If Scotland votes ‘No’ this month, Labour must move quickly to define the victory, says John McTernan

If, as all the polls have consistently predicted, the ‘No’ campaign triumphs in this month’s Scottish referendum, it will be a great victory for Labour. But then the real work begins. Normally after a victory – and particularly after such a long campaign – there is time to pause, draw breath and even take a break. Not so in Scotland – success, Scottish Labour will find, is its own punishment. There is a general election campaign for next May. The trigger on the firing gun for the longest long campaign will finally be pulled at Conservative party conference. After the election of a Miliband government, the next task will be to make 2015-16 Alex Salmond’s last as first minister. A lot of work – and it will only get done and done well if there is a strategy. Where to start?

First, it will be time to say thank you. Quickly and comprehensively to the voters – all of them. Whatever the longueurs of the campaign and the differences revealed, we do all have to live together after all. The voters are taking this decision seriously. Choices this important, this existential, come only rarely. No one on either side will vote without thinking deeply. For that we should all be grateful.

There was a Democrat senator in Wisconsin who spent the first month after each election he won going to every major factory in the state. He stood at the factory gate and shook as many hands as he could, thanking each voter personally. We will need a 21st century version of this. A combination of a nationwide leaflet drop, direct mail and email and town meetings should do the trick. We should also take time to thank each other for an amazing job. From the Better Together engine room, where Jackie Baillie and Frank Roy have proved they can out-organise anyone, to the media frontline where Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown remind us that we have produced giants who can still make a mark – as Salmond knows to his cost. From the volunteers, whether long-term party activists like my mother or the newbies, to the members of parliament and members of the Scottish parliament who led campaigns locally and nationally.

Second, we must define the victory. It is this that will make the result of the referendum decisive. If the ‘No’ campaign is victorious, Scotland will have chosen to stay with the most successful, multi-national, multi-racial, multi-faith country the world has ever seen – the United Kingdom. That will be no small thing. But we must make it clear it is a once-in-300-year choice. It will have been made. It will not be revisited. The ‘Yes’ vote is not a ‘good start for one more heave’ – it will be the end of the line. Remember, if the nationalists prevail by even one vote there will be no hesitation on their side about breaking up Britain: no Scottish National party worries about legitimacy, no second chances. We will have to be alert for nationalist narratives of grievance. We will have to make it clear they lost fair and square. They tried to trick the country into independence on a false prospectus and were found out. ‘What is Plan B?’ will be chiselled on Salmond’s political tomb. We will need to remind voters again and again why the SNP lost. It will not have been because they did not know the answers to key questions, but because they did but were too scared to tell voters the truth. That dishonesty will not just have been responsible for their downfall, it has been their hallmark. Salmond and the SNP have been unmasked – they put their interests first, not the nation’s. They must never be allowed to forget it.

Third, this will have been not just an SNP defeat, but also a Labour victory. Not just Scottish Labour, but UK Labour – everyone pitched in. From Ed Balls on the currency to Sheila Murphy, legendary north-west regional organiser, coming back for one last campaign. From established figures like Douglas Alexander taking time off the general election campaign and Jim Murphy on his ‘100 towns in 100 days tour’ to Johann Lamont and her talented team in Holyrood. We lived our values. Our movement has always known that ‘unity is strength’. For a while, sadly, we swallowed the myth of ‘London Labour’. The referendum campaign has banished that. Now we must bury it for good.

But we must not rest on our laurels – we must build on what we have learnt. We must reform, or perhaps, to steal Peter Hain’s phrase, ‘refound’, the party. Our organising culture has had a huge boost with full-time organisers. They have brought into the movement a huge crop of new volunteers. We must not abandon them just as they will have tasted victory – many for the first time. Some of the full-time volunteers should become full-time Labour staff – for the party, members of the Scottish parliament or members of parliament at Westminster. The new volunteers must be bound into a new and continuing culture of campaigning. We should learn from the best of our colleagues: from Stella Creasy in London, Gisela Stuart in Birmingham and Alison McGovern in Merseyside. One thing we are poor at in Scotland is fundraising. One of the essentials of modern politics is an ability to raise the money for your own campaign and not rely on unions or the party nationally. There are successful models to draw on, and Marcus Roberts, deputy general secretary of the Fabian Society, has usefully drawn them together in his booklet Labour’s Next Majority. He should be enticed back to his homeland to do some training and development.

Last but not least, it will be time to get back to basic politics. The constitutional debate has been a dead hand on Scottish politics for the last seven years. It has dominated the national conversation. Crucially, it has shielded the SNP governments from scrutiny. Take their much-vaunted claim to be ‘social democrats’. That has not survived the referendum campaign. There is nothing social democratic about believing that business in Scotland pays too much tax. Salmond’s inner Reaganite was outed in the white paper on independence. We must not let him hide from it.

After seven years of SNP government, it is time to ask exactly what working people have gained. Working-class kids get a secondary education on a par with that of Turkey while middle-class kids get one equal to Singapore. Then, to add insult to injury, while a handful of working-class youngsters get into university, the 80 per cent of middle-class ones who get into university have their tuition paid for by the taxes of working-class families. To top it all, the SNP has cut the further education colleges that have been a route to higher education or skills for working-class young people. If that is social democracy, I am a member of the Fourth International. Scottish Labour needs to turn a hard political eye on to SNP failure on education, health and skills. We will be helped by the general election. Ed Miliband’s plans for a living wage are a symbol of the reforming power of UK Labour. Scotland’s share of new home-building is 100,000 over five years. Energy price freezes help all families and all businesses (apart from the energy company cartels, that is). The city-region agenda for England has a strong read-across to Scotland, too, with great opportunities for new powers to go to cities and not just Holyrood.

Already it feels good. Some real politics with edge, bite and – dare I say it – socialism. As Gordon Brown, more than anyone else, reminded us – we need some old-time religion in Scotland. I am up for it. Comrades, are you?

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John McTernan is a former political secretary to Tony Blair and director of communications to Julia Gillard