Three: The Trick of Confidence
When people think of the con trick, too often they think in terms of ‘gullible fool who fell for that’. That is a misunderstanding. The confidence trick works because we all respond to the subliminal sense that someone else has utter confidence in what they are telling us. We may not like it, but we are all subconsciously influenced by a sense of confidence. This doesn’t mean the over-selling you get from someone faking confidence – most people can smell that from a mile away. It means the calm, assured sense you get from someone who seems utterly to know what they are talking about, the feeling that you’re not going to catch them out with tricky questions because you sense they already know the answers.
There is an awful lot which the confidence trick and a campaign have in common. Take for example an advertising campaign – and I’m afraid for the best example you should probably look at the advertising of cosmetic products to women. These are campaigns of confidence. Everything about them drips in confidence, from the flawless, perfect smile of the model to the bit which allows you to feel ‘not daft for caring so much about makeup’ where there will be some pseudo-science backed up by a short animation involving molecular structures. You know, molecular structures like you subconsciously recall from the deeply serious walls of your high school chemical lab. In your heart you know this skin cream isn’t going to disappear your wrinkles; that your hair isn’t going to look like that no matter how much ‘revitalising conditioner’ you apply; that a cheap lipstick will probably look much the same. But the confidence trick works and as a nation we spend silly sums on products we rationally know don’t work.
Car adverts drop in words like ‘torque’ and ‘brake horsepower’ – and a beautiful woman will often glance lustfully at the infeasibly handsome (and generally male) driver. You know you don’t look like that; you know that buying that car won’t make you look like that. You very possibly don’t know what ‘brake horsepower’ is. But you watch the advert and you yearn for the confidence of the man with that car. Very simply, people don’t buy products that they don’t feel confidence about or which don’t make them feel confident. (In fact, adverts heavily rely on the other half of the ‘deal’ which is to make you feel deeply unconfident about yourself as you are now, then offering the promise that your ‘failures’ can be fixed by them, but that’s a whole other book...)
Politics has always been about confidence. In Britain it was about a ‘ruling class’ with the education, accent and clothing we took to be indicators of authority. It made us feel confidence back in the patrician 1950s. As society changed, so did our definitions of authority. We came to reject the assumption that authority was a class issue we were born with and to replace it with a kind of meritocratic view of authority. It was success that granted authority by the 1980s. Britain’s elite private schools had for centuries marketed themselves as finishing schools for the ‘right kind of people’. It was social class and birth which mattered, not intelligence. Slowly, they rebranded themselves as places of academic merit, as incubators of brilliant minds. In truth, they were never about brilliant minds and were always about reinforcing privileges of birth. But they couldn’t say it out loud any more.
And with that social transformation came the new era of political PR. Stylists were employed to make sure that aspiring politicians sent out the subconscious vibe that they were ‘fit to rule’ by making them shave their beards and wear dark blue suits with simply coloured ties (for men) and angular business suits with perpetually groomed hair (for women). Confidence became a game of looking like the chief executive of a successful medium-sized white collar enterprise of some sort. Because focus groups seemed to show that this is what made people confident.
But much more than the over-analysed styling issue, politics became about set-piece indicators of confidence. If you ask 100 people why Labour lost the 2015 General Election, a good proportion will tell you that they lacked ‘economic competence’. If you then asked that group what aspect of economic competence they lacked, you will quickly descend into conversations of the vaguest sort possible. ‘Business leaders don’t trust them’. Nope, like bank robbers don’t trust the police. ‘They presided over a global crisis’. Yup, like most other world leaders. It’s not about coherent arguments, it’s about indicators that make us less confident. It’s a reverse con trick. (Well, actually, Labour did lack economic credibility, but mainly for almost the opposite reasons that are usually cited.)
In an election you are asking the public to select people to whom you will give unmatched control over their lives. Confidence is crucial – or at least the illusion of confidence is crucial. It’s what political strategists and image makers spend all their time doing, seeking to give the overwhelming sense of calm confidence to which people respond positively. (Hence Ed Milliband’s ‘be a happy warrior’ notes.)
