Let's get down to business

In fact, the strong preference of Scotland's business community for the Union may have widened the divide further, given the scorn poured by pro-Yes politicians and pressure groups like the Yes-aligned Business for Scotland on indy-hostile businesses that went public with their concerns, or even their questions.

The perception was projected that business priorities were often alien to the interests of the public at large, and non-supportive business people themselves were seen as hypocritically "scaremongering" for political reasons, rather than simply urging normal due diligence into the side-effects of separation.

The irony is that in the other successful European countries - Scandinavian and otherwise - that the Yes campaign aspired to emulate, the business-society divide the referendum has helped emphasise in Scotland is nowhere near as pronounced.

This is not because Danish or Norwegian or German businesses are any less ruthlessly focused on delivering profits for shareholders. Far from it. Those who have experienced it first-hand attest that Norwegian corporate practice is to take fewer prisoners than the Vikings did at Iona.

The paradox is that more communitarian societies are prepared to accept successful business people as being an integral part of the national fabric, not objects of suspicion.

To Professor Russel Griggs, a pro-independence board member of Scottish Enterprise and serial company director, if there are bridges to be built in the referendum aftermath it is necessary to start building them at both ends.

"I think it's fair to say that society does not sufficiently value business, but I don't think some businesses have helped themselves in the [independence referendum] campaign. The nonsense some of the big businesses spoke was exactly that. I think that business made the points it wanted to make - like the risk of prices going up - for its own sake rather than looking at the societal impact.

"I think if we are going to have that dialogue to bridge the gap between business and society, then business needs to learn to speak more in the language that society can relate to, and that's difficult in Scotland, where many of the biggest businesses tend to be headquartered outside of the country."

Asked to think of what better business-social co-operation might look like, Griggs has to go back to the end of the "silicon glen" era of the 1990s, when managers at Scotland's threatened semi-conductor industry organised themselves into a campaign to save workers' jobs, ultimately unsuccessfully.

While others on the Yes side were far less measured than Griggs in their attacks on the many business critics of the ­independence proposition, you can hardly blame the pro-independence side exclusively for demonising these corporate actors. After all, hadn't the likes of RBS and HBOS laid the foundations by spending the previous decade demonising themselves in an orgy of hubris and greed? But the question persists: is it possible that, as part of Scotland's post-referendum reboot, "business" can be transformed from a hostile alien entity to a cherished, essential, integral part of Team Scotland?

The most arresting expression of this sense of popular alienation from business was, of course, former SNP luminary Jim Sillars' inflammatory comments. He said businesses such as insurer Standard Life which warned of a possible relocation to London, or BP which had warned of increased difficulty in operating in the North Sea, were "subverting Scotland's democratic process" and faced a "day of reckoning" if Scotland voted for independence. In BP's case that included forced nationalisation.

Allowances should be made for the smoke of political battle, and Sillars later distanced himself from his remarks, saying that he had been exaggerating for media impact. Nevertheless, the old Nationalist war horse, like the often bitterly vituperative Business for Scotland, would not have adopted such combative tones if they thought Scottish business leaders were widely trusted and respected leaders of society.

According to Kevin Hague, the e-commerce entrepreneur and blogger credited as one of the few business stars of the No campaign, there is an urgent need in the aftermath of the long independence referendum campaign to ensure that Scottish society abandons its default perception of business as "evil and alien".

This underlying perception, the author of the influential "Chokkablog" believes, made it easier for credible business people with genuine questions to be delegitimised and demonised, sometimes by Government ministers, Cabinet secretaries and their civil service helpmates.

"There is a kind of latent problem that people see business as 'other', wealthy people serving wealthy shareholders to the detriment of society as a whole. A significant proportion of Scots just see business as evil, and the way the Yes campaign was run tended to play on that perception and, to some extent, reinforce that message. Now we have to think about how that gets repaired."

But who will lead the process? It has to be admitted that none of Scotland's business organisations - the IoD, the FSB, the Chambers of Commerce - has managed to break out of the business ghetto into the media mainstream in the campaign, and their role in society is far more limited than that of their equivalents in continental Europe.

