Pro-union campaign launch gets more wrong than right

The pro-union campaign, launched in Edinburgh yesterday got right its emphasis on the equally legitimate Scottishness of a pro-union stance.

And that was it.

This remains a lazy and complacent campaign and, for that reason, it is unworthy of respect.

We have said from the outset that the campaign for the union would have to do very much better than simply rely on the faded attractions of the status quo.

Scotland as a whole is in a mood for change. That does not mean that it is necessarily in a mood for independence. It means that it finds the status quo to be unsatisfactory.

The pro-union campaign may win by default, by the level of realistic fear many have of setting sail solo, in uncharted waters and with the political lodestars of the European Union, the single currency and the eurozone no longer reliable directional guides.

Scotland may well make a negative choice out of a canny evaluation of the odds of independent survival in the current and coming global financial situation.

But Scotland needs to make a positive choice one way or the other; and a positive minded Scotland in a re-engineered union can be a major driver of that vehicle.

The biggest attraction an independent Scotland has is the sheer fun of reinvention, of starting over.

If there was a counter-possibility of remaking the nature of the union, that would be really interesting. That would be something to engage with – and the pro-union campaign needs engagement to lift off.

But there is no trace of any thinking of this kind, any openness to discussion, any outline propositions in the pipeline. All there was at the launch was the comfort of the threadbare slippers and the predictable jagging of fears.

Yesterday what they served up had more substance than the Yes campaign’s turkey of a launch – in that it had some real people with something to say.

But who on earth imagined that Alistair Darling was the right front-man.

Darling’s appearance, with his black-beetle eyebrows and silver hair promises an exotic vitality. The reality is tedium at a level that makes sitting still while he intones a painfully tense business – and he made such an ugly mess of ‘ir-re-VOCK – able’.

The man cannot even lift his voice never mind a campaign, Mr Monochrome is, consistently, Mr Monotone.

Scots are faced with competing campaigns on the independence-or-union issue, each of which is lamentably short of specific detail.

The pro-union campaign can dishonourably get away with this because we already know what the union is.

The independence campaign absolutely needs a detailed prospectus since, without it, it is equally dishonourable in inviting folk to vote for a pig in a poke.

What could have been a political galvanic, re-energising and regenerating the country – whatever its choice in 2014, is turning out to be a repetitive, content-free bore, either empty or deceptive in both cases. We’re worth more than that.