As discussed in Chapter One, the ‘trick of confidence’ was one of the central planks of the way SNP and Yes Scotland strategists approached the referendum. It was framed and described as reassurance rather than confidence, but it was about making people feel confident that if they voted Yes, the sky wouldn’t fall in. I have already explained the extent to which I can completely understand why this was necessary in the context of the 2014 referendum – the whole process was so sudden that a longer process of confidence-building was impossible. So what could be called rapid- deployment assurance became necessary. Much of the campaign was built around arguments which did not so much explain exactly how the sky would be prevented from falling in but rather sought to make the idea of the sky falling in sound implausible through comparison with other small nations.
So we were all armed with lots and lots of slightly tendentious arguments about how pensions would be OK ‘somehow’ but without really costing out and designing what that ‘somehow’ was. It was all we could do. But because this concept of reassurance became so important and because uncertainty was the major weapon used by the No campaign, it led us up some unhelpful avenues. The easiest to mock are the fatuous ones – lifestyle gurus telling us that it is more ‘empowering’ to say independent than independence (as if the shift from abstract noun to qualitative adjective mattered a damn).
But there are much more important examples of where trying to bluff confidence didn’t work. By far the most important was over currency. The choice of currency that an independent Scotland would use became a sort of touchstone issue which defined the campaign. You either believed that somehow the currency issue would be resolved and so you voted Yes or you believed that it was uncertain and risky and you voted No. (In many cases it is likely that this was a reverse-engineered position which people took to justify the decision they had already made, but the broad lack of confidence in itself will have played a substantial subconscious part in making that decision.)
Here’s the funny thing though – despite the currency position being by far and away the issue which independence activists identify as the campaign’s biggest failing, my experience is that people aren’t exactly sure why or what should have been done instead. To make clear my personal position here, for very good economic reasons and reasons of sovereignty I always favoured a separate Scottish currency pegged to Sterling. But largely I did not arrive at this opinion for tactical reasons. It is why I am not convinced that ‘if only’ the Fiscal Commission had come out in favour of a Scottish currency everything would have been different and we’d have won. Strategically (rather than politically or economically) the problem was not with the conclusion the Fiscal Commission reached but with the Fiscal Commission itself.
So with the caveat that in 2013 there was little time to have done anything else, the problem is that the Fiscal Commission was not really a serious piece of economics but was more like a substantial piece of propaganda. The difference is crucial. As someone who runs a think tank, I can’t help but look at the report of the Fiscal Commission as if it was something we might have produced. I’d be perfectly proud of it (in terms of quality) if we’d produced it, not least because of the names attached. However, it is not only me who would have concluded that it was an interesting discussion paper and not a basis for any real plan. Had I taken that report to the Scottish Government and said ‘here you go, here’s a currency plan’ I would not have been taken seriously. Because that’s not what it was or what it was for.
With the best will in the world I don’t believe the Fiscal Commission really started with an open mind. Indeed, I’m pretty sure that key members of the Commission did not really believe its conclusion. From my interactions with the SNP leadership from before the Commission was set up, I am pretty sure that the decision to keep Sterling was a tactical one based on focus group work which had much less to do with the needs of the economy of an independent Scotland than it did with the requirements of a strategy which sought to give the impression that come independence you’d barely notice so don’t worry. I can imagine no circumstances in which the Commission report would have been published had it come out unequivocally in support of an independent currency, purely because that would have raised more questions than it answered. So instead we got a report which provided political cover (via the inclusion of ‘big names’) for a strategic decision that was already made.
I am not dismissing the argument that Scotland should have continued to use Sterling. I am the first to recognise that there are many very good reasons to hold that opinion and I have never argued that there is one, simple, ‘correct’ answer to the question. But I am definitely disputing any suggestion that the means by which that position was reached involved anything like enough critical thought, widespread consultation or detailed analysis which would generally be considered necessary to arrive at a decision of such monumental significance.
So to be clear, I’m not saying the argument that we should have formed a currency union was necessarily wrong. But it was short-term politics rather than long-term nation building. The reason currency became the issue most people identify as being the one which ‘went wrong’ during the referendum was because it was the most obvious example where people came to believe that independence campaigners were busking it. I find it hard to argue with that assessment.
To be technical (for no more than a paragraph), a position on currency arrived at without properly modelling crucial issues such as the size of a foreign currency reserve required to peg a ‘Scottish Pound’ to Sterling is incomplete. To brush over questions such as who would become the ‘lender of last resort’, what national banking institutions would be required to sustain a currency, how cross-border trade and exchange would be managed is to fail to look seriously at the question. You just can’t make a proper assessment of the options if you don’t know these things.
