Getting the ‘naw ye cannaes’ in early

Aaand we’re off, you can tell when the British nationalists are rattled when they wheel out “experts” to tell Scotland “Naw, ye cannae” because we’re too wee. too shtupit, too poor, too insignificant [delete as appropriate]. The latest entry in the genre has been dredged up by the Herald’s resident SNP baddist Tom Gordon, who has called upon Professor James Mitchell of Edinburgh University to provide a suitable, “But they can’t Colin, they just can’t” quote as clickbait for the British nationalist frothers who infest the comments section of a newspaper which still claims to be “neutral” on the topic of Scottish independence. That would be the rabidly SNP hating Professor James Mitchell, who has a long and inglorious record on badmouthing the SNP, the Scottish Government and Nicola Sturgeon in particular, Mitchell is impartial in exactly the same way that the Herald is neutral on the subject of Scottish independence.

The Professor is keen to let us know that there is no such thing as a de facto referendum, an election is an election he tells us, and the SNP cannot dictate the terms of the election. “But they can’t Colin, they just can’t.” However that is not what the SNP is proposing. The SNP is not in the business of telling other parties what platforms they can stand on, that would be the British nationalists who do that sort of thing. The Tories, Labour, and the Lib Dems can put whatever propositions they like before the electorate, and so can the SNP and other pro-independence parties who agree that this election is aimed at securing a mandate for independence. However if this is a de facto referendum on independence we will all be voting in full knowledge that the British nationalist parties have stripped any meaningful sense of union from the polity known as the United Kingdom and will have denied any validity to their once proud boast that the UK is a voluntary partnership of nations.

The SNP’s manifesto for the 2019 UK General Election was 52 pages long. It contained policies on health, tackling poverty and inequality, a call for the devolution of employment law, and a whole lot more besides. While it is not for me to pre-empt the SNP manifesto in a UK General Election which will be a de facto referendum on independence, I suspect that the SNP manifesto in that election will be considerably shorter, possibly just one brief sentence along the lines of “Scotland should be an independent country.” The manifestos of the other pro-independence parties may be very similar. Tom Gordon and his pet “But ye cannaes” should look up the UK General Election of 1918 because Sinn Fein did precisely that in order to secure a mandate for Irish independence at the 1918 election, if the SNP declare that a vote for them is a vote for independence and wins on that issue, no amount of British nationalist pettit lips can change the fact that Scotland will have voted for independence in a lawful vote and will have done so without the permission of the occupant of Downing Street.

Tom Gordon has got in his first “blow for the SNP” early, risible as it is. Knowing that they have lost control of the process the apologists for British nationalism are desperate to delegitimise the vote in an effort to discourage voter participation. We will be seeing a lot more of this sort of thing in the weeks and months ahead. This is what counts as a case for the union these days, at least that is what we are still calling it for now, until either Boris Johnson or the UK Supreme Court plunge a stake through its heart.

They are also trotting out their other tropes from 2014. Expect plenty of references to “Nicola Sturgeon’s referendum” just as the last time round it was “Alex Salmond’s referendum.” It’s an “SNP referendum” not an independence referendum. It suits the British nationalists to pretend that Scottish independence is wholly owned by the SNP as they try to peel off voters who might support independence but who don’t support the SNP and hope that they don’t remember that an independent Scotland will be a democracy, indeed far more democratic than this so-called union and people will be perfectly free to vote for whomever they choose.

Ever since the First Minister made her announcement there has been a lot of angry noise and deflection from the British nationalists, however not a single one has been able to give a credible alternative route to independence, because if the democratically elected Scottish Government are not able to hold the referendum that they have been elected to hold then what exactly is the democratic route to a referendum?

It’s a question that goes to the very heart of the nature of this so called union, and it’s a question that remains unanswered because the likes of Tom Gordon who are so numerous in the Scottish media are far more interested in finding “blow for Nicola Sturgeon ” quotes, however spurious or irrelevant, than they are in questioning the nature of this supposed union that they are so keen that Scotland remains a part of.

The answers to the question that they do elicit from the Tories are even more risible than Tom Gordon’s “blow for Nicola Sturgeon,” a “blow” which even if it were something substantive would not be a “blow for Nicola Sturgeon” but a blow for meaningful democracy in Scotland as a part of the UK, not that that appears to trouble the Scottish media. On Tuesday the BBC’s Glenn Campbell asked Douglas Ross what the democratic route to an independence referendum was if it is not a majority for one in Holyrood. Ross insisted that there is indeed a democratic route to another referendum but refused to say what it might involve because he’s “not in the business of helping to break up the UK”. So his position is that there really is a democratic route to another referendum but it’s a super secret one and he’s not going to tell anyone what it is because it might encourage people to use it. This arrant nonsense appeared to suffice for Glenn Campbell, who proceeded to button up the back of his head and hoped that viewers would do likewise.

Between now and the inevitable independence vote we will be seeing a lot of “blow for Nicola Sturgeon” headlines. What we won’t be seeing is a positive case for Westminster rule or a credible means by which Scotland can be guaranteed that it can get what it votes for while remaining a part of the UK, because no such case and no such guarantees exist.

That is because if the Scottish media did start to interrogate the nature of the “union” instead of allowing Douglas Ross to fob off the question with intelligence insulting drivel they would find that it is founded on a lie. The real purpose of the anti-independence Scottish media is not to hold power to account, it is to fend off independence and to deflect any potential criticism of their beloved British state. Scotland, you had your wee dalliance with democracy in 2014, you are not allowed to change your mind no matter how many lies were told in order to secure the result that the British state wanted, no matter how much circumstances have changed. Now trot along, shut up, and do what you’re told. Westminster has some human rights to strip you of. Now here’s the terribly important Andrea Leadsom to ask “What currency are you going to use?” As though that were some clever gotcha and not just her displaying her usual Tory arrogance and ignorance, an arrogance and ignorance which is a powerful argument for independence all by itself.

___________________________________________

I won’t be about tomorrow (Friday) as I have to go in to Glasgow for a disability assessment. I’ll be back blogging on Monday, by which time I’m sure that there will be plenty more British nationalist desperation to scoff at.

Many thanks to everyone who kindly supported the annual fundraiser. It’s always a nerve wracking time, I’m literally asking people to put their money where my mouth is. I’m delighted to say that the target of £5000 wasn’t just reached it was smashed. From all sources, the Gofundme page, PayPal donations, and direct donations by cheque or into my bank account, the grand total raised was an incredible £11,094. In my wildest dreams  I could not have expected it to go so well and my deepest thanks to everyone who contributed.  It is heartening to know that so many people value my writing and that there is still an appreciative audience for a positive pro-independence message that concentrates on making the case for independence and debunking the arguments of the real enemies of Scottish independence, the Conservatives and their little helpers.  That’s what I will keep doing thanks to you.

My Gaelic maps of Scotland are still available, a perfect gift for any Gaelic learner or just for anyone who likes maps. The maps cost £15 each plus £7 P&P within the UK. You can order by sending a PayPal payment of £22 to weegingerbook@yahoo.com (Please remember to include the postal address where you want the map sent to).

I am now writing the daily newsletter for The National, published every day from Monday to Friday in the late afternoon.  So if you’d like a daily dose of dug you can subscribe to The National, Scotland’s only pro-independence newspaper, here: Subscriptions from The National

This is your reminder that the purpose of this blog is to promote Scottish independence. If the comment you want to make will not assist with that goal then don’t post it. If you want to mouth off about how much you dislike the SNP leadership there are other forums where you can do that. You’re not welcome to do it here.

You can help to support this blog with a PayPal donation. Please log into Paypal.com and send a payment to the email address weegingerbook@yahoo.com. Or alternatively click the donate button below. If you don’t have a PayPal account, just select “donate with card” after clicking the button.

