Better Together for Whom?

The organization campaigning for a No vote in the September 18 Scottish independence referendum chose as its name, and initially its primary slogan, the phrase “Better Together.” Recently the campaign has been floundering, and showing signs of panic. Its political missteps have been much discussed in Britain. But the vagueness and evasiveness of the “Better Together” slogan has not occasioned much comment.

Better together is an adjective phrase. Used alone, with no accompanying noun phrases, its intended meaning is a matter for speculation. It seems to suggest that something will be better in some way for someone than something else if something is together with something else. … But none of these absolutely crucial someones and somethings are specified.

The head of the phrase, better, is a comparative adjective, so there is an implicit object of comparison: Anything that’s better has to be better than something else.

The adverb modifier together makes no sense unless applied to a group: *Scotland is better together is grammatically incoherent.

A verb is needed if better together is to make a predication: We have to talk about something being better, becoming better, remaining better, working out better, functioning better, or something of the sort.

Together, as an adverb modifying better, has an implicitly conditional sense: Something will be better than some alternative only if some group stays together or works together or whatever.

There is also an implicit benefactive complement role: better for whom? It’s better for them to be together means “It’s better for someone if they’re together.” The beneficiary may be some vague entity like the general good or the rational observer, but there generally has to be one.

Hence the No campaign’s slogan is vague in five different ways about the very essence of the issue it purports to address. And the last is perhaps the most important. For whom?

The current United Kingdom will certainly be better off if Scotland votes to stay within it. For one thing, the steady supply of oil from Scottish waters in the North Sea is the basis of the pound’s stability. All political parties other than the Scottish National Party agree that they want Scotland to stay. But instead of positive arguments for their view they have offered only fear-mongering and bullying.

Part of the reason sterling is plummeting against the dollar is that the current government has insisted that there will be no currency union in the event of Scottish independence, so that they can raise the fear that the new country will be without an established currency. (They probably don’t even mean it: Everyone would gain from Scotland continuing to use the pound as its currency.)

Naturally the U.K. hopes to continue sharing Scotland’s stellar natural, recreational, educational, financial, and human resources. (Its superb universities are just one example: Edinburgh is ranked in the top 20 internationally by some surveys, and so is St Andrews, the oldest university in Scotland. Both are enormously popular with American undergraduates.) Few would doubt that Scotland is a plus for Britain as a whole. But that is not the crucial question for Scots. The crucial question is is whether the quadripartite union is a better arrangement than independence would be for Scotland itself.

The inept slogan of the Better Together campaign evades that key point, almost wilfully. And it is a failing campaign. Opinion polls have been shifting Yesward over the past week, with at least one showing Yes ahead of No. The man in England who has bet $13,000,000 with the bookmaker William Hill on a No outcome in the referendum must be getting very nervous.

Politically, Scots are overwhelmingly more to the left, more favorable toward European Union membership, and less hostile to immigration. The rhetoric of the U.K.’s Prime Minister David Cameron about a referendum on leaving the E.U., and cutting immigration by an order of magnitude, does not resonate with Scotland. (A familiar joke about Scotland is that it has more giant pandas than Conservative members of parliament: Yang Guang and Tian Tian at the Edinburgh Zoo outnumber Mr. David Blundell of Dumfriesshire.) It is by no means clear that Scotland’s best interests are served by being a small appendix to a country governed by a Conservative-dominated, London-centric, privately educated Westminster elite.

What is clear is that the ridiculously vague “Better Together” slogan does not encapsulate any reason for Scots to vote No. On September 18 we will find out how many Scots will vote Yes instead, and put their country on track to become the 194th member of the United Nations.