HERE is a vignette from the referendum campaign of 2014. A married couple I know got passionately involved in it, not only in the public debates but also, hammer and tongs, with each other. They were hopeful, yet still sceptical, about the prospects for an independent Scotland. As the day of the vote approached I was pretty sure they would plump for Yes – they had, after all, helped to distribute some of our campaign materials from Wealthy Nation.

In the event they voted No, swayed right at the end by the fraudulent Vow. But then, as soon as the fraudulence of it emerged from the mouth of David Cameron himself, they joined the SNP! There they still are, two Nationalist No-voters. Truly, the riches of our new political culture in Scotland are unfathomable.

My friends sprang to mind when I read in The National the article by Ian Dommett and Iain Black on the “11 lessons the Yes campaign must learn to win a second referendum”. Some of it was about organisational defects, which were certainly there, though for me the more important points concerned just those people who might have voted Yes but who finally decided to vote No.

I might be able to offer some useful comments because Wealthy Nation occupied an unusual position in the wider Yes campaign, at least as it appeared in the central belt of Scotland. We found people more open to our message round the outer regions of the country, not so frequented by campaigners vaunting themselves as progressive. In Aberdeen or Inverness, in Helensburgh or Melrose, we were welcomed by audiences receptive to the good news of capitalist economics and liberal politics. If some others of the undecided in these places had heard more from us, and less from the direction of Red Clydeside, they might have voted Yes too.

Yet in Dommett and Black’s analysis there is little questioning of the message, as opposed to the medium, of the Yes campaign. They only remark that “we spent far too much time last time talking to people who had already decided to vote Yes and only realised too late that we had not spent enough time persuading ‘soft no’ voters. This is understandable. It’s easier to spend time with those who agree with us.”

This ducks the question whether the message was the right one, surely crucial for a second referendum. If we just go over the same ground again we will lose again, regardless of the time spent talking to voters. Assuming Yes voters of 2014 can be held solid, maybe added to by some Unionists who voted Remain in the EU referendum, there will still be a crucial margin of people needing to be won over not by romantic attachment to Scottish history and tradition, nor by some form of egalitarian idealism and certainly not by the promise of higher taxes, but by a crude calculation: am I and my family and my community going to be richer or poorer in an independent Scotland? It was in large part the inability to give a straight answer to this straight question that led to the defeat of the Yes campaign in 2014.

Wealthy Nation always took the view that an independent Scotland would be a richer country. In our vision, independence would open up to us the pursuit of economic growth, in the same ways (though also in some ways of our own) that other small successful countries round Europe pursue economic growth. That policy would entirely replace the failed economic strategy imposed on us under the Union, which relies on fiscal transfers, that is to say, on official subsidies of various kinds to individuals and industries in Scotland reckoned to be backward: investment in failure, in other words, rather than in success.

Because this strategy posits Scottish backwardness, it has never been able to give us the same prosperity as other small European countries enjoy. In 1945 a number of the most prosperous today, such as those in Scandinavia, were still poorer than Scotland. Today they are all a great deal richer. Even some of the small countries only liberated from socialism in 1990 – the Baltic republics, Slovakia and Slovenia – are growing much faster than we are, and one fine day will overtake us in their standard of living too.

What is the difference between them and us? How come that nations which until a couple of generations ago rested on peasant agriculture can now outdistance by a country mile the Scotland that used to call itself the workshop of the world?

It is because they concentrate their energies and policies first on achieving growth. Denmark and Finland have better social security than Scotland, but they finance it through higher growth rates, an average of four per cent a year in the first case, five per cent in the second. That is even before we get on to growth rates twice as high in the Baltic countries. By comparison, Scotland had at the last count a growth rate of 1.5 per cent – and falling. It is not unlikely that by the turn of the year we will be going into recession.

I am one of those still quite hopeful of the political prospects for winning a second referendum on independence in 2017. But there cannot be the slightest chance of that happening unless the present economic outlook changes for the better. Otherwise, Unionists will be able to pillory a vote for independence as a vote for poverty – and they will be right.

We should present Scotland becoming independent as rather like a married couple (perhaps one of those couples overwhelmed by doubts on September 18, 2014) moving into a new home. The bare walls and the smell of paint and the as yet untended garden make it all appear a bit bleak. But think of the home a few months from now, by which time they will have been able to transform it according to their own needs and tastes – their own enterprise too. By any standards that will be better than having it centrally planned so as to make them and it equal with all the other households in the street.