White Paper Strategies

Government publishes long boring report.  Plenty of trees mulched, nobody dead.  Not really the stuff lively media and public interest is made of, is it? Wonkish characters in their garrets may chortle in joy, but you can't usually expect many callooh callays from the general public. But is this week's White Paper different? 

Without slighting the Water and Sewerage Charges Exemption Scheme for Small Third Sector Organisations paper and its ilk, the White Paper's importance clearly exceeds your average government business. So does its ambition. The Plain People of Scotland can tuck themselves up cosy in their beds tonight, untroubled by the detail of much government policy. The White Paper, by contrast, has to make an impact. It arguments, and to some extent, its detail, has to "trickle down".  It needn't do so immediately. It needn't do so in full. But this ambition posed obvious tactical challenges. How's the trick best to be performed?

For example, should the Scottish Government roll out a thematic programme for independence, bit by bit, dealing with immigration and citizenship one week, the economy the next, and so on? As we've seen over the past few months, the UK government have published a range of subject-specific dossiers, in their Scotland Analysis papers.  

This approach has some advantages. It breaks down the bigness of all of the policy issues into more discrete, digestible segments. For those with visions of your average punter with a short attention span and wandering attention, this approach might seem attractive. It gives you a series of front-page splashes in the papers, a series of news bulletins, giving you the opportunity to set the agenda - not for a day or two - but for a number of weeks. What's more, multiple interventions minimises the events dear boy, events factor. Hurricane, flood, scandal - unforeseeable Iberian interventions - it's all too easy for unknown unknowns to intervene and bugger up your launch. Or at least, knock it off its preferred trajectory.

On the other hand, it means that your information and your arguments are diffusely distributed across a series of lengthy and inaccessible documents. The chances of much of the Scottish population picking up any of these reports and engaging with their arguments is limited.

Despite their ability to command the front pages on sympathetic newspapers, one also has to question the extent to which even the existence of these Scotland Analysis papers have really impinged on the public consciousness. You don't read documents which you don't know exist.  Even if, as Adam Tomkins argues, the UK government papers don't aspire to give you reasons to vote No, but aim to sculpt the debate in a manner which forces pro-independence campaigners to answer a series of often awkward questions. It seems to me that there's a good chance that they've achieved this ambition, sending the media gyroscope spinning, and making SNP politicians speak to the Unionist agenda, and some of the most uncomfortable aspects of the case for independence. It remains to be seen whether these advantages prove evanescent, or deeply entrenched.

In the alternative, should the Scottish Government - as it has - hand down its policy Bible from on high, weighty and singular? Seen in the light of experience, this approach has some clear benefits and disadvantages too. A subject-specific paper would never have achieved the attention which Wednesday's publication commanded in the media. Not just on the front pages of newspapers. It dominated and reshaped the all-important tea-time news broadcasts. For anyone keeping even a lazy eye on the news, the existence of the White Paper is unavoidable. 

It remains to be seen how many folk in the country will want to consult the Nationalist Testaments in making up their minds, but by expending all of their force on a single blow, the SNP have at least made it more likely that engaged but undecided voters know where to look. Condensing its argument into a single accessible text also facilitates this. Not everybody is an amateur archivist, keen to scour the internet to find a string of lengthy government documents.  One click, and you've got the SNP vision, kit and caboodle. We could have done without the Spanish fireship sailing up the Clyde. I'm sure the air was blue in the SNP press office when it came through on the wires, but such are the perils of letting everything ride on a single publication.  Coordinated Unionist mischief was sure-fire. 

But isn't it awfully long? Who is going to read all that? Certainly, the White Paper is a long document, but it's wrong to think people minded to give it a look will behave like the harried media commentator, on camera in half an hour, and keen to pretend they've read and digested the whole thing.  The White Paper isn't a sustained argument which has to be consumed whole to be understood at all.  It isn't a polemic essay, but a work of reference.

This is important, both for the investigative voter, but perhaps more importantly - for activists.  For all the talk of "ground campaigns", activists on the doorsteps must have something to say.  Yes, Yes Scotland is a broad church, and a vote for independence is not necessarily a wholesale endorsement of the SNP platform.  But in my experience, when folk have questions about independence, they frequently concern fairly commonplace issues, seeking reassurance about the continuity of programmes or policies which are important to them, or simply keen to know that thought has been given, for example, to the criteria governing who will be a citizen of this new state. This is intended as no slight to the seriousness with which these questions are asked. But few undecided characters I've discussed the referendum with demand a discourse on the theory of the state or a first principle-driven account of the nationalist movement's political economy.

I've never found the "gamechanger" theory on the White Paper terrifically convincing. The demand for sudden reversals of fortune tell us more about the impatience of the commentariat than they do about the slow drivers of social and political change.  Certainly, if Yes is to carry the day next September, something has to shift. Those nine points between Yes and No must narrow.

But this referendum is an unanticipated, early confrontation between Scottish nationalism and its ultimate ambition. Victory will be won only by slow degrees, if at all. It remains to be seen whether we have enough time, between now and next September, to work that change. But the Yes campaign must borrow its motto from Arthur Hugh Clough: "say not the struggle naught availeth ... for while the tired waves, vainly breaking seem here no painful inch to gain, far back through creeks and inlets making, came, silent, flooding in, the main."