Sometimes a ‘gamechanger’ really is just that

In the immortal words of Dad’s Army’s Corporal Jones, “They don’t like it up ’em.” It is safe to say that British nationalists are not reacting at all well to the realisation that they do not after all get to dictate the terms, timing, and conditions of the Scottish independence process. The term ‘game-changer’ is much over-used, but yesterday’s announcement from the First Minister about how the Scottish Government intends to proceed towards a lawful vote on Scottish independence with or without a Section 30 order was just that. Nicola Sturgeon made it clear that Scotland is not going to be consumed by a sterile debate about a Section 30 order, a debate which only benefits opponents of independence as it allows them to avoid confronting the substantive issues in the independence debate.

Scotland will not be held prisoner by a British Prime Minister who Scotland didn’t vote for and whose party has only six MPs in Scotland, four of whom have no confidence in him. Scotland will take its destiny into its own hands and will have its say on independence no matter what Johnson wants, because this is a matter for the people of Scotland to decide, not him.

The usual British nationalist suspects are deeply unhappy about this, how dare Nicola Sturgeon pursue her “divisive” and “damaging” referendum. Being divisive and damaging is Boris Johnson’s job.

Margaret Thatcher’s Scotland Secretary Malcolm Rifkind, who spent the 1980s and 1990s denying the people of Scotland any form of self-government despite overwhelming evidence that Scotland wanted its own Parliament, told BBC Radio 4 through pursed lips that “little Scotland” was going to be lonely and friendless without Westminster, the classic trope of the spurned abusive lover, “You are pathetic and useless and no one else will have you.” Rifkind also insisted that the Holyrood election in 2021 only gave Nicola Sturgeon the mandate to “ask for” a referendum, but he insisted that it did not give her a mandate to deserve one. What one might take from this condescending attempt to avoid the issue is that Rifkind doesn’t appear to grasp how democracy works, but then those of us who can remember his time as Scottish Secretary of State knew that already.

When the electorate of Scotland voted for a Scottish Parliament with an unassailable majority of pro-independence MSPs in an election campaign which was dominated by the single issue of whether there should be another independence referendum, that is what gave the Scottish Parliament the mandate to deserve the referendum. It is for the people of Scotland to decide whether another referendum is deserved, not unelected appointees to the House of Lords like Malcolm Rifkind who were awarded a seat in that undemocratic institution by their cronies for services to the denial of Scottish democracy. The people of Scotland gave their answer to that question in last year’s Holyrood election, it is not for Rifkind or any Conservative minister to gainsay them, particularly not one who has no mandate themselves from the people of Scotland.

Meanwhile Conservative Ministers are doing their usual run away and hide routine, Rifkind’s successor, the supremely useless Alister Jack, has refused all requests to be interviewed on BBC Scotland’s morning news show as have all other senior Scotland Office ministers and other senior Tories. That’s because they fear being questioned even by the institutionally unionist BBC on their refusal to acknowledge the democratic right of the people of Scotland to decide their own future.

The reason for their panic is that they were blindsided by yesterday’s announcement. This was not how the script was supposed to go. What was supposed to happen was that the Scottish Government announced its intention to press ahead with a referendum bill even without a Section 30 order. The British nationalists – we can’t really call them unionists any more – would then decry it as unlawful, and we would spend the rest of the year arguing about process and not the substance of the independence question while the British Government took its time over referring the matter to the courts in order to avoid being seen as the destroyers of traditional Scottish unionism and to eat up time so that it would become impossible to hold the referendum on the intended date of 19 October 2023. As all this was going on the anti-independence parties and their friends in the media would be demanding that the Scottish Government publish all its legal advice in full. And all the time the clock would be ticking and the anti-independence parties could continue to avoid dealing with the substance of the independence issue while they maintained their cosy lies about the nature of this supposed voluntary union of nations.

The decision of the Scottish Government to refer the question to the Supreme Court itself cuts through all that. Scotland is now in control of the timetable, not the British nationalists. What this means is that we will have a definitive answer to the legal questions within a couple of months, and if the UK Supreme Court does rule that Scotland is a hostage to Boris Johnson’s whims the UK Government itself and not some convenient proxy will be a party to that ruling. Traditional unionism as it has always been understood will be dead, and it will clearly be seen as the Conservatives who killed it. They will be forced to own that political reality, devastating as it is for the anti-independence cause. They will no longer be able to pose as “anti-nationalist unionists” but will be clearly seen for what they really are, Anglo-British nationalists who deny the sovereign right of the people of Scotland to choose the form of government best suited to their needs. If it’s not voluntary it’s not a union, it’s a prison.

Worst of all for the Anglo-British nationalists, they have lost control of the course of events. If they do win that court ruling they will not only have destroyed traditional unionism ,they still won’t be able to prevent Scotland having a vote on independence by which time they will be forced to go to the people of Scotland to defend a United Kingdom whose Supreme Court has ruled that Scotland does not after all have the right to self-determination. That’s not a defensible proposition.

You could see how unprepared the opponents of independence were in the perplexed questioning of presenters in the anti-independence media on Wednesday morning. Kay Burley on Sky News and John Kay on BBC Breakfast persisted in questioning the First Minister about “wildcat” and “unlawful” referendums despite the announcement yesterday making it clear that the independence vote will be entirely lawful. That’s British nationalism in a nutshell. It’s just not listening.

Many thanks to everyone who kindly supported the annual fundraiser. It’s always a nerve wracking time, I’m literally asking people to put their money where my mouth is. I’m delighted to say that the target of £5000 wasn’t just reached it was smashed. From all sources, the Gofundme page, PayPal donations, and direct donations by cheque or into my bank account, the grand total raised was an incredible £11,094. In my wildest dreams  I could not have expected it to go so well and my deepest thanks to everyone who contributed.  It is heartening to know that so many people value my writing and that there is still an appreciative audience for a positive pro-independence message that concentrates on making the case for independence and debunking the arguments of the real enemies of Scottish independence, the Conservatives and their little helpers.  That’s what I will keep doing thanks to you.

My Gaelic maps of Scotland are still available, a perfect gift for any Gaelic learner or just for anyone who likes maps. The maps cost £15 each plus £7 P&P within the UK. You can order by sending a PayPal payment of £22 to weegingerbook@yahoo.com (Please remember to include the postal address where you want the map sent to).

I am now writing the daily newsletter for The National, published every day from Monday to Friday in the late afternoon.  So if you’d like a daily dose of dug you can subscribe to The National, Scotland’s only pro-independence newspaper, here: Subscriptions from The National

This is your reminder that the purpose of this blog is to promote Scottish independence. If the comment you want to make will not assist with that goal then don’t post it. If you want to mouth off about how much you dislike the SNP leadership there are other forums where you can do that. You’re not welcome to do it here.

You can help to support this blog with a PayPal donation. Please log into Paypal.com and send a payment to the email address weegingerbook@yahoo.com. Or alternatively click the donate button below. If you don’t have a PayPal account, just select “donate with card” after clicking the button.

Well we are the people and we say yes

The First Minister began her much anticipated statement to Holyrood by quoting from the Scottish Claim of Right which affirmed the sovereign right of the Scottish people to choose the form of government best suited to their needs. She went on, quoting the late Canon Kenyon Wright who was instrumental in drafting that historic document which affirmed the right of the people of Scotland to choose a Scottish Parliament. Canon Wright observed, but what if the voice from Westminster says : “We say no and we are the state.” The canon retorted , “Well we say yes and we are the people.”

Right now the issue of another referendum is, as the First Minister noted, mired in questions of process which only benefit the anti-independence parties. This allows the likes of Douglas Ross and Anas Sarwar to focus on questions of process and the lawfulness or otherwise of another independence referendum and to side step questions on the substance of the matter. It is, as she correctly pointed out, vital to obtain legal clarity on the lawfulness of another referendum, otherwise all we get instead of addressing the actual issue of independence are anti-independence political opinions which the bulk of the Scottish media is only too happy to present as fact.

