I wonder how many true pro-independence voters will hold their nose and reluctantly vote SNP knowing that they aren't a true independence party under the present leadership and that an SNP victory will not take us any closer to independence? The evidence that the 'strategy' has failed after a big SNP win but with independence being kicked further down the park...if not totally out of the stadium with excuse after excuse... SHOULD lead to a night of the long knives to get rid of the devolutionists within and either install a more vigorous pro independence leadership that will go down the Scottish UDI route or the emergence of a new and more progressive thinking party/movement that WILL do the job. What a sad position we are in where the only recourse is either to abstain from voting because no one represents our wishes or to vote for a slightly more benign wishy-washy option simply to keep as many unionists out while folding our arms and saying 'right!! You've got our votes..you've got your win
Brilliant piece of writing. ..Peter....get a book started.Don't know how you can still be lucid while the Scots around you are fallin' doon drunk...as you know Scotland is the home of celebrating the New Year..aye right jimmy..London with its big wheel and well financed fireworks is now eclipsing that dubious honour.Even that honour will be taken off us soon...
I'd rather be celebrating Independence from the foreign english sh*te union. Remember 300 years of that excrement (helped by 'self entitled locals .. traitors)' slithering into our country and grabbing what they can..something the foreign english are good at as their own country is piece of crap..so have to steal from others...that 300 years of invasion theft and abuse has taken its toll.
Our Highlanders were demonised as brutish..tartan cancelled and Gaelic ..our very identity...forbidden..Lowlanders seen as peasants who are sent to fight in foreign wars for the foreign english....It's not a case of being colonised ...it's a bl**dy miracle Scotland is still standing as a nation.
I did laugh at ...'Scotland's place is beneath bitch britannia's stinking blood stained skirts regardless of how often and how copiously she shits on us..' (ref Peter A Bell) ( I bow to your perfect description of the toxic union and the b*st*rds that operate it)
One example of sh*tt*ng on Scotland.?....Grangemouth to the wall while foreign england's steel works saved......if that's not sh*tt*ng on us I don't know what is..we should be out on the street outside Holyrood the home of quislings telling swiney... our great quisling leader.. tae think again.
Let's hope 2026 is the year Scots wake up. Once that vote is in and SNP in control...WHAT THEN swiney...eh? Try and distract us with foreign english Reform?.. now we have to fight them ( to keep you in a job)...eventually swiney you are going to run oot o' road...and the homicidal amang us will be restless....
Happy and independent new year to us the faithful Scots who OWN this land.....be hostile to anything that stands in your way of freedom......('And let them see you do it'). (ref Braveheart)
For OUR Scotland and her weans that need to waken up.
The big problem for me isn't that the sNP would be the largest party, it's that the Greens would have a lot of seats and probably demand BHa2 which would collapse our economy and put Indy off the agenda like, forever, while we got excessive GRRB2, DRs2 which would cost a billion, compulsory heat pumps killing off a million with hypothermia and poverty-stricken starvation, and a whole load of other economically illiterate madcap Greer idiocies.
Whatever your feelings about the sNP, an overall sNP majority Government has to be better than the nightmare of BHa2, though swinney might not fall over for his tummy to be tickled as eagerly as sturgeon and Yousaf did, and a majority sNP might even be serious about Indy.
The budget is published in mid-Jan, and passed in February and I hope without promising the dreaded Greens anything ridiculous like the demands they've been flooding the airwaves with while attacking the sNP like it's going out of fashion. Perhaps swinney can get the LibDems or Labour to help, or even the Conservatives like salmond did.
and hopefully after the budget passes it's gloves off for the sNP and we'll see if swinney does have any ballcocks hidden away in his pants. If not the sNP don't get my votes - nobody does.
Meanwhile there is NO alternative to the sNP, so we have no real choice but to suck it up.
With the SNP in power, independence is not on the agenda. One would like to think Swinney wouldn't be stupid enough to sign BHA2. But one can never be sure. One would also like to think the clown wouldn't go down the toxic Section 30 route again. Yet doing precisely that is the only idea he has.
There is absolutely no way Swinney possesses the wherewithal to run a minority administration. He did all right when he had Salmond leaning over his shoulder. But on his own, he's nothing.
