outset, disputation over the protocols of voting has risen in scale and intensity. One question or two? Or Three? One referendum? Or two? Last week, at The Scotsman conference on independence, the focus was on the framing of the question – or questions. Professor John Curtice, Scotland’s premier polling expert, beguiled the audience with a presentation on the Condorcet method of voting. This is an election method that elects the candidate or proposal that would win by majority rule in all pairings against other candidates or proposals.

Do keep up at the back. It is named after the French mathematician and philosopher Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, the Marquis de Condorcet, who advocated this selection method. At least Prof Curtice’s explanation was more lucid than that on Wikipedia, where the editors have posted that it may need to be rewritten entirely!

Barely had we got our brains round the Condorcet choices than Prof MacLean popped up on Newsnight Scotland to set out a Condorcet variable: a “gateway question” leading to two or more further questions. And, because “the Scottish people will not know what they’re voting for because the negotiations on the nature of the split will not have taken place”, we may need a second referendum.

By the end of all this, the pundits will have either bamboozled the pants off 90 per cent of voters or we will all be walking Emeritus Professors in Condorcet Voting Systems and the Gateway Multiple Option Variant. Perhaps our universities could run degree courses, with diplomas for qualifying voters.

Several aspects should now be troubling the administration. The first is the hiatus effect such a prolonged campaign could have with the deferral of decisions ranging from investment through labour hiring to property purchase. Much will slow down pending the outcome – not good for an already frail recovery. Another is that voters may become disengaged as Jacobin policy wonks, fanatics and febrile constitutional lawyers come to hold centre stage.

Yet another is voter concern over options that may well involve more change than they bargained for. What for some may be a leap of faith will be for others an unacceptable leap into the dark. Small ‘c’ conservatism may be airily dismissed by the pundits. But it may prove a greater obstacle to the ambitions of the SNP than formal unionism can muster.