How UK politicians messed up making the case for the union

GLASGOW, UK — “I’m English, to start with, and I don’t want to live in a foreign country,” said Jimmy Hearne, 61, as he waited for the pro-union rally to start.

The part-time carpet fitter has lived in Glasgow for 40 years. His Scottish wife won’t tell him which way she’s voting.

He seemed baffled that support for a 307-year-old union — one a solid majority of Scots said they favored barely two months ago — had fallen to a margin so slim that no one can say which way Thursday’s vote will go.

“I don’t know how it got to this point,” he said. “Their campaign’s been better than ours. They’ve made a lot more noise.”

The question of whether Scotland should be independent will be answered in the polling stations today.

But the question of who ran the better campaign was answered long ago.

“The Better Together campaign has been hopeless,” Peter Kellner, president of the polling firm YouGov said last week. “It’s badly constructed. It lost the ground war.”

In less than two years, the Yes Scotland campaign has harnessed what it claims to be the largest grassroots movement in Scottish history.

Blue Yes placards, banners and Scottish saltires can be found on lampposts, windows, construction sites and even farm fields across Scotland.

Unionists grumble that’s because Yes supporters are also more willing to abuse or intimidate those who disagree with them, forcing many No voters to stay silent.

But they also acknowledge that Better Together has been beset by poor leadership and lack of focus.

Yes has Alex Salmond, the feisty, wily Scottish first minister whom Kellner called “the one British politician who could be seen making a good fist of a Senate race in Illinois.”

Better Together was led for most of the campaign by Alistair Darling. The bespectacled, stern-voiced former chancellor of the exchequer bears an uncanny resemblance to the Muppets’ Sam the Eagle and has the ability to sound like he’s scolding even when addressing supporters. 

Westminster’s political leaders seemed to be on cruise control when it came to the referendum — until a poll two weeks ago suddenly showed the Yes side ahead.

The whole experience has been a deeply humbling one for the UK’s governing elite.

The Better Together campaign has warned that a Yes vote could lead to a loss of jobs. One of the first to go could be Prime Minister David Cameron’s.

The prime minister could face a rebellion after Thursday’s vote, regardless of the outcome — either from MPs furious that he managed to lose the union, or from those appalled at the promises for greater powers and funding for Scotland he’s been authorizing over the last two weeks.

Though Cameron insists he won’t resign in the event of a Yes vote, the campaign has forced him to make some uncomfortable public concessions to his unpopularity north of the border.

Last week he prevailed upon Scots not to vote Yes as a flip-off to the “effing Tories.”   

“If you don’t like me, I won’t be here forever,” he told an Aberdeen audience Monday with a rueful smile. “If you don’t like this government, it won’t last forever. But if you leave the UK — that will be forever.”

Cameron’s Conservatives may be anathema in Scotland, but the Labour Party hasn’t fared much better.

The opposition party has a lot to lose if Scotland leaves and a reliable base of Labour support goes with it. Nonetheless, they too seem to have been playing catch-up in the last two weeks, with equally embarrassing results.

On Tuesday, Labour leader Ed Miliband hit the streets of Edinburgh in an effort to mingle with common folks. Instead of the conversations with undecided voters he was hoping for, he was besieged by reporters and heckling Yes supporters.

He managed to have face-to-face conversations with two people — one a confused tourist, the other a Yes voter — before cutting the whole visit short in less than 15 minutes.

"I think we have seen in parts of this campaign an ugly side to it from the Yes campaign,” he told the BBC afterward.

On Wednesday, with less than 24 hours to go before polls opened, the Better Together team was taking no such risks. A 90-year-old Glasgow auditorium was filled exclusively with guests handpicked from the rolls of local supporters and volunteers.

After an introduction by the English comedian and aspiring politician Eddie Izzard, a bagpipe player led the speakers through a sea of waving placards reading “Love Scotland: Vote No.” 

The crowd cheered passionately for all of them. There are not many rooms in Britain where people spontaneously shout “We love you!” at Alistair Darling, but this was one of them.

The event closed with a fiery exhortation from Gordon Brown, the former UK prime minister, who has stormed the country in recent days making a series of very expensive promises to Scotland that some Conservative MPs are already refusing to keep.

“This is not their flag, their country, their culture, their streets,” he said of the Scottish National Party, or SNP. “We have no answers. They do not know what they are doing. They are leading us into a trap.”

Within the hour, some commentators were calling it the finest speech of Brown’s political career. He left to thunderous applause.

The enthusiasm made it as far as the street.

“I’m voting yes, 100 percent,” said Ian Anderson, 27, an employee of the printing shop next door. “If the working class people of Scotland were in there, it’d be a different reaction.”