by Gordon Brown
Concerned that unless Labour fought its own corner we would be viewed as an appendage to a Tory government campaign, I met with David Cameron and George Osborne in the prime minister’s office in the House of Commons on 20 March 2012. I told them directly that the old argument – that Scots saw themselves as equally Scottish and British – had run its course. They now felt more Scottish than British, and any successful referendum campaign had to recognise this. Under the right circumstances, however, most Scots could still be convinced of the benefits of combining a strong Scottish Parliament with being part of the UK. My proposal was simple: the only way a referendum could be won convincingly was if Labour ran its own strong campaign, calling for a greater degree of autonomy for Scotland and reaching its own supporters with a Labour case for staying in Britain. I made the point that while Labour’s vote was still solid in Scotland, it was also the most vulnerable to the nationalist message that independence was preferable to living under a Conservative government. I urged that half the funds raised by Better Together be allocated to a distinctive Labour campaign, and that some funders should be encouraged to support this distinctive campaign alongside Better Together.
Cameron and Osborne were receptive to this proposal. But when Labour in Scotland shied away from this option, we lost the one chance we had of fully financing a Labour campaign wholly directed at Labour voters.
Having thought through an argument that was, I felt, radical, progressive and compelling, I decided that the only way I could get my views across was to write a book. I spent December 2013 and the early months of 2014 writing furiously. I could not have done any of this without excellent work directing the project by Andrew Hilland, who gave up a prestigious job as a lawyer in New York to return to Scotland to fight the referendum and who subsequently came very close in the 2017 election to defeating the SNP in his home constituency of Lanark and Hamilton East. Kirsty McNeill edited the book, and Rachael Thomas and Ross Fulton undertook the research. The book, My Scotland, Our Britain, argued that Scotland was a natural leader of a UK that pooled and shared its resources to deliver the objectives of full employment, free healthcare and a welfare state. It traced the origins of modern social provision to Scotland’s demands for the abolition of the Scottish Poor Law and its replacement by a British welfare state. Sharing across the United Kingdom was, I argued, not an English imposition but a Scottish invention. I also tried to show that, far from this being a hangover from the twentieth century, cooperation between nations was the way of the future for our increasingly interdependent world. The challenge was to build a modern constitution with as much autonomy as the Scottish people sought – through a strengthened Scottish Parliament – and as much cooperation as we needed to sustain our economy and public services.
Fortunately, in March 2014, Scottish Labour under Johann Lamont – drawing on the expert work of Jim Gallagher and a highly intelligent and perceptive policy head, Ross Christie – committed itself to an enhanced Scottish Parliament. As the campaign heated up and the margin between Yes and No narrowed, I suggested to Johann that we counter the rising momentum of the SNP’s big rallies with our own distinctive Labour events, separate from Better Together. At the first of these, at Glasgow Fruitmarket, Johann and I addressed around 1,000 people.
Yet our message was not getting through. With all the headlines focusing on the negative back-and-forth, the No campaign was increasingly viewed as Cameron and Osborne speaking for the United Kingdom, allowing the SNP to claim it was not for Scotland but anti-Scottish. What was getting through, loud and clear, was that the people of Scotland wanted change. And here there was an irony: each pro-union party had a strong devolution programme, with detailed proposals about additional powers for the Scottish Parliament over taxation, employment, social policy and welfare. The problem was that nobody had heard about the proposals or had any idea that if they voted No, new powers would be delivered.
Privately, in fact, I had favoured a third option on the ballot paper, one that offered a more powerful Scottish Parliament as a positive alternative to both independence and the status quo. Later I was advised by the respected Edinburgh University academics David McCrone and Frank Bechhofer that had there been such an option, support for it could have been around 78 per cent and support for independence would have been much lower. In hindsight, it would have been far better if the campaign had relentlessly counterposed independence with a powerful Scottish Parliament playing a bigger part in running its own affairs. As the campaign went on, it became increasingly clear to me that we needed that kind of forward-looking offer.
