Campaign tactics that discredit the Yes camp in Scotland

The significance of tomorrow’s referendum on Scottish independence is
impossible to exaggerate. Scots will be faced with a choice whose
consequences will echo down the ages – namely, whether to break apart a
Union that has stood for more than 300 years, and instead become an
independent nation. Under the circumstances, it is vital that voters make
this choice in full knowledge of the facts and with complete liberty of
conscience. But as the outcome of the referendum grows ever more uncertain,
some campaigners appear unwilling to allow their fellow countrymen that
liberty. Both online and in person, there has been an increasingly strident,
even abusive tone to the debate – and while there are doubtless sinners on
both sides, it does seem that the majority of the violent language has come
from the Yes camp.

Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, was yesterday sworn at and shoved during a
tour of Edinburgh. George Galloway of Respect was called a “traitor” and
“Tory stooge”, and told he would “face a bullet” by protesters at a rally in
Glasgow this week, at which he was speaking alongside other pro-Union
politicians including Danny Alexander, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury.
Jim Murphy, the Labour MP, was earlier forced to suspend his speaking tour
of Scotland after his opponents whipped up a “mob atmosphere”.

It is understandable that people should be passionate about such an elemental
issue. But the overwhelming majority on both sides have been able to voice
their views without descending into the kind of rancour that will make it
harder to weld Scotland back together, whatever the outcome of the vote. And
to his great discredit, Alex Salmond’s team has helped create an atmosphere
in which such hostility can flourish. We report today, for example, on
Mr Salmond’s attempts to intimidate his alma mater, St Andrews University,
into not attacking his cause.

Such bullying tactics have been accompanied by a refusal to engage with any
questioning of his plans. It is hardly distorting the facts to observe, for
example, that Mr Salmond’s economic strategy has been torn to shreds during
this campaign, with huge uncertainty surrounding the currency Scotland would
use, among much else. His response is to attack those who raise the issue,
including the BBC’s Nick Robinson – prompting hundreds of Yes supporters to
march on the corporation’s Glasgow headquarters demanding that the “biased”
BBC be browbeaten into silence. The Yes campaign may not want to hear the
inconvenient truth, but its leaders should bear in mind that cowing your
enemies is no substitute for rebutting their arguments – and that such
behaviour hardly augurs well for the new nation they hope to build.