Six: A better campaign
The Scottish independence referendum is viewed around the world as one of the most inspiring examples of self-led, grassroots campaigning in recent years. I know this because I have been at quite a few seminars and conferences in a number of countries where people from social movements of many sorts and many countries have expressed their admiration for what happened in Scotland. It has – quite justifiably – been remembered as a model of a really engaged, functioning democracy creating a movement that spans well beyond any one political party or social group. In the UK it is particularly recognised for the extent to which it engaged and mobilised working class people who are generally assumed to be not politically active. It was an amazing campaign, one I will always be incredibly proud to have been a part of.
(It is worth noting in passing that one of the few countries which seems reluctant to remember the campaign for the amazing democratic experience it was is Scotland, where both a media and large chunks of an elite political class seem to want us to be ashamed of what happened, painting the whole process as ‘divisive’, driven by ‘grievance’ and having the characteristic of a ‘cult’ with irrational plebs refusing to accept the analysis that elites wish to put on events. Thankfully, history will remember them all unkindly – as it does with all reactionary elites who oppose social progress driven from the grassroots.)
The joy I experienced by working with and meeting people I’d never usually have had a chance to work with and meet. The laughter I experienced among the creativity, humour and down-to-earth good will of the campaign. The moments I was driven to tears by the emotion of what people sacrificed and how strongly and deeply they believed in a good cause. The fact that, time and again, what we did was open and generous and loving. Those mass donations to food banks left in George Square the day after we lost – all those things together; tears; laughter; pride. Enormous pride.
The way young creative types made it fun – and beautiful. Thanks National Collective. The way a women’s movement found a strong and inspiring voice that changed the gender debate in Scotland. Thanks Women for Independence. The way an exciting, radical edge made us all believe that yes, something was really about to happen. Thanks Radical Independence Campaign. The great writing, the great ideas, the great debate. Thanks Bella, Wings, Wee Ginger Dug, Bateman, Scot Goes Pop and everyone else.
I’ve been involved in professional political campaigning for 20 years. I thought I’d seen how it worked, and that I knew how it would work this time. I was very wrong. At the outset of the campaign I am very happy to admit that I was concerned that without some kind of central strategic direction and without really nailing the practices and techniques of standard political campaigning, a disaggregated, locally-driven campaign could very easily come off the rails and collapse. And I’m delighted to say I was wrong. Mostly. What happened belied the belief that only professionals can run national campaigns.
But the ‘mostly’ is important. Because while, like everyone else, I got so swept up in the campaign and loved every moment, it does not and should not mean I can’t look at it critically as well. In Chapter One I discussed a little of what I think were the bigger strategic errors. There was an obsession with targeting the cautious, so-called ‘aspirational’ middle classes which was simply not supported by the polling data which made clear our votes would come from people lower down on the income scale. And there was a false belief that we were somehow going to be able to ‘reassure’ people into a Yes vote and that we could persuade them using abstract concepts of democracy rather than more concrete, real-world, inspiring ideas of what would be different.
But there was more than that which we didn’t get right, organisationally and practically. The last thing I want to do is spend time picking apart the campaign and blaming people or organisations. Nevertheless, it would be irresponsible of us all not to try and work out what we didn’t do well enough and to try and do better. Because we lost. And that means that brilliant wasn’t good enough. It is perfectly possible that we could win next time with the same campaign – one more heave and all that. But is it really a risk we want to take? Wouldn’t you feel more comfortable if we didn’t assume victory and rather assumed that we need to fight for every inch of it? If so, let’s see what we can do better.
The first and toughest thing to say is that as the official campaigning organisation, Yes Scotland wasn’t ideal. There were many really good people who worked there, many good things done. I personally thought that Blair Jenkins was a good figurehead and a reassuring presence on TV. The team that liaised with the grassroots gradually found its stride and became rather effective by the end. And I want to give particular credit to Stewart Bremner and Stewart Kirkpatrick who created respectively many of the amazing visual images that defined so much of the campaign and the social media strategy which reached so many people who would not otherwise have been reached. But that wasn’t enough.
