A POLITICAL strategist credited with helping the SNP win the 2007 Holyrood election has set out how an independent Scotland in Europe could experience a cultural and economic renaissance after Brexit.

Gordon Guthrie believes the country could act as a magnet to companies and a new generation of workers reluctant to remain in a post-Brexit UK – helping to boost the Scottish economy and generate higher levels of income tax.

He makes his arguments in a new book, The Second Independence Referendum – a Manifesto for Scotland and the EU after Brexit, published this week and from which we have an exclusive extract below.

“The ripping of the UK out of the European Union offers an independent Scotland within the EU many ways to flense the old unbalanced British state – to relocate companies, university researchers and people and to use these opportunities to make our country known in the world,” Guthrie writes.

“A key resource in our renaissance will be people, those currently resident in Scotland and those we will invite to come – from the rest of the UK, and from the rest of Europe.”

He adds: “Our small size compared to England plays strongly to our advantage. We are a 12th of rUK – about a 10th the size of England. Stripping England of a mere one per cent of her high-end economy that is dependent on EU membership would see an uplift in our own economy of 10 per cent.”

Guthrie, a former SNP parliamentary candidate, believes Scotland should have a target of attracting more people who could live and work in the country’s vibrant and growing cities. “The goal is clear – to grow our tax base by growing our population and our skills – that raises still more problems in its own right. Where are these people to live? How do we absorb 250,000 new people? 500,000?” he asks. “We need to be relentless in our goals. The world that is coming is a world of digital connectedness, of people working from home – we need to live in dense, walkable, exciting cities with rich culture and nightlife.”



Guthrie, above, argues some migrants could find work in Scotland’s expanding technology sector.

“One of Scotland’s major economic successes, and the cause of much growth in Edinburgh, is our emerging high-tech/internet sector," he goes on. "By some measures this is the third-strongest in the world – adjusted for size.

“About a quarter to a third of people working in it are European nationals. Growing large technology businesses in Europe requires foreign nationals in large numbers, native speakers, people who understand the customer’s culture and circumstances.

Brexit threatens to put this to the knife, as it does to the London tech scene. But a world in which Edinburgh stays in the EU and London leaves offers us delicious opportunities to poach companies and investments.”

Guthrie suggested many young, highly-skilled people would be lured to an independent Scotland not only because of its continued links with the EU, but also because of its more progressive and cosmopolitan leanings than an England which, he says, appears to be heading back to the past.

“The phrase of the moment is 'I want my country back' a phrase that divides more than it unites," he says. "For the ‘back’ of Brexit is about going back to the sun never setting on the Empire, when it will never again rise. British engineering may well become better, but Britain will never be the workshop of the world again.

“England will not be a world power reborn – no new Elizabethan Age – it will go from a small and fairly successful European country to a smaller and slightly less successful one.”

Guthrie was originally a Labour Party member and a candidate for the 1999 Holyrood election, but switched allegiances to the SNP in 2002 over the war in Iraq.

Before leaving Labour the computer expert devised the party’s electoral software which allowed it to identify potential voters during campaigns.

His 2004 paper SNP Electoral System Review called for a complete overhaul of the party’s internal structures, advising it to tear up its old way of campaigning and policymaking so that it began to build up a wider “coalition of support”.

His paper also recommended a more advanced computer system which allowed the SNP to track sympathetic voters.

One senior source in the party said at the 2007 result: “Guthrie’s paper was the blueprint for winning the election. It is fair to say it changed the way we ran the campaign.”


Exclusive extract: ‘Bringing people here isn’t just about jobs, but about a zest for life, opportunities ... the bright lights’

THE ripping of the UK out of the European Union offers an independent Scotland within the EU many ways to flense the old unbalanced British state – to relocate companies, university researchers and people and to use these opportunities to make our country known in the world.

