The question I am most often asked as head of the Vote Leave effort in Scotland is: Why are Scots so much more pro-EU than everywhere else in the UK?
A loaded question, if ever there was one, and one based on a popular fallacy.
Nevertheless, the polls do indicate a larger gap between Leave and Remain in Scotland than the national polls indicate. This is a problem for Leave, but it also presents a significant opportunity.
Because while there is no doubt that support for EU membership north of the border is wide, it is also very, very shallow. As to why that gap is, on the surface, so much wider than in England, allow me a brief historical interlude…
At the 1997 general election, the Tories were wiped out in Scotland. The only party ever to have won a plurality of the votes here finished up without a single seat. You don’t need to understand the reasons for this, except to know that virtually everything associated with the Tory “brand” has been seen, until relatively recently, as toxic. And the perceived rows over EU membership – from the downfall of Margaret Thatcher to the subsequent low-level civil war among Conservative MPs and members – has therefore been seen by Scots as a peculiarly Tory obsession and, therefore, something most of us don’t really bother too much with.
Secondly, there’s been little room in Scottish politics for a debate about constitutional reform of the European variety; here, constitutional change means only one thing – independence. And we’ve been obsessing about it virtually non-stop for 50 years. So debate about the EU, until very, very recently, has grabbed no one’s attention.
That has changed, I’m glad to report, although whether it’s changed soon enough to affect the national picture on Thursday night, we shall have to see. But the opportunity to gain significant new levels of support in Scotland is one that simply isn’t available to the Leave campaign anywhere else in the UK, where much larger groups of voters have been thinking about this for a while and made their minds up a long time ago.
The message about secure borders and the need to emulate the vast majority of democracies in the world by having immigration control is one that resonates in Scotland as much as anywhere else, particularly in our more deprived housing estates, among people whose services suffer the most from unlimited immigration.
But we’ve also used different arguments from those deployed at a UK level. For example, it’s been fun to watch SNP leaders tie themselves in knots trying to justify a Remain vote to their supporters when a Leave vote will leave the Scottish parliament with significant new powers. Fishing and agriculture policies (and a few others) would automatically, by default, revert to Holyrood’s jurisdiction on the day the UK left the EU.
No doubt the First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, is nervous at polls which suggest her own party’s supporters are more likely than any other to vote Leave.
As a Unionist who campaigned for Scotland to remain in the UK, I see no contradiction in campaigning now for a Leave vote. The UK as a political union works; the EU most certainly does not.