During the time of Sturgeon when she promised a de facto referendum after the UKsC ruled against the scot Parl, I speculated it wasn't her who decided against that but the many many careerist wets - MPs like Flynn, many MsPs, and even members - particularly amongst the 100,000 newbies, many ex-Labour. I still think so, Yousaf had the same problem - look at how he was basically sacked after correctly ditching the BHa. Here's an example:
"Hannah Mary Goodlad, who is also going toe-to-toe with the LibDems in the Shetland Islands in a bid to unseat Beatrice Wishart, argued that Scotland needs a diverse range of candidates, and while focussing on independence may be a key campaigning point for some of her colleagues, it won’t work for her."
People demand the membership take control of the party. Perhaps it's the most of them who are left are the problem not the leadership. so it's the membership swinney needs to stand up to, not the other way around. Valera had I guess a similar problem with the Sinn Féin after the 1918 election (formed the Fianna Fáil), and some would say Brendan McNeil was basically sacked for talking about Indy at Westminster. Look with fresh eyes at that last sNP conference.
Given that John Swinney is the leader of the SNP and the First Minister of Scotland, to say that he is "the key" is merely to state the obvious. What you fail to note, however, is that this key has already been turned. You imply that we await something from Swinney. But he has already made his position clear. He could hardly have been more explicit that he regards Westminster as sovereign and NOT the people of Scotland. He adheres rigidly to the Sturgeon doctrine, which holds that only a referendum sanctioned by Westminster can have 'legal and constitutional' legitimacy.
He is NOT proposing to pursue the restoration of Scotland's independence. He is committed only to seeking a referendum in which the British state has the first and final say - effectively giving the British state a veto over the democratically expressed will of Scotland's people.
For John Swinney to be the key to a proper constitutional referendum, he would have to go back on everything he has ever said on the subject. That is not a reasonable expectation.
Well, firstly people have complained that the SNP resolution has no detail, but that precisely gives Swinney a lot of wiggle room. Secondly, he models on the 2011 election, thirdly this from May 2nd 2011:
"ALEX SALMOND last night pledged he would hold an independence referendum by 2015 if he wins the election on Thursday.
The First Minister unveiled the plan during the BBC's leaders' debate.
After weeks of refusing to name a date, he said he wanted Scots to vote on breaking up Britain "in the second half of the parliament".
With the next Holyrood election due in May 2016, that would mean a 2014 or 2015 referendum."
That I think is what won that election and gave us the Indy Ref. At the last minute. We won't know until end of April if Swinney is the key, or a damp squib.
Swinney has already told you what he intends to do. He has already committed to what he will do if he achieves the ludicrous threshold he has set. You choose to ignore what he has said. Or pretend he said something else.
As a strategy for restoring independence, waiting and seeing if John Swinney does a last-minute 180-degree turn on everything he has ever said about the constitutional issue seems like the very definition of a non-starter. Not to mention a gobbet of triple-distilled stupidity.
I thought the wife and myself would have nobody to vote for in May (Shetland) But yippee!
Sovereignty party leader Brian Nugent announced this morning he would be standing for both the Shetland constituency and the Highlands and Islands regional list.
Labour rejected the leader of their Shetland branch and are putting forward a guy from Inverness 300 miles down the water! Beatrice Wishart isn't standing and has been replaced by Emma Macdonald (council leader)
My understanding is that Sovereignty favours legalising the use of violence against children. For this reason alone, I could never bring myself to vote for them. There are other reasons. But that one will do.
There are other nominally pro-independence candidates - SNP and Greens. Admittedly, Nugent may be thought of as more genuinely pro-independence, since he at least dares to talk about UDI. But I have seen no credible plan from him. So, it's just talk.
For some, the fact that a candidate talks a lot about independence is enough. I am rather more demanding.
I think any sNP candidate that refuses to campaign at least 50% on Indy deserves to lose their deposit. Indy is the second item in the constitution, the first being the name "scottish National Party". and the sNP leadership should stay away and not help. a non-indy sNP MsP is of no more use than a LibDem, less probably.
You may be right. It's the last chance for the SNP as far I'm concerned, and it needs something BEFORE the election to get my vote.
