I have a couple of articles 'cooking' at the moment. One is inspired in part by a superb photograph sent to me by Edd Carlile (see if you can guess which one), but mainly by the bitter and nasty response from some self-proclaimed independence activists to the launch of New Scotland Party. The other is my own response to a thoughtful and thought-provoking piece on Barrhead Boy from Ewan Kennedy (Some Comments on the Treaty of Union and Sovereignty). I'm off to Stirling later this morning, however, at the invitation of The Scottish Resistance to attend their Guardians of Scotland Awards ceremony and I don't feel I have time to do justice to either of these articles.
A response to the Ewan Kennedy article would be premature in any case, as it is awaiting a promised response from Sara Salyers, and it would make sense to deal with both lawyers' perspectives together. You'll understand when you read what Ewan Kennedy has to say.
It is now four days since I published my last article, and as my fellow bloggers will be well aware, if you don't feed the beast at least twice a week, it is likely to sicken and die. So, you might regard this piece as filler. Alternatively, and more generously, you could think of it as bonus content.
Employers have never lacked imagination when it comes to finding ways to control and exploit workers. One of the more ingenious ploys - now consigned to history, at least in theory - was company scrip. I've linked to the full Wikipedia entry and urge you read that. But for present purposes, the opening paragraph will suffice.
Company scrip is scrip (a substitute for government-issued legal tender or currency) issued by a company to pay its employees. It can only be exchanged in company stores owned by the employers. In the United Kingdom, such truck systems have long been formally outlawed under the Truck Acts. In the United States, payment in scrip became illegal in 1938 as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act.
Don't ask me how or why my mind makes this connection, but company scrip popped into my head when I was thinking about ways of explaining the reasons for starting New Scotland Party. Regular readers will know how fond I am of a good analogy. If I've done this correctly, you should now be filled with irresistible curiosity to know what links company scrip to the launch of a new political party.
The thing about company scrip is that although it is your wage paid for your labour, you can't spend it as you please. This inevitably lowers its value, as workers would find if they tried to exchange their company scrip for genuine currency on the black market. The dollar they'd earned might turn out to be only ninety cents, or less. It occurred to me that our vote is remarkably similar.
We are conditioned to believe that our vote is precious. It is held to be a thing of immense value. People died to get us that vote, and others have sacrificed much to ensure that we keep it. In a supposedly democratic system, people put up with a lot because they are persuaded that they have the power to change things. The power of their vote. If things are bad, at least it's only for the five years until the next election when they can vote for something different.
But can we? Can we really vote for something different? Or is our vote like company scrip and the British political system akin to the company store where we are obliged to spend our hard-won reward? Can we vote for what we want? Or are we restricted to voting for whatever the company sees fit to offer us, paying whatever price the company wants to charge?
What we hope to do with New Scotland Party is demonstrate what a Scottish political party might be if it was not captured by the British political system. We aim to make it the kind of party people would vote for if they weren't restricted to shopping in the company store. We are proposing an approach to the constitutional issue which we are persuaded people would vote for if only the company would stock it.
We want to show Scottish voters what their vote could buy them if they declined to be restricted to voting only for what the British system offers. Quite why some in the independence movement find this so offensive is for them to explain.
My information is that the ICCPR ploy is dead. Killed, as I feared, by the competence issue.
New Scotland Party currently has no plans to stand candidates at the 2026 Holyrood election. We will only ever stand candidates when and where we are persuaded that doing so will serve Scotland's cause.
I am dubious about any scheme to game the electoral system. It always seemed daft to me to condemn a political party for advocating a voting strategy that best suited them. It's what political parties do. Alba, for example, recommended the voting strategy that best suited them. The odd thing was Alba expecting the SNP to promote the strategy that helped another party. Madness!