Don't tell me the British are panicking! I'm not stupid and I will not be patronised! They are not panicking! They are calmly, coolly and arrogantly going about the business of protecting and advancing their own narrow interests at the expense of anyone they can push the cost onto. Scotland being at the head of that particular queue! They are perfectly relaxed; leaning against the Union knowing it will protect them so long as they preserve it.
It's that mindset thing again! Pete Wishart, and even more regrettably Nicola Sturgeon, think it perfectly normal and acceptable that the government of England-as-Britain should be intimately involved in the process by which Scotland exercises its right of self-determination.
Rather than the now routine outrage at some British politician's lies it might have been more interesting and thought-provoking to consider why this phrase is being so enthusiastically weaponised by the British political elite and their lackeys in the British media.
Every moment of every day is a struggle not to succumb to the hopelessness that threatens to overwhelm and extinguish even the anger at the way members are being treated by party leaders and senior managers.
So! The SNP sets up a 'working group' to study stuff that should have been the subject of constant and intense study for at least the last couple of decades. This, we assume, won't happen until after the party conference at the end of this month. Then we're into December and the holiday season and then the January 1 2021 plunge into the Brexit unknown and then the election campaign and always there is the public health crisis. So, maybe this 'working group' gets grouped and working sometime in the first half of next year. Or maybe, the second half. Or maybe, like so many SNP 'initiatives' which have been launched in response to some clamour from the independence movement, the whole thing just peters out.
That's the whole story. The Scottish Government wants to address a situation in Scotland with measure tailored to the situation in Scotland. The British government doesn't want that. Not that they actively want more people to die. Just that they actively don't care if more people die. It is not a factor in their political calculations. Other than that it suits the British establishment's agenda if a situation worsens under an SNP administration. The situation worsening bit is a factor. The people dying bit isn't.
Why would we empower their deviousness? Why would we pander to their lack of principle? Why would we facilitate interference in our constitutional referendum by what, if we heed Joanna Charry's advice, we must regard as an unfriendly foreign power? Am I missing some impenetrably cryptic irony here?
Plan B is, at best, a half-measure. It is exciting and appealing only because it stands in contrast to a Plan A which in a desert analogy now stretched well beyond its safe operating limits would be the equivalent of drinking our own urine. Plan A is bad. Plan B is merely a bit less bad.
A more concise way of putting the two options I mentioned in the first paragraph is that we can have a Scottish referendum or we can have a British referendum. One or the other.
Given that no credible process for a free and fair referendum exists within the legal and constitutional framework developed by the British state for the purpose of preserving the Union at any cost to the people of Scotland, the party must commit to creating such a process immediately upon being elected to govern. Only be having a commitment to the Manifesto for Independence well in advance of the election can the Scottish Government have an unassailable mandate to take the action which will be required when the inevitable confrontation with the British state happens.
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A blog by Iain Lawson
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All the recent posts at: https://www.scoop.it/topic/talking-up-scotland Contact: talkingupreminders@gmail.com
