And so the deception continues. (Nicola Sturgeon: One year to go until Scotland can ‘choose a better future’) Apparently, with great success. Very large numbers of people seem to be convinced that the proposed referendum is an opportunity to “decide their own future”. Sturgeon has them captivated.
It’s all lies, of course. But the lies are more immediately appealing than the reality. So, most people naturally choose to believe the lies. They decline to question the story they’re being told. They refuse to ask even the most obvious questions. Questions such as: What actually happens if/when Yes wins this referendum? What ensues from that victory?
The answer – the HONEST answer is, nothing! Precisely nothing! Nothing will have changed. No progress will have been made towards restoring Scotland’s independence. We will be in almost exactly the same place as we are now, except we’ll have had the second referendum that we’d been demanding.
Has Nicola Sturgeon explained what will happen if/when there is a Yes vote? I mean what will actually occur, not what she hopes will come about. Has she set out the next steps? Perhaps more to the point at this stage, has anybody even asked her to explain how she intends to translate a Yes vote in the proposed referendum into the restoration of Scotland’s independence?
Is there any doubt that this is what most people understand by the phrase “decide their own future”? Is there any doubt that this is what they are supposed to think it means? Is there any doubt that when people put their mark next to the Yes option on the ballot paper, they do so supposing that this is to make Scotland an independent nation again?
Is there any doubt that they will be tragically wrong in this assumption?
That the proposed referendum will have no effect is not a matter of one person’s opinion. It is a legal fact by virtue of having been clearly stated in the Scottish Government’s arguments submitted to the UK Supreme Court (UKSC). It is a political fact in that it has been confirmed by the First Minister and those close to her. The following clarification was provided by Mhairi Hunter, the former election agent and close confidante of Nicola Sturgeon, the day after the announcement of the October 2023 referendum.
If Supreme Court finds Scotland Act prevents [the Scottish Parliament] legislating for an indyref, and if there is no movement from UK Gov & allies (including Labour), pro indy parties will campaign in next GE for a mandate to start indy negotiations with UK Gov. It will be a de facto referendum.
A successful outcome will not lead to a declaration of independence. There is no route to independence that does not involve the agreement of UK Gov. But it would be politically impossible to continue to deny a mandate for a second referendum in the face of a Yes win.
Note that sentence! “THERE IS NO ROUTE TO INDEPENDENCE THAT DOES NOT INVOLVE THE AGREEMENT OF UK GOV. ” (my emphasis). Although Mhairi Hunter is referring to the ridiculous ‘Plan B’ to pretend the next UK general election is a Scottish referendum, that statement is categorical enough that it must also apply to the proposed referendum. Mhairi Hunter is actually answering the question none of the Sturgeon/SNP loyalists want to ask. What happens after a Yes vote is NOTHING – unless the UK Government agrees. The one certainty that we all can anchor ourselves to is that the UK Government will NEVER agree to any process which would place the Union in jeopardy. So, the short answer to the question of what happens if there is a Yes vote is NOTHING.
Mhairi Hunter pins the SNP’s hopes to a gobbet of wishful thinking so fantastical that only the most wilfully credulous could possibly take it seriously. In her best Jackanory voice, she tells us that “it would be politically impossible to continue to deny a mandate for a second referendum in the face of a Yes win”. Aye! Just as it was “politically impossible” to deny a mandate in the face of all those SNP election wins. Elections which actually were determinative, as opposed to a referendum which is strictly consultative and emphatically non-determinative.
