Euro vision

The UK is divided over many issues - about paying the bills, about keeping the lights on and, most ridiculous of all, about the continent we’re on.

“Are you in favour of Europe” is a ridiculous question to ask. It’s like asking a Swiss politician if they are in favour of mountains. We live in Europe. It is the continent our country is on. It’s not a matter of political opinion, it’s geographical fact. The narrow strip of water between us and France is not tectonically significant - we are Europeans.

Now, of course, in statements about ‘Europe’, people are mostly using the word as a shorthand for the EU. But the laziness of the nickname betrays a sloppiness in the thinking. Many of the evils ascribed to one European body derive from a different one entirely. These unthinking kind of eurosceptics do not distinguish between European unions, commissions, courts, or councils. They will rail interchangeably about Brussels or Strasbourg. When they say Europe, that is exactly what they mean. They mean local foreigners. Foreigners are a worry to these people, and nearby foreigners are just as foreign as distant foreigners, but with the added worry of proximity.

Over the last decade or two, the eurosceptic tendency - most often affiliated with the right wing of the Conservative Party - has been a constant presence. They have made a considerable contribution to public life, not least ensuring the frequent unelectable disunity of the Conservative Party - a valuable service to the nation in itself. More surprisingly, there have even been occasions that they have been right.

The euro is the best example. When the euro was a live political issue in the UK, those who advocated British entry were the modernisers, the bold dreamers of the future, the new generation. Needless to say, this bright gleaming bunch were led by Tony Blair, who liked things that were new. At one point, he seemed to like things for no reason other than their newness. We may not know much about Tony Blair’s culinary tastes, but if he were coming round to dinner in the late 90s, you would probably give him new potatoes - it would feel like the safe bet.

The euro was a new idea but, it turns out, not a particularly excellent one. The eurozone seems not to have benefited many of its countries in their efforts to manage the financial crisis. When things go bad, it seems that governments benefit from having control of as many financial levers as possible. There is never a good time to lose control of your economy, but this has surely been amongst the worst. 

This was always part of the problem of the euro. The problems of Germany and Greece were never likely to be identical, but the euro demands they swallow the same medicine. The chances are that if the prescription matches the needs of one country, it will do no good for the other. And between Germany at one end and Greece at the other, there are sixteen more countries with individual needs. A single economic and monetary policy for all of them will, at any one time, be a compromise that probably serves none of them especially perfectly.

The eurosceptic wing of British politics warned us about the euro. How? Did they talk of the dangers of co-ordinating economic and monetary policy over too widely varied an area? Not exactly. Mostly, they wore suits made of pound signs, and dressed their bulldogs in union jack waistcoats. If that was meant to be a metaphor for the harmonisation of interest rates, it was a pretty damned subtle one.

The one time that the right wing of the Tory party happened to be right about something, they made  absolutely sure that they seemed as ridiculous as possible. There’s no use being right if you also make yourselves laughable. If Churchill had spent the 1930s warning about German rearmament while wearing a red nose and oversized shoes, he would have to share some of the blame for being ignored.

The euro was, either in concept or execution, a flawed plan. But not for any of the reasons that its opponents were noisiest about. The fatal weaknesses of European and monetary union were nothing to do with the Queen’s head. National identity was never even remotely at stake. You may have travelled to countries that use the euro: you will have noticed that they are still countries. Crossing the channel, you don’t feel you have entered the part of the eurozone that used to be called France. If you think changing currency will reduce your national character, you surely have a pretty low opinion of your nation.

Europe exists, and no amount of pulling faces towards Calais will change that. The EU is an incompetent, partly corrupt organisation that needs massive reform. It is still a good thing that it exists. Before it was created, its countries did not often, if ever, go seventy years without declaring war on each other. Yet the current era, the era of the European project, is on the verge of that record.

And it is still a good thing that the UK is a member. Why would you not want to be a part of the club of where you live? You may not often, or ever, attend your residents’ association meetings, but you’d be pretty annoyed if they didn’t invite you, then in your absence voted to knock your house down. Leaving the EU would be asking to have less of a say.

UKIP have now inherited the eurosceptic mantle. They feel that something is wrong with the country, they don’t like it, and foreigners must be to blame. Imagine if UKIP had been around in the 1960s. Britain spent that decade begging to be let into the EEC, but France’s General de Gaulle kept saying ‘No’ (or whatever the French for that is). ‘Sixties Farage' would have decried these obstructive continentals, and demanded entry into their cosy private club. How dare these pesky foreigners tell us what to do. If we weren’t in the EU, UKIP would be demanding we be let in.

David Cameron also thinks that the EU is imperfect, and the best option for Britain is to improve it, and stay in. What eminent good sense. But for some reason, Cameron will only allow himself one attempt at improving it. He is giving European reform one last go, but doesn’t mention this is also his first go. If it doesn’t become what the government wants, we will move towards leaving. Cameron’s motto on European reform is, ‘If at first you don’t succeed, quit immediately.’

The UK has done precious little to improve the EU. Before this government, there has been little political will to push for change. During this government, we have seen a prime minister who would rather go home halfway through a summit than influence discussions positively. Neither approach has given EU reform a serious go. Cameron’s attitude is, “Well I’ve tried absolutely nothing - what else is there is to do? I’m at the end of my tether.”