A key resource in our renaissance will be people, those currently resident in Scotland and those we will invite to come – from the rest of the UK, and from the rest of Europe. The persistent history of our continent is people overcoming obstacles and building new economies by addressing challenges; and our task is to rescue as much of the European infrastructure from the UK as we can: skilled people, mobile workforces, the young, the outgoing, the aspirational.

There will be a price to pay, a price in tax, in lost services, in change, in sacrifice – but the purpose of these sacrifices is to build the new Scotland, a richer, more stable, more confident, more powerful Scotland – a Scotland of high-skill, high-wage jobs, of desirable cities, a Scotland of cultural power, a deeper and stronger university network. But the sacrifices must be shared.

The old spirit of the democratic intellect has long been a problematic in Scottish politics – with much nominal support for it, but an unhealthy fear of things being too democratic or indeed too intellectual. That reverse snobbery must go. In this endeavour we must seek out the best people for the job and back them in the task.


There is no detail we should spare – yes let’s strip the London restaurant trade of its non-UK workers, let’s strip the universities – let us set ourselves the highest standards and be our own harshest critics. We have talked ourselves to death and havered and hesitated – well the plunge has been made, maybe not by us, certainly not at our behest, but a plunge it is.

The goal is clear – to grow our tax base by growing our population and our skills – that raises still more problems in its own right. Where are these people to live? How do we absorb 250,000 new people? 500,000? We need to be relentless in our goals. The world that is coming is a world of digital connectedness, of people working from home – we need to live in dense, walkable, exciting cities with rich culture and nightlife.

It is not down to the Government, nor to local authorities to personally direct the constructions of these cities, but it is down to them to shape them, through changes to building regulation, through how we provide civic services – and through what we allow people to do in their urban environment.

Our small size compared to England plays strongly to our advantage. We are a 12th of rUK – about a 10th the size of England. Stripping England of a mere one per cent of her high-end economy that is dependent on EU membership would see an uplift in our own economy of 10 per cent.

The dirty secret of the UK is that London’s success depends on immigration – immigration to the Great Wen from Wolverhampton and Dungannon, Auchermuchty and Abervagenny.

Every kid from Macclesfield walking off a train in Glasgow with a university place, three newly-minted top-quality A-levels and the promise of a free EU passport is a golden nugget from heaven for us. A fully paid-off tax, work and spending machine: ready and committed to generate wealth in our country, tax dollars for our public services, growth for our companies, custom for our retailers. We should erect flowered bowers at the train station; bands and ticker tape.

But immigration is not just driven by availability of work, though that is a necessary requirement, it is also driven by a zest for life, for opportunities, by uncertainty and risk, by promises, the bright lights, the big city.

To get the most of this we need to remake our politics – and the last indyref made a great start at it. The new Scotland cannot be a statist Scotland – the transformation of the economy and growth of the tax base, can be encouraged, nurtured and hot-housed by the state is all its manifestations, but the actual work has to be done by people, by companies, by communities, communities of residents, of students, of business people.

We need to throw off the compulsive suspicion of the state that the Thatcherites have done so much to inculcate in us. One of the great ironies of the world is how backwards the US is in its trimming of the state.

In California, the trains, the public transport and the power stations are all nationalised – apartments are under rent-control. There are things that the state used to do and shouldn’t – where Thatcher was right – but there are things that only the state can do and we should let it get on with it, and trust our fellow citizens who happen to work in the public sector – they are flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone, and want to help Scotland as much as we do. Local authorities must be freed of the shackles of central control and trusted to get on with it.

If we manage it right we can make the whole Brexit farrago one long advert for Scotland. The eyes of the world will remain on the UK family for the next few years, let us steal the limelight, gurn for the cameras, seize every opportunity to promote Scotland, ourselves and the opportunities that we are making. No ambitious person in the Europe or the rUK should be unaware of what we are doing, of what better life we offer them, of how we will welcome them.

The Second Independence Referendum – a Manifesto for Scotland And the European Union after Brexit, by Gordon Guthrie, published by Lithgae Press, October 2016.