As a first step, the First Minister has written to Boris Johnson today in order to urge him to negotiate the terms of a Section 30 order with her in order to put the legality of the referendum beyond any doubt, the letter makes plain that Johnson’s actions to date “call into question the whole idea of the UK as a voluntary partnership.”

In order to avoid a long drawn out legal process, and to put pressure on Johnson, the letter also states that against the background of Johnson’s reluctance to respect the mandate given to the Scottish Parliament by the electorate of Scotland last year, ” the Lord Advocate has, following a request from me, decided to refer to the Supreme Court the question of whether Scottish Parliament legislation for such a referendum relates to reserved matters. The reference is being served on the Advocate General today.”

What this means is that the Conservative Government will be a party to the case and that Johnson and his allies cannot hide behind a case brought forward by some private individuals acting as British nationalist proxies. If the political pressure Nicola Sturgeon has now created forces Johnson to negotiate a Section 30 order, or if the Supreme court rules that the referendum bill is within the competence of Holyrood then all is well and good, the lawfulness of the referendum will have been put beyond any doubt and the referendum will take place on 19 October 2023 with the question “Should Scotland be an independent country?”

The fact that the referendum will be consultative does not diminish its standing, no matter what Douglas Ross might want us all to believe. In the UK all referendums are consultative. The 2014 referendum was consultative, as were the 2016 EU referendum, the 1999 devolution referendum and the 1979 Assembly referendum.

However if Johnson continues to refuse a Section 30 order and the Supreme Court rules that the Scottish Parliament does not have the right to implement the mandate given to it by the people of Scotland in a democratic election, this will be a ruling obtained by the Conservative government, and the Johnson government will stand revealed as holding the democratic will of the people of Scotland in contempt and of having destroyed the proud claim of traditional Scottish unionism, that Scotland is a partner nation in a voluntary union which the Scottish people have the right to end should they so choose. Scotland will have been told that it does not matter what it votes for, it is subject to the whims of a Prime Minister from a party which has not won an election in Scotland since the 1950s, a party with a mere six MPs in Scotland, four of whom have no confidence in the Prime Minister whom they want to hold Scotland hostage. This would change the nature of the independence debate at a stroke, it would no longer be a debate about what is the best form of government for Scotland, but would become a campaign to guarantee democracy itself.

Such a ruling will have seismic political effects. It will, as Nicola Sturgeon pointed out, not be the end of the matter, indeed as she said it would make the argument for independence in the strongest possible terms. The independence debate is a political debate not a legal debate. It is a debate which can only be settled with a democratic event, not with a court ruling. If the UK Supreme Court does indeed rule that it doesn’t matter what Scotland votes for, the anti-independence parties will be forced to defend a UK which explicitly denies Scottish democracy and we can add “a voluntary partnership of nations” to the long list of British nationalist lies along with Gordie Broon’s Vow, the Sewel Convention being given legal status, and the promise that only a No vote in 2014 could guarantee Scotland’s place in the European Union.

If the British state is foolish enough and arrogant enough to go down that democracy denying road then there will be consequences. The First Minister went further than many were expecting and made it clear that the people of Scotland will not be denied their say. If all routes to a lawful referendum are blocked off by a Conservative party which is running scared of the verdict of the people of Scotland then the next UK General Election in Scotland will become a de facto referendum on independence, a campaign which the anti-independence parties will have to fight having made it clear to the people of Scotland that they do not respect the will of the Scottish electorate. They will be standing on a platform of “Vote for us Scotland, you have no standing as a nation and we are going to ignore you.” It will be an election where the future of democracy itself is at stake, an election where what is on the ballot is Scotland’s very status as a nation with the right to decide its own future. Nicola Sturgeon’s announcement today made it plain that one way or another, Scotland will have its say, either in a lawful referendum on 19 October 2023, or in a General Election in which it will be clear that the union is dead and Westminster does not recognise Scotland’s historic nationhood in any meaningful sense.  Johnson and the UK Supreme Court can say no if they want to, well we say yes and we are the people.

Many thanks to everyone who kindly supported the annual fundraiser. It’s always a nerve wracking time, I’m literally asking people to put their money where my mouth is. I’m delighted to say that the target of £5000 wasn’t just reached it was smashed. From all sources, the Gofundme page, PayPal donations, and direct donations by cheque or into my bank account, the grand total raised was an incredible £11,094. In my wildest dreams  I could not have expected it to go so well and my deepest thanks to everyone who contributed.  It is heartening to know that so many people value my writing and that there is still an appreciative audience for a positive pro-independence message that concentrates on making the case for independence and debunking the arguments of the real enemies of Scottish independence, the Conservatives and their little helpers.  That’s what I will keep doing thanks to you.

My Gaelic maps of Scotland are still available, a perfect gift for any Gaelic learner or just for anyone who likes maps. The maps cost £15 each plus £7 P&P within the UK. You can order by sending a PayPal payment of £22 to weegingerbook@yahoo.com (Please remember to include the postal address where you want the map sent to).

I am now writing the daily newsletter for The National, published every day from Monday to Friday in the late afternoon.  So if you’d like a daily dose of dug you can subscribe to The National, Scotland’s only pro-independence newspaper, here: Subscriptions from The National

This is your reminder that the purpose of this blog is to promote Scottish independence. If the comment you want to make will not assist with that goal then don’t post it. If you want to mouth off about how much you dislike the SNP leadership there are other forums where you can do that. You’re not welcome to do it here.

You can help to support this blog with a PayPal donation. Please log into Paypal.com and send a payment to the email address weegingerbook@yahoo.com. Or alternatively click the donate button below. If you don’t have a PayPal account, just select “donate with card” after clicking the button.

The laying on of hands

In the Middle Ages, and right up until 1714, it was believed that ills could be cured by a king or queen laying their hands on an afflicted individual. The ceremony of the laying on of hands was most commonly associated with the disease scrofula, a bacterial inflammation of the lymph glands which usually causes disfiguring but painless lesions on the neck. Noawadays it is easily treated with a course of antibiotics. The disease is rarely fatal and often goes into spontaneous remission, a miraculous seeming disappearance which was hailed by 17th century Nicolas Witchells as “Proofe that ye Monarche is indeede Marvellous.”

Today the Queen and assorted other members of her family, but not the one with the miraculously vanishing sweat glands, came on a visit to Scotland, stopping off in Edinburgh for a spot of sycophantic pseudo-mediaeval ritual before buggering off to Balmoral for a summer of massacring the local wildlife. Perhaps the British state is hoping that this spot of passing monarchical attention will miraculously cure what Westminster regards as the unsightly outbreak of independence support in Scotland. Given the other royal stories to hit the press today, that seems about as likely to happen as Prince Charles refusing to accept Fortnum and Mason’s bags and suitcases stuffed with banknotes, presented to him and his staff by some Middle Eastern potentate with a record of trashing human rights that would make even Priti Patel blush.

There has of course been no impropriety. Accepting suitcases stuffed with cash from authoritarian rulers is all part of the job for a [checks notes] working royal. It was all for *charidee* so that makes it all A-OK and totally above board.

Not that I have any affection or sympathy for Prince Charles, a cosseted and indulged man who reeks of hypocrisy, but it is interesting that just a few days after he criticised the British Government’s despicable, unlawful, and morally repugnant policy of sending asylum seekers on a one way trip to a Central African dictatorship with a record on human rights as poor as those of the regimes they’re fleeing, up pops the Daily Mail with some dirt on him dating from 2015, a story which they have known about for seven years but only now have chosen to publish.

