The Anatomy of Panic

The collapse of old, critically-unexamined certainties can be discombobulating. We've all got them - basic assumptions we make and generally don't question, that keep life toddling on undisturbed.  The sun will rise tomorrow. Labour will win any Glasgow election going. What I'm good at today, I'll be good at tomorrow: my talents and faculties won't desert me.

Often as not, we can afford to take these things for granted.  But when the ground falls suddenly away beneath you, you're generally unprepared for the landing. In my experience, your first reaction is almost invariably the wrong one.  The temptation to overreact, to panic, is acute.

For my part, the experience of working on a doctorate has been a serious salutary one in this respect.  The process of writing has always tended to come easily to me, even as a nipper.  I may run like a hirpling pygmy hippo.  My body may have the accumulated athleticism of an adipose sloth.  My character may be haunted by its share of weird anxieties and frustrating inadequacies. But I have always been confident, and have always enjoyed, turning a phrase in print. To find yourself tongue-tied, fretful, blocked and inarticulate - was seriously disturbing.

As people's troubles go, this is a fairly minor anxiety which I invite no particular sympathy for. But what rendered it dismaying was the discovery that an old immodest conceit was fundamentally mistaken. I am now, I'm happy to say, over the hump, but for a period, this confrontation with the unforeseen collapse in one of life's certainties curdled my spirits and demolished my confidence. I'm doubtless better off for it, but the internal resources had to be slowly worked up, to deal with it.

Why the confessional note, you might reasonably wonder.  In the referendum debate, recent weeks have seen a familiar existential panic grip sections of the Better Together campaign, particularly in Tory circles south of the border.  There are plenty of prudent reasons to be anxious.  The polls have narrowed.  The incoherences and disunities in the No campaign are proving increasingly difficult to manage privately, and are spilling out into acrimonious press briefings and backstabbings. Interventions supposed to have been decisive, warning of the perils of separation, have failed to stir up the animus against independence which was hoped.  

More fundamentally anxiety-provoking is the discovery that the positive case for the Union has proved disturbingly difficult to state lucidly or with confidence.  Folk like Hugo Rifkind, profoundly invested in ideas of Britain and Britishness, lament that "the fat-tongued, rubber-footed, cack-handed, tin-eared uselessness of British political discourse on Scottish independence is beginning to give me the fear." You don't have to be a wizard strategist to discern that this bag-of-ferrets strategy doesn't look good. 

In these unhelpful, public intra-Unionist anxiety sessions, the tone has been by turns hysterical and resigned. It's all Alistair Darling's fault, the dreary so-and-so.  No, that's not it at all. It's all these horrid Tory day-trippers, these coalition ministers with their hectoring tones and messages of calamity. That's not it. It's Labour's dereliction of duty when it comes to activists. Like Wellington at Waterloo, you can imagine senior Tories rattling around empty offices, crying, "where are the Prussians?"

All of which, for the independence-supporter, is fine larks and to be encouraged.  But I do wonder if the pitch of the panic tells us more about the gap which has opened between Scottish and Westminster politics, than it does about the likelihood of Yes carrying referendum day. I've written here before about the phenomenon of being talked at about Scottish independence in parts of England. Surely the idea of Scotland separating is disreputable, ludicrous, laughable, impossible, unthinkable. Surely no right-thinking person could possibly endorse the idea. Oh, if you must. Have your silly referendum, then. But it is a foregone conclusion, my dear chap.  Even explaining that a good chunk of the country had voted for the SNP twice did nothing to shift this basic conviction in those I talked to. I came to realise that our political imaginations occupied two different spaces, and they simply hadn't begun to take the possibility of independence seriously, or pondered why others might find it desirable or compelling.

With the Yes campaign catching up in the polls, that cherished certainty has been annihilated. This is, I'm sure, profoundly disturbing and helps to explain the irrational and excessive alarm now gripping parts of the No campaign. Also in the Spectator earlier this week, Alex Massie was on perceptive form on this point, concluding: 

"Some people seem shocked that the race looks as though it will be a close one. I’m more tempted to be shocked by the fact people are shocked by this. It’s almost as if they’ve not been paying attention."

Crumbling certainties confuse and they upset. And the No campaign across the UK doesn't have the luxury of much time to recalibrate its emotional and intellectual resources.  The imaginative gap, alluded to by both Massie and Rifkind, separating the Westminster-dominated politics and the debate in Scotland, remains one of the Yes campaign's most significant structural advantages.

The best advocates always understand their audience, its quirks and assumptions and reactions.  They know which levers to pull, which switches to turn and which to leave well alone. Now and then, the talented amateur may get lucky, but it is a risky business. For the increasingly-anxious political actor, steeped in London-centric politics and hoping to have an impact on how Scots vote in September, the prevailing disunities within the UK make the job that much harder. For Better Together's supporters, they can but hope that none of their fretful, tinkering amateurs presses any big red buttons before September.