How to lead

Nicola Sturgeon cannot have it both ways. She cannot sensibly or credibly insist on the sovereignty of Scotland’s people while meekly accepting the British state’s authority to deny our right of self-determination. If we are truly sovereign, then none can legitimately deny or constrain our right to exercise that sovereignty.

By acknowledging the supremacy of the British parliament, Nicola Sturgeon is compromising our sovereignty in a manner that is wholly inconsistent with the fundamental principles of sovereignty and totally incompatible with the role to which she aspires as leader of Scotland’s independence movement.

I am NOT saying that Nicola Sturgeon is unfit for that role. What I am saying is that she must fit herself to it. She must put independence at the centre of her thinking. She cannot proceed as if sovereignty is a boon in the gift of the British state, to be granted or denied on the whim of British politicians. She must embrace the idea of sovereignty as absolute and inalienable. She must strenuously reject any notion that there can be some compromise between Scotland’s popular sovereignty and the parliamentary sovereignty imposed by the British state.

Quite simply, a denial of our right of self-determination IS a denial of our sovereignty. It is nonsensical to assert sovereignty while accepting that our right of self-determination can be denied.

Above all, anyone who hopes to lead Scotland must recognise that the sole aim of the independence movement is the dissolution of the Union. It is the Union which affords a spurious legitimacy to the anti-democratic British Nationalist dogma spouted by David Lidington and his ilk. It is the Union which, from its inception, has served as a device by which to prevent the people of Scotland exercising the sovereignty that is theirs by right.

So long as Nicola Sturgeon is talking about saving the UK from Brexit rather than saving Scotland from the Union, she is not giving the independence movement the leadership that it requires.

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