But think for a moment about the wider implications of Mhairi Hunter’s clarification of Nicola Sturgeon’s ‘plan’. She says it would be “politically impossible to continue to deny a mandate for a second referendum in the face of a Yes win”. Which can mean nothing other than that a Yes win in the proposed referendum leaves us in the position of still needing a referendum. Exactly as now. Except that the referendum we will be seeking will no longer be the second one, it’ll be the third. And it can only happen if the UK Government agrees. Which is exactly the position of the SNP/Scottish Government at the moment. A Yes vote in the proposed referendum will have altered nothing but the ordinal number of the referendum we will still be unable to hold because the SNP/Scottish Government accedes to the British state’s authority to deny our right of self-determination. Our own government declines to assert and defend the concept of popular sovereignty. Our own government forsakes the fundamental principle that the people of Scotland are sovereign.
Which DOES NOT mean that we don’t need a Yes vote in this ’empty’ referendum. We absolutely do! All it means is that the Yes vote gains us nothing. But we have to secure that Yes vote because a No vote costs us everything.
And so the deception continues. If it goes ahead, we will all strive to get the biggest Yes vote possible in the proposed referendum. Should we succeed, we will find that nothing has changed. For many, this will be a shock. Because despite the fact that they have been warned and despite the fact that even someone as close to the First Minister as Mhairi Hunter has answered the question of what ensues from a Yes vote, most people prefer the lie that the referendum allows then to “decide their own future”.
I despair.
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Peter A Bell 
Hunter speaking for Sturgeon has no right to bin our inalienable right to self determination and promotes the niave fantasy that UK would not have the balls to say no in face of a consultative referundum yes. The October 2023 Referendum is a bust as is the madness of a plebiscite election. They throw away our best card and create another pointless hurdle. We are fucked. I will never forgive the cosy team keeping their heads down and taking the cash.
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Dead right.
There really does seem to be collusion between Nicola Sturgeon, The National and The National readership.
Sturgeon is the deceiver. The National is the deceiver’s messenger. The readership are the deceived.
Although “readership” may not be an entirely accurate adjective since it is only the blind that can see through this charade. Or those who willingly suspend their disbelief.
Some of them are even calling for an early UK General Election on the basis that the SNP winning again in replacing British Conservatives with British Labour will somehow advance Scotland’s Cause and impact on the UK Supreme Court’s current (farcical) deliberations … quite how is never explained.
It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic … for Scotland and those of us who want a proper process that will actually lead to regaining Scotland’s Independence.
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It is beyond pathetic, what ARE they thinking of ? I really hope that the UKSC will judge that it is not within Holyrood’s powers to hold a referendum – even an opinion poll referendum, because the downside risks are far too high, and there is no upside. I have recently tied myself in conspiracy theory knots on this – what if – bear with me because it is actually unbelievable – the whole woeful performance of Bain at UKSC was deliberate – not because it was known that UKSC would refuse, but because it is known in the relevant quarters that UKSC would OK the pretenderendum ?
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Like Bushgeoff, I hope that the Supreme Court says NO. That will give the SNP the impetus to protest and blame the Court while knowing full well that nothing could be closer to their heart than a put-down, but at least it will save us from ignominious defeat and humiliation in the longer term.
It is a game, Peter. ‘Ring-a-Ring o Roses’ for the faithful. The reality is that the SNP is a devolutionist party. It has to be to get through its favoured policies (i.e. emphatically not independence). Independence is, and has been since 2015, the distraction. I’m hoarse saying that. Iain Lawson has the results from the elections of office-bearers in his blog today. Almost 100% ‘wokerati’. The ‘wokerati’ of the SNP are akin to the ‘wokerati’ of the Greens: independence is not the priority; ‘wokeratidom’ is the object, and that is best pursued via devolution. Its pursuit was the reason that Stonewall and the Scottish Trans Alliance infiltrated the party, albeit they found a willing and gullible home.