Better Together regained some ground when Alistair Darling won the first TV debate against Alex Salmond at the beginning of August 2014, but by the end of the month it was on the back foot again. People continued to think that the alternative to Scottish independence was the status quo. I believed that the answer was to set a timetable, showing how the new powers supported by the different pro-union political parties could be brought in expeditiously.
Having talked to Johann Lamont, Ed Miliband and David Cameron, I decided to move things forward by publishing my own timetable in the hope that all the parties would follow it up. Two Mondays before the referendum and the day after a poll that suggested we would lose, I spoke in Midlothian and called for legislation within a year: I said that proposals should be agreed by St Andrew’s Day in November and legislation drafted and published by Burns Night in January. With all pro-Union parties agreeing to this timetable, it set in train events that led to the Smith Commission on further powers for the Scottish Parliament and the Scotland Act 2016. The SNP came back with the argument that this was tinkering and technical and unlikely to be delivered. They were wrong, but we still had to do more to convince people that change was on its way.
What the Scottish people needed to know was not so much the detail of the individual powers but that the main United Kingdom parties were wholeheartedly and irrevocably committed to – and would deliver – what we called ‘faster, fairer, safer and better change’ than the nationalists could offer. In conversation with Bruce Waddell, the former award-winning editor of the Daily Record, Murray Foote the current editor, and Alan Rennie the managing director, the considerable weight of the Record was put behind what they called the Vow: an iron-tight commitment to be signed by all UK party leaders in support of more devolution on the timetable I had previously outlined. To get the leaders on board, I spoke to David Cameron, who agreed to approach Nick Clegg, and to Ed Miliband and Douglas Alexander. They agreed with me that the Vow, while signed by UK leaders, had to be an initiative that was not imposed by London but initiated from Scotland. Originally the Vow was to appear on Monday 15 September, three days before the referendum, but because of the tragic murder of David Haines, a Scottish aid worker in Syria, we postponed it until Tuesday.
Over the course of the final months of the campaign, I had joined Labour and Better Together leaders in addressing nearly a hundred meetings and rallies in cities, towns and villages across Scotland. I particularly enjoyed one aspect of the campaign: speaking at meetings alongside an old friend, Shirley Williams, whom I admired greatly from across party lines. I worked with her before and after I became prime minister on issues from disarmament to Europe, and to be honest, tried to persuade her on a number of occasions to rejoin Labour. I spoke in schools and at pensioner forums, to the Royal British Legion and Carmelite nuns, in almost all of Scotland’s great universities and at a joint meeting in Glasgow, the largest meeting of all, comprising members of the Hindu, Christian, Sikh, Muslim and Jewish communities. I had come a long way from my initial reticence on re-entering the political fray. But the referendum was unlike an ordinary election: we were making an irreversible decision that would have consequences for every Scottish family for generations to come.
Arriving outside Maryhill Community Hall for my final speech of the campaign just twenty-four hours before the poll, I was instantly struck by the number of Yes posters on shop and flat windows on
the building opposite. Inside, there was an altogether different atmosphere. The hall was packed to the rafters with noisy supporters of Better Together and the walls were adorned with the slogan ‘Love Scotland, Vote No’. It was the most positive poster message I had seen throughout the whole campaign. As I sat quietly in the corner of the upstairs green room, word came back of camera crews and journalists squeezed together, upstairs and downstairs, that it was hot, and that there was a real air of anticipation in the hall.
The Maryhill speech had been organised by Better Together at short notice and would have to be word-perfect. While the stump speech that I had delivered to audiences across the country ran to forty-five minutes, this was to be just thirteen minutes. Kirsty McNeill had come over to my house the evening before to help me develop my ideas. Valuable advice also flowed in from Douglas Alexander – who had relocated to Better Together headquarters and was making some telling interventions in defence of the Union – as well as from Bruce Waddell and Andrew Hilland. I was convinced that in addition to focusing on the benefits of the Union and on exposing the economic risks of independence, we also had to make people feel proud about voting No.