Prince Charles has now called for an investigation into the “cash in bags” controversy, Which is a bit odd seeing as how he was the one who accepted the suitcases and shopping bags stuffed full of dosh. There’s no need for an investigation, he just needs to tell us all why he thought that behaving as though he was a drug baron in the middle of a dodgy cocaine deal was remotely appropriate behaviour for anyone never mind the next head of state. What does this sordid little episode tell us about his judgement, even if as he asserts, it was all legitimate? The Prince’s representatives say that “all correct procedures were followed”, which makes you wonder what the “correct procedures” are when it comes to accepting bags of cash from the leaders of oppressive regimes.

Meanwhile, as his maw arrived in Edinburgh on her summer hols, it came out that she and her minions have been intervening to get Scottish legislation altered even before it comes before Parliament meaning that MSPs don’t even know that the royal family has been meddling in the democratic process in order to protect the financial and other interests of the royal household. A Scottish government memo obtained by the Guardian newspaper has revealed that “it is almost certain” that draft legislation has been secretly changed in order to secure the Queen’s approval.

Under rules known in Scotland as Crown Consent, which are imposed upon Holyrood by the Westminster Parliament, the monarch and her advisors are routinely given advance sight of all legislation which could potentially have an impact on the Queen’s personal property or public powers. Effectively this gives the royal household a back door into legislation allowing it to make changes to any proposed laws that it dislikes or which it fears may affect the private wealth of the Windsor family. The fact that this intervention takes place before the proposed new laws are presented to Holyrood means that MSPs have no way of knowing if the royal household has intervened in order to protect its vast wealth.

Last year, lawyers for the royal household secretly lobbied Scottish ministers to change a draft law in order to exempt the queen’s private land from a major initiative to cut carbon emissions. The exemption they secured meant that the Queen is the only private landowner in Scotland who is not required to facilitate the construction of pipelines to heat buildings using renewable energy. Since the start of her reign in 1952, the Queen and Prince Charles have vetted more than 1,000 laws enacted by the Westminster parliament under the consent mechanism. And yet despite literally having a licence to exempt themselves from legislation that might cost them money, Members of this immensely entitled family still feel the need to accept bags of cash from Middle Eastern autocrats.

As long as Scotland remains a part of the United Kingdom this kind of scandal will continue, but what will also continue are all the other instances of royal grift that we never get to hear about. The biggest scandal here are all the scandals which are kept under wraps. You can be quite sure that for every marital infidelity, suitcase full of cash, or pauchled law that we hear about there are dozens more which are kept firmly under wraps and never come to public attention. The queen passing through Edinburgh on her way to her Highland estate isn’t going to change any of that. Westminster will never change it. The only thing that will change it is independence and a written constitution. Tomorrow Scotland has a far more important appointment than a passing visit from the queen, we will find out more about the steps towards this country’s date with destiny and the independence referendum to come, when the people of Scotland can lay their own hands on Scotland’s future and cure it of Westminster’s ills.

Many thanks to everyone who kindly supported the annual fundraiser. It’s always a nerve wracking time, I’m literally asking people to put their money where my mouth is. I’m delighted to say that the target of £5000 wasn’t just reached it was smashed. From all sources, the Gofundme page, PayPal donations, and direct donations by cheque or into my bank account, the grand total raised was an incredible £11,094. In my wildest dreams  Icould not have expected it to go so well and my deepest thanks to everyone who contributed.  It is heartening to know that so many people value my writing and that there is still an appreciative audience for a positive pro-independence message that concentrates on making the case for independence and debunking the arguments of the real enemies of Scottish independence, the Conservatives and their little helpers.  That’s what I will keep doing thanks to you.

My Gaelic maps of Scotland are still available, a perfect gift for any Gaelic learner or just for anyone who likes maps. The maps cost £15 each plus £7 P&P within the UK. You can order by sending a PayPal payment of £22 to weegingerbook@yahoo.com (Please remember to include the postal address where you want the map sent to).

I am now writing the daily newsletter for The National, published every day from Monday to Friday in the late afternoon.  So if you’d like a daily dose of dug you can subscribe to The National, Scotland’s only pro-independence newspaper, here: Subscriptions from The National

This is your reminder that the purpose of this blog is to promote Scottish independence. If the comment you want to make will not assist with that goal then don’t post it. If you want to mouth off about how much you dislike the SNP leadership there are other forums where you can do that. You’re not welcome to do it here.

You can help to support this blog with a PayPal donation. Please log into Paypal.com and send a payment to the email address weegingerbook@yahoo.com. Or alternatively click the donate button below. If you don’t have a PayPal account, just select “donate with card” after clicking the button.

British nationalism: making a mockery of Scottish democracy

The anti-independence parties and their friends in the media are convinced that the British Government has “blocked off all legal routes to indyref2 next year,” according to a headline in the increasingly British nationalist Herald newspaper on Sunday. The actual article was more nuanced, Professor Ciaran Martin, the man responsible for the quote, which the paper wrenched from all context, also said that he thought that some form of consultative referendum might be legally possible, which isn’t quite the absolute closing down of any legal route to a referendum next year which was screamed by the headline.

Under what passes for a constitution in this increasingly disunited Kingdom, all referendums are consultative anyway. The EU referendum was a consultative referendum. The Edinburgh Agreement underpinning the 2014 referendum was a political agreement, it did not make the result legally binding. What it did was to put the referendum itself beyond legal challange. In the event that Yes had won, Westminster would not have been legally compelled to implement the result. The fundamental principle of the British constitution is that the sovereignty of the Westminster Parliament is absolute. There would have been a massive and overwhelming political imperative to implement the result, but as we all know, the British nationalist parties tell lies.

However even if the British nationalist parties had indeed created an absolute slam dunk and had blocked any possible route to a lawful independence referendum, this would not be the death blow to any chance of Scottish independence that some of the frothier British nationalist who infest the comments section of the Herald seem to think it would be, and that was the real thrust of Professor Ciaran Martin’s comments, for all that they were cherry picked by the rabidly anti-independence Herald in order to generate a click bait headline.

Professor Martin was pointing out that resorting to legal means to thwart the operation of Scottish democracy is a short term tactic which risks backfiring in the longer term. He cited the example of the infamous 40% rule in the Scottish Assembly referendum of 1979. It was a wheeze which succeeded in blocking Scottish demand for some form of autonomy in the short term, but the anger it generated and the way in which subsequent Conservative governments ran roughshod over the will of the Scottish people in the following years converted the desire for a Scottish Parliament into the settled will of the people of Scotland and when the Parliament did come into being it was considerably more powerful than the limited proposals of 1979 for an assembly had foreseen. The narrow victory for very limited Home Rule in 1979 became overwhelming support for a much more far reaching form of devolution by the time of the referendum of 1997.

Right now opinion polls suggest that support for independence is pretty evenly matched by opposition to it. The real point that Professor Martin was making was that Conservative intransigence on the issue of another referendum, just like Conservative intransigence on the issue of devolution in the 1980s and 1990s, risks converting support for independence into the settled will of the people of Scotland.

A point he did not raise, but which is obvious to anyone who has been paying attention to the Scottish constitutional debate is that even if it were possible for the Conservatives and their fellow travellers to create a legal bar tpreventing Holyrood from holding another independence referendum without the consent of a Prime Minister who can not even count on the support of most of his Scottish MPs, they still cannot prevent the people of Scotland from expressing their democratic will in other ways, and the more that they close down the path which led to the referendum of 2014, the greater the likelihood that an alternative route will enjoy widespread support from an increasingly alienated Scottish electorate.

The key problem for the anti-independence parties is that they have no real strategy for preventing Scottish independence. All that they have are short term delaying tactics. There is a fundamental contradiction between the assertion of the Unionist parties that the people of Scotland have the right to decide the future of Scotland and their refusal to specify how that right can be exercised. That’s an avoidance tactic that cannot last forever even with the assistance of an overwhelmingly anti-independence media. In an interview with the BBC’s Sunday Show Douglas Ross pointedly refused to say exactly how how Scotland could exercise its right to self-determination if not through a referendum, even though it was pointed out to him that the United Nations deems this a to be key principle of democracy.

