For all of those who couldn’t make it to Saturday’s sold-out event at the IMAX:
As for the next 10 years, that’s another question.
The event was thoroughly enjoyable, and definitely worth the 16 hours on trains there and back (Standard Class, by the way, despite what that shifty Salmond character tried to claim on stage. Never believe a politician.)
Not least because I also got to see the World’s Best Mammy.
But everyone that I met was absolutely lovely, whether fellow panellists or audience members (including a good smattering of former MPs and MSPs like Angus MacNeil, Neale Hanvey, Margaret Ferrier, Kenny MacAskill, Eilidh Whiteford and more).
I had chocolates and sweeties and home-made raspberry curd and other presents thrust upon me, as well as what one kind gentleman described as “a note” but turned out to be rather more, and the reception when I walked into the hall to take my seat in the front row (where all the panellists were sat to facilitate easy changeovers) before the start of proceedings brought a lump to my throat.
I didn’t get nearly enough time to talk to people before or after – I didn’t even manage to say hello to Dennis Canavan, so my apologies to him, and only got seconds with people I’d have liked a serious chat with – and four hours flew by in what was an engrossing but still pretty pacy show.
Everyone I did speak to afterwards seemed to have had a good time and many said it had lifted their spirits, although I don’t think it altered the grim political situation we face now that the supposed party of independence has so formally and comprehensively given up the fight.
Whose job does John Swinney think it is to make independence the settled will of the electorate, if not his? He’s the one who gets paid for it, and he’s the one with the powers. He is, after all, the First Minister of the country. It seems, though, that he’s passing the buck to the rest of us and telling us that he’ll only bother his backside once we’ve done all the hard work.
That’s a heck of an ask, but at least those of us in the IMAX on Saturday did manage to draw a crowd, unlike last night’s events by the SNP-backed fake “grassroots” of what now passes for the “mainstream Yes movement” in Edinburgh and Aberdeen.
(As far as we can tell, promised rallies in Dumfries and Orkney didn’t even happen at all. If they did, not a single soul posted a tweet or picture of them.)
The SNP has been lavishly funded – by both its members and the UK state – to the tune of tens of millions of pounds for the last decade with the ostensible goal of building support for independence, but has failed miserably and now blames the rest of us for its failure. Apparently it’s US who need to “get our mojo back”.
But the SNP spent most of those 10 years jealously sidelining, vilifying, persecuting and even imprisoning every Yes entity that it didn’t directly control.
It was the SNP that went to war against the likes of Alex Salmond, Mark Hirst, Manny Singh and of course this site, and now they feign shock and dismay that few people – and certainly none with any detectable record of success at anything – want to stick their heads above the parapet for a cause in which the SNP itself shows no tangible interest or sense of urgency.
The last 10 years have been, by any measure, a total unmitigated catastrophe for the Scottish independence movement, and the blame for that lies solely and squarely at one door – that of the SNP. They were in charge, and they made SURE they were in charge, elbowing out anyone they saw as competition.
But nothing about the party has changed. Not a single lesson has been learned. That was demonstrated yesterday, in breathtaking fashion, in what must surely be the most shameful day in the Scottish National Party’s 90-year history, as it voted with the Unionist parties against the only remaining democratic route to independence. There is no possibility of a way back from there.
Scotland’s future is as an independent nation? Yeah, that IS hard to believe right now, and as long as the SNP is in command it’s impossible.
Just over 100 years ago, a parliamentary party ostensibly seeking Irish independence but which had become a roadblock to it was destroyed at the ballot box and cast into permanent oblivion. Just a few years later – though not without conflict – that goal was largely achieved.
There can be no such bloodshed in the fight for Scotland’s freedom. But in political terms the only hope now is to follow the path of Ireland a century ago. The SNP are the enemy, and there will be no independence until they are destroyed and replaced.
The party’s “rebels” – some of whom I shared the stage with last weekend – need to bite the bullet and decide what side they’re on: independence or the SNP. We cannot afford to waste the next 10 years as we’ve wasted the last.