After the Ref a lot of bandwagon-jumping opportunistic all talk and no action party-crashers got pushed up as candidates and got elected. It needs for them to be cowped into general rubbish, along with the rest of the dross.
Anyways, at last I've got through what I wanted to say until near the election! Now it's wait and see for me.
edit: To make the point more clearly a lot of people think the problem is the leadership. I think it's many of the elected politicians. For instance when Sturgeon announced the de facto referendum election, MPs moaned "It's our jobs on the line, not yours". Jobs my hairy backside. You were there for us, not yourselves. I was delighted so many of them got kicked out by the missing 520,000 voters, in an election where Independence was a dirty word for the SNP.
We cannot afford to "wait and see". We cannot afford that kind of complacency. We need and must demand a commitment to making the 2026 election the trigger for a process which has a proper constitutional referendum and hence independence as its endpoint. As things stand, no party or politician on the nominally pro-independence side of the issue has made such a commitment.
Moreover, in Swinney's case, he has made it politically impossible for him to make that kind of commitment because it is opposed to everything he has ever said about restoring independence. He would have to resign and be replaced by a party leader/FM who was both politically able and personally willing to make that commitment. That person, as far as anybody knows, does not exist anywhere in the SNP, far less within reach of the top job.
There is no reason to "wait and see". We already know what the SNP is committed to. Some of us, at least, are aware of the dire implications of what they propose. We also understand that there is no possibility of a 'plan B' because, among the consequences of their proposal, is that it obviates any 'plan B'. That 'plan B' could not be anything other than something that 'plan A' acknowledges as illegitimate or illegal.
If Swinney knows of a better way than his 'plan A', why is that not his 'plan A'?
I wonder how many true pro-independence voters will hold their nose and reluctantly vote SNP knowing that they aren't a true independence party under the present leadership and that an SNP victory will not take us any closer to independence? The evidence that the 'strategy' has failed after a big SNP win but with independence being kicked further down the park...if not totally out of the stadium with excuse after excuse... SHOULD lead to a night of the long knives to get rid of the devolutionists within and either install a more vigorous pro independence leadership that will go down the Scottish UDI route or the emergence of a new and more progressive thinking party/movement that WILL do the job. What a sad position we are in where the only recourse is either to abstain from voting because no one represents our wishes or to vote for a slightly more benign wishy-washy option simply to keep as many unionists out while folding our arms and saying 'right!! You've got our votes..you've got your win
...now amaze us and prove us wrong'!!
Indeed.
A couple of typos Peter:
resented for represented
on-off for one-off
;-)
Some people might think you are exaggerating.
In reality it is quite possible that things will work out substantially worse that that. :-(
Thanks for the heads-up on typos.
Brilliant piece of writing. ..Peter....get a book started.Don't know how you can still be lucid while the Scots around you are fallin' doon drunk...as you know Scotland is the home of celebrating the New Year..aye right jimmy..London with its big wheel and well financed fireworks is now eclipsing that dubious honour.Even that honour will be taken off us soon...
I'd rather be celebrating Independence from the foreign english sh*te union. Remember 300 years of that excrement (helped by 'self entitled locals .. traitors)' slithering into our country and grabbing what they can..something the foreign english are good at as their own country is piece of crap..so have to steal from others...that 300 years of invasion theft and abuse has taken its toll.
Our Highlanders were demonised as brutish..tartan cancelled and Gaelic ..our very identity...forbidden..Lowlanders seen as peasants who are sent to fight in foreign wars for the foreign english....It's not a case of being colonised ...it's a bl**dy miracle Scotland is still standing as a nation.
I did laugh at ...'Scotland's place is beneath bitch britannia's stinking blood stained skirts regardless of how often and how copiously she shits on us..' (ref Peter A Bell) ( I bow to your perfect description of the toxic union and the b*st*rds that operate it)
One example of sh*tt*ng on Scotland.?....Grangemouth to the wall while foreign england's steel works saved......if that's not sh*tt*ng on us I don't know what is..we should be out on the street outside Holyrood the home of quislings telling swiney... our great quisling leader.. tae think again.
Let's hope 2026 is the year Scots wake up. Once that vote is in and SNP in control...WHAT THEN swiney...eh? Try and distract us with foreign english Reform?.. now we have to fight them ( to keep you in a job)...eventually swiney you are going to run oot o' road...and the homicidal amang us will be restless....