As Professor Martin noted,the current constitutional position in the UK is that Scotland is in principle allowed to choose independence, but no matter how Scotland votes, Westminster blocks the implementation of Scotland choosing to revisit the question of independence. At some point this contradiction will have to be resolved. It cannot go on forever. The independence question is not merely mainstream in Scottish politics, it is the single most important issue in Scottish politics, the prism through which all other matters are reflected. It is not just going to go away, no matter how much the likes of Douglas Ross or Anas Sarwar wish it would. If is natural course is blocked, it will find another path, whether a plebiscite election or some other democratic means, and by that time the parties of Ross and Sarwar will have lost all influence over the course of events.

The fact is that the people of Scotland have clearly and unequivocally stated their demand for another independence referendum through the only democratic avenue open to them an election to the Scottish Parliament. For a party with just six Westminster MPs in Scotland and only 31 MSPs at Holyrood to resort to legal chicanery to block the will of the people makes a mockery of democracy.

Tomorrow (Tuesday), the First Minister will lay out the Scottish Government’s strategy for holding a lawful referendum even without the consent of the Prime Law Breaker. Hopefully we will then see how the Gordian knot can be cut through.

Many thanks to everyone who kindly supported the annual fundraiser. It’s always a nerve wracking time, I’m literally asking people to put their money where my mouth is. I’m delighted to say that the target of £5000 wasn’t just reached it was smashed. From all sources, the Gofundme page, PayPal donations, and direct donations by cheque or into my bank account, the grand total raised was an incredible £11,094. In my wildest dreams  Icould not have expected it to go so well and my deepest thanks to everyone who contributed.  It is heartening to know that so many people value my writing and that there is still an appreciative audience for a positive pro-independence message that concentrates on making the case for independence and debunking the arguments of the real enemies of Scottish independence, the Conservatives and their little helpers.  That’s what I will keep doing thanks to you.

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Being the media that we need

The veteran BBC presenter Andrew Marr has spoken out against Scottish independence, claiming that it would be “rotten” for ordinary working people and would cause an “angry, rancorous” separation from the rest of the UK. If you are at all surprised that one of the BBC’s former senior political editors was a dyed in the wool unionist who parrots the tropes of the British nationalist parties, just wait until you find out that the Pope believes in god and that bright orange is not actually Donald Trump’s natural skin colour.

Of course Marr is a unionist. The BBC, where he had a very long and successful career, is an institutionally British nationalist organisation which thinks it is not political to force feed us a diet of royalist sycophancy and whose idea of balance when the topic of Scottish independence is being discussed is to have one person from the SNP against one each from the Tories, Labour and the Lib Dems, and that SNP representative is all too often not physically present, but appearing via a shonky video link from Dundee, a city which according to an infamous edition of Question Time broadcast from the city, is predominantly inhabited by Brexit supporting Tories with posh English accents.

For the BBC framing the independence debate in this way achieves a number of anti-independence goals while still allowing the BBC to claim that it is unbiased. By featuring representatives from the four main parties it ensures that pro-independence voices are outnumbered three to one in what is essentially a binary debate. It also frames the debate as a party political debate and not as a Scottish national debate. It identifies the cause of independence as the cause of the SNP, while portraying opposition to independence as a cross-party cause. This plays into the British nationalist narrative of the issue of independence being divisive, and encourages the mistaken belief that support for independence equates to support for the SNP. It conveniently sidelines and marginalises those in Scotland who believe in independence but who for one reason or another do not support the SNP.

The BBC is very much aware of itself as the last major publicly owned British institution, after the Conservative privatisations of the 1980s and 1990s, apart from the Westminster Parliament itself the BBC is one third of the unholy trinity of the armed services and the monarchy which are the only institutional forces that remain to create and foster a sense of a British identity. You are not going to have the career that Marr had at the BBC if you do not fully subscribe to the British nationalism which infuses and defines the Corporation.

This is not Marr’s first intervention on the side of opposition to independence. In2013, during the run up to the first referendum in 2014, Marr told an audience at the Edinburgh Book Festival that he was very worried by the “tone” of the Scottish independence debate, claiming that it was defined by a toxic anglophobia, saying : “There is very strong anti-English feeling and everybody knows it, there always has been.” All this told us, other than Marr’s instinctive British nationalism, is that his understanding of the Scottish independence debate is mired in the 1970s. Judging from his most recent comments, that is pretty much still where it remains. Admittedly there has been some progress of sorts. Marr admits that he understands the anger and frustration that so many people in Scotland feel, saying : “I do get that people in Scotland are outraged. Nobody here voted for Boris Johnson or for Dominic Raab or Liz Truss, or that lot. You didn’t vote for Brexit. So things have been imposed on Scotland and I can absolutely understand the annoyance.”

However he remains unconvinced by the case for independence so essentially he is giving Scotland the exact same message as the arrogantly patrician Conservative Governor General Alister Jack, it doesn’t really matter if Scotland doesn’t like what the Conservatives are imposing on it, you can suck it up.

Back in 2013 when Marr made his remarks about Scotland’s supposedly toxic anglophobia, many people in Scotland were still prepared to give the BBC and the British media in general the benefit of the doubt and hope that they would treat the Scottish independence debate impartially and fairly. Those hopes were well and truly smashed during the 2014 campaign and by everything that has happened since.

It is now beyond any doubt that the BBC will not be an impartial observer of and reporter on the independence campaign in this second referendum which lies ahead but rather, along with the explicitly anti-independence print media, it will be an active and enthusiastic participant in the independence campaign on the anti-independence side. The BBC is going to behave in this second campaign exactly as it behaved the first time around. It is clear that it has already dusted off the BBC British nationalist playbook from 2014. Following the publication of the first in the Scottish government’s series of papers making a fresh case for an independent Scotland, the BBC has focused almost exclusively on the lawfulness of another referendum should Johnson withhold a Section 30 order. It has paid very little attention to the substance of the paper, comparing Scotland’s performance as a part of the UK with that of a range of similar Northern European nations, a comparison which proves that Westminster is holding Scotland back and preventing it from achieving its full potential. The agenda of the BBC in response to the publication of the paper is very much that of the anti-independence parties.

What the BBC has carefully avoided is any discussion of what it would mean for the character and nature of this supposed union and for democracy in Scotland if the anti-independence parties resort to the courts or to appeals to Boris Johnson in order to veto the democratic right of the people of Scotland to determine for themselves the form of government best suited to their needs.

The BBC is not a reporter on Scotland’s constitutional debate but a participant in it. An organisation whose charter dictates that its role is to “contribute to the social cohesion and well being of the United Kingdom” is institutionally incapable of reporting objectively and fairly on a debate in which a part of the United Kingdom weighs up whether it wishes to continue being a part of the United Kingdom.

As we enter a second independence referendum campaign it is vital that the independence movement develops and builds upon its alternative means of reaching out to the people of this country. The British nationalists will not be as complacent this time around as they were in the early stages of the 2014 campaign. This time they know that they could lose, and they know that they have destroyed most of their strongest arguments and claims from the first referendum campaign. Our job is to make sure that the people of Scotland know it too. We need to be our own media, the media that we need. As yer maw always telt ye, if ye want something done, ye need tae dae it yersel.

I am currently running the annual crowdfunder to allow me to keep blogging and to earn the equivalent of the minimum wage. Please click the following link to donate directly to the crowdfunder. The crowdfunder has gone extremely well and I’d like to give my immense thanks to everyone who has contributed.  The initial target has now been met, which is a huge relief as next month we have to pay over £5000 in lawyer’s fees and Home Office fees in order to renew my husband’s visa.  It is heartening to know that people value the work that I do and wish to support it.  The link to the crowdfunder page will remain active for the rest of this week and I will give a final report on how it has gone at the end of this week.

