Interview: Journalist Blair Jenkins on why he backs the Yes Campaign

FOR many, he was an odd choice to lead such a campaign, but Blair Jenkins believes his message will galvanise Scotland

FOR many, he was an odd choice to lead such a campaign, but Blair Jenkins believes his message will galvanise Scotland

BLAIR Jenkins is recalling the turn of the year with the SNP government having just made it clear it intended to plough ahead with a referendum on independence in 2014.

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For 30 years, the 55-year-old journalist had kept his views on the constitution to himself; first as director of broadcasting at STV, and then as head of news and current affairs at STV and BBC Scotland. Although it had been six years since he had resigned from his job at the state broadcaster, old habits of neutrality were dying hard.

“The jobs I was doing, I went into journalism at a very early age and so I’ve never been a member of a political party and never expressed public views,” said the Elgin-born Scot. “I hadn’t seen myself as getting involved, but at the beginning of the year, I thought if I’m ever going to come out and campaign for something, this is so important.”

At the launch of the pro-independence campaign in June, Jenkins’ appearance on stage as the head of the Yes campaign was one of the few genuine surprises. “I just couldn’t see myself biting my tongue for the next two and a half years,” he adds by way of explanation.

And so Jenkins now finds himself on the other end of the microphone, yesterday following a roll call of the SNP’s finest over the years to deliver the annual Donaldson lecture to the faithful at its conference in Perth.

The former BBC journalist had some taste of the SNP after being asked in 2008 to head up a Scottish Broadcasting Commission. But the new job is of a different order – with scrutiny attached as standard. Critics have already claimed he does not have the political experience to head up such a high-profile campaign – and he has already found himself accused of being a “yes man” to Alex Salmond. “I’m running YesScotland and I am in charge,” he ripostes firmly. Does he get on with the FM? “I get on reasonably well with Alex Salmond,” he declares guardedly. With new polls last week showing that support for independence is now beginning to fall, has he got a mission impossible, as one pollster declared last week?

Jenkins became a journalist at the Aberdeen Evening Express in 1974, before crossing to broadcasting six years later at the BBC in London. Six years after that, he returned to Glasgow as head of news at Scottish Television where, among others, his understudies included junior reporters Michael Gove (now Tory eeducation secretary) and Craig Oliver (now David Cameron’s director of communications).

A switch to the BBC in 2000 saw him take over as head of news and current ­affairs, but he quit in 2006, at a time when senior managers there were having to make cuts. He is settled now in Glasgow, and it is the experience of the city he turns to immediately when asked to explain his backing for independence – although his analysis may seem a little bleak to some.

“A lot of the most serious problems that we have in Scotland are problems that we see in Glasgow. You have got communities and individuals who just feel marginalised and hopeless and helpless and left behind. That has been going on for decades and I don’t see that changing.”

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The city has a history, he says, of saying “we can deal with anything life throws at us… there is a kind of in built resilience”. Independence is “a turn of the dial”, he argues, “to shift away from saying we can endure anything to saying we can achieve anything.” It is about “people having the belief in their own destiny and taking responsibility for their own lives and I don’t think people feel that at the moment”.

He is a believer in small countries which “achieve a stronger sense of national cohesion” than big ones, he claims (Americans may disagree). And he argues there is a definable set of “Scottish values” which are “distinct from values elsewhere in the UK”. This difference is why the country needs to say farewell to England, he argues.

“From a Scottish perspective, what is true is that the UK is on a different direction of travel than I think Scotland wishes to take. The UK under Labour and successive Tory governments has become one of the most unequal in the western world, and that’s not an act of God, it is an act of policy. And I don’t think that chimes with Scottish values.”

It is quite a claim – a complacent one, some might say. For example, earlier this month, a devastating report found that there were just seven children from the poorest areas of Edinburgh, the UK’s second wealthiest city after London, who got the grades to earn them a place at a top university (education is run from Scotland, with no interference from London). So much for egalitarian Scottish values.

Jenkins responds: “I’m not sitting here saying that Scotland is perfect. But in Scotland there is a desire to invest in health and education and to invest in society.”

The Yes campaign – currently financed by Ayrshire lottery winners Colin and Christine Weir, who donated £1 million to the cause – is well placed to win, he argues, because of the 40 per cent of ­people he claims are still undecided (although an Ipsos Mori poll put the figure at more like 19 per cent). “I think if you say at this stage you don’t know or you are open to discussion then I think you are leaning our way,” he says.

His job, he insists, will be to clear away the “misinformation and distortion” about independence. Already, he says, having engaged people in conversation since the summer “you do find the more you talk about it the more people go in our ­direction”.

He says when he was still a journalist, pro-UK politicians told him they expected support for independence to rise during a referendum campaign. “I won’t make a prediction of what pace, but I have no doubt that public opinion will move ­towards independence,” he adds.

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But what about all that “misinformation”? Jenkins wants to nail claims that Scotland is a “subsidy junkie” and has used recent data to argue that Scottish households in the most recent year contributed £1,000 more to the UK Treasury than they eat up in spending.

There would, therefore, be an “independence wealth bonus”, he says, once Scotland’s money stays here, rather than supporting the whole of the UK. However, Scottish Government data shows the figure is relative: it amounts to the cash-per-household difference between Scotland’s deficit and the UK’s as a whole. So, rather than claiming a “bonus” with independence, wouldn’t it be more accurate to say the country is currently slightly less broke?

“Every country in Europe is running a deficit,” he says. But, “Scotland is running less of a deficit relative to the size of the economy than the UK is as a whole.” The point he wants to make is that, while an independent Scotland would still have a huge deficit and would have to take on its share of the UK’s £1 trillion debt pile, “the Scottish economy outperforms the UK economy”.

But that’s now – what about after independence? Economists are noting already that, as a new country, borrowing in a foreign currency, with massive inherited debts, without a central bank of its own, and a volatile source of cash (oil), investors might be nervous about giving the same near-zero borrowing rates to Scotland as those currently given to the UK. We benefit from that right now in low ­interest rates, don’t we?

“Yes. That’s true. But I don’t see any ­reason why, given that Scotland’s economy would start from a position of greater strength than the UK, that that would be any different.” Surely, though, there are going to be huge challenges with the transitional period – not least sorting out a new fiscal and monetary relationship with London? “The fundamental truth here is nobody, including me, can make any guarantees about the direction of travel of the UK and Scottish economy. You can report accurately on what the current position is and what the most recent data tells you. But going forward, you make your own luck, you make your own success and I think Scotland has the ambition and ­talent to do very well.”

So it is a leap of faith then? “Getting up in the morning is a leap of faith,” he answers. “If you take a negative look at things rather than a positive one, then you’d never do anything in life,” he counters – adding quickly that there is a “rational underpinning” for all this, based on Scotland’s inherent strengths.

Jenkins is now heading up a wide coalition of interests and – as we report today – claims that he will soon be able to unveil significant support from within the Labour Party. All sides in the debate are a long way in front of most of the population, whose attention is only now beginning to turn to the issue.

“An awful lot of people have tuned out of political debate and party politics,” he says. YesScotland will succeed, however, because it won’t be “politician driven”, he claims. “I think the more we talk about the material, social and cultural benefits of independence then we will get people moving our way,” he says.

It’s heavy on vision, but the tough questions will keep on coming over the next two years. «