But what do these technicalities mean for the outcome of the campaign? Am I suggesting that the people of Scotland would have burrowed down into the details of such a report and, by reassuring itself about the nature of foreign currency reserves, rush out and voted Yes? Nope, that’s not what I’m suggesting at all. I’m suggesting that, to go back to the beginning of the chapter, there is a world of difference psychologically between someone barking confidently at you that they know everything and it’ll be OK because some famous economists said it and being able to answer calmly and assuredly a series of important questions with the confidence that only comes from having the right answers.
I know this first-hand because I had to answer the question many times over in many town halls to many sceptical questioners. I tried to answer these questions as honestly as I could without undermining the wider campaign (in which disagreeing with keeping Sterling or the Queen or joining NATO were turned into screaming headlines about splits and conflict by a hostile press). I did a very little sketchy work of my own to answer some of these questions. I said honestly that there was no definitive or correct answer, that there were a range of options with pros and cons which I talked through and then eventually came down in favour of an independent currency while being clear about the costs and work involved balanced with the long-term benefits that would accrue. Generally, I got a positive response, even if the questioner wasn’t in complete agreement. However, I did see some painful attempts by others just to ‘stick to the line’, which sometimes came across a little bit like ‘Joseph Stiglitz has a Nobel Prize don’t you know’. Saying it with certainty didn’t seem to make people any more confident. And admitting doubt didn’t seem to make people any less confident.
That’s the thing about the confidence trick – people often think that a con artist is all bluster and style and no content or knowledge. This is the opposite of the truth. A good con artist prepares and prepares and prepares, knowing every avenue is covered, that every question can be answered, that no inconsistencies stick out. That is how they manage to con people. In politics the same is true – the more you have done the work - the hard, serious work - the more you have considered all the real pertinent questions and found answers to them, the more confident you will sound.
That is why currency is the emblematic factor of our defeat – because it symbolises the real problem with the campaign. We (for good reasons) weren’t prepared. It’s not that members of the public want to know the size of a foreign currency reserve, it’s that they want to be convinced that someone really knows the answer. It’s not that they necessarily preferred a ‘Plan B’ of an independent currency, it’s that they wanted to be reassured that there was a fully-functioning Plan B in place just in case Osborne really did refuse to allow us access to the Bank of England. The currency issue became a failure because people sniffed out that the work hadn’t really been done and that we were, to all intents and purposes, bluffing. (Let’s be clear here – England really could have prevented a currency union and it did no good at all for us to have only the answer of ‘liar, liar, pants on fire’. And with only 18 months to sort it out according to the timetable for independence, there wasn’t much scope if things did go wrong. I write this here only so we can make sure this doesn’t happen, but I was definitely a little worried that by painting ourselves into a corner for short-term campaigning purposes we were going to get a bad deal on currency which could have taken years if not decades to recover.)
It is this failure to induce confidence in nervous possible Yes voters which I believe to be the single biggest factor in the Yes campaign failing to win. On referendum night TV (which I recall only blearily) there was a crucial moment which encapsulated all this perfectly. There were various members of the public on a panel. The host interviews one. He tells her that he thought the currency case hadn’t been worked out properly, that he was a businessman and the White Paper was too much assertion and not enough information, that this was all risk and the rewards hadn’t been outlined (or words to that effect). An English-based commentator picked up on this and said ‘so you’re anti-independence?’. To his great surprise the man said ‘not at all, I really want to believe in an independent Scotland, but it needs to be based on a much better case than this’. If we do not listen to this man and this opinion and we do not respond and react to it, we will shoot ourselves in the foot. We must make it easy for those who want to believe to actually believe.
Here I want to direct a little criticism towards the ‘hold the line’ tendency in the Yes movement. There are people who have expressed the view that the last thing we want to do is to mess around with the case but that rather we should just plough on with loyalty to the cause and discipline to the message. In this view, questioning whether we got things right the last time round is simply ‘splitting the movement’ and that if the ‘high heid yins’ have settled on Sterling union (for example) then it must be for a reason. This might be fair enough in the middle of a campaign, but it is positively dangerous in preparing a campaign. If we listen only to those ‘above’ us and expect to relay that to those ‘below’ us, we will ignore what we are being told by the very people who we need to win over. I have many No-voting friends and neighbours (I live in a firmly No-voting town). Absolutely none of them are saying to me ‘right, what I need for you to convince me is to come back again with exactly the same stuff you came with last time and then to badger me about it some more’. The sympathetic ones are saying ‘look, I’m proud of Scotland and want to believe it can be an independent nation but you need to answer my questions’.
