Nicola Sturgeon should use Boris Johnson’s “simplistic” Brexit tactics to win independence, according to a leading expert on referendums.
Professor Matt Qvortrup said Alex Salmond lost his fight for independence in 2014 because he tried to be too transparent. Intellectual arguments for separation are less effective than emotional propaganda, Qvortrup added.
Johnson and Nigel Farage successfully took the United Kingdom out the European Union by making “simplistic claims, which were at best based on weak, if existing, evidence”.
•Support for Union grows following death of Queen
Qvortrup, professor of political science at Coventry University, has been present at every independence referendum around the world over the past two decades.
The Times has obtained exclusive extracts from his new book, I Want to Break Free: A Practical Guide to Making a New Country, which will be published in November. Qvortrup found that arguments that appealed to the head through economic analysis and informed debate were less effective than campaigns that were light on detail but stirred the emotions.
He traced the roots of the modern Scottish nationalist movement to the poems of Ossian, which evoked the spirit of a mythical Scottish nation, in what most scholars think was an 18th century hoax.
Qvortrup said that the 1995 movie Braveheart, known for its historical inaccuracies, did more for Scottish nationalism than Scotland’s Future, Salmond’s weighty independence prospectus from 2014.
He said: “You don’t need to fact-check everything if your supporters accept the tenor of what you say and if you speak to their prejudices . . . this is what the Scottish independence campaign got wrong. Anxious to be seen as credible, Salmond put a coherent plan ahead of anything else, and the result was he was on the back foot when the unionists sought to pick holes in his argument.”
He contrasted the 2014 campaign with the 2016 Brexit campaign which combined “the alluring prospect of taking back control” with “a potent cocktail of a reasonable economic argument and an emotional grievance”.
The Brexiteers’ “outlandish” claim that the UK sent £350 million a week to the EU was false but it triggered an emotional debate about the cost of EU membership that Remainers struggled to counter with sober facts and figures.
Qvortrup said: “You might not like individuals like Farage and Johnson. Don’t let antipathies get in your way. You learn from those who are successful, never mind what they believed in, and then you copy their methods.
“You can’t generally lie but you can get away with a lot if your slogans capture the sense of people’s grievances.”
He said the SNP’s plan for a new Scottish currency “when the economic conditions are right” was fraught with difficulty. “While it may be politically desirable for an independent country to have its own central bank, the costs of this are prohibitively high. Other options would be cheaper and more efficient,” he said. “So, to start with, peg your currency to the dollar or the euro and do not worry too much about this.”
An independent Scotland could keep the pound without the Bank of England’s permission but this would make it “less independent than before” as its currency would be controlled by a foreign nation, Qvortrup said.
Scotland’s political parties have suspended their constitutional debates during mourning for the Queen and declined to comment.