There are small points in terms of priority that I’d hope a new Yes Scotland would get right next time, such as spending less money fitting out an office and showing more restrain in salaries, instead focussing the money on producing materials for local groups. And I’d very much want to see much better, tighter governance. An Advisory Board wasn’t enough – it should have been a Management Board with full control and responsibility for spending decisions, strategy and personnel. Ideally that Board should have had a broad plan before designing the organisation and not the other way round (though I appreciate the timescales concerned). This is important – had we all known the plan was for a grassroots-driven movement there should have been a greater focus on providing resources and training to help groups be as effective as possible.
Another thing I’d like to have seen would have been a more openly shared strategy. There is a view that you need to keep your entire strategy completely secret in case the other side gets hold of it. That may be fine if you’re a small team doing the devising and delivery entirely yourself. It isn’t so good if you’re trying to deliver a strategy involving over 350 individual groups. People sometimes behave as if strategies need to all be super-secret. But your opponent is seldom daft and generally understands the rough outline of what you’re trying to do (because they’re generally professional campaigners too). It’s therefore not a brilliant idea if your opponents have a pretty good idea of what you’re up to but lots of people on your own side don’t.
There are then a few aspects of that strategy I’d like to suggest we develop better next time. (I had pretty good access to Yes Scotland and have a reasonable picture of the strategy which was in place.) Let me begin with voter segmentation. The voting population is not one thing – indeed, no individual voter is one thing. There is an age spectrum, an income spectrum, a gender divide, political affiliation, religious affiliation, nationality of birth and loads more which create people’s individual identity. To my knowledge, Yes Scotland just didn’t have enough data on these different segments – or at least I don’t know of anyone who saw it.
We can compare and contrast this with Better Together. In many ways it was a truly useless campaign, clumsy and tone deaf. But not in all ways. They didn’t fit out an office at great expense, they just rented a bog standard unit and got on with it. And the ‘it’ they got on with was identifying our weaknesses and exploiting them ruthlessly. They had data that showed that pensioners were scared, so they got phone banks set up and they phoned every pensioner to scare them further. We didn’t respond to that. In fact, there was very little message-targeting of older people from the Yes campaign (and noticeably no prominent ‘Pensioners for Yes’ group). It may be ‘old politics’ but having good segmented data on voting trends and using that data to respond effectively is ‘old’ because it works. We should have known better what was happening to attitudes among older voters and we should have been sending a message out to all our local groups to get out and focus on positive, reassuring messages to older voters.
And negative messages. Very early on I was involved in preparing a private strategy document on how to run a campaign. I was one of the people who said ‘positive, positive, positive’. The more positive the campaign felt, the more it helped us; the more negative it felt, the better for them. But I didn’t realise that message would be taken quite so literally. I don’t know if I could prove this but I suspect that it’s functionally impossible to run a 100 per cent positive campaign. You need to be ready to poke at your opponent’s weaknesses.
Britain is one of the worst places to be a pensioner in Europe with a low state pension, a collapsing occupational pensions system and a frankly fraudulent personal pension industry. Why didn’t we say that more often? I did a radio debate with Willie Rennie and I kept making that point and it was as if it was the first time anyone had raised it. Why were we not pushing these buttons? The now iconic RIC leaflet about ‘Britain is for the Rich’ did exactly that; poked at Britain’s failures. It worked very effectively and turned out to be one of the most downloaded things from the Yes Scotland website – which is slightly ironic because for a while they really resisted putting it up there.
There is a world of difference between having a couple of negative weapons in your armoury and being Project Fear. It is perfectly possible to run a positive campaign overall while still asking difficult questions of the other side. It was daft not to. And this was not only a Yes Scotland issue. I know that the SNP was for quite a while very resistant about what was described as ‘bringing the NHS into play’. The feeling was that if there were negative messages around the question of the future of the NHS, that would be seen as negative and cynical. Perhaps. But when breast cancer surgeon (and now SNP MP) Philippa Whitford made a speech about it and someone filmed it, the video went viral. The NHS and the risk to it posed by Tory government in England became an important campaign theme – but only in the last few months of the campaign. It was a mistake not to use those arguments earlier.
