Just over a year ago, the ‘Yes’ campaign came unexpectedly close to breaking up the UK in the Scottish independence referendum. In 2011 YouGov polling concluded that just 28% of the Scottish population were in favour. Yet two weeks before the referendum a YouGov poll put the ‘Yes’ side in the lead, and Scotland voted to stay in the Union by a much slimmer margin than one would have expected in 2011 – 5 per cent. And, most shockingly, Glasgow – Scotland’s largest city and a century-long Labour stronghold – opted to leave the UK.

Why? Because Yes Scotland – the official campaign effectively led by the SNP –planted a narrative of optimism at the core of the public discourse on their side in the referendum. The opposing campaign, Better Together, didn’t help itself – as epitomised by its nickname ‘Project Fear’, privately used by its own members. Its dominant message was negative: Scotland couldn’t afford to go its own way, politically or economically.

Thus it was easy for Nicola Sturgeon to claim that the pro-Union campaign was based on a notion of Scotland as “too wee, too poor and too stupid” to be an independent country. And it was easy for the Yes campaign to communicate an overwhelmingly positive idea of an independent Scotland. In one of the most left-wing nations in Europe – in which the Labour Party had taken for granted the huge swathes of working-class voters who had felt for so long a deep loyalty to it – the SNP fashioned a narrative of the ‘Yes’ vote as a step towards a social democratic utopia.

They would free Scotland of what many regarded as the oppressive straitjacket of austerity, abolishing welfare cuts including the so-called bedroom tax and using oil revenues to ramp up spending on public services. And whenever ‘Westminster politicians’, to use the ‘Yes’ campaign’s unjustly derisive epithet, sounded perfectly reasonable warnings that in practice Scotland would drive away the economic dynamism needed to fund any decent system of state services, the SNP could frame them to the Scottish electorate as the out-of-touch British Establishment doing Scotland down.

Now the UK as a whole faces a referendum on its EU membership by the end of 2017 – and the campaign to leave has learned lessons from Yes Scotland. In terms of political philosophy, with his pseudo-intellectual “libertarian” nonsense, UKIP’s sole MP Douglas Carswell is “a stupid person’s thinking man” – to quote the eminently sound Times columnist Matthew Parris. Yet the plethora of speeches he gives on Europe evince a clever kind of animal cunning as they weave a narrative of British exit from the EU as the progenitor of a freewheeling, economically vigorous Britain, ripping apart the constraints of the EU in order to trade with the rest of the world. Carswell has an almost monomaniac fixation on this idea, but his proclamations merely epitomise the discourse emerging at the centre of British Euroscepticism: even prominent Tories including Liam Fox and Boris Johnson are lining up to assert that we should feel optimistic about the future of Britain if we leave the EU.

It’s a right-wing version of the left-wing narrative fashioned by the SNP, tailored towards English voters who gave Cameron his famous victory this year – who make up 84 per cent of the UK population. But, most importantly, it is a message based on an idea of hope – however dubious that idea might be in practice. And as the campaign to stay in the EU alerts the country to the potentially dire consequences for British jobs and prosperity – not to mention Britain’s influence across the world – in the event of Brexit, it is not difficult for the anti-EU campaign to ramp up rhetoric lambasting this as dismal scaremongering as opposed to rational cost / benefit analysis. They will make it look like the British political class is pushing a negative, unpatriotic argument that the UK is, if not too poor, then at least too wee and too stupid for life outside the EU. 

As a member of the endangered species of Europhile Tories, I consider it to be one of Cameron’s worst decisions to cave in to pressure from UKIP and his rabidly Europhobic backbenchers by committing a Conservative government to a referendum on British EU membership. There are many Tory MPs left who have varying degrees of affinity for the European project, but who recognise the economic and geopolitical benefits of being in the world’s largest intergovernmental bloc.

They need strong cross-party co-operation with Labour to take on the Europhobes; but it is of gargantuan importance that their united campaign is the polar opposite of Better Together, racked by squabbling between the main UK parties and negative campaigning. They need to create a positive vision of a Britain outside the eurozone but taking a leading role in using the vast resources of the EU – with its half a million people and a quarter of the world’s GDP – to create further leaps forward in prosperity and to uphold liberal democratic values against Islamist extremism, Russian revanchism and authoritarian China’s ascendency.