Happy and independent new year to us the faithful Scots who OWN this land.....be hostile to anything that stands in your way of freedom......('And let them see you do it'). (ref Braveheart)
For OUR Scotland and her weans that need to waken up.
Refuse to vote for ANY Unionist party within that cess pit they call Holyrood and that's including the UKSNP.
The big problem for me isn't that the sNP would be the largest party, it's that the Greens would have a lot of seats and probably demand BHa2 which would collapse our economy and put Indy off the agenda like, forever, while we got excessive GRRB2, DRs2 which would cost a billion, compulsory heat pumps killing off a million with hypothermia and poverty-stricken starvation, and a whole load of other economically illiterate madcap Greer idiocies.
Whatever your feelings about the sNP, an overall sNP majority Government has to be better than the nightmare of BHa2, though swinney might not fall over for his tummy to be tickled as eagerly as sturgeon and Yousaf did, and a majority sNP might even be serious about Indy.
The budget is published in mid-Jan, and passed in February and I hope without promising the dreaded Greens anything ridiculous like the demands they've been flooding the airwaves with while attacking the sNP like it's going out of fashion. Perhaps swinney can get the LibDems or Labour to help, or even the Conservatives like salmond did.
and hopefully after the budget passes it's gloves off for the sNP and we'll see if swinney does have any ballcocks hidden away in his pants. If not the sNP don't get my votes - nobody does.
Meanwhile there is NO alternative to the sNP, so we have no real choice but to suck it up.
Happy New Year!
With the SNP in power, independence is not on the agenda. One would like to think Swinney wouldn't be stupid enough to sign BHA2. But one can never be sure. One would also like to think the clown wouldn't go down the toxic Section 30 route again. Yet doing precisely that is the only idea he has.
There is absolutely no way Swinney possesses the wherewithal to run a minority administration. He did all right when he had Salmond leaning over his shoulder. But on his own, he's nothing.
During the time of Sturgeon when she promised a de facto referendum after the UKsC ruled against the scot Parl, I speculated it wasn't her who decided against that but the many many careerist wets - MPs like Flynn, many MsPs, and even members - particularly amongst the 100,000 newbies, many ex-Labour. I still think so, Yousaf had the same problem - look at how he was basically sacked after correctly ditching the BHa. Here's an example:
"Hannah Mary Goodlad, who is also going toe-to-toe with the LibDems in the Shetland Islands in a bid to unseat Beatrice Wishart, argued that Scotland needs a diverse range of candidates, and while focussing on independence may be a key campaigning point for some of her colleagues, it won’t work for her."
From her own mouth - "fuck Indy".
https://archive.is/3rzWm
People demand the membership take control of the party. Perhaps it's the most of them who are left are the problem not the leadership. so it's the membership swinney needs to stand up to, not the other way around. Valera had I guess a similar problem with the Sinn Féin after the 1918 election (formed the Fianna Fáil), and some would say Brendan McNeil was basically sacked for talking about Indy at Westminster. Look with fresh eyes at that last sNP conference.
Hence - watch swinney. He is the key.
Given that John Swinney is the leader of the SNP and the First Minister of Scotland, to say that he is "the key" is merely to state the obvious. What you fail to note, however, is that this key has already been turned. You imply that we await something from Swinney. But he has already made his position clear. He could hardly have been more explicit that he regards Westminster as sovereign and NOT the people of Scotland. He adheres rigidly to the Sturgeon doctrine, which holds that only a referendum sanctioned by Westminster can have 'legal and constitutional' legitimacy.
He is NOT proposing to pursue the restoration of Scotland's independence. He is committed only to seeking a referendum in which the British state has the first and final say - effectively giving the British state a veto over the democratically expressed will of Scotland's people.
For John Swinney to be the key to a proper constitutional referendum, he would have to go back on everything he has ever said on the subject. That is not a reasonable expectation.
Well, firstly people have complained that the SNP resolution has no detail, but that precisely gives Swinney a lot of wiggle room. Secondly, he models on the 2011 election, thirdly this from May 2nd 2011:
https://archive.is/Leanu
"ALEX SALMOND last night pledged he would hold an independence referendum by 2015 if he wins the election on Thursday.
