Imagine the following post summarising the current state of the Scottish independence debate.
There’s an independence referendum coming. Obviously, with less than a year to go, the Scottish Government’s campaign is in full swing. There have been marches through the streets of major Scottish towns and cities, SNP MPs and MSPs at their head, spreading the word, making sure everyone in Scotland knows about the benefits of independence.
The biggest march, so far, has been in Glasgow, with Nicola Sturgeon leading over quarter of a million independence supporters to a rally in Glasgow Green. An even bigger march and rally is planned for Edinburgh, with close to half a million expected on the Meadows to witness the widely rumoured reconciliation between Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon, setting aside their differences to work together for independence.
The independence bloggers have all got a new lease of life. Stuart Campbell has unretired Wings over Scotland and has nothing but praise for the actions of the Scottish Government. Many blogs, even including my own poor efforts, are showing a ten-fold increase in traffic, driven by the availability of two independence supporting video channels now being broadcast into every home in Scotland and being watched by millions.
Even the mainstream media are finding it impossible to ignore what’s going on, especially following the decision of Scottish Labour Party members to demand separation from the UK Labour party so Scottish Labour can become a truly Scottish based party. The Scottish Liberal Democrats are soon expected to follow suit. The numbers involved in independence events are so large that the mainstream media, even including BBC Scotland, are forced to report (almost) truthfully on what’s happening, even showing glimpses of the hundreds of onlookers stepping off the pavement to join the marchers. Unionist supporting organisations are finding it hard to get a platform because very few want to listen to what they have to say and they have no evidence to back up their increasingly deranged utterings.
How many of you have been swept up by the colour and noise and excitement of the events? How many of you have now been converted to be strong independence supporters when the true facts were put to you by the Government. Were you a No and are you now a Yes? Will you now be voting for independence? The campaign is being and will be a success. There is no longer any doubt that independence is the settled will of the Scottish people. Scotland will return to being an independent country next year.
But …
Is this true or is it all a figment of my imagination? Is it just wishful thinking on my part? Is it all a dream? Unfortunately, it turns out I’ve woken up to the real nightmare, the real nightmare where nothing described above is happening and where the ‘party of independence’ has leaders who are actively trying to prevent independence. This is the nightmare when the people in whom you put your trust turn out to be no better than those you knew would do everything they could to stop you from succeeding. This is present day Scotland.
However, to end on a lighter note, here’s a few words that Abba could have written to cheer you up and help you through these dark times.
I Have a Dream, a fantasy
To help me through, reality
And my destination, makes it worth the while
Pushin’ through the darkness, it’s just another mile
I believe in Indy
Something good in everything I see
I believe in Indy
When I know the time is right for me
I’ll cross the stream, I Have a Dream
Don’t give up. Keep the faith, folks.
Angry Weegie 
Nicely put AngryWeegie. An inventive way to contrast what would have been happening had genuine Independence supporiters been in control of the SNP with what counts for reality in Scotland these days. LIke you have been saying on this blog for a while now we have been sold out. When will the punters suss it out? There are folk at my work and in my wider circle of friends and acquaintances who are still able to find excuses for them. They are usually nice people who have invested a bit of their hearts in the project. Folk like myself who are of a more cynical bent and who have a clearer idea in their head what a scottish nationalist actually is picked up on them years ago.
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The Salmond fit up. This is just one feature of the betrayal of the Scottish Independence cause. Picking through this one issue and the reams of evidence is complicated and takes ageas for me to even try to do and that is why I point folk to Gordon Dangerfield’s blog. Hardly any of them bothere to read it. In Scotland things have to get bad before people will be forced to find out for themselves or realise the damage that is being done to Scotland deliberately by those that claim to be its protectors. It is a very sad state of affairs. Maybe we are bedevilled by what some call ‘A Wish for Kings’ and because of this we are a long way from reasserting the people’s sovereignty. Our British Establsihment opponents in Scotland would go to extreme lenghts to stop the Scottish people usurping their privileges. How do you see this working out?
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I suppose most Indy supporters expected Sturgeon to continue on from where Salmond left off. I know I did. I even found an excuse for no progress in 2015, but 2016 was when I started to get concerned. By.the time she and her mates tried to give Alex a life sentence, I had lost faith and nothing since has made me change my mind.
