9 Jun 2014

Scotland: ‘No thanks,’ baby-food and inoculations

Nine months of relentless focus-grouping have culminated in this slogan: “no thanks.”

Even the font has been road-tested with voters, a bubbly lettering normally seen promoting baby-food rather than framing great constitutional issues.

Voters, they say, prefer the softer tone of “no thanks” compared to a straight, blunt “no.” Unionists in the Quebec 1995 referendum came to the same conclusion with “non merci” badges – maybe they should’ve saved money and just copied them?

The Better Together 100 days event at Maryhill in Glasgow was dominated by women. The yes event in Edinburgh is focused on women too. They are thought to constitute one third or so of the “don’t knows”.

But the big new message was one filtered out to the Scottish papers this morning, plastered on posters in the hall and slightly over-sold by Gordon Brown in a recent speech. There are now, as Alistair Darling said in his speech, “broadly similar proposals for further powers” for Scotland from the three main Westminster parties (Gordon Brown suggested there was detailed agreement – aides at Better Together prefer to say there are overlaps in the Venn diagram).

When the independence referendum campaign started, David Cameron came to Edinburgh and said any talk about what follows a no vote, the alternative devolution offer, would have to wait until after 18 September. That’s all changed. The Tories have u-turned not only on that but on the actual offer they’re making.

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The no – or non merci – campaign is trying to up the activity rate. Frank Roy MP is prowling the community hall here and has been drafted in to mastermind that.

The hope in this camp is that they can inject some positive patriotism into “project fear” and immunise or inoculate voters to the heart-string tugging campaign they expect the yes campaign to launch into in the last three weeks of this campaign.

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