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Not sucking it up

There’s a lot going on in the Britnatosphere this week, none of it good, and all of it received by the anti-independence media in Scotland with that collective shrugging of the shoulders and faux outrage about a broken down ferry which we have all come to know and loathe. After all, if the media in Scotland actually did its job and held the Conservatives and the British Government to account with the same energy and tenacity with which they pursue a story about a broken down ferry on Berneray, then people in Scotland might just start to wonder whether this country is indeed best served by an institutionally corrupt British Government which is already more than half way down the road to authoritarianism and a sclerotic Westminster system which is even worse at holding the British Government to account than the anti-independence media in Scotland, yes *that* bad.

Boris Johnson is far from being chastened by the recent failed attempt to unseat him, he has learned only that there is no outrage against democracy and decency in high office that he cannot get away with. All he needs to do is to run off to Kyiv to demonstrate that he’s besties with Volodymyr Zelenskyy and all is forgiven because Putin and there’s a war on you know.

This week Johnson, or someone in his office, leaned on the Times newspaper to pull a story about how when he was Foreign Secretary Johnson had tried to arrange a government job paying some £100K annually for his then girlfriend, now his wife, Carrie Johnson. Using their connections in order to land cushy and well paid government jobs for family members is the sort of thing that Nigerian princes do in between sending mass emails offering an amazing investment opportunity. This is not a story about Carrie Johnson. It’s about Boris Johnson. This is a story about a senior government minister trying to get his mistress a lucrative job paid for out of the public purse, and then as Prime Minister using the immense power and influence afforded to him by that aforementioned sclerotic Westminster system, in order to try and silence a journalist from talking about it.

This is a depressing and troubling story on a number of levels. We all expect Johnson to be sleazy and unethical. That is who he is. It is not unsurprising that such an unprincipled and entitled individual should attempt to pressurise the press into covering up yet another of his misdeeds. However what is truly shameful is that the Times, a newspaper which claims to represent fearless and diligent journalism, caved in to Johnson’s demands. Rather than being scared-off by lawyers, or shadowy court orders, or super injunctions, the Times seems to have merely folded to political pressure and a quiet word in its editor’s ear from someone in the Prime Minister’s office, an individual who if they were not acting on Johnson’s direct instruction, most certainly did so with his full knowledge and consent. The UK is already woefully short of meaningful ways in which power can be held to account. If the press starts to collude in enabling the corruption of a corrupt, lying, law-breaker of a Prime Minister there is absolutely nothing that stands in the way of the UK making a descent into a fully blown authoritarian kleptocracy.

The Times likes to call itself the Thunderer. In this instance it’s not so much the thunderer as an apologetic fart which it blamed on the dog.

This week we have the rail strikes, caused by an intransigent Conservative government which refuses to negotiate with the unions but which instead threatens to introduce legislation to crack down even further on the right of union members to take industrial action to protect their jobs and working conditions.

Can you imagine if either of these developments had been the work of SNP ministers? If it had been a Scottish Government transport minister who had refused to intervene in order to reach a settlement which could have prevented industrial action and then compounded their arrogance by announcing that the Scottish Government intended to legislate in order to restrict the rights of unions, the Scottish media would explode in a paroxysm of SNPbaddery. We’d be told that at interminable length and in tedious detail how the government was failing the people of Scotland. It would be relentless.

Equally it does not bear thinking about how the anti-independence media in Scotland would have reacted if it had been a senior figure in the Scottish Government who had tried to land a cushy and well paid government job for his mistress and then the First Minister’s office had leaned on a newspaper to pull the story. Glenn Campbell would be parked outside Bute House for weeks doing his sad face and doorstepping government ministers. The story would dominate Reporting Scotland for weeks, and they might even forget about the ferries for the duration, although not about the murrdurrs, the fitba, and the wee cute kittens. But as far as the Scottish media is concerned, this appalling scandal will be covered in a blink and you’d miss it sort of way, because the primary job of most of the media in Scotland is not to do anything that might foster dissatisfaction with Westminster and stoke up support for independence. Power is only to be held to account when it’s devolved power, the authority that the power is devolved from is not to be challenged.

The Tories know this too. They know that they cannot be held to account at Westminster and that the Scottish media is focused on stemming support for independence. This is why on a farce of a Scottish Affairs committee on which sat the Tory MP for Milton Keynes, Iain Stewart, Lord Malcolm Offord, who got his peerage for donations to the Tory party, and Alister Jack, one of only two Scottish Tories who didn’t vote to remove Boris, Jack told an SNP MP who complained about the way in which the British Government by passes Holyrood and undermines the devolution settlement to “Suck it up.” It was a remark dripping in arrogance and contempt. That’s what the Conservatives think of Scotland, a subordinate to be ordered to suck up the orders of its imperial masters. This is why an independence referendum is an imperative, in order to teach these arrogant and entitled British nationalist patricians that Scotland will not suck it up. As part of this corrupt and dysfunctional UK we have to suck it up. As an independent nation it’s the likes of Jack who will have to suck up what Scotland wants. That’s a lesson we need to teach him.

I am currently running the annual crowdfunder to allow me to keep blogging and to earn the equivalent of the minimum wage. Please click the following link to donate directly to the crowdfunder. The crowdfunder has gone extremely well and I’d like to give my immense thanks to everyone who has contributed.  The initial target has now been met, which is a huge relief as next month we have to pay over £5000 in lawyer’s fees and Home Office fees in order to renew my husband’s visa.  It is heartening to know that people value the work that I do and wish to support it.  The link to the crowdfunder page will remain active for the rest of this week and I will give a final report on how it has gone at the end of this week.

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Many thanks

The dilemma for British nationalism

Since the publication of the first paper in the Scottish Government’s series of papers setting out a fresh case for independence, there has been much talk of the difficulties that the Scottish Government will face in securing a lawful and recognised ballot. However, perhaps unsurprisingly given the overwhelmingly anti-independence bias of the majority of the Scottish media, far less attention has been paid to the quandary in which the anti-independence parties now find themselves.

Basically, the Tories and Labour will either have to concede that there needs to be a second independence referendum, one which they know they have only a poor chance of winning, or they will have to admit that the entire foundation of traditional Scottish unionism is a lie and tell Scotland that the operation of democracy in Scotland is subject to a veto from an unpopular Prime Minister whom Scotland didn’t vote for – a Prime Minister who doesn’t need an ethics advisor but rather a probation officer – and that everything that they have told us about the people of Scotland having the absolute right to choose for themselves the form of government best suited to their needs was only ever a convenient fairy story which they agreed to when they didn’t think that Scotland would opt for a form of government which did not include the Westminster parliament.

The mandate which Holyrood possesses for another independence referendum is, as the First Minister has pointed out “cast iron”. The subject of another independence referendum absolutely dominated the Holyrood election last year. Everyone was fully aware of what it meant when they cast their ballot in a certain way, not least that shadowy and suspiciously well funded British nationalist group which organised a tactical voting campaign in order to deprive the new Parliament of a pro-independence majority. It failed. The Tories knew that a pro-independence majority in Holyrood meant that there would be another referendum, which is why they threw all their energies and dark money into trying to ensure that didn’t happen. They failed.

Labour knew that a pro-independence majority in Holyrood would mean that the electorate had voted for another referendum. That was why Anas Sarwar went on interminably about all the reasons why he thought there shouldn’t be one. The voters listened, and then voted for parties that wanted another referendum. Holyrood now has the greatest pro-independence majority it has ever had, and the two pro-independence parties represented in Parliament both stood on unequivocal and explicit manifesto commitments to another referendum. However the anti-independence parties and their friends in the media are desperately trying to gaslight Scotland int believing that there isn’t really a legitimate democratic demand for another referendum. For Labour and the Tories to imply now that people didn’t know what they were voting for is a gross insult to the intelligence of the people of Scotland. Opponents of independence are now reduced to delaying tactics and unconvincing sophistry in order to escape the dilemma in which they are now trapped.