Again, I have said so many times that I’m sick of it, that this is bigger than Scotland, but Scotland was the chosen battlefield in the UK, all the better to infiltrate the bigger prize later when men in dresses armed with GRCs (or not, in most cases) would be able to move between the two jurisdictions legally. Had the men and women of the SNP co-operated and girded their loins against this madness, we had at least a fighting chance to save the party, but too many swallowed the lies of the bigger prize, independence, which, had they thought about it hard enough, they would have realised stood in the way of ‘wokeratidom’, and they abandoned women to their fate and self-ID. Yes, Peter, I despair, too, but you can only take the horse to water; you cannot force it to drink; not even to save itself. From 2015 onwards, the two fights have been the same, intertwined, but too many men (not all, by any means) and even silly women just could not see it.
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I’m dubious about the conspiracy theory while being able to see the reason for it. It’s conspiracy as an emergent property of organisational behaviour. Think of it as a large pond with the organisation on one side looking to cross. The pond is littered with stepping stones. You see where the organisation’s landing point and when you look at the pond your mind tends to pick out the pattern of stepping stones that leads from where the organisation was to where it is now. It disregards the ‘irrelevant’ stepping stones despite the fact that the organisation has trod every one of them repeatedly as it tried to cross the pond. It looks like there was a plan to take that route because the end result is what it would have been if there was a plan.
The appearance of conspiracy doesn’t require that there be a conspiracy. If in any organisation there is a sufficient number of people with the required amount of influence and a common preference then the organisation will tend to move towards that preference absent any intent. If the commonly preferred outcome transpires then it looks exactly as if people had conspired to bring it about.
The human mind does not like randomness. The brain is a massively powerful pattern detector. So powerful that it can generate patterns to explain outcomes. Abhorring randomness, the mind imposes order. It wants there to have been a plan. So, a conspiracy theory is born.
For the most part, large organisations are not directed. Management is mainly concerned with dealing with situations as they arise rather than determining what the situation will be. There’s far more randomness than most people are comfortable admitting.
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In similar vein Peter a recently-arrived dispassionate observer might quickly notice that the situation that has resulted from the deliberate manipulations of the Party personnel and institutions by the Established Ruling Hierarchy would be difficult to distinguish from those imposed by Anthony Charles Lynton Blair on the former Labour Party of Britain.
Whom it was alleged lifted his strategy of Triangulation and sham Identity Politics directly from the Clinton Teams ‘successful’ strategy imposed upon the preexisting former Democratic party of the United states of North America.
And whose intended and visible outcome was to install self serving careerists and derail any possibility of those pre-existing institutions long established aims of affecting any anti-establishment or ‘Socialist’ political change.
If anyone finds any part of that contention , errr, contentious please do attempt to explain why!
😉
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I am from time to time struck by certain similarities between Sturgeon and Blair. Both, of course, having first rate communication skills. Both using those skills in ‘certain ways’.
I’m saying no more than that.
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She is inordinately comfortable with a certain Mr Campbell of Blair fame.
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I really don’t think the SNP have a huge conspiracy on the boil, Peter, about independence, but I do believe there have been wee conspiracies within the party. I don’t believe they want to move straight to independence either, no matter how bad it gets. The Denton’s Document proves conclusively that there was a conspiracy to infiltrate all public, and as many private, institutions as possible in the West, as a whole, not just in Scotland. The SNP was chosen as the vehicle, and Scotland as the battleground in the UK, with the intention to bring self-ID into the law in th smaller jurisdiction, when it would spread out from Scotland. Understand that, and you understand why this has played out as it has. There is too much unwillingness to look outside Scotland and see what is happening elsewhere.
Although every mainstream party has been infected with this, the SNP’s whole ethos under Sturgeon made it so much easier: Daddy Bear’s immature young, gay coterie was the core, along with Kirsty Blackman’s ‘trans’ cohort in Aberdeen; their push into the NEC and every other influential organ of the party; and younger and younger and more and more inexperienced people appointed to positions they were very evidently unsuited to fill. The ‘wokerati’ movement is totalitarian in nature, so every democratic principle had to be subverted. It has been a lesson in how to infiltrate and drive a party in a democratic country to your purpose, which is, ultimately, the undermining of heteronormativity and totalitarian overkill, and all in th name of ‘victimhood’. It would be a belly-aching howl if it were not so serious.