EU reform is a laudable aim. It is an organisation which has repeatedly failed to get its books signed off by its own anti-corruption arm, and frequently behaves with questionable priorities. But reforming it is a lifetime’s work. Any politician genuinely committed to making the EU better would see that the job must be done inch by inch, month by month. It would also be done by engagement, not posturing and flouncing off.

Cameron is prepared to do anything to make the EU work for Britain. As long as it happens straightaway and with minimal effort. He has the mentality of an 11-year-old, frustrated that he still can’t play the Flight of the Bumble Bee, even though he’s owned a flute for, like, hours. 

Either that or his fides are not entirely bona - he wants failure, but he doesn’t want the failure to reflect on him. Except, that is, from the people who would consider the failure a success, and then he’s eager to take the credit. The EU is a genuinely complex area, with strong feelings on both sides. Cameron wants to be the darling of the eurosceptics, without alienating moderate opinion. In other words, he wants to be popular with two sworn enemies. It’s not going to work.

Talk politician to me

The relationship between politicians and people, at its best, is an oddly imbalanced one. Politicians should be fascinated with people - but they must remember that people are totally uninterested in them. When it works, it’s not like a healthy marriage, it’s more like cat ownership.

If a political message assumes the public is interested in politicians, it will fail. The general public’s feelings about politicians range from indifference to antipathy. Half of people wouldn’t care if the politicians all jumped in the lake - the other half actively want them to.

Not caring about politicians is quite different from voter apathy. Some people either don’t care about the issues or, more likely, feel that politics has no effect on the issues they do care about. Or they think there is little difference between the available voting options. They feel that voting is a choice between being punched in the face or kicked in the goolies. And that’s why they won’t schlep out to a local primary school on a Thursday next May.

Voter apathy is understandable but sad, and should be fought against. But the public’s indifference towards politicians is not just inevitable, it is healthy and natural. It is the politicians’ job to make themselves relevant to people’s lives, not the other way round. No voter ever heard a politician speak, went away and thought about it for a while, made some calculations on the back of an envelope, and then came back and said, ‘Right, now I’m inspired.’

Politicians often make this mistake, but it’s a particularly common error at the moment. And what has caused the party leaders to ignore this golden rule of how to talk to the public? UKIP. A new party with a genuinely gifted communicator at its helm, who always speaks from the point of view of normal people. Admittedly, his definition of ‘normal’ is disgustingly narrow, and his plans for those who fall outside his normality are at best neglectful, if not actually hostile. But he speaks to the people he considers to be his public from an angle they understand. They never have to translate Farage out of Politician and into English.

So this is exactly the worst moment for the main party leaders to forget how to speak. The Tories’ favoured line about UKIP at the moment is, ‘If you go to bed with Nigel Farage, you’ll wake up with Ed Miliband.’ Cameron first said it at the party conference, which is the right place to say it - to a live audience of your own party, and a wider national audience composed entirely of political obsessives. This is the kind of crowd that would laugh at a punchline about the public sector borrowing requirement: nerdiness is allowed.

But outside the conference hall, it doesn’t wash. It is undemocratic and patronising. When you vote for a party it might be out of principled conviction, or as a complex tactical hedge, or to win a bet - it is no business of politicians to tell you what your vote means. If you start persuading people that their vote isn’t what they think it is, you are tampering with the democratic process. You’re also likely to get people’s backs up. Voters will quite rightly say, ‘Hey, politicians, you get to run the country the other 1825 days of the electoral cycle. But on election day we’re in charge, so butt out.’

The Tories are assuming that normal people see politics the same way they do. Their message of ‘vote Farage, get Miliband’ is assuming that UKIP voters have one precise set of opinions about three political parties: they normally like Tories, but UKIP are exciting and new, and Labour are filthy vermin. That’s a lot of assumptions, and if any one of them is wrong, the message breaks down. The claim to understand the minds of so many people in such detail is highly patronising. Many UKIP voters have deserted the major parties exactly because they felt patronised. You’re not going to solve that problem by patronising them a little bit more.

Labour have pounced on this tactical error from the Tories by replicating it precisely. The main slogan Labour is using to attack UKIP is ‘More Tory than the Tories’. It’s true of course. If you dislike the political principles of the Tory party, you will object even more strongly to those of UKIP. But what possible campaigning value does that have for Labour? How is comparing the Tories and UKIP going to persuade a single person to vote Labour? It should be a chance for Labour to tell the country what’s good about them - instead it sounds like they’re changing the subject. Every time Labour says, ‘UKIP are more Tory than the Tories’ they may as well be saying, ‘Looks like it might rain’. It's like trying to sell oranges with the slogan, 'Bananas are yellower than apples'.

Looking at the polls, Labour have made a pretty poor job of persuading people that the Tory plan for the British people is bad news. Why do they think there is any value at all in tarring UKIP with the Tory brush? You would think that Labour had vanquished one right-wing foe, and are now gleefully dispatching the next. In fact, having inflicted very few scratches on their first combatant, they are expecting the second to be terrified at their fearsome reputation. No wonder Farage always seems to be giggling a bit.