The Unionist columnist Alex Massie is a case in point, during much of the first independence referendum campaign Massie spent months posing as an undecided voter before triumphantly announcing just before the vote that he was unconvinced by the Yes campaign’s arguments and intended to vote no. Based upon his writings ever since it’s hard to escape the conclusion that he intended to vote no all along and was merely pretending to be undecided in order to get publicity for himself and to inflict damage on the Yes campaign at a crucial juncture before the vote.

Massie has now published a piece in the Sunday Times in which he argues that the current push for a referendum is “doomed to fail”, claiming that there is no appetite for it in Scotland. This claim is based upon his and his anti-independence colleagues’ interpretation of opinion polls. But government is not carried out on the basis of opinion polling, it is carried out on the basis of election victories, and despite Massie’s protestations to the contrary it very much *is* democracy denying to seek recourse in the courts or to appeal to the veto of a British Prime Minister who has no mandate in Scotland in order to prevent the Scottish Parliament from implementing the policy that the Scottish electorate elected it for.

Massie also makes the frankly outlandish and ludicrous suggestion that a future referendum should only take place when all the parties agree to it – no matter what the people of Scotland have voted for. In other words Scotland should only ever have a chance to ask itself if it wants to become independent if the parties opposed to independence agree to allow it. Those parties are not going to consent to a referendum when, as now, it seems likely that they could lose it. So in other words what Massie is saying is that Scotland can only ever have an independence referendum if it is a foregone conclusion that the result will be a victory for opponents of independence, which makes a travesty of the entire idea of referendums. Still, at least he’s honest about it, which is more than can be said for the Labour or Conservative parties.

He further suggests that the threshold for victory should be increased to two thirds, which could potentially lead to a majority in Scotland voting for independence yet it still being refused. It seems that Massie hasn’t quite grasped the concept of “democracy denial.” But then he’s a British nationalist which means that by definition he’s not a nationalist because he’s British, so a self-serving rewriting of the rules is very much on brand. Just as British nationalism isn’t nationalist in the eyes of British nationalists, British nationalist democracy denial isn’t a denial of democracy, because it’s British.

Despite the sophistry, the gaslighting and the self-serving attempts to rewrite the rules, it’s really very simple. As Massie points out, it is perfectly legitimate for the anti-independence parties to continue to oppose independence and another referendum, and they can do so by voting according to their beliefs when the matter is put to a vote at Holyrood. However the anti-independence parties do not have a majority in Holyrood, so they can only thwart the will of Holyrood and block the referendum by having recourse to extra-parliamentary means. To do so is very much the denial of Scottish democracy, no matter how much Massie and his ilk assert otherwise. And that opens up the fundamental question, if the UK cannot or will not respect the democratic will of the people of Scotland then this is not a democratic union but an authoritarian state of coercion.

I am currently running the annual crowdfunder to allow me to keep blogging and to earn the equivalent of the minimum wage. Please click the following link to donate directly to the crowdfunder. The crowdfunder has gone extremely well and I’d like to give my immense thanks to everyone who has contributed.  The initial target has now been met, which is a huge relief as next month we have to pay over £5000 in lawyer’s fees and Home Office fees in order to renew my husband’s visa.  It is heartening to know that people value the work that I do and wish to support it.  The link to the crowdfunder page will remain active for the rest of this week and I will give a final report on how it has gone at the end of this week.

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Many thanks

Labour and devo max: Flogging a dead distraction

Labour MSP Alex Rowley has called for “home rule” to be considered as part of the ongoing debate around a second independence referendum. The MSP said that “all options” should be on the table as part of the ongoing debate around a second independence referendum, and that devo max should be included alongside yes and no options.

It’s progress of sorts that a representative from the Labour party is prepared to put his head above the parapet and challenge the Conservative enabling British nationalism which dominates in Labour’s Scottish branch office management and is at least acknowledging that a referendum needs to be had. Rowley thinks that including the option of devo-max in a multi-option referendum would allow Labour to differentiate itself from the Conservatives in the referendum campaign and would allow the party to participate in the constitutional debate in a way distinct from the Conservatives. Rowley conceded that it was difficult to see how Scotland’s constitutional debate could be resolved without another referendum.

To an outside observer it seems that Rowley’s proposal is aimed more at extricating the Labour party from between the independence rock and the Tory British nationalist hard place to which Anas Sarwar’s hard line and uncompromising unionism has confined it. Many in the party fear that Labour in Scotland could not survive being seen as allies of the Conservatives in a Better Together Mk 2. The experience of appearing on the same platform as the Tories in Better Together destroyed Labour’s previous electoral dominance in Scotland and saw it lose almost all its Westminster MPs. Labour has struggled to find a space for itself in Scotland’s post referendum political landscape, which is dominated by the constitutional issue and in which, whether you support or oppose it, you have to take the idea of Scottish independence seriously. The prospect of another referendum where Labour shares a platform with Johnson, Gove, Rees-Mogg and the Anglo-British nationalist Brextremists could consign Labour in Scotland to an oblivion from which there would be no escape.

Even Anas Sarwar has been trying to backtrack on his absolute rejection of Scotland’s democratic right to determine its own future, telling the BBC on Sunday that he is not opposed in principle to another independence referendum, explaining that he and his party stood during last year’s Holyrood election on a platform of opposition to another referendum during the term of this Parliament. Aye, so and you did, Anas, that’s just lovely, and that would be the election in which your party came third would it not. So let’s just file you under “sore loser who willnae take a telling.” The questions of whether to have another referendum and the timescale on which it would be held were decided by the electorate during that election.

Labour sees the offer of devo-max on the indyref ballot as its get out of jail free card for the next referendum, but for Scotland it would be a trap. There are several problems with the idea, problems which are insurmountable. First of all there is the problem of definition. What exactly is meant by the phrase “home rule” or devo max”? The Labour party’s idea of what it means is likely to be very different from the understanding of its meaning held by an independence supporter such as myself, and both those understandings are going to be different yet again from what a Conservative government at Westminster believes it to mean.

Even if a definition could be settled upon which all parties agreed on, we would still face the problem that if devo-max did indeed come out of the referendum as the preferred option of the Scottish electorate, we would have to rely on a Conservative government at Westminster which seeks to roll back the existing devolution settlement to implement this “neo devo max.” Good luck with that one. Or are we to be expected to hope that voters in England will vote for a Labour government to introduce devo max for us.

The essential problem here is that whereas independence is a decision for the people of Scotland alone to make, such a far reaching change to the devolution settlement requires a fundamental and permanent cession of powers from Westminter, and that will require the approval and consent of the English electorate. There is no evidence that there is sufficient support in England for such a radical set of constitutional changes.

More immediately,what guarantees would Scotland have that the proposal would not be eviscerated by the anti-independence parties following the defeat of independence in the referendum? We saw what happened to the Vow in the years following 2014. It turned out that the promise that no Westminster government would ever make changes to the devolution settlement without the express consent of the people of Scotland and their parliament was not worth the newsprint it was printed on. So how can we be certain that devo max would not go the exact same way. We can’t, is the short answer. If there is one thing that we can trust this Conservative government to do it is to lie, lie and lie again.

Even in the unlikely event that this devo max was implemented in full, how can Scotland be sure that it will not be undone by some future Westminster government? It is a fundamental tenet of Britain’s unwritten constitution that no government can bind the hands of a future parliament. The doctrine that “Parliament can do anything except bind its successor” is the official ideology of the British constitution. This means that even if devo max was agreed upon and fully implemented, there can be no guarantee that some future British Government will not decide to rip it up.

