Whilst Boris Johnson and his motley crew
seem to be realising, albeit very belatedly, that they need to do something if
the UK is to continue to exist, it seems that they are struggling to
decide which strategy to adopt. Whilst some want to be aggressively anti-SNP,
others think that Project Love might be more productive than Project Fear. The
confusion looks set to run and run, with the likeliest outcome being two camps
following two different strategies at the same time. They’re not really
concerned about Wales at all, only Scotland (and that looks like a mistake in
itself – the reason that they are in such a hole over what to do in Scotland
is, at least in part, that they didn’t see any need to act sooner), but even
there, they seem to be starting from an assumption that there are no
fundamental problems with the way the union works, it’s just a question of
finding the best marketing strategy. It is the very superficiality of that
approach which dooms it to failure.
Some of the most successful marketing
campaigns are those which attempt to sell Brand X instead of Brand Y, where the
two products are basically very similar, and the demand is well established.
Sadly, the political battle between Labour and the Tories in EnglandandWales has
long been reduced to that sort of marketing exercise – two very similar
products each trying to persuade customers that they are the best or cheapest.
But reducing the choice to Brand X cornflakes or Brand Y cornflakes presupposes
that the punters want to buy cornflakes in the first place. The problem that
the unionists are facing is that most Scots have decided that they don’t want
cornflakes, and aren’t even sure that they want any other type of cereal either.
Trying to sell the merits of a particular brand of cornflakes to an audience
which has gone off the whole concept of breakfast is an entirely different
project, and probably an impossible one for people who can’t even imagine what
the world might be like without breakfast.
Successful marketing requires an understanding
of the mindset of the target audience, and the most successful businesses are
those which, having understood their audience, adapt their product where
necessary to suit the market rather than assuming that they can adapt the
market to suit their product. And that, in a nutshell, is the biggest problem
that the unionists face. So convinced are most of them that their product in
its current form is indispensable to every household that they cannot even
conceive of any way in which it might be improved. From their perspective,
there is nothing in any way deficient about their product, and no need to
change it. If people have stopped buying it, it’s because those people are
wrong-headed and stupid. It’s easy to see how anyone starting from that
viewpoint might believe that bullying, cajoling, or even bribing people into
buying makes sense. But businesses which behave in that fashion invariably go
bust, and there’s no reason to suppose the outcome for unionists will be any
different.
The second big problem which they face is
their own inability to distinguish between outcomes and structures. The union,
as a structure, has value for its parts only to the extent that it delivers outcomes
which could not be delivered without it. The suggestion is that ‘Project Love’
will concentrate on perceived successes, such as the vaccination programme and
the furlough scheme. There are, in truth, problems with both, but let’s leave
those problems aside and assume that these schemes can indeed be considered
successes for the government. Whether they are also advantages of being in a
union depends not on the degree of success achieved but on whether an equal
degree of success could have been achieved had the UK already been dissolved
into its constituent parts. Considered from that point of view, there is
absolutely no demonstrable reason why Scotland, Wales, and England could not
have individually achieved the same outcomes. (Whether they would have done so
or not is a different question, to which the answer is unknowable, but it
depends more on the competence of the governments elected than on the
constitutional position of the countries concerned.) Claiming the successes,
such as they are, of a particular government at a particular time to be
successes of the constitutional structure under which it operates is a category
error, pure and simple.
None of the above is intended to suggest
that there is no case for the union. There is a case to be made, just as there
is a case for independence, and people will have different opinions on the
relative merits and strengths of those cases. It’s just not the same case that
the unionists are making. A defensible case for the union isn’t about marketing
and spin, or about misrepresenting apparent successes as being due to the
union. I’ll return to what the case for the union might be in due course, but
first it’s worth examining, over the coming days, some of the problems with the
case usually being put forward.
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