For all that David Cameron would go down in history as the prime minister who lost Scotland and broke up Britain, it is the leader of the opposition whose influence should most keenly be felt. Scotland has only the one Conservative MP. The argument about independence is about what variant of non-Conservative Scotland wants to be. Today Mr M iliband will give a speech that shows, rather belatedly, that he realises what is at stake.
Public opinion in Scotland is moving. The No campaign had enjoyed a lead of up to 20 points for some time. This week that lead narrowed to six points. The change can be attributed, in the most part, to Labour supporters who were undecided about independence suddenly making up their minds to support it. If the trend continues among the tenth of the electorate that is still to settle on a firm view, Scotland may yet be lost to the United Kingdom. Thirty per cent of Labour supporters have already decided to vote Yes.
There is rational case for Labour-inclined voters in Scotland to vote Yes, even though a former Labour cabinet minister, Alistair Darling, is leading the No campaign. The thesis goes like this — Scotland is a left-wing country that will be more hospitable to a social democratic future than a united Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Therefore, nationalism can be used as a bridgehead for socialism. The necessity to endure Conservative policies designed in Westminster and visited on an unwelcoming Scotland can be averted.
This plausible case might not be a real description of what would happen in Scottish politics in the event of independence. Taking the electorate for granted, assuming it would return a Labour administration in a newly independent nation is the kind of complacency that contributed to the rise of Alex Salmond and the Scottish National party in the first place.
Indeed, the tribulations of the Better Together campaign, which has failed to find a message, is a mirror of the historic enmities that have beset Scottish Labour. Where Better Together has failed to do the basics, like getting leaflets delivered, it is because the organisational base of the Labour party has become so depleted. Major Scottish Labour figures left for London and Labour has treated Scotland as a second-order concern.
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There is, of course, a serious danger for Labour in the drift towards independence which Mr Miliband has now realised. Even if it can be said that Scotland is a country of the left, the same is hardly true of England. A Labour government of the United Kingdom is heavily reliant on votes and seats from Scotland. Without them it would make Labour governments much harder.
This is why Mr Miliband will say that voters do not need to vote Yes to expel the Conservatives from Scotland. That job can be done, he will say, by voting Labour in a general election. His rhetoric is likely to fracture the peaceful co-existence of the main parties in the Better Together campaign and it is a sign of the alarm in Labour ranks at the movement in opinion. Mr Miliband’s politics only work, if they work anywhere, in a union that includes Scotland.
There are more noble reasons for wanting survival of the union, the most successful partnership between nations in history. The future of the Labour party is a small thing beside that. In the last weeks of the campaign, it falls upon Labour to make a better case for Better Together.