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Nicola Sturgeon shouldn’t dismiss a European “Project Fear”

The First Minister set out her positive case for the EU this morning, but her advice on campaigning strategy is wrong

By Henry Zeffman Henry Zeffman

Nicola Sturgeon was in London today to make the positive case for remaining in the European Union. The First Minister came to show David Cameron that it’s possible to win a referendum campaign without resorting to what she perceived as the negative arguments of the Unionist campaign in 2014’s Scottish Referendum – “Project Fear”, as it came to be known.

Sturgeon’s speech offered a compelling and credible social democratic argument for EU membership. Her advice on campaigning tactics, however, is based on slim evidence and a bad analogy.

In a passage from her speech – not included in the official text – Sturgeon opined that “one of the undoubted lessons of the Scottish experience is that a miserable, negative, fear-based campaign saw the No campaign in the Scottish referendum lose over the course of the campaign a 20-point lead.”

It’s probably not as simple as that, though. The First Minister appears to be using a sample of just one referendum to divine the correct tactics for winning another very different referendum. That is not an especially scientific way to think. The Scottish referendum was the complicated culmination of years of national debate. Yet Sturgeon seems convinced that the decline in support for the Unionist cause over the course of the campaign can be ascribed entirely, or almost entirely, to the tactics of the Better Together campaign.

Quite apart from anything else, this line of argument seems to suggest a peculiar lack of faith on Sturgeon’s part in the nationalist argument. Surely she thinks that the SNP won more and more support in the run up to the referendum because of the strength of their cause? If so, then Better Together’s perceived negativity can only have been an incidental factor in a much bigger picture. The SNP can – quite reasonably – resent and lament the negative campaigning they were faced with. But Sturgeon appears to have ended up in the strange position of advising Unionists that they would have won by even more if they’d only said more nice things about the prospect of an independent Scotland.

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Which leads us on to a somewhat unfortunate fact that undermines Sturgeon’s dismissal of “Project Fear”. The Unionists won. Scotland is not an independent country. Yes, the SNP has all but wiped out Scottish Labour and the Union is clearly fragile for the foreseeable future. Still, it would be something of a leap to argue that it was “Project Fear” that divided Scotland, rather than the mere fact of the referendum. Even if the two referendum campaigns had somehow been resolutely cheery about their opponents during the campaign, a vote that allowed a sizeable minority of the population to express a wish to secede would still have been divisive.

Another problem for Sturgeon’s case against negative campaigning is that her analogy is wrong. The persuasive case she set out this morning was that that “the European Union is good for the prosperity and wellbeing of individuals, families and communities across our country.” In support of this claim, the First Minister cited free movement, the reciprocal right to medical treatment, various protections from discrimination enshrined in EU regulations, and the EU’s commitment to reducing emissions. This is a pragmatic argument that EU membership is instrumentally good for British citizens.

In fact, it’s a pragmatic argument that looks fairly similar to the pragmatic argument made by many Unionists in 2014: that though in an ideal universe Scotland might be independent, the UK provides benefits to Scottish people that an independent Scotland could not. The optimistic argument that Better Together was criticised for failing to make was the romantic case for the Union of the Scottish people with the English and the Welsh and the Northern Irish. A European parallel of that would argue that there is something intrinsically necessary about the union of the European people.

Admittedly, Sturgeon briefly came close to making that sort of argument towards the end of her speech.  Noting that the former church in which she was speaking had been bombed on the final night of the Blitz, the First Minister argued that “there’s something inherently noble about 28 independent sovereign democracies choosing to work together to promote peace and mutual prosperity.” Yet she admitted that this was not her main argument, and seemed to concede that it was not a strong enough argument to stand alone with the caveat that “it is hard for this generation of politicians and voters to fully appreciate the place the European project had in the hearts, of so many people who lived through those times.”

Finally, Sturgeon should remember that counter-arguments are not always scaremongering. As my colleague George Eaton has pointed out, the SNP planned for Scotland to formally become independent in just under a month, sustained by what Sturgeon called a “second oil boom”. Oil prices have collapsed. Better Together expressed scepticism about an economy so dependent on oil. The SNP derided their so-called scaremongering. Project Fear was right.

Even though Brexit would dramatically increase the prospect of a second independence referendum, Sturgeon’s speech this morning was evidence enough that she is genuinely passionate about the UK staying in the EU. Instead of warning her pro-EU allies against attacking the anti-EU case, she should relish the opportunity to do just that herself. 

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