The worst aspect is Sturgeon’s continued repeating of her Salmond was really guilty mantra, picked up by so many of the other elected members. I lost loads of ‘friends’ because I wouldn’t go along with it, but the final straw was when I found out the the NEIGHBOURING branch had a team monitoring both my social media output and my wife’s and were creating a log of ‘transgressions’. This is what MSPs and councillors have become.
Even now, there are so many who still believe Sturgeon is the Indy champion and she’ll bring us independence when the time is right, without stopping to wonder why the time hasn’t been right before now.
How can anyone accept zero progress months after the announcement of the referendum? How can anyone accept the Supreme Court stalling? How can anyone accept handing over the decision on independence to Westminster and the Tories? How can anyone accept that ordinary members have no input into party policy, made obvious by the only legislation being pushed being self-id which has never been discussed at party conference and has never appeared in any manifesto, despite recent attempts by the leadership to rewrite history. It’s all so depressing.
I can’t see anything changing while folk still vote for them. As long as voters continue to give them another ‘one last chance’, why should they change. It’s all about the money and status now. There’s no interest in independence as it would risk losing both and that’s what Sturgeon’s SNP is all about. If she gets her longed for UN job, she’ll hand over the reins to Robertson or Smith and nothing will change. It’s too late for the SNP. Disaster at the ballot box, along the lines of Labour in 2015, is the only way to be rid of them. Unfortunately, I don’t think Alba are radical enough at the moment to get the benefit of an SNP plunge. My only hope is that this will change by the time the next election comes along.
The worst of all possible worlds would be Labour in power in both Holyrood and Westminster. That would almost certainly kill independence for decades.
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Aye, it looks bad no doubt about it.
I followed the same path, doubts were there early doors. 2015 wasn’t about Independence evidently. Then 2016 and the Brexit open goal when it became clear that the SNP leadership was sidelining genuine Independence groups and voices and splitting up the movement. Cutting the members and from any input into policy cuts the public out from input as well. Why are they doing this? Still, there was always the benefit of the doubt until the Salmond fit up.
Sturgeon was supported by the crown office when trying to fit Salmond up. The press were on board (If we cannae get him in court then we will do him in the court of public opinion). The police did their bit no questions asked and the top civil servants in Scotland colluded with her. That means the British state or at least its presence in Scotland was on board with the scheme.
It is obvious that some agreement has been made. It has to have been. Possibly only here in Scotland but certainly with the agreement and support of the agencies of the British state. It has to be along the lines of we will stop Independence and keep the important people happy by governing along neoliberal lines in return we get to fill our pockets and pensions. Maybe a nice job at the UN where our sociopath FM can get all the attention she craves.
Why though? Sturgeon and her management team – Murrell, Robertson, Blackford – are thieves and nasty bastards certainly. Has this been a set up going back longer than 2014?
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One of the truly awful things Sturgeon has managed is politicising the police and the legal establishment and bribing the press. If you’re on the wrong side of Sturgeon, you can be arrested for any old thing, e.g. stickers and ribbons, but if you’re in the clan, you can get away with murder (it’s what they tried with Salmond). The passing of the Hate Crimes act will just make it easier. There’s no doubt that there’s collusion with the British state. She’ll be looking for their support when the time comes to move on to bigger and better things.
When did it start? Not with Alex Salmond. He may have made mistakes, but independence was and is his aim. I think it started in November, 2014. Surely the decision to rule out independence in as a consequence of a victory in 2015 was the first signs of what was to come. Was she planning beforehand? Was she already getting help from MI5? If we’ve learned anything about Sturgeon, it’s that strategy is not her forte, but it happened so quickly after her coronation that there must be some suspicion of pre-FM collusion. After all, MI5 would already have known the result of the referendum and would be looking for a patsy to control afterwards. Was it bribery or blackmail? Who knows, but I would go for the former.
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Thanks for the reply.
There would be no need for blackmail
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‘NEIGHBOURING branch had a team monitoring both my social media output and my wife’s and were creating a log of ‘transgressions’. This is what MSPs and councillors have become.’
