NICOLA Sturgeon will make her first major intervention on the European Union referendum campaign today.
Her aides have been quick to point out she will make a positive case for the UK’s membership of the EU.
This, it seems they are suggesting, will be the opposite of a debate that has so far seen the media more focussed on the clash of personalities between David Cameron and Boris Johnson.
Much of it has focussed not so much on what the positive arguments for the EU are but, rather, on what the negative result of a No vote would be.
When Scotland Stronger in Europe launched earlier this month, John Edward, the senior spokesperson, promised us that his campaign would be more Project Cheer than Project Fear.
The problem is Project Fear is a much easier way of campaigning and arguing. Telling voters what they will lose is a lot simpler and a lot less complex than attempting to explain what they may gain.
We Scots are seasoned referendum campaigners now. We know the downside to this tactic.
With the exception of the Tories who are, at best, treading water, the Project Fear parties who campaigned for the Union are dying in Scotland. The genuinely grassroots movement created by those who supported independence still thrives.
As Labour’s Alan Johnson said over the weekend, the Remain campaign have all the right words – they just don’t have the right tune.
Project Fear may help get the result wanted by those who back the UK’s membership of the EU, but the result from a case that is positively made will be significantly more meaningful.
Across the political parties, the EU referendum is becoming a test for leadership. It is the battleground on which those Tories who wish to succeed David Cameron find themselves.
It is an issue on which Jeremy Corbyn is said to be apathetic, despite the majority of his party’s representatives being passionately Europhile.
Up here, Sturgeon has to make the case for Europe even though there are plenty of fundies in her party who would be quite happy to see Scotland taken out of the EU so that they could have an automatic referendum on Scottish independence.
The First Minister is not an independence-at-all-costs type of politician. She knows that Europe without the UK would be a mess and damaged – possibly irreparably. Those are not the ideal circumstances most independence campaigners would hope for.
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