Independence referendum was 'undoing' of the SNP, says Better Together campaign boss

Blair McDougall said the nationalists were "the dogs that caught the car".

It came as he spoke to The Scotsman to mark ten years since the referendum, which gripped the nation and transformed politics north of the Border. Scotland ultimately rejected independence by 55 per cent to 45 per cent.

Mr McDougall, who was elected the Labour MP for East Renfrewshire in July, was the campaign director of Better Together. He said he had conflicting emotions about the referendum.

"I have very strange, mixed feelings about that time in the sense that I'm incredibly proud of what we achieved, and I think the decade since then has made what we achieved look more impressive than it was at the time, but it was also a time of extreme aggro, of a significant personal cost in terms of that level of abuse and all the rest of it," he said.

"I think if you're a lifelong nationalist, this was a festival of everything that you had spent your entire life working for. For me, issues of identity are so unimportant to my politics. My sense of Scottishness and my sense of Britishness sit in a box that's entirely separate from my politics. 

"And so as someone who is deeply committed to political change and political life, getting up every morning for two and a bit years to work on something that you, at best, thought was a distraction from the things that you were involved in makes for a completely different experience from what perhaps people on the other side would have had."

Mr McDougall said a lot of what has happened in Scotland since 2014 was shaped by the referendum. However, he said the current “crisis” in the SNP, which lost dozens of seats at the recent general election, “obviously has several levels to it”.

He added: "I think one of them is if you have, as they did during the referendum, established a story about yourself which is essential a moral story, that we've got more moral politics than those terrible people across the border, and suddenly you're caught up in what they've been caught up in since then, that is especially damaging to you."

He continued: "There's a sense of the SNP being the dogs that caught the car. Their argument was for more powers because ‘we want to do things’. 

"My criticism of them is I think they are an existential nationalist movement that pretends that it is a utilitarian nationalist movement. 

"So their argument was always, ‘we need these powers because of what they can deliver’. And as a result of the referendum, as a result of the Smith Commission, they have an enormous amount of new power and they have been incredibly incompetent at using it. 

"The referendum, in a sense, has been the undoing of the SNP in that way because the claim that political decisions in Scotland wouldn't involve a lot of the difficult choices, and in a sense a lot of the real politics where you're choosing between different interests in society and saying, ‘you get resources and you don't get resources’, which is the job of politics - that sort of simplistic lie that underpins nationalism has kind of been unpicked by, if nothing else, the budgetary decisions we've been talking about in the last few days."

Scotland gained new powers over areas such as tax and welfare as a result of the cross-party Smith Commission on further devolution, which was set up following the referendum.

Mr McDougall said referendums “are effective ways of engaging people in a debate”, but added: “I don't think they're a good way of having a debate. Politics is complicated. It's difficult. There are a million shades of grey on every issue and I think referenda reduce things into that binary choice."

Asked about his regrets, he said the pro-union campaign was “incredibly strategic”, adding: “We were determined that the campaign would not be framed in the way that the nationalist side wanted it to be framed. They wanted it to be a kind of emotional moment, to be a contest and a test of your belief in Scottishness and a test of your national pride.

"Our decision to make the campaign much more prosaic and much less poetic was a very deliberate one.

"I think when you look back that also makes you acutely aware that that became almost like a stereotype of ourselves through that. 

"Now ultimately, I'm still not convinced that if we had shifted from that and told a more emotional story, or if we had shifted into trying to build a kind of sense of a story about British identity throughout the campaign, I'm not convinced that would have led to a particularly good outcome for us. But it is something you have in your head and question. 

"But I think ultimately we were having the referendum because that story of shared identity and endeavour had become unstitched a little bit.

"I think it's a fair question as to whether we should have used the campaign to attempt to rebuild that, but I think there's an element of that which forgets exactly how strong nationalism was in that moment, how dominant the SNP were and how weak the other political parties were in that moment."

Asked where Scotland would be now if it had voted Yes, Mr McDougall said Brexit was a cautionary tale.

He added: “In many ways Brexit is a much smaller change than establishing an entirely new state. I think we saw for years how that completely sucked all life out of the political debate in the UK.

“And I think that's where we would have been. Instead of having a debate about education or health or drugs deaths or poverty or Scotland's economy, we would have been in an endless conversation about the minutiae of our relationship with the rest of the UK, our relationship with the European Union, about the mechanics of setting up a separate state.

"I think we would also have been coming out of very, very deep economic trauma."

He argued the independence question will be reopened if it becomes clear that is what the people of Scotland want.

"If Scots are desperately demanding that this question is reopened, it will be reopened,” he said. “But they're not.

"Is that a change? I don't think people were ever desperately demanding it even in 2014. I think it happened in spite of people's views then rather than because of them.

"Time will tell on this. Ultimately, it will be for us to decide whether we think it's something that does need to be reopened. 

"I think at the moment, people seem pretty firmly in a place where the chaos of the last decade and the conflict and the noise, whether it's the Scottish referendum or the Brexit referendum or Trump or Ukraine or Covid - people are exhausted and want a few years where governments govern, rather than get up in the morning and look for someone to have a fight with."