Why NS went along with it is anyone’s guess, and I can’t even be bothered to speculate. It was very evident from 2015 onwards that independence had to be sidelined, and if NS was not part of that, she has played the game very well indeed, effectively reducing the party to one of rolling devolution, with the intention of ensuring that all her ‘wokerati’ policies would be embedded before independence could raise its head again. Everything to do with independence is a game, but many of us are no longer in the mood to play along. I cannot even express how I feel about what this woman has done to all of us. Were it not for ALBA biting at her heels, I think we would still be where we were in 2015, and even though she has no intention of doing anything radical, she has been forced to concede some ground – straight back to sterling and the Growth Commission, full circle, like a dog returning to its vomit.
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That is a very perceptive * take * on ” Conspiracy Theories ” , Peter . All the things you say have also occurred to me as possible counter-explanations to how things can appear from a , let’s say , ” alternative ” perspectives . However , that doesn’t mean that every political/social situation has a straightforward explanation – Occam’s razor can get blunt too , at times .
It really depends what one means by ” conspiracy ” . What else accurately describes the blatant falsehood of Iraq’s – non-existent – WMDs ?
Closer to home , likewise what was done to Alex Salmond .
I have no difficulty believing there is ” Intelligent Design ” behind the massive over-promotion of ” Trans Rights ” : as Lorna has been saying ……Pharma Corps stand to make A LOT of money from this lunacy – BTW as they did and continue to from Covid/Vaccines . And if it also serves to divide and fracture the Independence Movement ? There are those who would use it for that very purpose
We can never afford to underestimate the sheer ruthless greed of the Corporate/ Capitalist psyche . Nothing is sacred to it . Or the Will To Power of those who believe themselves superior to the the masses .
In Scotland’s present case , there are just too many things stacking-up , too many stupefyingly bad/wrong decisions being made regarding Independence – and just about everything else , it becomes – almost – impossible to believe there is not some kind of intentional malfeasance going on
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This is getting pathetic. You lot are taking on the persona of Marjorie Taylor-Green of Donald Trump’s MAGA Republicans. Nobody on the ‘Yes’ side is disputing the fact that this is all about pressurising the Westminster Government to accept the legitimacy of Scotland deciding its future. There will be many other angles to take up if Scots decide in a Referendum or a plebiscite election to go for Independence.
Frankly, I would be disappointed if we can’t get 60%-75% Yes in a vote for Independence, because it is not a good start to have a divided country. All the disputation over process from the Unionists is grist to the mill in terms of exposing the anti-democratic nature of their position. So, I will go with the First Minister’s strategy until such times as I am shown by her and others that it is all fake. Somehow, I don’t think so. And as for the anti-GRA nonsense. Get real! I frequently go into restaurants where there are uni-sex toilets. So What!
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You seem unaware that with the proposed referendum, even a Yes majority of 60%-75% would change nothing.
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That’s an opinion. Nothing more, nothing less.
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It’s written into the legislation, you fool!
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If the franchise is still the same as in 2014, with anyone currently living in Scotland allowed to vote – ni other words any students who come to St Andrews or Edinburgh Universities (both largely English institutions now) and anyone from south of the border who has bought a bargain retirement home in Scotland, no matter how recently, and who will not vote for Scottish indepenendence as they identfy as English or British, though they are happy to take advantage of out free prescriptions, free personal care etc, – we Scots will lose as we are becoming a minority in our own country and losing what is left of our languages and culture, which are derided by our colonial masters.
I despair. We are being set up to fail again.
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Thanks, I got more and more pissed off as i werote that. I cannot work out why we are putting up with this ridiculous situation, Never mind the fake referendum, announce we are leaving the Union NOW!