We saw this with the devolution settlement. The Sewel Convention which states that he UK Parliament “would not normally legislate with regard to devolved matters, except with the agreement of the devolved bodies in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.” was written into the Scotland Act following the 2014 referendum but the UK Supreme Court later ruled that it had no force in law as it violates the doctrine that that “Parliament can do anything except bind its successor.” The Conservative Government has since made a number of unilateral changes to the devolution settlement, all of which have allowed Westminster to by pass Holyrood and intervene directly in matters which are supposed to be devolved. The Conservatives have not bothered with even the pretence of seeking a democratic mandate from the people of Scotland to do so. If Scotland has learned anything frombeing stabbed in the back after 2014 it is that backstabbers are only powerful when your back is turned. Now we see the British nationalists for what they are. Remember, a mistake is an accident, lying and cheating are deliberate choices. Scotland cannot afford to let the British nationalists do it again.

Promises of devo max are a distraction, and a dead distraction at that. The time for Labour to flesh out a detailed and credible proposaol for devo max was during the 2014 campaign and to implement it afterwards. But after the No victory that year Labour was too busy trying to water down the promises made in Gordon Brown’s vow. The devo max ship has sailed, hit the iceberg of Gordon Brown’s duplicity, and now rests rusting at the bottom of an ocean of British nationalist lies and broken promises.

I am currently running the annual crowdfunder to allow me to keep blogging and to earn the equivalent of the minimum wage. Please click the following link to donate directly to the crowdfunder. The crowdfunder has gone extremely well and I’d like to give my immense thanks to everyone who has contributed.  The initial target has now been met, which is a huge relief as next month we have to pay over £5000 in lawyer’s fees and Home Office fees in order to renew my husband’s visa.  It is heartening to know that people value the work that I do and wish to support it.  The link to the crowdfunder page will remain active for the rest of this week and I will give a final report on how it has gone at the end of this week.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/wee-ginger-crowdfunder-2022

Alternatively you can donate by Paypal using the Donate button below or by making a PayPal payment to weegingerbook@yahoo.com If you don’t have a PayPal account, just select “donate with card” after clicking the button. If you would prefer to donate by some other means, please email me at weegingerbook@yahoo.com for details

Many thanks

Assets, debt, and British nationalist desperation

According to a report in the Sunday Times, the Scottish Government intends to hold a consultative referendum in order to avoid any potential legal issues if a Section 30 order is not forthcoming from the British Government. The report claims that the Scottish Government believes that a consultative vote is within the powers of the Scottish Government and has a better chance of bypassing possible legal challenges. Essentially what this boils down to is that a Yes vote in the referendum would not result in Holyrood making an immediate declaration of independence but rather would give Holyrood a popular mandate to open independence negotiations with Westminster. This is basically what would have happened anyway in 2014 had that year’s referendum produced a Yes vote.

It should be pointed out straight away that under what passes for a constitution in the UK, referendums are always consultative. The British nationalist fetish for the absolute sovereignty of the Westminster Parliament means that nothing can bind the hands of Parliament, no government can pass legislation that a subsequent government is unable to repeal, by pass, or overrule, and it is up to Westminster to legislate in order to put into effect any decisions made by the electorate in a referendum. The EU referendum was a consultative referendum, but the second that the result was declared, the political pressure to implement it became overwhelming, and was immediately taken advantage of by the right wing of the Conservative party.

The key issue here is to ensure that the referendum is lawful, if it is lawful, the Conservatives, the Lib Dems and Labour as political parties could choose to boycott the referendum but they would not be lawfully able to order Conservative or Labour controlled local authorities not to participate in the referendum and to deny the vote to residents of those local authorities.

As I mentioned in my previous piece, right now we are in the same stage of proceedings as we were in 2012 before the Edinburgh Agreement when the British nationalist parties refused to accept that Holyrood does have a mandate for a referendum and are intent on arguing about process, about the legality of the referendum, rather than engaging in the substantive arguments of the merits of an independent Scotland versus their assertions that Scotland is better served by remaining under Westminster rule. This is not a debate that they want to have because they are painfully aware, even if they would never admit it in public, that they themselves have destroyed the strongest weapons that were in their persuasive arsenal in the 2014 campaign. No one in Scotland will now believe a Westminster promise that following a No vote there will be greater powers for Holyrood. Instead we know that Westminster will seize on a No vote and eviscerate the remaining powers of Holyrood in order to turn it into a toothless talking shop. The only thing that has prevented the Tories from doing this already is their fear of another independence referendum. One that fear is removed the Anglo-British nationalist gloves will be off and we will see an all out assault on the devolution settlement from the Tories.

Equally no one will believe any commitments to investment or promises that jobs will be secure. Those 26 frigates have sailed off into imaginary waters. Crucially they also know that we enter the second independence with the two sides neck and neck in the polls and that the No campaign no longer possesses the massive lead in opinion polling that it enjoyed at the start of the 2014 campaign and that opposition to independence and support for the British state can no longer be portrayed as opposition to “nationalism”. We can all see for ourselves the xenophobic Anglo-British nationalism of this Conservative government.

This is why the anti-independence parties are hoping to use any means that they can in order to frustrate the democratic will of the people of Scotland for a second independence referendum. They realise the weakness of their own position. It is because they know that their union flag jaikets are on a very shoogly peg that they are desperate enough to try and block the operation of democracy in Scotland by asserting its unlawfulness. However as Matt Qvortup, a professor of political science at Coventry University who has studied referendums around the world, pointed out, there was no doubt ­that the Scottish Government did have a democratic ­mandate for a fresh vote and he predicted that attempts by the Westminster parties or their British nationalist surrogates to use the courts in an attempt to thwart that mandate could significantly boost support for independence by as much as 5%.

The professor also pointed out that one of the persistent claims of the anti-independence parties is categorically untrue. We have heard a lot that an independent Scotland would immediately be saddled with a debt of £180 billion as its pro-rata share of debt from the UK. However Professor Qvortup noted that an independent Scotland would be under no legal obligation to pay any share of UK debt after independence and could use this fact as a negotiating tactic. Scotland could point out that legally it was perfectly free to walk away from the UK’s debt but negotiate to take on a share of it in return for a share of the UK’s assets. No assets, no debt.

Professor Qvortup also said that we should not rule out the possibility that Johnson might after all agree to a Section 30 order and another referendum. It has always struck me as odd that certain people are prepared to accept at face value Johnson’s claim that he will not agree to a Section 30 order when he lies about everything else. From Johnson’s point of view there are political advantages to facilitating another Scottish independence referendum. If he wins it he can pose as the great champion of the Union and can use the victory in order to destroy the power of the Scottish Parliament, removing an inconvenient and annoying source of political power and authority which is independent of him. If he loses, he removes a block of fifty anti-Conservative MPs from Westminster, which in Qvortup’s words would “fireproof” the Conservatives at Westminster for a very long time, adding : “So either he saves the Union or he goes down as a democrat and also guarantees his majority for a very long time. If somebody were to think that thought then it [a section 30 order] may not be quite so unlikely.”

I am currently running the annual crowdfunder to allow me to keep blogging and to earn the equivalent of the minimum wage. Please click the following link to donate directly to the crowdfunder. The crowdfunder has gone extremely well and I’d like to give my immense thanks to everyone who has contributed.  The initial target has now been met, which is a huge relief as next month we have to pay over £5000 in lawyer’s fees and Home Office fees in order to renew my husband’s visa.  It is heartening to know that people value the work that I do and wish to support it.  The link to the crowdfunder page will remain active for the rest of this week and I will give a final report on how it has gone at the end of this week.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/wee-ginger-crowdfunder-2022

Alternatively you can donate by Paypal using the Donate button below or by making a PayPal payment to weegingerbook@yahoo.com If you don’t have a PayPal account, just select “donate with card” after clicking the button. If you would prefer to donate by some other means, please email me at weegingerbook@yahoo.com for details

Many thanks