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?”