It's The Lexicon, Stupid

The extent to which the SNP has been winning the Scottish political debate can be measured not just in the number of MSPs their Parliamentary group now boasts, but also in the extent to which their language has increasingly come to dominate the debate on the constitution.

Talk about positive aspects of the Union, and you’ll inevitably be accused of talking Scotland down, or of being negative about her prospects; the charge that you view Scotland as too wee and too poor to succeed (a phrase only ever used by nationalists) will not be far away.

On the one hand, it’s pure sophistry, scoring a debating point at the same time as avoiding the debate itself. But there can be little doubt that this nationalist critique of pro-Union arguments has to some extent taken root, assisted, it should be said, by the often apocalyptic tone and content of some of Labour’s attacks on the SNP and separatism. It’s become increasingly clear that Scots are no longer receptive to messages along the lines of Labour’s Divorce is an Expensive Business campaign. Partly, that’s because Labour poisoned its own well by assuring Scotland that an SNP government would be a disaster, which it has not been; partly because there’s a disconnect between a nation that’s been growing in self confidence since devolution, and the spendthrift basket case which that type of message implies; and, partly because the essentially negative message looks increasingly unappealing next to the SNP’s positivity.

But that’s not to say that the core of the pro-Union appeal fails to resonate with Scots. The SNP wouldn’t spend so much time trying to change the language around the Union, or triangulating their own offer around the Union’s benefits, if it did not. The bailout of the Scottish banks by the UK government was a tangible paragon which tapped into what many Scots think of the merits of the Union, and there’s every indication that the election campaign changed few minds on the issue. So the challenge for pro-Union advocates is not just to articulate the benefits of the Union, but to find a new vocabulary which allows us to do so without turning Scots off, and places those benefits in the context of a vision of the kind of society we want. In short, we need to start being as clever when talking about the Union as is the SNP.

That’s something I intend to do in an irregular series looking at the Union’s benefits; or, as I’ll refer to them (in an unashamed steal from Niall Ferguson’s Civilization), the Killer Apps.