As ithers see us

by Jason Michael McCann Twitter@Jeggit

RATHER THAN setting anything approximating a case for the Union before the Scottish electorate in 2014, from start to finish, Better Together developed and stuck to a strategy singularly directed to sowing the seeds of uncertainty. This – the original “Project Fear” – increasingly focused on two crucial aspects of the independence debate; the currency question and that of Scotland’s continued membership of the European Union. Ultimately the issue of what currency a newly independent Scotland would use was bogus, built on nothing more solid than threats from the Westminster establishment that Scotland would be refused the comfort of its own historic currency.

Where this threat took on a truly nightmarish aspect was in the second question. Against the background of a natural and conservative reluctance to switch currency with independence and the intimidating rhetoric that the pound would be denied to us, and in the face of the promise that our membership of the EU was guaranteed only by remaining in the United Kingdom, we faced the prospect of becoming a state without a currency. As preposterous as the idea of being the first state in the history of commerce to be reduced to bartering livestock or trading beads now sounds, the fear of a double lockout – from the pound and the euro – worked.