Indeed, given the overwhelming prominence of the economy in all of the arguments about independence, one of the most extraordinary aspects of the campaign was the effective near-silencing of these membership lobbying bodies, most notably the traditional business voice of constitutional conservatism, CBI Scotland.

In an irony no doubt relished by Yes strategists, a procedural cock-up about registration as a campaigning organisation by a junior CBI staffer in London, brilliantly exploited by the Scottish Government and the Yes campaign in April, led to Glasgow-based CBI Scotland seeing mass defections and effectively being silenced. For reasons that remain unclear, CBI Scotland's highly experienced chief executive Iain McMillan was posted missing in the campaign's crucial final stages, depriving indy-averse companies of an important conduit of legitimate questions and concerns. There were honourable exceptions, such as Owen Kelly of Scottish Financial Enterprise who continued to ask awkward questions about the potential disruption of the currency, the UK single market, EU membership and the single regulatory regime, all very real potential threats to a sector that provides 7% of Scotland's GVA (gross value added) and 200,000 jobs.

But the employers' organisations were hardly pro-active in their due diligence exercise on the Scottish Government's independence proposition, barely raising their voices about the questions which the White Paper had not raised nor answered.

Thus it was that the various potential outcomes and permutations of independence were skated over by the business organisations, apparently anxious of being accused of breaching their self-imposed neutrality, and perhaps aware that Scottish society, with its traditions of suspicion of business "bosses", would prefer them to keep out of it.

This meant some of the articulation of the necessarily complex business-related questions about independence was left to big business beasts such as Keith Cochrane of Weir Group who in April commissioned Oxford Economics to produce one of the most comprehensive and balanced assessments of the economic and commercial case for independence. This was followed in August by the emphatically neutral Sir Tom Hunter, who in August published an academic tract entitled "Scotland's Decision - 16 Questions to think about for the Referendum".

Hunter, a billionaire whose global ­philanthropic efforts have won him respect throughout Scottish society, is cited by Kevin Hague as a potential leader of what he sees as a necessary conciliation between society and commerce.

Hague says: "One of the things that was quite interesting about the campaign was when the pro-independence group Business for Scotland said what they did, there wasn't a credible counter-voice given that CBI Scotland was muted, and it was left to people like myself, who, as an entrepreneur just doing my thing, had never previously participated in organised business activity, to take on arguments that were not just misleading, but intentionally misleading."

He cites as an example the Business for Scotland claim, repeated by the First Minister, "that an independent Scotland would have been £8.3 billion better off" or have an "£8.3bn surplus" if it had been independent. "What they meant was that it would have been able to borrow £8.3bn more," Hague says.

"The campaign exposed the fact that business does not have an effective and trusted collective voice and one benefit of this process might be to show that this is needed not just to participate in a political campaign against well-organised and slick professional political campaigners, but also to address wider issues about how Scottish society perceives business. I know a lot of business people who do charitable work that is not recognised, but it's not just a PR exercise in drawing attention to that which needs to be done.

"All the interaction I have had on this campaign, mainly fire-fighting some of the claims made by Business for Scotland and others, is that we need to have a voice. We need people to understand that business is not just about people's jobs and livelihoods, it's something you can use to improve society for the good."

Hague believes that the era of political and constitutional flux after the end - for now - of the Scottish independence dream, is the ideal time to rethink the relationship between business and society.

"I would be a willing participant in that process now but if someone had written to me before this campaign started suggesting that, I would have filed the letter in the bin, but I do feel there is a time window here. Memories are short and business people are very busy.

"If something isn't done quickly to change the nature of the relationship between business and society, the danger is that we miss the boat."

Not everyone in Scotland, particularly in business, will agree with the political pundits who are filling their columns this weekend with praise for the referendum process and its celebration of democracy and civic participation. Some of these naysayers will consider the long campaign has been a distraction both from growing the economy and improving society.

If it has exposed the misalignment of business and society, and the need for a more permanent reconciliation, then it might have unintended benefits.