Spokesperson for the pro-union campaign in Scotland, Labour’s Anas Sarwar, is part of a clear drive by the Labour party these days to put a real shape on the pro union campaign and to drive it purposefully to a clear success on 18th September.
Labour’s bright red indyref bus, with Sarwar aboard, has been visible around Argyll, in Dunoon and Oban amongst other places – and more widely around Scotland.
The team on the bus seems to get on well together. The feeling is jokey, communal – and focused.
David Graham from Dunoon, the candidate for Argyll and Bute in the last General Election in 2010 who increased the Labour vote, is aboard. So is Mary Galbraith, the party’s candidate for the 2105 General Election. And so is John Duncan, managing the running strategies of the day.
With Sarwar’s colleague, Jim Murphy, doing barnstorming ram raids around the country from his car – on his ’100 towns in 100 days’ stampede – these two motorised front men are reminding people what’s fun about the union.
Murphy appears and disappears on his Irn Bru crates like the Cheshire Cat. Sarwar’s bus sweeps across the scene in a visual flourish that could hardly be more in your face.
This campaign is now an extrovert full-on expression of the attraction of the union – of variety and multiplicity rather than singularity, of the thrill and the challenge of coming to terms, of absorbing both the enrichment and the abrasion of difference, of relishing the texture.
In a way the extroversion of the indyref bus seems not quite in tune with Sarwar’s nature. Where Murphy is a visceral politician, Sarwar is considerative, working perhaps from behind his face rather than in it, giving himself a little space.
When asked where, right now, he would put the pro-union campaign on a scale of 1-10, he says: ‘I saw you’d asked my colleague, Jim Murphy that question ‘. But when we say everyone will have a different view and we are interested in his, he says he agrees with Murphy’s estimate – that the campaign had a slow start but is now up at an eight, maybe a nine. He feels that the last 2% for a perfect score will come from Labour’s doughty reclaiming of patriotism – that it is not only possible but expansive to be patriotic about Scotland and patriotic about the United Kingdom, about Britain.
Talking about what is now a clear Labour initiative to do the heavy lifting on the campaign for the union, he points out the greater traction Scottish Labour has over its Scottish partners in this campaign – 40 members of the UK parliament; controlling, alone or in coalition, 50% of the councils in Scotland; being the biggest opposition group in Holyrood; being the party whose values align philosophically with those of so many Scots.
These factors give the Labour pro-union campaigners more immediate connections with the people they are now energetically seeking out. There is a sense that after the multiple Blairite distortions, the party is on its way to refinding the moral compass it had put aside; and bonding again with a Scottish audience which had become, to a degree, distanced from it.
Recognising that the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats each have areas of real influence that are important, Sarwar sees Labour as on the move now, with a big team and an effective team – out there.
The battle for the union – and it is a battle – is not actually about David Cameron and the Conservatives at all. Cameron may be the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and will preside over the consequences of whatever is the decision on 18th September, but it is Labour who must take to the field against the SNP, with the battle not only for the referendum result but for power in Scotland afterwards, within the union or independent.
Sarwar says that if the outcome is a vote for independence. he will accept that and will commit to making it work. In saying this he makes it clear just how final that decision will be, drawing an amusing distinction between dealing with a new government you don’t like [you can change it next time] – and dealing with a constitutional change you find alienating but which is beyond your power to reverse. ‘Tories are for Christmas’, he says, ‘Indy is forever.’
Where he becomes quickly passionate is in response to our observation that the SNP campaign is focusing hard on Glasgow’s large housing estates, the places where those at the bottom of the heap might as well take a punt on indy, even if they sense that the prospectus put to them is optimistic – because if it happened and the promises made failed to materialise, they would still be at the bottom of the heap. They have nothing to lose.
Sarwar speaks sharply and almost angrily, saying: ‘The people will pay for it. It won’t be the big corporations who suffer. It won’t be the bankers. It will be the working people of Scotland, those with the least cushion to protect them from hard times.’
Those are, of course, the people it is Labour’s raison d’etre to serve and to defend.
Talking of the partnership of the parties in the pro-union campaign, he says: ‘We share the aim to retain the union but we have no shared vision.’
Looking at the SNP campaign, he remarks on how quiet the members of the Scottish cabinet are these days. ‘That’s the cost of a one-man band, of centralisation, even in their own campaign.’
We put to Anas Sarwar the SNP’s obvious plan for the last days of the campaign – an orchestrated sequence of influential people and bodies apparently deciding, having weighed all the evidence available to the last minute, that Scotland’s future clearly lies in independence. This is intended to create a seemingly spontaneous tsunami of support for indy that will sweep the innocent uncertain over the threshold of ‘Yes’.
We spotted this in the phenomenon of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister each, over the space of a couple of days, making the same strangely specific prediction in the same words: ‘We will not take the lead until the last three days’.
Sarwar is unfazed. ‘We have our own plan for that phase’.
Asked what, as a Westminster MP, he would do personally in the event of a vote for independence – stand for Holyrood or consider a political life in Pakistan, where his father, the former Glasgow MP, Mohammad Sarwar, is now Governor of Punjab. He laughs at the cheeky question and dismisses unequivocally the possibility of a life anywhere but in Scotland.
He points out that he was born in Scotland, educated in Scotland, practised as a dentist in Scotland, has his family in Scotland, that his loyalties are to Scotland. ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ he says.
Thinking of the way the SNP have been using the Tories as a ritual scarecrow to frighten off potential pro-union voters from landing in the cornfield, Sarwar laughs again. ‘Scotland thinks the Tories are toxic’, he says, ‘but even the Tories have got this one right.’
We jump off and the bus rolls on. There is work to be done and no trace of complacency here.