Like the Conservatives’ ‘Wake up with Farage’, Labour’s ‘more Tory than the Tories’ tries to explain political parties by forming an analogy with political parties - as metaphors go, it’s wildly uncreative. It is the sound of politics eating itself. And all the while, the true danger of UKIP goes unskewered.

UKIP preaches isolation on the EU and intolerance on immigration. It does both in a highly populist way. The mainstream parties are then frightened of their popularity. So the Conservatives offer eurosceptics enough treats to keep them sweet, and Labour attempt to talk tough on immigration. It shows a depressing lack of imagination, and a low opinion of the public.

You don’t oppose UKIP by impersonating them. Then you're giving them little victories, and encouragement. The way to oppose populist intolerance is with populist tolerance. You don’t beat Farage by stealing his song and singing it worse - find a better song and sing it better. He appeals to people’s worst instincts, so appeal to their best instincts. Actually, they will like you better for it. Assume people are tolerant and nice and they’ll take it as a compliment.

We can’t complain that the public are intolerant if we never gave them anything inspiringly tolerant to cheer along with. The narrow-minded can say, ‘I agree with Farage’, but currently there’s no credible banner for everyone else. Farage is good at his job, but from the reaction of the main parties you would think he cannot be bettered.

If that is what they really think, they must have a pretty low opinion of the country, and themselves.

Say 'the economy', and the argument's over

We on the left want make the world fairer, more equal, and happier. Then the right says, ‘Yeah, we’d love to do that too, but I’m afraid it’s not going to work.’ And when we ask why, they say, ’Er, cos of the economy?’ And we run away, terrified by their acuity.

There is often a perception that the right owns economics. Left-wing plans are idealistic and admirable, but if anyone ever tried them the economy would snap in half. We’d all like to do something for the needy, but if we did, within a week you’d all be carrying your daily wage home in cash in a wheelbarrow.

The right owns economics because the right owns everything, especially the money. The source of most of our economic punditry is large financial corporations. We ask the banks, we ask the City, we ask the markets. And these people predict doom and disaster if a left-wing agenda is proposed. Is this because left-wing policies genuinely cause economic meltdown? Or because so many economists’ employers think a left-wing agenda might make them a tiny bit less filthy rich?

There are voices in the economic world that don’t follow this relentlessly pro-business line, but not many. And not because it doesn’t have the arguments - it just doesn’t have the spokesmen. Think tanks, universities, and public sector organisations all employ economists without being owned by a financial behemoth. But they pay a lot less than a bank. So a career economist is unlikely to resist the top wages for their whole career. An economist working in the public sector was probably in the private sector in their previous job, and is probably heading straight back there once they’ve ticked the government box. Banks may not own all the economists all the time, but they own almost all of them most of the time. And any economists the banks don’t currently own either started there or will end up there - banks are their training ground, or at least their pension plan.

There are left-wing economists. Some of them have written marvellous books about the harm that the right-wing economic consensus has done the world - including, but not limited to, the financial crisis. But the market in economist employment doesn’t allow many of them to exist. And those that do exist are not accorded a regular platform. The media will talk to them about their new book, but to the media a ‘left-wing economist’ is a newsworthy oddity, like a skateboarding duck. If the media just wants an economist to be an economist, they want a right-wing one that works for a massive bank. For an economic argument you want an economist on the right, and on the left you want an environmentalist, or perhaps an aromatherapist. Anything else would confuse the viewers.

In politics, economics used to be thought of as rather a left-wing notion. When Tory prime minister Alec Douglas-Home confessed to understanding little of economics, he wasn’t just being a crusty old booby refusing to get with it. He was expressing a political idea of the time that the right held dear: the economy cannot be controlled by politicians, and it’s a damned fool that tries. Harold Wilson’s Labour government later in the 60s introduced a Department of Economic Affairs, because they had this new idea that the economy was something which could be managed by a government. A certain portion of the right will have looked on Wilson’s DEA much as global warming deniers now look upon a ‘Department of Climate Change’: a vast and costly attempt to control something which can’t be controlled and possibly doesn’t even exist.

That’s all a long time ago now. Now economics so firmly belongs to the right in political discourse, any proposal to the left of the status quo is automatically assumed to be financially ruinous. And one big coincidence has really helped cement that idea in people’s minds: when the global financial crisis happened, Labour were in government.

Labour had a very good line about this a year or two ago, which they seem to have stopped using. They said that Lehman Brothers did not go bust because Labour had spent too much on schools and hospitals. Sadly, a really cracking line like that is water in the desert to Labour MPs at the moment, so suddenly everybody said it for about 48 hours. Then they realised they were sounding like over-briefed automata, so they all stopped saying it again.

But it’s right. And they should start saying it again, but perhaps with everyone using their own version of it, substituting the collapsed business and the Labour policy of their choice. (Look forward to ‘Blockbuster didn’t go bust because Labour spent too much money calling Rochdale pensioners a bigot.’)

The global crisis happened ‘during’ the Labour government, not ‘because of’. They are very different things. Labour being in government cannot be blamed for the global financial crisis, any more than Bryan Adams being at number one can be blamed for Boris Yeltsin getting sworn in, Liz McColgan winning World Athletics gold, or Vauxhall launching the third-generation Astra.

