As the post-match analysis of the Scottish Referendum gets into gear, many commentators have already made mention of the likely significance of the barnstorming speech of Gordon Brown given on the day before the voting took place. By any account it was a beautifully constructed and passionately delivered call to arms for the Better Together and ‘undecided’ voters.

From my perspective, it struck exactly the right chords in terms of the heart of the No campaign argument. Our analysis (see previous blog post) to try and establish the core virtuous loops of the argument for ‘Better Together’ suggested there were two things that the No side of the debate would do well to focus on: first, the 3+1>4 synergy effect of being part of the Union, and second, playing on the economic doubts associated with Scottish debt.

Read the speech (http://www.buzzfeed.com/jimwaterson/gordon-brown-delivered-a-passionate-speech-against-independe#zzcu49) and you can quickly see Mr Brown hit the nail squarely on the head on both counts.

Here’s what he had to say on the synergy part of the story:

“So let us tell people of what we have done together.

Tell them that we fought and won a war against fascism together.

Tell them there is no war cemetery in Europe where Scots, English, Welsh and Northern Irish troops do not lie side-by-side. We fought together, suffered together, sacrificed together, mourned together and then celebrated together.

 And tell them that we not only won a war together – we built a peace together, we created the NHS together, we built a welfare state together.
We did all this without sacrificing within the union our identity, our culture, our tradition as Scots. Our Scottishness is not weaker, but stronger as a result.”

Not only that, when we analyse the entire speech with our PanSensic tools, especially when we compare what Mr Brown said relative to what Alex Salmond was saying in his run up to the start of the vote, we see that the ‘yes, and..’ tone indicative of the synergistic builder was the dominant one across the whole speech:

Notice too how, beyond the expected emphasis on the ‘uniter’ tone, Mr Salmond was far less focused overall in his output.

We can see a similar focus characteristic when we look at the Brown and Salmond words through another PanSensic lens, this time looking at emotional archetypes. As we might expect, both featured the ‘warrior/lover’ archetype strongly. But while Brown’s speech was almost exclusively speaking from this archetype, Salmond may well have blurred his position by also speaking from a ‘Monarch’ stance:

High ‘Warrior’ archetype scores are closely connected to authority figures that are positioning themselves as the ‘right’ person to tackle issues of fear. Playing on the fear card can always be a tricky one if you don’t get the message exactly in tune with the intended audience. Again, I think Mr Brown got it just right, both from the overall tone perspective, but also through his ‘economic trapdoor’ metaphor and the sentence, ‘ seven deadly risks pushing us through an economic trapdoor from which there is no escape’.

Here was what I think will come to serve as a classic ‘word that speaks a thousand pictures’ situation. Not only was it massively subtle in its construction, but it was also evocative enough that all the media picked up on it, and, as a result of that, it planted an unforgettably potent mental image in the mind of anyone that heard it.

And that’s perhaps the ultimate brilliance of the speech. It’s also very likely the lesson we might all take away from this story: understand what the key issues are and then connect them to a powerful visual image that supports your argument. Over the course of what will very likely go down in history as the most striking 13 minutes of his political life, Gordon Brown did exactly that for both of the core issues. Consciously or otherwise, we all went to bed on Wednesday night thinking of trapdoors and British soldiers in war cemeteries.