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You are a man, that’s what, Bill. You so evidently do not understand the issue, that, frankly, I cannot even summon the energy to explain it to you. If you can’t see it, if you can’t see the bigger picture, and why this is happening now, I’m afraid you will just have to find out the hard way. I sincerely hope you have no female relatives or friends, no children, no gay or lesbian relatives whatsoever because you appear to be quite happy to feed them to the lions. You would have sat in Cambodia/China/Soviet Union and said: “So what!”
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I get the impression the First Minister was hoping to have her “referendum”, and if YES, then make the upcoming UK General Election, the next step, and thus that would be the new Independence “Referendum” suggested in the quotes above.
However, the General Election just might come first!
Regardless of any of that, it is clear, SNP leaders have failed abysmally in getting Independence, and it is also clear, far too many Independence supporters have put complete and total blind faith in Nicola Sturgeon, as we can see from the attitude of certain bloggs, and comments in newspapers like The NATIONAL, etc, where they dismiss out of hand all talk of being concerned about “process” and they just concentrate all their hopes of what happens with a YES vote.
But the fact is, if the present SNP politicians were really, really out to get us Independence, either as soon as possible, or at all, even, then they would surely have by passed any London involvement altogether, gone ahead with their own vote in Scotland, and dared the London rulers to challenge them.
After all they did actually promise us they would do just that, but have done nothing they said they’d do!
It is very easy to see where those who talk of an anti Independence conspiracy are coming from.
It is easy enough to have them seriously wonder about Nicola Sturgeon’s motives.
However, some of those conspiracy theories are so over the top, as to be total nonsense!
But that doubts remain over Nicola Sturgeon still do exist and with good reason, and we cannot dismiss all of those doubts so smuggly.
I was always a bit weary of her taking over from Alex Salmond.
I remember the huge crowds that went to the Glasgow Exhibition Center to see and cheer her. And I wondered to myself, was this really the right person, and feared all those cheering crowds might be badly let down, as I knew as did others within SNP, just how very overly cautious Nicola Sturgeon could be.
Tho, even I have been surprised by how timid and averse to challenging London rule, she has been, especially given the circumstances, and more so, her many promises.
So, I do see where the conspiracy stuff comes in, but I also see it is not entirely due to the First Minister alone.
There are many others in senior positions within SNP who have also been part of this policy.
Then we have ALBA, in which more than a few of us have also been left disappointed, as they too, keep insisting on London approval.
It can only seem a more plausible answer, at least to explaining some of this timidity, is that, they still cannot see past London rules, and they still think they must go by those rules.
They try to avoid confrontation and to want to appear “Statesmanlike” as much as possible, perhaps in the vain hope they get more voters on their side, and maybe too, more support across in the Media.
Tho it seems also clear, there are some within SNP, who are happy enough to keep going as things stand, but who merely hope without ever really trying, we somehow become Independent.
But that is all a waste of time.
For as we see, even this very day, with UK Government in complete disarray, the UK in total chaos, energy prices going skyhigh in a country that produces all of its energy, but yet is controlled from London, we have folks who oppose Independence!
For once I will back Douglas Ross in his calls for the First Minister to copy Prime Minister Truss, but not in quite the way Ross wants.
That Nicola Sturgeon admits she has made “mistakes”, and reverses her current Independence strategy totally.
She can either say circumstances have changed, ( yet again) and so must she, and if challenged, merely point to Liz Truss, and if Truss can change, so too can Sturgeon change tact just as easily, and no one can say anything against her for it, and become a true hero for Independence, or go down in historical ignominy as one being too afraid to take on London!
It’s up to her.
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Gordon, she shows no timidity or caution in any other sphere. I don’t believe that is the reason she has done all in her power to circumvent independence. Anyone who is timid and cautious by nature is so in all things. This is just another cul-de-sac. I think we have to look elsewhere for the answers.
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The same people who can’t negociate a bottle return scheme with Asda would be negociating with the UK goverment. Maybe they would get a boat.
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