I was in the branch in Glasgow, a big one. it was tightly controlled by a small group of people, none of whom I would describe as Scottish nationalists. They were involved when the sacking of Joanna Cherry took place (same weekend as the shenanigans with the Trans Phobia definition was being worked on, same weekend that the list stitchup took place). I left in disgust at that point. I take it you think that the MSP’s and councillors are controlling the branches and running their little purges using the anti civil rights movement as a means to this end? Would you say that the anti-civil rights cult (Trans, Queer theory, anti child safeguarding, etc etc) that has found a host within the SNP are being used by the leadership to fill positions and therefore keep nationalists away from influence or are the leadership actually on board with it?
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It easy to take over a branch. Very few people turn up for meetings, so if there’s a small determined group, a dozen would do for almost all branches, you can easily get control and vote your group into all the exec positions. Your group may almost all be recent joiners. After all, every branch will welcome newcomers willing to put their names forward for difficult to fill positions. You then introduce rules to make it virtually impossible for anyone outside the group to introduce any discussion topics you don’t want and even invent reasons to get rid of any long standing branch members who you can’t vote out. A branch can completely change in the space of a few months.
Was Sturgeon involved in creating the situation or did she just take advantage of the situation? For reasons of lack of strategic thinking, I’d go with the latter. Post referendum, SNP membership increased enormously and no one really cared where they came from or what their background was. Many came from Labour, some because they wanted independence, but more because they wanted power and opportunity which they could no longer get in Labour. Overnight, Scottish elections went from you could elect a monkey in a red rosette to you could elect a monkey in a yellow rosette. Remember the rules for becoming a candidate were changed pre-2015 to allow recent party members the opportunity to stand, and many did, often at the expense of long-standing independence supporting members. Perhaps the first example of gerrymandering the candidates, just like putting disabled and minority candidates at the top of the list, especially when you could self-id as disabled or as a member of a minority group. The result was that many of the 2015 landslide had been members of the SNP for only a few months. Not much of preparation to get a £70k+ job.
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Thanks again for this reply. I can see that was how it was done now. It was something to be taken advantage of. There is a fair degree of coordination involved in it non the less. Strategy and organising (made easier by having so many wages made dependent on the leader I imagine). Some of the players weren’t in paid positions not directly paid by the SNP anyway. That must be one source of info. Payments made for services, jobs to pals etc.
All this had to be discussed, decisions made, plans and so on. There must have been a great many meetings, emails, text messages, whatsapp groups between the main players who would then have to provide e a little info to the people who were required to assist down the chain. Somewhere there must be a lot of incriminating information. The meeting involving Sturgeons inner circle and a prominent member of the Independence movement discussing whether to have criminal charges brought against Salmond springs to mind. There must have been a hundred or two similar meetings on dozens and dozens of different issues from removing democracy from the party to stitching us up on Scotwind right through to turning the SNP effectively into a unionist party.
A fair number of people have will have enough info to destroy Sturgeon’s circle even to have them jailed. Why do you think no one has spoken out beyond slipping wee bits of info now and again to the pro indy bloggers? Someone must have been dissatisffied somewhere. Despite the silence Sturgeon and her creeps must be absolutely despised by a section of mps and msps.
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Remembering that members of a branch likely live fairly close together, it might be easier than you think to make plans without writing much down, but you’re right about the large proportion dependent on the SNP for their income, though most of it will be paid by us. In some branches, the tight little group will not only take up all the branch positions, they’ll also have paid elected positions, MPs, MSPs and councillors, all that income dependent on keeping in with Sturgeon.
Quite a few will know where the bodies are buried, but that works both ways. They won’t want to leave because of the loss of income and Sturgeon won’t get rid of them because of what they know. Of course, if a relationship breaks down, there’s always plenty of folk available to spread smears and if that fails, there’s the police and the justice system to take charge. It’s not the guilty verdict that’s the problem, that can be difficult to get. It’s the cost of the defence that can leave you nearly bankrupt.
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Bollocks to it Angry Weegie. I am not in the slightest interested in the cult. They’ll be found out in the courts or in wider society in general eventually. I would be interested in your point of view as to when, why and how the SNP leadership took the shilling though.
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