The biggest impact on the nation’s finances is the enormous bail-out Labour gave to the banks which no one, and certainly not the Tories, opposed. Nor would they oppose it now. The greatest contribution Labour did make towards the financial crisis was in over-liberalising and under-regulating financial markets. The Tories supported those moves then, and they still believe those things now. The Tory party sometimes criticises Labour for their poor regulation of the markets between 1997 and 2010, but even they never have the cheek to claim that they wouldn’t have done exactly the same themselves - or possibly gone even further.

The narrative states that Labour broke the economy, and since 2010 it’s got mended. It’s a gross simplification which conceals more than it reveals about the economic reality. The Tories have pushed this story, understandably; the media have lapped it up, predictably; and Lib Dems have backed it up, irritatingly. In fact, it’s one of the most irritating things about the Lib Dems at the moment. In a list of the most irritating things about the Lib Dems, it would easily make it into the top 300.

Traditionally, the Lib Dems have represented a kind of casting vote. Tories say X, Labour say Y - which way will the Lib Dems jump? Although they have lost any true claim to that role by siding with the Tories, some of that lives on. So when the Lib Dems join in with the Tory chorus that Labour broke the economy, it sounds a little like an independently verified fact. Whereas, of course, the Lib Dems on this subject could scarcely be less independent.

If, in 2010, Labour’s internal election rules had allowed for a swift replacement of Gordon Brown, we could be looking at a Labour-Lib Dem coalition, and the Lib Dems would never have demonised the last government’s economic record to the ludicrous extent they have. If the coalition talks had lasted a few weeks - much closer to the European norm than the hasty weekend that created this government - and if the Labour party constitution allowed a new leader to be elected that quickly, then the Lib Dems would surely have gone for the Labour option. They only opted for the Tories because there was no non-Brown Labour party as a possible partner.

Instead, the Lib Dems teamed up with the Tories, and claimed the nobility of the ‘national interest’ for their unlikely union. That story required a national crisis and a national enemy for it to stick properly - the economy and the Labour party fitted the bill perfectly.

And in so doing, they have perpetuated the myth that the left don’t do economics. This is perhaps their most harmful contribution to British politics. If you are going to shore up the right, and demonise the left, then you are indistinguishable from the right. You are the right. The danger is that when the Lib Dems are extinct, their dangerous lie might live on.

The wrong traitors

It’s perfectly natural that David Cameron is suffering from defections, but why on earth are they coming from the right wing of his party? This government is cutting and selling off everything in sight. This should indulge the fantasies of every economic right-winger. They should all be staring moist-eyed at the television saying, ‘It’s happening, it’s really happening. I never thought I would live to see the day.’ But they’re not. They’re getting on the phone to Farage.

It defies the laws of political gravity that the Tories, while continuing their firmly right-wing agenda, should then suffer defections from its own right wing. Given this government’s political direction, the exodus should really be coming from its moderate left. These kind-hearted patriarchs should be saying to the Tory leadership, ‘Hang on a minute chaps, this is just not on, what?’ But where are they?

When Labour moved leftwards in the early 80s, it was the right wing of the Labour party that defected and formed the SDP. That’s the way it should be - when a party moves one way, those at the opposite end get itchy feet. The political river appears to be running uphill at the moment because this is an unusual time for the parties closest to the Tories. There are normally options to the left of the Tories but not the right. At the moment it is the other way round.

For the first time ever there is something credible - at least, electorally credible - to the right of the Tories. Despite there being almost no room on that side, UKIP have squeezed their clapped-out Bentley into the space. They have managed this by focussing on other subjects - Europe and immigration - and been vague and incoherent about bigger issues. When asked about tax and spending, Farage orders another pint, unveils another ex-Tory MP, and everybody cheers.

So why is no one jumping off the Tory ship to the left? Because there is no seaworthy vessel within leaping distance. Who in their right mind would join the Lib Dems at the moment? The sole purpose of the Lib Dems over the past four and a half years has been to make Tory dreams come true. A Tory joining the LibDems would look like a spy sent from head office to keep a closer eye on an under-performing branch.

If a Tory joined the Lib Dems, it would be assumed that they were a pro-European (or just suicidal). It must be tricky being a pro-European Tory, much like being a Jehovah’s Witness haematologist. Eventually something has to give. Any Tory MPs leaving the party now because it is too right wing wouldn’t join the Lib Dems. They’d probably just stay quiet, stick around til the election, then find themselves something more lucrative to do with their time.

The only examples of a left-wing Tory defecting to the Lib Dems come from the last days of the John Major government. Major’s government was gaining a sleazy reputation. Desertion had a nice mix of high and low motives - Major had lost moral authority, so could no longer be supported by decent people. Or anyone, really, decent or otherwise. As a career move, it was a handy moment to stop being a Tory.