I don’t mean to keep criticising Yes Scotland but there are three remaining issues I really do feel I need to cover. First was some of the approach taken to media management. Being positive and cheery is all very well, but you need to rebut. Rebuttal is a standard piece of campaign and PR practice where you are ready rapidly to contradict mistruths put out by the other side. If they say the sky is falling in, you need a geographer to come out and say ‘actually, the sky will still be there tomorrow’. Every dodgy ‘fact’ about the fiscal situation; the borrowing rates; the likely economic impacts; the banking situation and so on needs to be challenged. ‘Riding with the punches’ is just not a good way to go about responding to opponents’ attacks, because if numbers go unchallenged they become accepted as reality.
Next time we need to assemble a big address book of sympathetic experts who are ready at short notice to challenge opponents’ claims. I spoke to economists and political scientists who would have been very happy to help with this but who were never contacted. There has to be a rebuttal unit next time and it has to do the dull, boring job of rebutting; day in, day out. Last time round it became a positively weird dynamic where by far the most important and significant rebuttal unit turned out to be a blog run by a video games reviewer in Bath.
Just briefly I want to touch on the question of how we thought we were going to win. This might sound like an odd question, but generally, it helps if you not only want to win or have confidence that you will win – or even that you have a plan for winning – but that you can describe how and why you will win. What will change? What will cause that change? Why will people change their minds and vote a different way than the polls were pointing? Right across the independence movement there was a slightly dangerous ‘procession theory’ which took hold. The idea was that the momentum was in our favour so if we just kept going, just kept being reassuring, just kept looking positive, gradually and eventually we’d get there. Like some kind of procession to victory.
That was a delusion, and a damaging one. People do not just get swept up in a wave of positive feeling and vote for radical change because everyone is smiling. Nor could we assume that everyone had always wanted this and that all we had to do was make it ‘easy’ for them and it would all be alright ‘in the end’. Social group by social group, category by category, you need to think what it would take to change their mind, what it is that you can do to create that change and then get on with it. I believed that we had to make staying in Britain sound risky and getting out sound exciting and positive. That – roughly – is how I thought we could change minds.
The actions would then be different for different groups – emphasise pensions insecurity for the elderly and then devise a better welfare settlement for them (better social housing, better social services and so on – the whole ‘Common Weal’ thing). For the young, focus on courage and excitement and possibility (that bit we did very well). For the middle aged in relative security, focus on economic failings of Britain and devise a picture of a Nordic-style productive economy which underpinned good social services. For the poor and insecure, make them angry at how Britain has treated them and show them what it looks like when a country doesn’t have that kind of poverty. And so on.
That’s no more than a very crude run-through, but it creates a framework in which everyone can devise their own strategies. Processions never work unless everyone starts in the same place, which they didn’t. It may be a little bit unfair, but I always suspected that one or two reasonably senior people had looked at the polling numbers and concluded that we couldn’t actually win, so losing respectably with the ability to fight another day was the plan. I also suspect that some genuinely didn’t know how to win this campaign from where we were, not least because it was a campaign like none of us ever fought before. Personally, I knew that it was a big ask to take a subject (independence) which to be honest had barely been discussed for a generation and to win people over in what was really only two years. But I always believed the latent capacity for that vote was there (I still think only 30 per cent of the population is fundamentally opposed to independence, with 70 per cent wanting or willing to believe it is possible). Which means in the end we could win. And I still believe we could have won.
So one final point about the central organisation of the campaign – there was just no excuse for the slow and ineffective way that the canvassing procedure was created and rolled out. Canvassing data is crucial and you really can’t run a campaign without it. I was always surprised by this and still don’t entirely understand what happened because the SNP system (called Activate) is known as an incredibly effective system. When you hear people say that the SNP is a very effective campaigning political party it is this they are often talking about.
I’m not an expert on this aspect of campaigns but I couldn’t understand why that system was not just adapted for this purpose. I know it couldn’t simply lift the existing version of Activate for various data protection reasons, but it was hard to see why a new system took so long. That new system was YesMo. I confess that I didn’t use either of them so I am mainly repeating what people who know these things told me, but YesMo seemed never to have been quite as well regarded as it should have been. There are all sorts of reasons including familiarity with the other system and the slowness of the roll-out. Whatever the reason, quite a few groups opted to use Activate instead. This meant that data was collected by two different systems. That creates immediate problems.
