There are still Tory pearls being clutched over UK Labour’s recent attack ads on Rishi Sunak. And on the other side, there’s much macho briefing about not being passive anymore, in the face of long-term Conservative calumny against Starmer – enabler of Jimmy Savile, migrant excesses, whatever.

All this, in the run-up to local elections in May, is regarded as a rehearsal for next year’s UK General Election. Depressingly, most political correspondents are predicting a shitshow of attackery between the two big guns.

Get me to a mountaintop? An understandable response.

Another response might be – and it was mine initially – that indy-supporters should encourage the desperate mud-wrestling between the two big parties of the Union. Let them rake over the inevitable deviations from probity that each set of leaders have racked up in their public (and private) lives.

Doesn’t “a’ that” leave a positive high ground for the SNP and Greens to occupy?

Couldn’t a calmly-delivered, consensus-oriented prospectus, focussing on what Holyrood could progressively do with more or full powers, strike a chord with Scottish voters? Who might be recoiling from the mutually-assured destruction in Westminster and the Red Wall?

That depends on whether Yousaf can occupy that higher ground, and shake free of his own mire—that of a tired and fumbling previous SNP administration. The worst outcome of the Scottish Government’s recent travails (worsened, of course by an essentially antipathetic mainstream media) would be for indy-aligned politicians to be seen as “just like the rest”.

That is, as targets of popular cynicism – even contempt – towards the political classes.

We have to maintain the credibility of indy, as a path whereby conventional, representative democracy can reform and improve itself. Otherwise, something monstrously anti-political may arise, even at the heart of our self-proclaimed “common weal”.

So is there a way to do politics without bruises and bloodletting? Some polite but ineffectual distinctions are often made here.

The French political theorist Chantal Mouffe compares “antagonism” with “agonism”. The former aims at the destruction and vanquishing of an opponent. The latter accepts the other’s right to hold their position, and that these exchanges enrich the democratic process as a whole.

Well, good luck with all that, in the age of Trump, Johnson, Braverman, Truss, et al. (And now, attack ad Starmer?) As regular readers will know, I’ve become fascinated with the influence that deep and primary emotions have on our public (and political) lives. From certain positions in neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, the news isn’t good on negative campaigning. Meaning that it largely works pretty well.

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The faculty most regularly pointed at in the research is our brain’s tendency to negative bias. Negative information is a few times more memorable than positive information. One reason is that negativity can be more complex than a straightforward assertion of virtue; it needs lengthier processing in the brain, so its fragments linger more.

In addition, the “sleeper effect” is when you might even explicitly reject a noisome attack ad as “mere politics”—but the accusations and judgements stick around in your mind, ready to be drawn on in the voting booth.

And what function do “facts” – or at least factual claims – have in these attack ads? What is competitive about Labour’s anti-Sunak ads is that they don’t make the mistake of disconnecting emotion from knowledge.

A perverse effect of negative messaging is that it can send its recipients looking for more information – which then informs them sufficiently enough on the topic attacked, that they come to support it.

The National:

 

The anti-Sunak Twitter ads counteract this effect. They make their claims to his immorality – that he doesn’t want to imprison paedophiles, thieves and gun owners, that his family are tax cheats.

Then they instantly follow them up with authoritative-sounding statistics, below his grinning picture and signature.

Never mind that some of these stats have been subsequently overturned – for example, Sunak wasn’t even an MP when the stats for his alleged leniency over child sexual assaulters commenced.

The point is that the primary and involuntary emotions are first engaged, like anger, disgust and fear – the proximity of this ad to Suella Braverman’s claims about Asian grooming gangs is appalling, though breathtakingly strategic.

READ MORE: Sunak fails to back Braverman’s focus on British-Asian grooming gangs

Then your mind roams around looking for information to “confirm your bias” after that bias has first been established. Finally, campaigners place their confirming factoids where they can be easily found.

Tory right-wingers are past masters at this art. Remember a demonised EU taking £350 million a week from our beloved NHS on the side of a Vote Leave bus?

On these lines, I predict that the mass psychological trauma of Covid, and the hypocritical behaviour of ministers in the Tory government (of which Sunak was one), will be heavily triggered in pre-election Labour attack ads.

I also expect the advertising “mad men” are already testing out visceral imagery on test subjects.

Maybe they’re scanning voters’ brains in real-time, so they can see what ancestral emotional systems can be involuntarily stimulated. This will be happening on both sides.

All of this would have to be kept deadly secret, of course.

There’s nothing more guaranteed to have your higher and reflective brain functions kick in than hearing that you’re being scientifically jerked around by some political operator, targeting your lower brain regions. Remember how outraged we were about Cambridge Analytica and their “psychographics”?

It’s true that what I call “mammalian politics” has other evolutionarily vital emotions it can call on.

There’s a “positive” set, known as play/imagination, happiness/joy, care, curiosity/desire. At best, knowledge of these elemental responses could give indy-party campaigners the confidence to go positive, even visionary, in their messaging and narratives.

As we pass through these ever more demanding and grinding times, I wouldn’t underestimate the voters’ need for resources for hope. Hope turns out to be rooted in deep-seated emotional drives, ones that help us adapt and survive. I believe Scottish national self-determination remains a vehicle for such hopes.

Indeed, there is a psychological model called self-determination theory. It’s not directly related to the constitutional issue.

However, indy strategists could do worse than attend to what these experts say, about how to intrinsically motivate people.

We need to feel autonomous (I’m free to make my choices), competent (I’m capable of making my choices) and related (I make my choices in context with others). This isn’t a bad guide to the kind of character you would want to invoke in your campaigning.

In a social media exchange with the former head of SNP strategy Stephen Noon this week, I opined that it was “a good move”, in a politician-sceptical environment, “for HY [Humza Yousaf] to render himself ‘activist in chief’, which should also be ‘empath in chief’”.

Stephen responded: “Scotland’s ‘new politics’ was meant, in part, to be about the way our politicians and parliament were connected to the country, not ‘above’ but embedded within. There’s a fascinating book, Community by Peter Block, which offers a great model for such community-focused leadership.”

I raced off to investigate Block, and immediately found his glowing definition of a citizen: “One who chooses to create the life, the neighbourhood, the world from their own gifts and the gifts of others”.

Who knows whether the shift to aggression from UK Labour opens up space for something much more inspiring to flower in Scotland?

“Build A Bitter Britain” could easily be the unintended outcome of their attack campaigning.

If so, we should keep the flame of old-time left-wing nationalism in Scotland alive, in our calculations of Indy political strategy. Our mammalian human nature has resources that can support a cleaner, more creative and caring politics.

In the coming battle royal, let’s remember that.