It is strange, then, that there were so few defectors under Thatcher - just the one Tory MP who joined 28 Labour MPs in forming the SDP’s Commons presence in 1981. The Tories were tacking hard to the right every bit as much as Labour to the left in the early 80s. But the parliamentary drama only drew attention to Labour’s abandonment of the centre ground - the Tories’ lurch hardly lost them anyone. They were having too much fun winning elections, drinking champagne, wearing striped shirts, and carrying around enormous mobile phones to notice that part of their party’s identity was being discarded.

Strength of leadership is clearly the issue here. People defect from weak leaders and towards strong ones. Partly they are preserving their careers. But it can be a principled move as well. You can leave your party because you think poor leadership would be bad for the country, as well as your personal electoral ambitions. 

Maybe, in the Thatcher years, the one-nation Tories on the party’s left were just being patient, and thought the pendulum would swing back their way once she was gone. The problem is, it took her so long to go, and by the time she went she’d changed everything.

She also created a generation of new Tories - and that’s what stands behind the bizarre rightwards exits from an already right-steering party we are seeing now. Tories elected to the House of Commons over the last couple of general elections came of age under Thatcher. Anyone aged 42-57 turned 18 during Thatcher’s party leadership. This was a period where right-wing views were strong, brave, and proud, and the left-wing was weak, wet, and disloyal. Ever further right-wing opinions were lionised, like an escalating drinking game.

And that is where this generation of right-wing Tory candidates comes from. They have never encountered a right-wing opinion they didn’t admire. They know how to play a Tory selection committee, and say the right things about Europe, to get the job. But what they really crave in politics is Thatcherism to the nth degree.

So when a strong, charismatic leader comes along and trumps even David Cameron in terms of right-wing purity, no wonder they are tempted. When asked her greatest achievement, Thatcher said ‘Tony Blair and New Labour’. To that list she can now certainly add Cameron’s current Tories, and UKIP.

Why is a right-veering Tory party losing people to the right? Because of the kind of people we’re dealing with. Tory MPs last year proposed what they called an “Alternative Queen’s Speech”. Their suggestions included bringing back national service and the death penalty, privatising the BBC, and renaming the August bank holiday ‘Margaret Thatcher Day’. That’s what we’re dealing with here. That’s why the parliamentary Tory party is behaving in such an eccentric way. It is nuts.

The bank holiday policy seems unnecessary, though. Surely to people like this, every day is Margaret Thatcher Day.

All together now

Ed Miliband is never the most exciting speaker in the world. There are worse leaders’ speeches in recent conference history. John Major had very little authority as prime minister, so we can only imagine how underwhelming his speech as prime minister-in-waiting would have been, as he was never opposition leader. And the NHS is still surgically unclenching the buttocks of many people who sat through Iain Duncan Smith’s ‘The quiet man is turning up the volume’.

But it’s hardly great news for Miliband that he’s not the worst ever. It’s not the kind of description to build an election platform on: “Vote for Ed: I bet you can think of someone even worse.”

Of all the things to criticise him for, he seemed to get the most grief for omitting the word ‘deficit’. As if the speech would have been much more exciting if he had. It is hard to see how anything could be made more exciting by the addition of the word ‘deficit’. Try it with film titles - the result is always duller, with the possible exception of ‘Deficit in Venice’.

But he did use the word ‘together’. A lot. It’s quite an all-rounder as a word, ‘together’. It can be used in any part of a sentence. You can start a sentence with it, you can end a sentence with it. You can, according to the transcript of the script that I found online, have a sentence comprising the word ‘together’ and nothing else. Now there’s rhetorical confidence.

Miliband must have felt he had created such a world of meaning around this word, he could simply say it and walk away, knowing that the audience were piecing together the whole edifice of political thought that the word embodies. A bit like when Paul McCartney makes a peace sign, and the world understands, and loves, peace a little more than if he’d kept his hand in his pocket. No one can look at Paul McCartney’s index and middle fingers and remain a fan of war. Similarly, no one can hear Ed Miliband say ‘together’ without embracing collectivism.

Because presumably that’s what ‘together’ means. It means that the government should be run in a way that values the collective bounds of society, and therefore presumably values individual freedom slightly less. It’s a weak and vague statement, but it confers a slight leftwards lean.

You could say the same thing about “Yes we can”. Left-wing principles spring from the idea of people being together, while the right wing are more inspired by the sanctity of the individual. The left wing think that the government can, and should, do more. The implication of ‘Yes we can’, was ‘And we damn well will’. It outlined the beginning of a political principle without getting bogged down in what it is we can do, or even exactly who ‘we’ are. Or, if you preferred, it meant no more than a few more verses of ‘U-S-A! U-S-A!’

Obama meant the state when he said ‘We’, and Miliband meant the same thing by ‘together’. Tories think we should all be together as well, but they think that the state is not the best means of establishing togetherness - they prefer the family, capitalism, and the Rotary Club. It is understood that Miliband is referring to the government because that’s his job - or at least he wants it to be.

The biggest problem was with the grammar of how the word was used. In one section, Miliband illustrated various things that the ‘principle of together’ stands for. Stretching the metaphor to breaking point, he listed various things that ‘together says’. Together, it seems, has now acquired the power of speech. With so many things that ‘together says’, it starts to sound like a verbose opinionated friend, or possibly a rulebook.