I had been ushered to a corridor and was ready to be introduced to the audience when, thirty seconds before I was about to enter the auditorium, someone whispered loudly in my ear: ‘Your right shoe is covered in mud!’ It was suddenly a frantic race between Labour’s tireless and always helpful organiser Annmarie Whyte, clawing the mud off my shoe with a paper towel, and Eddie Izzard, who was wrapping up his introduction of me from the stage. I would call it a dead heat.
Fortunately, I had been listening to what was happening inside the hall, and having heard the speeches that preceded mine – spirited and eloquent testimonies from members of the public drawing on their personal experiences of the NHS, the shipbuilding industry, our education system and pensions – I was able to walk on stage and begin spontaneously: ‘At last, the world is hearing the voices of the real people of Scotland. The silent majority will be silent no more.’
As I spoke about the benefits of sharing and cooperating across the United Kingdom, I reminded people that we had fought two world wars together. When young men were injured in the trenches they did not look to each other and ask whether they were Scots or English – they came to each other’s aid because we were part of a common cause. I then sought to counter the claim made by some nationalists that No voters were less than patriotic Scots. Scotland was not owned by the SNP, the Yes campaign or any politician, I argued: our country belonged to everyone. You could be as proud and patriotic a Scot by voting No as you could by voting Yes. I implored the public to ‘tell them this is our Scotland’.
I hope that what I said in that speech accorded with what the majority of Scots felt. While I had seen – and indeed predicted to friends – the dangerous decline in support for the No campaign as polling day drew closer, I never believed that we would lose. So, on the night of the referendum I was nervous only about how narrow the majority for No might be, but once I had heard the first result – a clear No in Scotland’s smallest local authority area, Clackmannanshire – I felt able to go to bed and fell soundly asleep at the end of an intensive few days campaigning across the country. I woke up at around 6 a.m. on Friday 19 September, just as the nationalist leaders conceded defeat.
What determined the final referendum result? Alex Salmond had chosen the referendum question and the timing so it would occur just after Scotland’s Commonwealth Games and in the year of the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn, when Robert the Bruce defeated the forces of England’s Edward II. This had little effect. But he himself has said that the Vow threw the SNP off course: it upended their presumption that the closing ten days of the campaign would be a cavalcade towards independence. However, the Vow worked only in the context of a more patriotic case put squarely to the public. While economic arguments mattered, the Scottish people could not bear to think of themselves as unpatriotic.
I saw immediately that while we had won the vote, the SNP would assert they had won the argument and claim the moral high ground. Two days after the referendum, in a speech in my constituency, I appealed for the country to unite around an agenda for social justice which could be realised through a stronger Scottish Parliament. A month later l led a House of Commons debate demanding that the Vow be kept. The Scotland Act that followed gave substantial new powers to the Scottish Parliament. However, unable to shake off the accusation that Labour had aligned with the Tories to deliver a negative message and could no longer speak for Scotland, we were virtually wiped out in the 2015 general election in Scotland, holding on to only one seat – Edinburgh South, a constituency I knew well, having fought it in 1979 and which Ian Murray did brilliantly to retain. It was to take until June 2017 for the party to mount the first stages of a recovery under Jeremy Corbyn and Kezia Dugdale.
At root the still unanswered question, which will decide the long-term future of Scotland, was whether any strong sense of Britishness could flourish in the years to come or whether we would see the country fragment into mutually suspicious enclaves. On the day after the 2014 referendum, David Cameron called for ‘English votes for English laws’ – arguing that English MPs should meet as an English Parliament for England-only decisions. Immediately after he had done so, at around 8 a.m. I telephoned the Cabinet Secretary Jeremy Heywood and told him that Cameron had made a disastrous and sectarian decision that would only increase support for the SNP. Alistair Darling relayed the same message. When the prime minister wrote to thank me for my work in the referendum, I replied in blunt terms, warning him that ‘English votes for English laws’ would allow the constitutional reform package to be traduced as an insult in Scotland. The SNP would now say that he had misled the Scottish voting public by cynically waiting until after the referendum to tell them that restrictions would be placed on the right of Scottish MPs to vote on the UK Budget.
