Who really wants failure?

Tweet Two days ago, Cameron made the extraordinary claim that Scottish nationalists “don’t want the country to succeed”.  Obviously, he wasn’t talking about Scotland when he used the words “the country”, for it would be a very strange nationalist party that didn’t want its own country to succeed.  But if he was instead talking about the UK, it would still be a very strange form of nationalism which wanted the ‘country’ of which the Scots are still a part to do other than succeed.  And even if he was referring to the UK minus Scotland, there is still no evidence that the SNP actually want the country to ‘fail’.  Indeed, much of what Nicola Sturgeon has said throughout the election campaign seems to be saying quite the opposite.

If Scotland is to remain a part of the UK, it is very much in the interest of the Scots that the UK should be an economic success.  And if Scotland were to become independent, it is very much in the interest of the Scots that their largest trading partner should be an economic success.  Both of those things must surely be as obvious to Cameron as they are to me.

It’s easy to dismiss Cameron’s statement as electioneering nonsense, but I think that it tells us something very important about the unionist psyche, and underlines why the unionists will ultimately be defeated.  It tells us that he cannot really conceive of anyone pushing for a second referendum on independence for Scotland other than as a reaction to failure.  He doesn’t understand – can’t begin to understand, apparently – that the movement for Scottish independence exists regardless of the economic arguments, let alone that the certainty of economic success would only boost the nationalist cause. 

Particularly telling is his apparent failure to grasp that economic failure helps the ‘no’ camp more than the ‘yes’ camp.  Fear of economic failure was, after all, the basis of much of the ‘no’ argument during the referendum.  How to achieve economic success is an issue on which there is clearly a significant gulf between him and the SNP; but the goal of achieving it is a shared aspiration.

Panicking politicians don’t look for reasoned debate about alternative approaches to achieving the same goal; they only look for ways of scaring people into voting the ‘right’ way.  This time, though, it doesn’t seem to be working.