Apologies to What Scotland Thinks for ripping off borrowing their title for this
This post is not about the ‘missing million’ voters, who are largely Labour No voters who we spend a lot of our time trying to motivate to turn out so any help with that is welcome, instead it’s the missing millions the Weirs have given the SNP and which remain unspent.
Their donations to Yes Scotland have bankrolled poster campaigns, tabards and so on however their equally large donations to the SNP have been less obvious. Yes Scotland newspapers which bore an SNP imprint and had soft focus puff pieces on Nicola Sturgeon’s nuptials to the publisher aside, it seems the SNP have largely kept their finance back.
Given the narrowing in the polls1 should we expect to see the SNP’s financial clout deployed in order to push over the line? It’s very late in the game to effectively spend that much money, unless perhaps it’s on the huge call centre operations that they used in 2011.
It seems more likely that, despite what their treasurer said at their 2013 conference, the SNP are keeping something in reserve for 2016. Might they have kept too much back anticipating that by this point in the game they would be too far behind.
Could the SNPs fiscal conservatism lose them the referendum?
[1] There is no room for complacency