I now worried that Scottish nationalism was being matched by the rise of a knee-jerk English nationalism. Then, in the 2015 general election, as the Tories fell behind, they pivoted strategically and played the ‘English card’ again, publishing posters and newspaper adverts featuring Ed Miliband and Alex Salmond, asserting that any Labour government would be in the pocket of the SNP. It was a conscious attempt to whip up English fears and resentment against the Scots. It worked.
The same global economic forces that gave rise to Scottish nationalism were now giving rise to profound insecurities in England, with UKIP whipping up populist support for another referendum – this time on our membership of the European Union. David Cameron’s decision to placate his restless right wing in the face of UKIP’s rise with his now notorious undertaking to hold an in/out referendum was shown, of course, to be a terrible misjudgement. I suspect he calculated he would never have to follow through on it because he anticipated another coalition with the Liberal Democrats, who would oppose such a move.
Perhaps because of my perspective on the Scottish referendum, and how easy it was to incite an anti-establishment protest, I always believed that Britain might vote to leave. Indeed, a referendum on EU membership in many European countries in 2016 would have been a close-run thing. The European Union seemed to many to be governed by precisely the out-of-touch and technocratic elite that anti-globalisation protestors had identified as the enemy. What’s more, the Eurozone crisis had not united Europe as it sought to manage the fallout from an American-led recession. Instead it had divided the continent – with the north telling the south to accept austerity. In the process, the idealism which bound Europe together – the sense that the EU embodied decency, solidarity and social democracy – was tarnished, as bailouts for bankers, privatisation and the dismantling of social and labour protections confirmed the inequalities and insecurities of globalisation, rather than correcting them. The harsh reality was that a European Union that was created in order to make nationalism disappear had become the umbrella under which nationalist parties ac
ross the continent were making their claims for greater self-government.
Britain, of course, had its own very particular objection to the direction of Europe: most people bought the idea that the EU was moving inexorably towards becoming a federal superstate. Despite the fact that the high tide of European integrationist ambitions had been reached at the beginning of the century and had since been receding, Leave campaigners seized on this popular misconception, arguing that by voting Remain, the UK would be forced to accept greater economic and political integration against its will, hence the populist slogan ‘Take Back Control’. The parallels with the SNP’s campaign were plain to see.
I felt I had an argument that could win people round. For me, just as in the Scottish referendum, the starting point was not what we thought of Europe but the needs and aspirations of the British people – and what was in our patriotic interest as a country that had always been open, outward-looking and internationally minded.
One of the keys to Scotland’s vote to remain part of the British Union was that under a more radical devolution settlement Scotland could have a strengthened Scottish Parliament while continuing to share resources with the rest of the United Kingdom. In the same way, we could argue in the EU referendum that Britain could have a balance between the national autonomy it desired and the international cooperation it needed.
Before 2010 I had secured a European agreement that there would be no more of what I privately termed ‘empire building’ for ten years: no new federal-style constitutional initiatives. I had persuaded finance ministers to reject tax harmonisation in favour of a simple exchange of tax information, and I envisaged a European Union that also downgraded automatic standardisation of rules and integration in favour of mutual recognition of each country’s standards and thus subsidiarity. I still see Europe as a multi-speed and often multi-need and multi-directional union that should accommodate varying degrees of integration across different spheres of policy and between different countries. Yet, in their six years in power, the Conservatives had done nothing to persuade the public that their previous claim – that the EU was on the road to a federal superstate – was more myth than reality.