It wasn’t at all clear how this brand new sense of the word together, freshly minted for the speech, was meant to work logically. It is the worst kind of jargon. When very obscure technical terms are used, the users are often criticised for their jargon. Jargon-users - mortgage providers, IT helpdesks, hi-fi salesmen - are guilty of failing to connect with ordinary people, or possibly even trying to hide the truth from them. This second offence is the more serious.

When the jargon word is a new invention, the speaker’s intention is clear. If a businessman starts talking about ‘innoventation’, we’re all meant to look mildly confused and ask for a definition. It’s dreadful jargon, but it’s not pretending to be anything else. Much worse is when jargonisers take a word that you thought you knew, and start using it in a brand new way. This is an underhand ploy to gain your agreement by making you feel you've understood - but you haven’t understood, possibly because there was no meaning there to start with.

Turning ‘together’ into something that ‘says’ things belongs to this nastier, more invidious form of jargon. By using simple words that people know, it disallows the response of: “I don’t know what you’re talking about”. At least ‘neo-endogenous growth theory’ was just begging for someone to say, ‘What the hell’s that?’ When ‘together’ starts ‘saying’ things, there’s the whiff of the kaftan, and people earnestly saying, ‘Oh my God, I know exactly what you mean.’

Together does sound better than it reads. Listening to Miliband’s speech, it just felt like he’d said it a lot. Reading the speech, the word ‘together’ starts to swim before your eyes, and do that thing where it looks like you’ve spelt it wrong. Maybe that was why he performed without notes - afraid that when he read the word ‘together’ for the 51st time, he’d start to doubt whether the word actually existed, or perhaps he’d made it up.

Speaking without notes is not difficult. Speaking well without notes is difficult. And Miliband’s performance needed to attract rather wider admiration than it did to justify the method. The most vocal fans of the speech seemed to be people he has the power to sack, and members of his immediate family (not including his brother). Neutrals were not convinced.

Parading his scriptlessness seemed a particularly inept wheeze. It reminded me of the Fry and Laurie sketch where Stephen Fry plays the harmonica very badly for a few seconds, then says to the camera, ‘And the interesting thing is, I’ve never had a lesson in my life.’ Doing a speech without notes is only impressive when the audience is surprised at the news. No one watching Miliband’s speech, and being told afterwards that he was winging it, would have said, ‘No way! That’s a miracle.’

It’s a shame that the presentational clunkiness was such a distraction from the content. The content wasn’t mind-blowing, but it picked the right simple targets - highlighting a coalition policy, and promising to do the opposite. The harmful, divisive, and nasty policies of this government do mean that the Labour manifesto must half-write itself. There are so many coalition policies that simply need to be repealed - and each promise of a change is another tick in another electoral column. Much as John Major in 1990 probably didn’t spend a huge amount of time wondering whether he should keep the Poll Tax, Labour should notice that a large part of their policy agenda is a series of open goals.

Miliband’s speech has been criticised as a ‘core vote strategy’. But in that case, who is Labour’s core vote? People who go to the doctor, people who will in the future get old, and people who have bills to pay. If that is Labour’s target demographic, then that’s a pretty savvy election strategy. The newspapers may have you believe that these policies appeal to a left-wing rump of the country. But then newspapers are exclusively owned by people who own houses worth more than two million pounds.

The brilliant thing about Miliband is that he’s actually talking to the vast majority of the country. The unfortunate thing is that he’s not doing it particularly well.

Don't just stand there, say something

David Cameron passionately backed a No vote, but knew that any speech from him would be counter-productive. So what did he do? He went to Scotland and gave a big speech making exactly this point. He went on television, and begged the Scots not to make him a factor in their decision. He stood underneath a bank of stage lighting and said, ‘Pay no heed to me’.

When he said, ‘Don’t vote Yes just because you hate me,’ what kind of self-respecting Tory-hater would have been swayed? His fear was that they might have forgotten to ignore him if he hadn’t reminded them to.

I blame whichever idiot was the first person to say ‘no comment’. Until then, if a newsworthy person didn’t say anything, the press would report that the interesting party ‘made no comment’. But since people idiotically started saying the words ‘no comment’ out loud (which is a comment, of course), silence is no longer considered an option.

If you want to say nothing, say nothing. If you say stand behind a lectern, clear your throat and say, ‘I have nothing to say at this point,’ you have wasted everyone’s time. And it’ll be your fault if reporters chase you down the road saying at three-second intervals, ‘How about at this point? And what about now?’

There’s a dreadful self-importance about saying ‘no comment’, as if the world couldn’t possibly cope with your actual silence, as if the uncertainty would kill them. Instead you must reassure them that, although you have nothing to say, you’re still there with them. This is how to deal with an upset child, not the public.

David Cameron clearly understands that the Scots hate him with a righteous passion, as he showed when he called his party ‘the fucking T****s’. So who on earth did he think he was speaking to? Surely in Scotland you can’t be sympathetic to the Tories unless you actually are one. At the 2010 general election, the Tories were down to 16.7 per cent in Scotland. This is the so-called ‘hard vote’, the rump of people who will always vote for a given party - the opposite of a swing voter. These are the only people in Scotland who would give David Cameron a positive hearing - and what is the chance that they did not already agree with him? Cameron’s only possible audience is Scottish Tories who were planning on voting Yes - and the few hundred die-hard eccentrics who answer that description probably don’t own a television.

