Indyref was lost to fear, uncertainty and doubt – it won't happen again

As we curse our way through a changing political landscape, one word stands out. Like a praetorian guard watching over the fading days of the union, the word I refer to is fud.

Fud has a dishonourable origin and has been used for centuries as crude slang for the female pudenda. However, unlike the four-letter word which shares similar origins, fud has become almost acceptable, a pantomime insult, and the kind of word that pops up in the scripts of Still Game.

Nowadays, the word fud only offends a tiny minority of viewers and if Ofcom were to update their periodic table of offensive words, I doubt that fud would even register a mention.

But what has that to do with the perilous state of Union and the cause of self-determination? There is an obvious answer. I could start by naming the current figureheads of the Scottish Conservative Party but a revulsion for gun crime prevents me from shooting fish in a barrel.

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The real answer lies far from these shore in lands where fud has a vastly different meaning. FUD is a digital media acronym for fear, uncertainty and doubt, the tactic behind many online marketing campaigns and, of course, the underlying principles of Better Together during the independence referendum of 2014.

It is worth us reflecting on the three connected concepts that make up FUD. First up fear: throughout the indyref campaign exaggerating the presence of economic cliff-edges and spreading fear was the heavy cannon of the Unionist case. The phrase Project Fear was coined by Better Together’s director of communications Rob Shorthouse and even recently, Blair McDougall of the No Campaign has admitted that without the relentless negativity of Project Fear the referendum might have been lost.

It was a miserable redoubt or rather a crumbling fort incapable of hosting further victories. Project Fear had a built-in defect, its sheer negativity was self-defeating, what should have led to the exuberant taste of victory and a settled political outcome, left deep resentment in the minds of those that saw independence thwarted by fear but also in the minds of many of those that had fought for a pyrrhic victory. Who can forget the banks of campaigners, many of them young Labour Party activists, commandeering phone lines from faraway cities to frighten Scottish pensioners by telling them that their pension would be lost of they voted for independence? The outcome exposed them as message boys working for a snobbish, dismissive and incompetent boss.

Who can forget the Glasgow MSP Ian Davidson’s spiteful claims about self-governance, that “the debate will go on in the sense there is a large number of wounded still to be bayoneted”? What Davidson’s underwhelming intellect failed to grasp was that nearly half the adult population of Scotland were wounded but would live to fight another day. His bayonet remained in its pathetic scabbard and he lost three elections in a row.

This for me was the lowest moment in the history of the British Labour Party. The movement that had built the foundation stones of the welfare state, invented the National Health Service and enabled the Scottish Parliament to exist. Better Together by contrast was designed to ignite fear rather than vision and has been proven to be the miserable endgame to a once-great party. What a victory – scaring grannies and dancing the Eightsome Reel with Tories?

FUD is a term that many of you will have encountered in the workings of your laptop or home computer too. Technology companies deploy it as their ghost in the machine, a modus operandi that codes software designed to scare us. I am

currently experiencing it through the manipulative workings of the computer security company McAfee.

Because I have not downloaded and subscribed to McAfee’s security then they reserve the right to pester me daily, often using tactics designed to emotionally unsettle. “Your security has not been updated and you are at risk from viruses, spam and wee guys from Belarus who will sneak into your cupboard and nick the chocolate digestives.”

When a software warning pops on to my desktop I often think that Blair McDougall has a new job in software design.

The second letter of FUD stands for uncertainty. Those that argued vehemently for No told us that to pursue independence would throw Scotland into a vortex of unimaginable uncertainty – a science-fiction of tortured masks and all-encompassing flames. Scotland would become a world of lonely pestilence and an economic catastrophe from which we would never recover. Even if we did succeed in the referendum – what currency would we use as we limped south of Gretna desperate for a packet of cheese slices?

But what the sneering lords of uncertainty did not predict as they salivated about Catalonia was the real and present danger to our European membership and the humiliating decline of the pound sterling that followed.

It was not so long ago in the stretched imagination of Project Fear that sterling was portrayed as timeless, undaunted and respected around the world. The pound was a galleon proudly sailing on the high seas unfortunately no one predicted that Captain Pugwash would be at the wheel.

All this scaremongering and uncertainty led inevitably to the third and most damaging word in the FUD acronym, the D is for doubt. The impregnation of doubt into Scotland’s body politic was what really did for us back in 2014. Too many Scots, particularly those in the older age groups, harboured doubts about what a future Scotland would look like. Would we be in Europe or would we have to “join the queue” behind Turkey, Yemen and Rwanda, or whatever fanciful idea came into the minds of fearmongers?

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Fear and doubt are anxieties that never have to prove their credibility nor be consistent for more than day or two. None of the characters who held Scotland’s European membership up as high risk have had the common decency to admit that the real threat was Brexit and a horrid army of misfits and tax avoiders that led the Leave campaign.

The gaping flaw in the politics of FUD is that it is Scotland they were demeaning, the one place in the world uniquely incapable of managing itself. What slipped through the cracks was how people feel about Scotland. It is not an idea ... it is a real place where people live, where they feel at home and – sorry for the sentimentality – it is a place that many millions of people love. To humiliate a place that is cherished is to risk the most powerful retaliation.

Like the bee that stings and then dies, the Unionist campaign led with fear, but it can never have the same decisive impact again. I have no doubt that Project Fear will be reactivated next time round, but these are different times, the mask has slipped and too many people have woken up to the voodoo ideology of fear.

Recent polls have shown consistent support for independence, but it is the underlying statistics that tell the most powerful tale. Labour’s support in Scotland is haemorrhaging, partly their punishment for being on the wrong side of a positive future vision. Now 30% of remaining Labour supporters back independence and 10% don’t know, leaving a leadership caught in the headlights of seismic change and a declining rump of members willing to participate in Project Fear II.

Only 68% of those that voted No in 2014 would do so again, suggesting that the core Better Together vote has eroded and will decline even further. But below the headlines, by far the most significant statistic is that only 17% of those aged 18-24 are opposed to independence. Psephology can be an evasive science but the future journey to independence is as close to inevitable as it could possibly be.

Juggle with the figures any way you want but the era of Fuddery is over. We simply ain’t scared anymore. Some of us never were.