Labour's big beasts need to woo, not scare, the voters in Scotland

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/15/labour-big-beasts-woo-scotland-voters

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The Scottish referendum campaign jungle is about to be repopulated with some of Labour's bigger beasts, or so the latest intelligence has it. Alistair Darling, whose efforts leading Better Together are regularly hampered by the number of knives in his back, is to be given frontline reinforcements.

The knives, incidentally, are wielded by unionist colleagues, mostly of a Conservative persuasion. They feel he doesn't connect sufficiently with the electorate: too dull, too low key. They conveniently forget that it was these very qualities of perceived unflappability which made them persuade him to go forth and multiply the no vote in the first instance.

So enter stage left Messrs Brown, Murphy, Reid and Alexander, due to be launched on a fresh charm offensive – though charm is not the first adjective which always springs to mind with some members of that particular gang of four.

Gordon Brown, who commands rather more respect north of Hadrian's wall than in the London bubble, is about to publish his own thoughts, and has been tiptoeing under the Better Together umbrella after originally reserving his appearances forUnited with Labour.

You might wonder why a campaign which, as of Wednesday, still held a comfortable 12-point lead should be summoning fresh troops to the fray. But the fact that they are Labour troops is not at all incidental.

As is regularly observed by the tartan twitterati, Scotland has twice as many pandas as Conservative MPs, so Tories popping north to advise the natives on their voting duty are liable to prove counter-productive. David Cameron, on another Scottish sojourn, is acutely aware that a toxic label still sticks to his brand in the land of his father.

And that risk factor is even more pronounced when the headline acts in the Better Together roadshows appear to be reading from different scripts. Back in February, the month the Better Together team called "Dambusters", Cameron used the Olympic Park as a backdrop as he invoked the Team GB spirit and spoke of Scots as "friends and family".

His Scottish audience, somewhat bemused to be thus addressed from central London, by a chap behind a lectern bearing the crest of a Glasgow university, seemed mightily underwhelmed.

Not so a week later when a tank rolled over the border in the shape of George Osborne. His speech assured the friends and family that they would shortly be foreigners if they voted yes, and could expect no favours. Walk away from the UK and you walk away from the pound, he warned.

It is fair to say that this was not regarded as endearing, particularly by those commentators who pointed out it wasn't just Osborne's pound to play with. And that sense of irritation came out in subsequent polls suggesting Osborne hadn't quite got the hang of a national psyche for which the term bolshie often seems inadequate. "Sez who?" was a not atypical response on the ground.

The Osborne day trip provoked former Labour first minister Henry McLeish into saying the chancellor's "relentless negativity runs the risk of pushing more Scots into yes".

But Cameron has gambled on a prime ministerial state visit sprinkling some stardust over the campaign, and locations have been carefully calibrated to extol the joys of the union. In part, this will respond to this week's polling data that most Scots find the Better Together campaign unduly negative, including 40%-plus of its own supporters.

Cameron was suitably emollient in Glasgow, assuring his audience how much they contributed to the Great in Great Britain. This was a notable contrast to his chancellor 48 hours earlier assuring Scottish voters that any deal on currency was just an SNP fantasy.

Ed Miliband is also due to take the northern air, having indicated that after the English local and European elections are safely out of the way his whole focus will be turned on the Scottish referendum. In your own time Ed. Flagging up these priorities so publicly was hardly designed to flatter a nation which views a chip on both shoulders as a sign of balance.

Meanwhile, on the question of big Labour beasts and their helpfulness ratings, it would be wise to remember that it can be only too easy to become a victim of your own hyperbole. When George Robertson, erstwhile secretary general of Nato, used a New York speech to warn of the "cataclysmic" effects of a yes vote, suggesting it would be an early Christmas present for global terrorists, even close colleagues had to avert their ears.

With four months to go until polling day, those wooing the 28% of the self-described undecideds would do well to ponder which buttons to press and which to leave well alone.

Here is a handy checklist: Scots do not respond well to being called poor, or wee or stupid; they are rather resentful at the suggestion that daddy knows best; if it comes to a choice between ramming a scare story down their throat or tickling their tummy, the latter is generally more acceptable.

Welcome back to Scotland, Dave. Have a nice day.