In his early days as prime minister, Cameron was notable for letting national events go past - a plot development in a soap opera, or perhaps an interesting result in a sports fixture - without giving it a prime ministerial response. He still manages it now, but back in 2010 it was a real novelty.

It all started with Blair, as so much of modern political communication does. Blair’s presidential style meant that he saw himself less as the democratically elected head of the UK government, and more as the lead character in the national soap opera. When the Dagmar burnt down, Dot Cotton would have had something to say about it, even though it wasn’t her storyline. Similarly, it felt totally normal for Tony Blair to talk about anything in the national conversation. He was just a regular kind of guy, as he never tired of telling us.

Then Gordon Brown took over and, naturally, continued to govern in the same style as Blair, on account of their extraordinarily similar personalities. Brown communicated with the country according to the habits of the Blair years, because everyone had forgotten that there was any other way of doing it. Brown led the tributes to Jade Goody, he publicly congratulated racing drivers on winning driving races, and he told off radio presenters for sleeping with the granddaughter of a Fawlty Towers actor. It was all the kind of thing Blair could have done with ease, but Brown looked uncomfortable.

To be fair, Brown looked pretty uncomfortable doing anything apart from reading out the Budget on Budget Day - and he never looked blissfully happy even doing that. But when Cameron arrived, he managed to let several major events pass without the country knowing what Downing Street thought. In the second half of 2010, Tomasz Shafernaker accidentally gave the finger to BBC Weather-viewers, Nigel Havers walked out of I’m a Celebrity, and Emma Watson had a haircut - and the country never heard the First Lord of the Treasury’s take on it all. The nation, you will recall, felt rudderless.

But, although Cameron brought a welcome prime ministerial silence to the world of celebrity trivia, he has yet to learn how valuable the same tactic can be in politics. Of course, he would have been criticised if he had kept 400 miles from the independence campaign, but there were lines he could have used to shut that criticism down.

He could have played the high-minded democrat: ‘I don’t have a vote, so I shan’t be in the campaign.’ The No campaign had its leaders and its spokespeople, and David Cameron wasn’t one of them. His respect for the No campaign could have been his public answer for staying away - his desire not to boost the Yes campaign could have been a jokey subtext for Westminster-watchers to enjoy. Basically, Cameron could easily have spent the last month impersonating the Queen.

Or he could have played the ‘far too busy’ card, and just hoped that something time-consuming happened in England or Wales - or, even better, on the world stage. It might have been a risky strategy, and if things went a bit quiet you might have to ring up Morocco and persuade them to invade Gibraltar. But, thanks to Isis and Putin, that wouldn’t have been necessary. There has been easily enough on the prime ministerial plate to keep him locked in Cabinet Office Briefing Room A, emerging only to narrow his eyes to the cameras and say ‘Cobra’.

He was so close. In the weeks and months running up to the referendum Cameron, along with the rest of England, did an excellent job of entirely ignoring the independence debate. With extraordinary self-control, we non-Scots followed our leader’s example and gave not a moment’s thought to anything that happened up there in the weeks and months - probably the years and decades - running up to yesterday. It may have looked like neglect, but it was in fact the profoundest respect.

He kept quiet before the speech, and he certainly kept it buttoned until polling day - you can only imagine what the No campaign must have threatened him with to buy his silence. Something rather more Gordon Brown-ish than Alistair Darling-ish, in political bruising terms.

You can point to Cameron’s speech in Aberdeen on Monday of polling week as one of the moments the Yes campaign started to look like a contender. This makes Cameron the chief villain for every kind of British unionist. Many already blame him for letting Salmond get his way in important aspects of the referendum, not least in allowing the wording on the ballot to give the pro-independence answer the feelgood advantage of being a Yes.

Cameron’s tactical mistakes and toxic unpopularity have brought him uncomfortably close to defeat. There are many things a politician doesn’t want to be: a loser, a tactical dunce and electoral poison are all pretty high up the list. And to avoid it hew only had to say the simplest thing: nothing.

Scotland: I think I've worked out the problem

Every statement about the Scottish independence debate is missing the point. Including this one.

Normally, in a political debate, you agree or disagree with a politician, then you back the one you agree with. Unless you really distrust them - then you still won’t back them even if you agree with them. You wouldn’t support someone who answers the question, ‘Should we have nuclear weapons?’ with the answer ‘Kittens are furry,’ however much you go along with their kitten stance. It’s just possible they have something to hide.

The Scottish independence debate hasn’t been like that. Neither side’s statements have been easy to agree or disagree with. But, unusually, neither have they sounded like cynical evasions, calculated to conceal the truth of their devilish plans. It just sounds like they don’t know how to talk to us about this kind of stuff, or possibly we just don’t know how to hear it. The most natural response to every single point made in the independence debate is, ‘No, that’s not it’.

The first mistake was to view the debate as Salmond vs Darling. Voting Yes is likely to get you a bit more Salmond, but there’s no guarantee a No result will get rid of him. And whatever you vote for you won’t get Darling, you poor lovelorn fools. But we understand personality politics, so those instincts kick in. There will still be people voting No because Alex Salmond reminds them of their school bully, or Yes because they swear Alistair Darling once pushed ahead of them in a Wimpy.

