Project Fear and the grim legacy of Scotland’s ‘no’ campaign

A year ago today, Britain woke up to find the union saved – but only just. In 10 Downing St, the 45 per cent voting ‘yes’ looked like a victory, and the whole issue closed. I was in my hometown of Nairn that day, in the Highlands, where things looked rather different: after visiting pupils in my old school I wrote that, far from being closed, the debate had just begun. It wasn’t just the depressing closeness of the result, but the way the ‘no’ campaign had relied upon relentless negativity to make its case. As Joe Pike puts it in his fascinating account, the campaign ‘left a kingdom united, but a country divided’

The case for the United Kingdom, the greatest alliance of countries that the world has ever seen, was reduced into a few cold-hearted (and, often, barely-credible) arguments that Scotland was too small or too poor to survive as an independent state.