So let me be absolutely clear on how I think we answer those questions. I propose that we need not an updated White Paper (which frankly sprawled over far too many subjects, some barely related to the actual process of independence) but rather we learn the lesson from the Scottish Constitutional Convention which built the case (very successfully) for the Scottish Parliament. Over a pretty compressed period of time it worked through not every question it could think of but rather every question that needed to be answered to set up the infrastructure of a new Parliament. We should do the same.
Restricting ourselves only to the institutions and infrastructure required of a new country but which is not currently in place in Scotland, we should build a coherent, thought-through plan. In the next chapter I will outline in a little more detail what I think needs to be in that case. But broadly it covers the fiscal, monetary, social and regulatory infrastructure which is currently reserved to Westminster, the things we know we need but which we don’t have. (There is all the time in the world for political parties and campaign groups to build a case for what we could do with all this new infrastructure and while I do not believe for a second there is such a thing as policy-neutral institution-building, we should stick as far as possible to what things would look like and how they would work rather than what they would do.) This would create what you might call a ‘consolidated business plan for a new, independent nation’.
The process of building this plan will be important. It must be something which is broadly shared. It will do no good if there are unilateral decisions about controversial issues imposed on the whole movement without the movement having the opportunity to debate and negotiate these properly. Last time round a lot of people bit their tongue on issues like whether to keep a hereditary, unelected Head of State, a policy imposed on the movement which had very little support. This time round we have time to resolve these issues better (I am a republican but would happily accept a compromise that sees Queen Liz accepted as Head of State for her lifetime but with a promise of a referendum when the time of succession comes around). No-one will get absolutely everything they want (just like not everyone got what they wanted out of the final report of the Constitutional Convention). But what we should get if the process works is a really solid, really shared, really persuasive proposal for a new country which doesn’t involve bluff or anyone holding their nose. The power of having such a document would be enormous. Independence would become a specific proposal which could be discussed seriously, not improvised round the edges.
There is of course a major problem here – which is that we’re running out of time. Let’s work backwards for a second from my proposal for a 2021 referendum. Ideally you’d want to have at least two full years of a major Yes campaign persuading people of the new ‘business case’ before you went anywhere near the election or referendum. This means that ideally you’d want the case completed for launch not later than the very beginning of 2019 (and the cautious side of me suggests that longer than that would be preferable – think how fast the last 18 months of the indyref went...). That means it would need to be signed off by everyone in the autumn of 2018. That is less than two and a half years away at the time of writing. And a cross-party body for overseeing and negotiating this work does not even exist yet (though steps are being taken to try and create it).
To demonstrate the time pressures, let’s work forward for a moment. To create a detailed and robust case for a currency solution, a pension and social security system, a new civil service, regulatory infrastructure, an inland revenue service, some kind of central bank and so on, is not a small task. Were you to plan such a project I suspect you’d want more than three years and possibly something more like five years. We’ve got two. I will admit to being frustrated that we didn’t get something like this started within six months of September 2014. From here it would be easy to sleep-walk into a second referendum little more prepared on crucial issues than we were for the first one.
But if we get it right we could hold a massive national launch of this founding document perhaps for Burns Night in 2019. We can by then have a big, effective national campaign planned (as discussed in Chapter Six). We can then spend two years campaigning relentlessly on this proposal. It gives us two years to shift that chunk of the population who were not opposed in principle but did not have confidence in us last time. They are more than enough to cross the 60 per cent threshold needed to enter 2021 with confidence. We then have the opportunity rapidly to convert that majority support into Scottish independence.
There is one other issue to do with confidence that I want to raise here. Throughout this chapter I have emphasised the rational end of confidence, the bit that wants to know there are proper answers to questions. I am utterly convinced that this is the only way to get us to substantial majority support in a short timescale. But there is another kind of confidence we must always be conscious of, which is cultural confidence.