In an election, your preference of one person over another is a valid element of your decision. If one of the candidates looks a bit shifty, maybe they are - well done you for noticing and voting for the other guy. But this isn’t an election, it just feels like one because it happens on a Thursday, and all the usual Dimblebys are excited.

Our next instinct is to say that politics should be about policies, not personalities - because that’s something people say. So, when Salmond/Darling started to get a bit personal, that corrective instinct kicked in, and the argument shifted to things like the NHS. The Yes campaign focused on the evils that a Tory government has visited on a non-Tory Scotland.

But the referendum question is not about policies either. Hating the privatisation of the NHS - or any Tory policy - is no reason to vote for Scottish independence. ‘Scotland’ and ‘Tory’ are not opposites. Scotland has voted Tory before and - however unlikely it may seem from where we are currently sitting - it may do again. The Conservatives got half of the Scottish votes and seats in 1955. Even Margaret Thatcher got nearly a third of Scottish votes in 1979. Stranger things have happened than the resurrection of the Scottish Conservative Party. And if that happens after independence, Scots who voted Yes because they hate the bedroom tax might feel a bit silly.

Voting for constitutional change because you think it will benefit your party can come back to bite you. Ask the Labour ministers who backed Scottish devolution in 1997 because they assumed the resulting Scottish Parliament would be a permanent Labour stronghold.

The No campaign has also talked about policies. Issues like currency, where the banks’ chairmen have their offices, and the prices in John Lewis are all of vital importance. But they are so much smaller than the question of whether the country should be independent or not. If they vote Yes, the Scots will use the pound, somehow; or much less likely, the euro; or even less likely, some brand new Scottish invention. And it will play out over the first few years of the independent nation’s existence, and then it will die down. None of these issues are central to whether that country should exist or not. All the policy-based arguments will be relevant for five years, maximum. They are details that concern the launch of the nation, not its on-going seaworthiness.

So it’s not about personalities or policies - it’s about democracy. Alex Salmond (who I’m sure, like Mr Ferguson, used to be called Alec) has said to Scotland that, under independence, “We will get the government that we vote for.” It’s not true, of course. “We” don’t vote at all: I vote, you vote, and so do lots of other people - though not prisoners, the insane, or Russell Brand (Representation of the People Act 1918). The collective will of the people is then imperfectly aggregated into a series of regional decisions, and then even more imperfectly into a national decision. Democracy is messy.

Non-Tory Scotland may have got a Tory government, but so did non-Tory Peckham. The fourteen Tory voters in Peckham didn’t get the MP they wanted, but they did get the government they wanted, though their votes contributed nothing towards the victory. Did democracy give them what they asked for? Not really, but then democracy doesn't give everyone what they want. If you could give everyone what they want then we wouldn’t need democracy.

Democracy is such a universally agreed good thing that’s it’s easy to forget what a complicated nuisance it is. Everyone agrees that the people should be ruled by the people. We don’t like it when the people are ruled over by one person (monarchy), a few people (oligarchy), the best people (aristocracy), God (theocracy), or clever robots (technocracy).

By deciding on democracy as a system of government, you’ve effectively agreed to make life enormously complicated for yourselves. Unless you live in Athens about four or five hundred years before Jesus got away in his manger, democracy needs a lot of mechanisms, concessions and fudges to work.

Having the vote in Athens didn’t just mean they got to vote in elections. It meant they voted on the second reading of the Supply and Appropriation (Main Estimates) Bill, the lucky blighters. Everyone - apart from slaves and women, obviously - got to vote on everything, by a show of hands, in a very large hall. Now that’s democracy.

These days, people queueing up for elections is the definitive sign that democracy has arrived in a country. To Athenians, nothing could be less democratic than having an election. “Choosing someone to make decisions for us? No thanks, I prefer democracy,” they would have said, almost certainly in Greek.

Democracy has got a whole lot less Athenian since then. Due to the increasing populations of cities - or possibly our decreasing ability to build enormous halls - this method has fallen out of favour. Now we use democracy only to decide who the deciders are. Then the deciders choose one person who gets to decide almost everything, despite the fact that only half the inhabitants of one town in the country directly voted for him (or, in one disastrous case, ‘her’).

Democracy often sounds like a thing of purity and perfection. But it is a messy, muddled mish-mash. Someone has to draw the lines of the constituencies. You have to decide how often an election will happen. You have to decide what falls to local government and what to national government. You have to decide what colour the voting paper will be, and whether you write an X or some numbers.

And you have to decide when you stop counting - when you say, ‘Right, that’s everyone.’ And that’s a country.

Everyone wants to get their way - that’s only natural. Democracy serves that desire, and mediates around the fact that it is impossible. Saying, ‘We will get the government that we vote for,’ is a gross simplification, but it’s probably the one statement in the independence debate that has come closest to expressing what the referendum question actually means.

The question is really something more like this: “Often you will not get what you vote for, because lots of people disagree with you. Are you content for this to happen because some of those people live in Surrey?”