CommonSpace columnist and Common Weal director Robin McAlpine says Scotland’s grassroots campaigners have the greatest insight into No voters’ motivations
THE grassroots of the independence movement is an amazing repository of knowledge and wisdom. But we don’t draw on it enough to inform our overall thinking – and that’s a mistake.
The grassroots of the Scottish independence movement was badly maligned by the unionist media and used as a kind of slur on the whole project.
And this seems to have had a knock on effect – there appears to be some people floating around near the top of the SNP who rather see the grassroots as a liability, a problem to be managed and avoided.
There appears to be some people floating around near the top of the SNP who rather see the grassroots as a liability, a problem to be managed and avoided.
If we allow this to settle into the collective mindset we do ourselves a substantial disservice. Not only do we acquiesce in portraying the involvement of ordinary people in politics as being a bad thing, we get ourselves into a situation where we’re not listening to what they’re telling us.
But to understand this it will be helpful to clarify just what is meant by ‘grassroots’ in the indy movement.
Broadly I think of three categories. There is what I’d call the ‘supporters’. There are a lot of people who are strong supporters of independence and will go to some events, express their views to friends and colleagues and on social media, and who are important advocates.
But it isn’t that group which tends to organise the events or do a lot of the structured local work. Those are ‘local activists’ and they are the people I know best, having been invited to contribute to their events throughout the last referendum and almost constantly since and having made many good friends and contacts.
In turn, local activists can sometimes fall in the shadow of ‘national activists’. These are the people who set up and drive forward the national level non-party organisations such as the Radical Independence Campaign or Women For Independence.
Local activists are much less likely to subscribe to more extreme views because they are the people who are most likely to have had direct engagement with No voters who are immediately turned off by those extremes.
While there is plenty crossover between these groups, there are some clear distinctions. For example, most of the people who drove forward the national organisations were already activists in some area of political or social life in Scotland whereas very few of the supporters were.
And while there is a fringe of the supporters who veer towards the extreme, it has been my observation that local activists are much less likely to subscribe to more extreme views because they are the people who are most likely to have had direct engagement with No voters who are immediately turned off by those extremes.
So local activists were smeared by association with the so-called ‘cybernat’ fringe of supporters and in a different way were portrayed as being in the shadow of kent faces in national campaigns.
Talking about grassroots as it is normally understood would focus on local activists – with the national organisations being non-party campaign groups.
For me the defining feature of the local activists is that they’ve had a lot more direct contact with voters than most of us.
I talk to an awful lot of people in the more establishment parts of politics who are almost constantly guessing what No voters think. And then I spend an evening with a group of people who know in some detail what No voters think.
They curated their own local campaigns last time, chose their own messages, selected the leaflets to distribute that they thought would work, ran events and invited speakers they thought would go down well locally. And it was they who got the feedback on what did and didn’t work.
In particular, I talk to an awful lot of people in the more establishment parts of politics who are almost constantly guessing what No voters think. And then I spend an evening with a group of people who know in some detail what No voters think.
The latter group is far more compelling. As an example, everywhere I go people are jittery about this obsession with tying a second independence referendum to the EU. I don’t think I’ve met a local activist who isn’t concerned about whether we’re equipped with better answers for on the doorsteps than last time.
There is an almost constant debate about how to engage with older voters which everyone identifies as a problem – while at a national level the debate is stuck on single markets and democratic deficits.
Democratic deficits in themselves almost never come up as a primary issue for the grassroots. It is the kind of argument politicians like because it is all about them (‘imagine how great it would be if your MSP controlled everything!!!’).
Put simply, people who looked into the eyes of real voters and talked to them about real issues and their real concerns have amassed a substantial body of knowledge.
But on doorstops, the ‘our politicians versus their politicians’ argument has at least two mentions of politicians too many to be effective with much of the target audience.
This far out from the last referendum local activists were quite scornful of what they were reading in newspapers about ‘don’t say independence, say independent’. I expect them to be equally unpersuaded by the latest stuff on ‘it’s not indyref 2, it’s new indyref’.
(As a note here, sticking the word ‘new’ in front of something political went out of fashion around about Iraq war time.)
Put simply, people who looked into the eyes of real voters and talked to them about real issues and their real concerns have amassed a substantial body of knowledge. It has also made them serious about the issues which are raised.
Writing clever rhetoric in print or rehearsing it in a Scottish Government meeting room is easy. Delivering it to curious, sceptical or hostile voters is a different business entirely.
As is so often the case, the very frontline troops who experienced the battle first hand and who have the best knowledge of what has worked and what has not worked are the ones least likely to be listened to by generals.
If we’d listen to what the real grassroots of the independence movement are saying we’d be more worried than we are about questions which don’t have proper answers. We’d be less comfortable that ‘because EU’ was all the motivation people were lacking to change their positions.
We’d be thinking not about free trade but rather about all the much more mundane and day-to-day things people have real worries about and we’d be trying to find a way to wrap those up in a story which can persuade people who’re not yet on board that independence is their cause, too.
If you spend time in the meeting rooms and town halls where local activists are getting together again, of course you’ll come across the occasional wild view. But I think you’ll probably be surprised at how sober, thoughtful and realistic they are.
I’m a bit worried that the SNP leadership is hinting at a strategy that could be described as ‘keys – that last wan didny count’. They seem to think we can ‘reset’ the whole debate and make it about something completely different from ‘old indyref’ (is that what we’re to call it?).
This is possibly the kind of thinking that comes from not having continued to engage with the voters on the issues. People in strategy rooms may think that enough time has passed that the punters will forget their old concerns about pensions or currency or public finances.
I know that in Scotland much of the media would like us to be ashamed of our grassroots and I fully expect that their smear campaigns will escalate. I also know that political insiders with controlling tendencies can sometimes be happy to write the grassroots out of the story.
People who’ve been standing round folding tables on street corners regularly since 2014 will tell you that these concerns have not been forgotten.
As is so often the case, the very frontline troops who experienced the battle first hand and who have the best knowledge of what has worked and what has not worked are the ones least likely to be listened to by generals.
The pace of things is very clearly picking up again and I find myself back out talking at meetings a lot (Greenock last week, St Andrews and then Cupar yesterday, Rutherglen tonight…) and I’ve started opening meetings just by asking people why we lost last time.
I’ve gained some genuinely valuable insights, sometimes ones that were similar to my own but also some really relevant local information about what happened on the ground in different places.
I know that in Scotland much of the media would like us to be ashamed of our grassroots and I fully expect that their smear campaigns will escalate. I also know that political insiders with controlling tendencies can sometimes be happy to write the grassroots out of the story, to be slightly ashamed of them too.
And yet outside Scotland the grassroots of the independence movement are still taken as a case study of what positive, genuinely participative people-led politics in the new era of populism can look like.
And yet outside Scotland the grassroots of the independence movement are still taken as a case study of what positive, genuinely participative people-led politics in the new era of populism can look like. It’s the unionists who are so parochial they can’t see the significance of the citizen involvement we’ve achieved.
So my plea is simple; let’s listen more to the people who have the most experience of talking to precisely the voters whose minds we need to change. They are a wealth of knowledge and good sense and they will make an invaluable contribution to shaping a strategy for a new campaign.
Picture courtesy of Change:How
Check out what people are saying about how important CommonSpace is. Pledge your support today.
