Let me deal with Referendi first. If I ask 1000 people if Scotland should be Sovereign I will get 1000 correct answers; guaranteed. The answer could be [Yes/No Don’t know] all correct answers and I can progress from there. Simple question, simple a,b or c answer.
Now, if I want to ask the same question in the form of a referendum I can expect:
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- 2 years to plan
- Q & A for each potential perceived part of the question
- £thousands or £10s thousands in costs
- Political interference
- Media interference
- Threats, spins, distortion, fake news, false stats
- Divisions within the communities and across the country
- Baseless Predictions, conspiracies and probable the odd death threat
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This is just a sample basket of events if I go down the Referendum route. Guys, this was a simple Yes/No/Don’t know question. Cost almost nothing, happened in real time, gave me the information I needed and nobody got upset. I did not poke the bear, shake the hornets nest in fact no animals were harmed in this experiment.
I suspect many will have already grasped the concept, probably even got there before me. But, just in case I will rabbit on for a few more paragraphs ….
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Around 2012 it was all Indy for me. Canvassing, leafleting, presenting, stalls, Twitter, Facebook and of course blogging. The team stuff was all pre-prepared but Social Media and Blogging was down to me. I got to think about things for myself. Sure, I towed the Party Line. There was a lot I did not agree with and this came out in my blogs. I always felt that Alex Salmond and the SNP were going about this the wrong way.
2014 was a disaster, but it was also a great success. I think Alex did the honourable thing but not the smart thing. He should have focused on what had been achieved not what had not been achieved. Failure is the first step to success and I was disappointed when he resigned. The amount of learning was huge and therein lay the key to success. I don’t blame Alex for his exit and handing the reigns to Nicola Sturgeon as successor seemed intuitively right.
In the early years of Nicola Sturgeon she seemed to run with the momentum. On reflection I think the momentum was actually a bow wave from Alex. Like all bow waves it eventually fades away.
I took quite some time, perhaps denial played a key role but Nicola Sturgeon seemed to go rogue. She was enjoying the popularity and the role but was she really being tested. She was given one job by the people. While many things in Scotland seemed to be vastly superior to England, and I speak as an immigrant to Clydeside with 25 Years in the City of London but this was simply not why she was there. For me the tipping point came when she was called upon to back Alex who was faced with serious allegations. Even the uber-corrupt Tories close ranks to protect their own until it becomes too risky. Not so, Nicola Sturgeon. First opportunity she throws him under the bus in a manner that looked to me more planned than Brutus.
When the clank of that penny hitting the floor came around the blinkers came off and on reflection I could see so many deeply worrying aspect to her leadership. Not least of all her attitude to the Yes Community and her complete lack of a strategy to do the one job she was given.
I am not going to go through all the deeply worrying facets of her leadership – I think I have done that to death in earlier blogs.
I want to suggest a somewhat different, perhaps controversial approach to Independence. First of all I avoid using the term Independence, I see the term as a Westminster trick word conveying isolation. Scotland was never Independent – we were Sovereign, we were Interdependent, we were a proper nation. Unfortunately, we were on the doorstep of an Empire building war mongering belligerent neighbour who basically conspired to snap us up just for the sheer hell of it. Scotland brought nothing to the English party at that time.
So here is my take. Forget Independence voting. That is a trap. It’s almost like turning up at the polling station to find a block of cheese in the doorway.
Under International Law the people of a country decide for themselves if they want to run their own affairs. They don’t ask permission, they don’t have to qualify, they don’t do it to for personal aggrandisement, or because it is easy. People do this as a Right, a Human Right and they take all the consequences, good bad and indifferent. Think about the uttering of the likes of Gordon Brown, ‘you don’t have currency’ [read Brown’d off] says the man who trashed the UK finances, Reserves and pensions. The man who turned the UK into a FIAT economy from which it can never emerge. Taking back our Sovereignty is the only way forward. If we have the backing and support of other nations then all the better. But do we? probably more so than any other country in history. Scotland is a nation loved, admired, respected and occasionally envied except maybe our football? sorry folks.
Let’s get past some tough concepts:
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- Sovereignty is not politics. Asking a people to make a decision on their Sovereignty based on a Political Party’s manifesto is profoundly wrong and perhaps very worrying
- The Sovereignty question is as basic as ‘should slavery be abolished?’ The question does not require qualification, justification or permission. Mandela did not ask permission to set his people free.
- Sovereignty gives people freedom to control their destiny and face the consequences from good through bad and everything in the middle. Considering the consequences prior to making the decision is cowardly, lazy and perhaps symptomatic of servitude. What I call Jockholm Syndrome.
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I think, probably believe, that Alex Salmond knows that he and probably others and his predecessors know they made one big mistake. From this everything else went wrong and there was no going back at that time: CONFLATING A NATION’S SOVEREIGNTY WITH THE ASPIRATION OF A POLITICAL PARTY. Had Alex left the people to decide, free of politics the SNP would have been returned as the political driving force of Sovereign Scotland well into the foreseeable future.
If this mistake had been avoided, in 2014 Scotland would have voted out of the UK, forged a new and better working relationship with our neighbours, remained in the EU and without a shadow of doubt, England would never have voted to leave the EU. England has for decades felt financially emboldened; in denial of the source of their wealth withheld by MSM – that would be Scotland of course. Sovereign Scotland would have forced the English to re-evaluate their relationship with the EU.
So, given all this what is the mechanism? It is really quite simple.
I call this CONFIRMATIVE LOGIC
We probably do this 20 times a day. We read the small print and tick the ‘I accept’ box – job done, one tick. Few ever read the wording so they adopt that other concept TRUST.
There is a Divine Principle that protects every free nation. Politics is a term in Office, Sovereignty is Forever.
OK. Imagine I am the leader of a Fictitious Political Party the FPP and we have been in power for years. We stood on a platform of regaining Scotland’s Sovereignty so now, the time has come:
I broadcast my Statement to the Nation:
There is a General Election in eg 3 months. We ask you to consider ONE thing and ONE thing only. As we have stated our first principle is a Sovereign Scotland. If you vote for us we will consider that a Plebiscite to declare our International Human Right of Self Determination. There is no Manifesto, no White Paper, no Promises. We ask only a judgement on TRUST. Judge us on our past record, what we did well, what we did not so well and how we responded. Did we act in the best interest of the future for the people. We make no promises. The party will say no more, answer no questions, predict no outcomes – TRUST IS NEVER A QUESTION. ON THIS OCCASION IT IS AN ACTION, A SIMPLE MARK ON A PIECE OF PAPER