Will the energy brought by the referendum be maintained in May?

In houses in Glasgow, Dundee and Leith, people have still not taken down the Yes posters from their windows.

To Kevin Pringle, the SNP’s Strategic Communications Director, there is a good reason for this.

“For a lot of people who put up that poster, they don’t want to take it down because it was the one day when they felt like they were in control, a day when they believed that whatever they did made a material difference to what would happen in the future.”

Over the course of a two-year campaign, the posters for Yes and No sprung up across Scotland as people debated the country’s constitutional future. Political dialogue extended well beyond the Parliament and into schools, pubs, bus stops and homes.

Speaking at Holyrood’s breakfast briefing on the future of engagement, campaigns and elections, Pringle admits that, watching events prior to 18 September from inside party HQ, he had no idea if Alex Salmond was right when he was predicting an 80 per cent turn out.

In reality it was 84 per cent, with 97 per cent of the eligible population registering to vote. In the continuing narrative of declining turnouts across Europe, the story of the referendum seemed an anomaly.

As Professor Ailsa Henderson, Head of Politics and International Relations at Edinburgh University puts it, “engagement was off the chart.”

She says: “Half of people we spoke to said that they were very interested in the referendum and that it was the most important vote they would ever make in their lives. But when we asked them about other areas – Scottish politics, UK politics, politics in general, we couldn’t get that figure any higher than 20 per cent. When we asked them about Scottish politics, the number was down at ten.

“So the referendum was good news and one would assume that that would then translate into continued participation afterwards. And we did ask people: ‘Do you think it will make a difference to your participation, or those around you?’, and we got answers from different groups. There is no difference in terms of gender, there is no difference in terms of class, there is a bit of a difference according to religion and ethnicity – but the big difference is in whether people were Yes or No.

"If you voted Yes, you think there has been a shift in politics in Scotland, that the electorate as a whole is going to be more engaged and that you personally will participate. If you ask No voters, they say it will just go back to normal and they are more pessimistic about the prospects of participation in Scotland.”

To Mark Diffley, Ipsos Mori Research Director, it was precisely because the referendum was a unique event that it got such a high turnout.

"There was something to play for and people’s vote would count for something"

“We did work with the Electoral Reform Society and we spoke to people who had never voted before and almost all of them said they would vote in the referendum, and these are slight clichés now but they are true – people were fed up with party politics, with the cut and thrust of elections which turned them off, but the election was seen as an important decision.

"There was something to play for and people’s vote would count for something, which was partly because each vote had an equal weight, which they don’t in a normal election, but also because the issue was so vitally important.

“The trend over many years, not just in the UK but in most of the world, is that turnout is falling. And that is a particular problem for young people – your age is the key determinate for whether or not you will vote and young people are much less likely to vote than older people.

"This is not an academic discussion, it really does matter, just yesterday the Prime Minister was on the radio saying that the benefits that older people have enjoyed during austerity will continue if the Tories are re-elected and we know that, in part, that is because older people vote. You piss off the grey vote at your peril.” 

So how then can the sort of engagement seen during the referendum be harnessed? On this, Diffley is not too optimistic.

“The polling data would suggest that it can’t – at least as far as the General Election is concerned. In our final poll before the referendum we had about 90 per cent of people saying that they were definitely going to vote and actually 85 per cent of people did. The poll we had out last week found that the number of people who said they were certain to vote in the General Election was down to 68 per cent and with people 18-24, it was 41 per cent.

"So already, more than half of the young people who voted in the referendum will not vote in the General Election, and that is clearly a tragedy. They have gone back already to what you would expect in a general election, which would suggest that we are already returning to normal, at least as far as that indicator is concerned. It suggests that the fervour that the referendum generated is not felt for other political events.”

Yet, as Pringle points out, the passion stirred by the referendum obviously still exists, even if it is in a latent state. The answer may lie in showing those who have been disaffected that they can hold power.

He says: “If you take a Tory-supporting woman in Morningside – her opinion will be acted upon on a fairly regular basis. She probably feels reasonably in control, respected, listened to and so on, but for an awful lot of people in the Yes side that was not the case. 

“We heard in the latter stages of the referendum about what the Queen was meant to have been thinking, but for any person in Easterhouse or Leith or Dundee, they were in a more influential position than the Queen, or David Cameron.

"They had control over their lives and I think that has led to a residual attachment to the referendum for a lot of people"

"They had control over their lives and I think that has led to a residual attachment to the referendum for a lot of people, because that was their one day of control, and that made an awful lot of people feel very good about themselves. Not so good about the result but for people in these communities, the objective must be to make them feel like they have the same degree of control over their lives as a Tory in Morningside, though that is a very difficult thing to do.

“I think the feeling of having power of itself helps to generate hope. Rather than just passively wishing things were different you can actively make a contribution. It’s about trying to create the circumstances to do that, we can’t have referendums all the time, and general elections can do that as well to some extent but people’s votes are more or less influential according to which constituency they live in. The objective in a genuine democracy must be to create a situation where everyone feels in control over their lives and over the communities they live in.”  

But although participation in the referendum may not be transferred into the General Election, groups like Women for Independence are more active than ever.

Jeane Freeman, one of the organisation’s founders, attributes its success to the fact that it exists outside of normal party political lines, allowing its members to avoid the black and white lines drawn up by traditional party politics.

In this sense, although engagement in May is likely to be lower than it was during the referendum, the activism generated by the referendum will not disappear. 

“It wasn’t party X versus party Y and there is a difference between a Yes/No vote about the country – about what you want for the country and how to achieve that – and one that is confined to the political prism of parties. 

“I think we need to be a wee bit careful not to judge how well engagement continues by focusing exclusively on the General Election. 

“The groups that interest me are the ones in Shettleston and in the east end of Glasgow. Now they are not going to pitch up at a meeting about Women for Independence, but they might pitch up at a meeting about what’s happening with their local care homes or what is happening to their kids – issues that matter locally, where the local campaign can potentially make a difference.

"Or even if it doesn’t succeed,  it gives people a sense of their own power – the noise they can make and the difficulty they can cause elected politicians in justifying some of those decisions, and that’s the route into engagement.

"So I am wary of the idea that we can measure continued engagement from the referendum on the basis of the General Election. It feels far too distant for a lot of people, but local stuff doesn’t.”