IT is a plan which has been formulated over three years and is of a level of complexity appropriate for the scale of the challenge.
The new Common Weal plan for Yes, "Direction: A realistic strategy for achieving Scottish independence", is published today and gives an in-depth look at how think tank founder Robin McAlpine believes Scotland could achieve independence in the next decade.
The first is to assemble a 150,000-strong army of activists who will be co-ordinated by a central team.
They will operate on a “peer-to-peer” model popularised in the US in the 2020 presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders.
This means activists are recruited and then briefed on arguments, lines and campaigns – sometimes tailored to local or niche issues – in support of independence.
They will be organised by a central team and directed through an app on when to raise certain points, and will be informed if they are campaigning too much or too little.
In the US, Sanders’s campaign benefitted from more liberal marketing laws, so “targets” in Scotland would need to give consent to be approached digitally, though there are no laws against raising “talking points” in pubs, cafes or at the school gates.
Their work would also be directed by psychographic research, which builds up profiles of groups of people based on their values, aspirations, fears and beliefs.
The second campaign area will create a national commission – something McAlpine argues can be achieved by the Scottish Government, though it does not have to be.
This would be a panel of independent experts tasked with providing concrete answers to the “day one” questions about independence: Who pays the pensions? Which currency will we use?
McAlpine says the Yes movement lacks definite answers to these questions which puts off undecided and No voters.
Both of these things will push up independence support, over a period of three years, to around 60%, according to McAlpine.
At this point, the “settled will” of the Scottish people has changed, therefore Scotland is in a far stronger negotiating position than with the polls as close as they are currently.
Then it is a matter of dragging the UK to the negotiating table, which in this plan is estimated to be likely once polls show support for independence polling at 60% consistently.
McAlpine’s preferred method of doing this is by organising a “carnival” of democracy in the form of a massive petition signing event to take place over a weekend.
The Government would hire out polling stations across Scotland and people would be encouraged to sign a petition in support of independence, with an official target of hitting more than two million signatures over the weekend.
This would be an unshakeable mandate for independence, McAlpine argues, and the UK would need to negotiate to maintain adherence to “democratic norms”.
