We’ll be honest, folks, we’re not 100% sure this is how you build unity.
But what uplifting and powerful alliances might we be missing out on?
“A few thousand”, eh? We were a bit surprised on Wednesday evening not to see BiS post more tweets and pictures from all these events that they’d made such a big deal about for weeks, so we went looking for evidence.
It really wasn’t easy. But we’re good journalists, and after a few hours of diligent and determined digging, and with a bit of help from some of our always-alert readers, we managed to find them all.
The big central “hub” event was in Edinburgh.
It’s fair to say it was rather less than mobbed.
But if you scrunched your eyes up a bit and took a very generous interpretation of some blurry pixels it was just about possible to say there were 150 or so people there at the busiest point. (We’ve tagged 100 in this image – click to enlarge.)
The next-biggest gathering was in Aberdeen, led by our old pal Fatima Joji.
It’s there if you look closely, honest. Bottom middle.
Cllr. Joji kept the dynamic and youthful crowd enraptured.
Let’s charitably say the crowd was 50-strong, so we’re up to 200 total.
Then there was Stirling. As far as we can tell nobody tweeted about this one or posted any photographs, but we eventually managed to track down a Facebook video.
We can get a pretty full count from that 360-degree panaround, and we make it 16. So the total is now 216, as we go live to Dumfries.
No pictures were posted of the crowd watching these festivities, but someone in the choir told us there were “30? Ish” and we have no reason to disbelieve them, so including all the performers let’s add another 50 to our running total, now at 266.
Back north, to Inverness.
That’s a hard count of 26, giving us 292 altogether. And lastly we beam up to Orkney, where “around 15 people gathered” to, um, watch a stream of the Edinburgh event:
But we’ll include them too. That’s a grand total, not of the “few thousand” claimed by Macintyre-Kemp, but just 307 of Scotland’s 5.6 million people (or 0.005%) turning out to rally for independence on a pleasantly balmy late-summer evening 10 years on from the indyref.
(BiS claims to represent 142 separate groups, so that’s about two people from each.)
And fair play to them. We’re not here to snark at the folk who showed up. We’re here firstly to warn people to take anything said by Gordon Mcintyre-Kemp, self-proclaimed chieftain of the “grassroots Yes movement” and self-anointed guardian of all Scottish political facts, with a very hefty pinch of salt.
(Mcintyre-Kemp is a snake-oil salesman preying on the gullible and desperate, has no detectable source of income other than BiS crowdfunding, and neither the company’s fundraisers or its accounts at Companies House – where it’s listed as “Dormant” – tell us anything about where that money comes from or where it goes, or how much he pays himself, so he’s clearly just naturally averse to giving anything away.)
But secondly we’re here to tell the indy movement something it’s needed to be told for quite a while now, which is this: it’s time to stop holding rallies.
Rallies don’t persuade anyone to your cause, but that’s not a reason not to have gatherings. They can be spirit-raising social events where you meet intelligent like-minded souls and are energised and reassured about the fundamental merit of your cause and the talents it can bring to bear.
(Even at £25 a ticket, the capacity crowd at the IMAX last Saturday was more than showed up for all of BiS’s free events put together, which isn’t bad for a bunch of “has-beens” and “toxic forces”.)
But not when they look like this, and solely comprise people reading out barnstorming speeches of empty rhetoric written for a crowd of 20,000 but actually delivered to seven people in kilts, a couple of barely-pubescent “anarchists” with “TRANS VEGANS FOR A NET-ZERO PALESTINE” placards and a bored dug in a Saltire bandana.
When you struggle to pull a few dozen diehards together for a political viewpoint shared by almost half the country, the main thing you achieve is to delight your enemies and dismay and depress your allies, because what that tells you is that while a couple of million people may still want independence, they think it’s so unlikely to happen right now that they won’t get out of bed for it, let alone embark on a massive campaign effort.
We’ve been gently making this point behind the scenes for a little while now, and are happy to note that the message seems to be finally getting through.
We must never stop working towards independence, because despite the many and manifest catastrophes of the current Holyrood administration, self-rule still remains the best possible future for Scotland.
But the public are sick and tired of hearing about it after the last 12 years, because they know it’s going nowhere at the moment and frankly it’s an irritation and an insult to their intelligence to pretend otherwise. And you get nowhere by irritating and insulting the electorate (as Labour are fast discovering).
We need to work QUIETLY for the next few years, actually putting the hard yards in on policy and strategy and purging or somehow bypassing the useless failures and charlatans who wasted the last decade but still have their hands around the throat of the movement, and the parasitic leeches who use the independence movement to promote their own pet causes and careers.
So let’s stop embarrassing ourselves needlessly in public and make sure that the next time voters think seriously about independence, we’re properly fit and ready for action.
They have their place and time, but this isn’t it. Please, no more marches.
