Robin McAlpine: ‘Yes’ should no longer be the word

We are stuck in a timeloop and we think that the thing that got us into this loop is the thing that can get us out of it. That’s not true. It is us who are keeping ourselves in this same loop. By accepting that reality and creating the next phase of the campaign to achieve Scottish independence we can make much, much faster progress than we currently are.

OK, what do I mean when I write that Yes is dead? Clearly, I don’t mean independence as an issue because it certainly isn’t dead. In fact, even its most ardent critics will tell you that the desire for Scottish independence has not gone backwards at all, only the sense of immediacy has changed.

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Many people in 2014 were involved in their first big political campaign. That was one of our strengths. But one of the legacies of this is that a lot of people think that how we organised ourselves in 2013/2014 is how this is normally done, how it is always done.

It isn’t. Almost every major campaign in history draws from previous campaigns but virtually none of them are a rerun or a carbon copy. The anti-Vietnam protests weren’t a facsimile of the Civil Rights Movement, but were clearly influenced by it. New ideas emerge, new approaches, new evidence, new science. Campaigning always evolves and adapts.

What we did in 2013 in sparking to life a Yes campaign from almost nothing was what we needed to do. Without a wide range of pre-established pro-independence campaign groups and structures, we needed to create them fast. The only way to do that was to harness the energy of a wide range of ordinary people. The only way to do that was a completely decentralised campaign which was fashioned from whatever we had to hand.

There was no money but there was enthusiasm. There was no “establishment”, but leaders emerged. There was no training programme, but we found our own ways to do things. In all of this, it was a classic guerilla formation, fighting a bigger and more powerful opponent by focussing on your own strengths and turning them into your opponents weaknesses. I described it in an article I wrote shortly before the vote as a “butterfly rebellion”.

There were so many of us and we were, in many ways, so small and vulnerable, but we were so bright, so colourful and there were so many of us that the other side struggled to land a blow. As I wrote: “Gordon Brown swings his big, clunking fist at a thousand butterflies. All grunt. No connection.”

But nothing stays the same. For the most prosaic of reasons, Yes needs to go as a brand. If there is to be another referendum, it will not be a Yes/No question because the science and practices of referendums moves on as well. If you stood in a field with a Yes sign now, a 21-year-old would legitimately have no idea what you were on about.

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So let me ask you this: If I told you that you had an unlimited budget to rebuild an independence campaign from scratch and you knew that this campaign had to work for a long period of time when there was no agreed referendum, would you have called it “Yes”? Why would you have called it Yes? What has that got to do with Scotland being an independent nation? It is only the answer to a single question at a single time.

It has a strong, sentimental attachment for us, but does that make it the campaign few need? Because it very much does not have the same strong, sentimental attachment for our target audience. In fact, by 2017, the Scottish Independence Convention commissioned serious public attitudes research work from a Scottish university to identify why we lost in 2014.

One thing that came across strongly was that Yes was seen as a “club” by a lot of our core target audience. We were so comfortable with our Yes identity and they liked it, but they had more doubts than us, and those doubts didn’t feel welcome inside Yes. It became not “their club” but “the club they didn’t join in 2014”.

And, as I’m sure many of you know, if you want to get someone to listen to you, starting off with “you were wrong” is a bad way to do it. Strategically, we should have created a new “question” to put in people’s minds, a new way of asking them the same question they were asked on September 18, 2014 so we didn’t need them to “admit they were wrong”.

So it’s a bad brand for us now. The longer we cling to it, the worse that brand gets. We look like a re-enactment society or one of those nostalgia concerts where one-hit wonders from the 1980s sing their one hit to an ageing audience. If we had had a mature discussion about why we lost in 2014 after the fact, we ought to have concluded that Yes was a time-specific brand.

But we didn’t. There was, instead, an almighty battle over who “owned” Yes, who was its leader. Sturgeon’s SNP wanted Yes gone altogether because it wanted indy to return to being a wholly owned subsidiary of the SNP, then decided it needed to completely own it.

Too many others just wanted to inherit the attention that the Yes campaign had stimulated. And too many of us wanted to continue to bask in the dying light of that moment in our lives, that moment of hope and camaraderie that was indyref1.

Well, it’s 10 years later and that light has dimmed. We are fighting with ourselves. The battle for who is top dog has left cynicism and has absorbed enormous resources of time and money while delivering very little. We have no strategy and so instead we do what we did before: Putting leaflets through doors, organising public meetings, setting up street stalls.

And that is what has slowly decayed, slowly lost its meaning and potency. We are not structured like a civic campaign ready to fight the long fight, we don’t have the mindset of an effective campaign ready to work within the limits of the moment in which we find ourselves, we don’t have the outwards face of a campaign that has accepted we lost 10 years ago and has evolved.

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We are our own problem. The struggle among wannabe messiahs has worn us all out. Our strength of 2014 – our decentralisation, our enthusiasm, our single-mindedness – has become our weakness in 2024. We cannot build the future because we cannot let go of the past. We are still, still, fighting that fight, shouting at the BBC, blaming everyone but ourselves.

The day after indyref, I knew it was time to leave the Yes brand behind. It was certainly time to move beyond an uncoordinated, anarchic campaign and build collectively into a more coherent and more professional structure. I underestimated how sentimentally attached people were to the events of 2014. I was stung by how hard people wanted to hold on every time I told them we had to let go.

But none of this is to pick over the past. We lost our chance to learn about what went well and what went badly in 2014. Ten years is far too far beyond those events to be able to gather accurate or helpful data. We are where we are now and we need to respond to that.

If we are serious, if we really want to win independence, then we must grow up. We need to take seriously what we know about why we lost, and what we know is that people didn’t not think we had answered their questions well enough. They were right; we didn’t answer the questions well enough.

We need to build a modern campaign which is designed to cut through to the audience we have now inside the political context in which we exist today, and that is not lots and lots of us making up our own organisations on Facebook.

We need to use the techniques of modern campaigning like proper public attitude research work and new methodologies of communication.

We need to build a stronger, better case for independence. And we need to step forward with an identity, with a face that encourages our target audience to engage, not to walk away from the same old slogans they’ve heard from us for more than a decade now.

None of that is what we have. What we have is a mess, the detritus of a movement held together by the gravity of its own moment and which can’t hold its shape when that moment is gone. As a professional political strategist and campaigner, I can promise you that we don’t have a single organisation in the independence movement which is competently structured to take us to the next stage.

Yes is dead. Ten years on, I suspect you know that in your heart. I also suspect that, much as you know it, still you will find it hard to fully let go emotionally of that feeling we had over that summer 10 years ago. But we need to let go because the firmness of our grip is dragging us into the past with it.

We will win Scottish independence. I’ve tried to apply modern strategy development approaches to the data we have and everything but everything tells me that an effective pro-independence campaign will deliver at 60-40 victor for independence. We could get there in under five years.

But not like this. Ten years later, the Yes brand doesn’t work, and nor does the campaigning structure which created the Yes movement in the first place. If we can let go and if we can give up our search for the next set of messiahs; if instead we can rebuild for the task ahead rather than the task behind us, we are in a strong position.

For that to happen, we must lay Yes to rest.