By emphasising rational, calculating aspects of confidence I have intentionally ignored other aspects. If you look at Catalonia for example they have a big and vibrant independence movement which is not really predicated on a ‘business case’ at all. Catalonia is not on the verge of independence because people have a detailed plan for a new nation state but because they have reached a level of cultural confidence we do not have. Catalonians wage a flag unashamedly, we do not. In fact, we are still struggling to drag ourselves out of the Scottish cringe.
Here I really do want to place some blame at the feet of more or less all the political parties. They may well claim to be ‘stronger for Scotland’ or ‘Scotland’s radical alliance’ or use other identifiers of Scottishness (a green saltire). But they really do far too often give the distinct impression that they are not quite as comfortable with the concept of being Scottish as they might. There was an awful lot of talk during the referendum aimed at distancing us from flags and identity. Fair enough in as far as militaristic, chauvinistic nationalism has sometimes used the aggressive waving of the national flag as a provocation. But honestly, do you really see the Saltire as a symbol of militarism or chauvinism? What is your real fear – that the waving of flags might lead to poetry?
The official Yes campaign was constantly vigilant about the issue of identity politics, policing diligently uses of Scots language, couthey imagery, flags and symbols. It was always worried about being tied to an impression of a ‘small Scotlander’ mentality. So was Nicola Sturgeon who was always at great pains to claim that she was really only interested in the democratic and civic cause. This was a line that was clung to by the Greens in particular (who constantly brand the life out of their party with Green everything but for some reason give the strong impression of objecting to the branding of the nation of Scotland via a simple national symbol like a flag). Colin Fox of the SSP deployed his ‘democrat, not nationalist’ line to very great effect.
As a professional political strategist I understand completely and myself sought to project an image of our campaign as civic and democratic. But here is my question – can someone explain to me where ‘emphasising our civic nature’ ends and ‘cringe’ begins? If we want people to identify Scotland as a viable, separate nation state, why do we sometimes give the distinct impression that we’d really rather people viewed it as a convenient administrative entity? The more we apologise for the flag, the less cultural confidence we give people. And people need to feel that cultural confidence as well as rational calculation. It’s part of the package of confidence which makes people take (calculated) leaps into the dark.
And if you think I’m misreading this, that the SNP (in particular) is perfectly comfortable with the Saltire (which it is), explain the apparent fetishisation of things non-Scottish. Why are so many governmental advisors chosen from outside Scotland? Does it not give the very distinct impression that we don’t have the relevant expertise here? Why have we not done things that boost cultural confidence like investing in the arts, film, music, the reflections of a modern nation state that let us see ourselves represented and then to feel proud of it? Why the hesitancy over Scottish history (which is just not all about ‘beating the English’)?
Because there is a constant, low-level cultural war going on right now. There are Union Jacks on our driving licences; policies to undermine our renewables industry; the devolution of contorted tax powers which are difficult to use. The media is relentlessly repackaging Scotland as a small administrative centre which should focus on micromanaging a limited range of bureaucratic policies in health and education. It’s the kind of narrative you’d usually find around a local authority. Apparently we should get over our cringe at TV series Outlander and welcome the jobs it creates. Eh, sorry here, but I wasn’t cringing. It really is a perfectly good historical romp like much of what is coming out of the new wave of US long-format television.
Feel free to call me paranoid but I am of the belief that unionists are engaged in an ongoing attempt to undermine Scotland’s confidence economically, culturally and politically. It’s what I would do if I was them. Are we going to fight back against this and assert our own confident, modern cultural identity? Or are we just going to cringe along with them? I don’t want a film studio in Scotland which has the sole purpose of enticing American productions about elves and goblins just because we have mountains. I want a film studio in Scotland that makes exciting contemporary films about a nation which is widely seen as one of the most exciting places to be in Europe.
I do not intend to go into any more detail in this book about these questions of cultural confidence, a subject which would require a book of its own. But we must be aware of that low-level culture war which is being run continually and we must be ready to assert our own vision of what Scotland’s culture(s) mean not in theory but in rich, beautiful, tangible reality.
There will be no Scottish independence if there is no increase in Scotland’s collective confidence in itself both as a cultural entity but more importantly as a functioning, modern nation state. People must believe – really believe – we know what we’re doing. And that means we have to work and work hard to make sure that we absolutely do know what we’re doing. For me, this remains the single biggest task ahead. So let’s get that confident case for a confident nation built.