The First Minister unveiled the plan during the BBC's leaders' debate.
After weeks of refusing to name a date, he said he wanted Scots to vote on breaking up Britain "in the second half of the parliament".
With the next Holyrood election due in May 2016, that would mean a 2014 or 2015 referendum."
That I think is what won that election and gave us the Indy Ref. At the last minute. We won't know until end of April if Swinney is the key, or a damp squib.
Swinney has already told you what he intends to do. He has already committed to what he will do if he achieves the ludicrous threshold he has set. You choose to ignore what he has said. Or pretend he said something else.
As a strategy for restoring independence, waiting and seeing if John Swinney does a last-minute 180-degree turn on everything he has ever said about the constitutional issue seems like the very definition of a non-starter. Not to mention a gobbet of triple-distilled stupidity.
Stet
"We won't know until end of April if Swinney is the key, or a damp squib."
I thought the wife and myself would have nobody to vote for in May (Shetland) But yippee!
Sovereignty party leader Brian Nugent announced this morning he would be standing for both the Shetland constituency and the Highlands and Islands regional list.
Labour rejected the leader of their Shetland branch and are putting forward a guy from Inverness 300 miles down the water! Beatrice Wishart isn't standing and has been replaced by Emma Macdonald (council leader)
My understanding is that Sovereignty favours legalising the use of violence against children. For this reason alone, I could never bring myself to vote for them. There are other reasons. But that one will do.
Brian Nugent is the only candidate that is pro indy, choice would be nice but we have non.
There are other nominally pro-independence candidates - SNP and Greens. Admittedly, Nugent may be thought of as more genuinely pro-independence, since he at least dares to talk about UDI. But I have seen no credible plan from him. So, it's just talk.
For some, the fact that a candidate talks a lot about independence is enough. I am rather more demanding.
Sovereignty claims its emblem, a lion counter-rampant, is "protected by copyright". It isn't. Jist sayin'.
I think any sNP candidate that refuses to campaign at least 50% on Indy deserves to lose their deposit. Indy is the second item in the constitution, the first being the name "scottish National Party". and the sNP leadership should stay away and not help. a non-indy sNP MsP is of no more use than a LibDem, less probably.
A genuinely pro-independence SNP MSP is of no use to Scotland's cause so long as the leadership of the party is pro-independence in name only.
Mmmm, put it another way: is swinney the last Jedi? The Force be with you!
He's not even an Ewok.
You may be right. It's the last chance for the SNP as far I'm concerned, and it needs something BEFORE the election to get my vote.
After the Ref a lot of bandwagon-jumping opportunistic all talk and no action party-crashers got pushed up as candidates and got elected. It needs for them to be cowped into general rubbish, along with the rest of the dross.
Anyways, at last I've got through what I wanted to say until near the election! Now it's wait and see for me.
edit: To make the point more clearly a lot of people think the problem is the leadership. I think it's many of the elected politicians. For instance when Sturgeon announced the de facto referendum election, MPs moaned "It's our jobs on the line, not yours". Jobs my hairy backside. You were there for us, not yourselves. I was delighted so many of them got kicked out by the missing 520,000 voters, in an election where Independence was a dirty word for the SNP.
We cannot afford to "wait and see". We cannot afford that kind of complacency. We need and must demand a commitment to making the 2026 election the trigger for a process which has a proper constitutional referendum and hence independence as its endpoint. As things stand, no party or politician on the nominally pro-independence side of the issue has made such a commitment.
Moreover, in Swinney's case, he has made it politically impossible for him to make that kind of commitment because it is opposed to everything he has ever said about restoring independence. He would have to resign and be replaced by a party leader/FM who was both politically able and personally willing to make that commitment. That person, as far as anybody knows, does not exist anywhere in the SNP, far less within reach of the top job.
There is no reason to "wait and see". We already know what the SNP is committed to. Some of us, at least, are aware of the dire implications of what they propose. We also understand that there is no possibility of a 'plan B' because, among the consequences of their proposal, is that it obviates any 'plan B'. That 'plan B' could not be anything other than something that 'plan A' acknowledges as illegitimate or illegal.
If Swinney knows of a better way than his 'plan A', why is that not his 'plan A'?