(Incidentally, this is only anecdotal because I only discussed this with a few local campaigns but it always appeared to me that the places with the best and most effective canvass returns were the ones which used Activate. I don’t know if that was because they were already more experienced at managing canvassing and so used a system they were familiar with which those ‘new to the game’ used the new system and were just not quite as good at it.)
What is certain is that there were really patchy canvass returns. That is certainly not just Yes Scotland’s fault and it is here that we all need to look to ourselves. There were an enormous number of doorstep-hours put in during the campaign. People were amazing. But too often people had great, long, inspiring conversations but didn’t come away with the right data. I am most certainly not advocating that we follow the ‘professional political’ approach of just knocking the door, getting the minimum information and running away as quickly as possible. The conversations were really valuable. But the data was too, and we needed both.
And we needed comprehensive coverage. I spoke to some campaigns who had a good idea about specific voting intentions across their area. I spoke to some who had good data in some parts of their campaign area but not in others. And I spoke to some campaigns who just didn’t really have reliable data. What I certainly never saw was any sense that at a nationwide level, we had a solid and reliable picture of what was going on. If we did, we’d have picked up the ‘pensioner problem’ – which we simply didn’t seem to. (People knew it wasn’t our best voting segment but I don’t think I ever came across someone who realised that the voting patterns of over 60s alone would be enough to lose us the campaign.)
I compare and contrast this with Better Together. I was clearly not party to their data, but I did on occasion meet some of their strategists. With about a week to go, they seemed confident they had the data that showed they were going to win (though they didn’t seem to be in crowing mood so I guess their data showed it was tighter than they’d have liked). Perhaps it was bluff. But if I had the same conversations with counterparts on our side of the campaign, they were much more of the ‘fingers crossed’ persuasion. Unless I’m misreading, some people whom I’d have expected to have access to pretty solid canvas data did not seem to know what was happening until polling day.
Certainly I know that RIC did an enormous amount of work in poorer housing estates and did get quite a lot of data. But I also know it was a bit haphazard – we knew what we’d got from the houses where we found someone at home, but when I asked what percentage of houses we’d got to, what percentage of those we’d got a reply at, what percentage of those had been Yes and so on, we simply didn’t know. We should have. We should have known place by place how each community was planning to vote.
I am endlessly accommodating to our campaign. I know well that many of the people who did most of the work on the ground had sometimes never been near a political campaign before. I don’t know how many times people told me about how nervous they were when they ‘knocked their first door’. I am not going to criticise people for learning on the job. I admire them enormously. But let’s not make the mistake again. We have a number of years to prepare. Why aren’t we holding national training sessions to make sure that people really get trained on how to do things next time? At the very least, why don’t we still have a network of all the local groups so we can send them training videos and they can self-train? Next time we need to be not only beautiful and inspired, but technically competent and effective.
There is more we can train on. The national media was so overwhelmingly hostile that we needed to use other outlets. Some groups used their local newspapers effectively – but some didn’t. Every local group should be offered training on how to work the local media and how to get stories taken. Indeed, every local group would benefit from having good training materials on how to construct a campaign – how to identify local issues, how to relate them to the campaign, how to target segments of the voting population and so on. It is not patronising to ask people to keep learning – I’ve been doing this for many years and I continue to learn all the time.
I know that a lot of people were exhausted and of course a bit demoralised. And of course a lot of people were either in a political party or joined a political party and didn’t stop campaigning. I know it also may feel like quite a long time away before we need to fight the fight again. But even if we set aside the possibility of a snap referendum some time in the next few years (which I think unlikely but certainly not impossible), even then we have less time than we think. If we started now we’d barely be ready to create networks and training materials and some central support before the middle of 2017. We might then be only 18 months away from finding ourselves in a full-blown referendum campaign. So no, we really don’t have all that much time to kick our feet up and wait.
There are of course endless things we could do to become better. And we should try. I don’t of course necessarily mean ‘more professional’ – all those leaflets photocopied at someone’s work advertising a meeting put together by people who’d never put a meeting together before were effective because they were so authentic. But we can be better. It’s just that we can’t rely on it happening ‘all by itself’.
If you really, really want to win, good is never good enough – and neither is brilliant. We need to be tough on ourselves individually and collectively and we need to ask ourselves how to be better and better prepared.