New Scotland Party: Slow progress

There's just so much to be done!

Have you ever had that feeling that you’re spending an extraordinary amount of time on something, but making little headway? The feeling that the thing you wostly do is add new items to your to-do list? I've been a bit like that this past week. I've done not nearly enough work on the party constitution and not nearly enough work on the website and not nearly enough work on half a dozen other tasks. In short, not nearly enough work.

I do have an excuse. People may not think of tinnitus as a cripplling affliction, but it definitely can be. The constant roaring and ringing in the ears can make it impossible to concentrate. Which has very much been my problem for nearly a fortnight. I have been profoundly deaf in my left ear for some years and am now partially deaf in my right ear as well. Ironically, it is my deaf ear that is noisiest. I pick up new hearing aids on Wednesday and, hopefully, this will help. For the moment, I literally can't hear myself think.

Excuses made! Down to business!

Last week wasn't a total loss. My collaborator, David Heriot, sent me a list of questions about New Scotland Party which I turned into an article. This has proved to be a very worthwhile exercise which rescued what would otherwise have been a total write-off of a week. I've lost count of the number of people who have been in touch with the same comment - they are starting to get a better idea of what New Scotland Party is. They begin to see what it is we are trying to do. That has to be regarded as progress.

Intitially - and as anticipated - most of the critical comments I was fielding fell into two broad categories. There were those who said we didn't need another political party and that it was just "splitting the independence vote". And there were those who had lost all trust and respect for political parties in general and so couldn't see the point of another one. I had considerable sympathy for the latter and very little sympathy for the former. The "splitting the vote" nonsense was dealt with in an earlier article in which I explained that it was not the independence vote that was split, but the party vote. The independence vote can't be split because there is only one independence. It is a binary issue. Independence or the Union. The notion that the pro-independence vote can be split only arises if one imagines that vote to be the 'property' of a single party so that taking votes from that party was taking votes from independence.

New Scotland Party is necessary because there currently is no real 'party of independence' in Scotland. There are parties using the word 'independence' as an electioneering device. And there are parties whose founders and members are sincere in their commitment to Scotland's cause but who are no more ready to talk about the process involved than the kiddy-on pro-independence parties. New Scotland Party is not another pro-independence party. As things stand, it will launch as the only pro-independence party.

Of course, the 'New' in the party's name stands for much more than the fact that it is a new political party. It also refers to a new approach to the constitutional issue as well as suggesting the idea of remaking Scotland as a nation. That's as close as we want to get to the whole 'vision' thing. We are quite happy to leave to others the dreaming and wishful thinking about what independent Scotland might look like. New Scotland Party is for nationalists who regard the restoration of Scotland's independence as a matter of justice. It is precisely what the political left insist it mustn't be - an end in itself. If restoring justing and righting ancient wrongs is not a worthy aim in itself, than what is?

New Scotland Party is Scotland's party of national liberation. This is not just a form of words. It is a way of thinking about the constitutional issue which contrasts sharply with the 'old thinking' of the 'old guard' of the independence movement. Whereas they suppose independence can - and indeed must - be restored by a process which involves the honest cooperation of a British state suddenly and magically moved to respect both the people of Scotland and the principles of democracy, we acknowledge that such a British state exists only as a fantasy and that our struggle involves taking that which the British state will never willingly give up.

Whereas the 'old guard' of the independence movement imagine independence as a remodelling of the existing relationship between Scotland and England, New Scotland Party accepts that the break must be complete in order that a new form of association can be forged. That is why New Scotland Party is explicitly a republican party. We recognise that to retain the monarchy, in whatever form, is to leave intact one of the principal institutions involved in the annexation and exploitation of our nation.

There can be little doubt that people are increasingly coming around to the new thinking on the constitutional issue - even if the process is slower and more gradual for some than for others. It is hoped that the existence of a political party willing to say the things the nominally pro-independence parties shy away from will hasten the process.

As I said, I have a great deal of sympathy with those who say they want nothing more to do with political parties of any kind. In fact, I am quite pleased when people tell me they are hesitant to take up with New Scotland Party. These are mainly people who have already jumped from one party to another - some more than once - often without a great deal of thought. Parties were winning support for no better reason than that they were not the parties people were leaving. There was very little pressure on the leaderships of these supposed alternative parties to make the case that they were actually different enough to be an alternative. When that pressure was later brought to bear, the leaderships were found wanting.

New Scotland Party is faced with a 'market' in which most of the 'clients' are in a once-bitten-twice-shy frame of mind. For some, it's a case of twice-bitten-ten-times-more-shy. This is healthy! It means we have to work to convince these people that New Scotland Party really is different. To do this, we need to be genuinely and markedly different. And that is what we are striving for. Our rule of thumb is to look at the way the traditional parties operate, and do as close as we can get to the opposite. We aim to be organised and financed differently. We are considering new forms of membership which encourage active participation. We are exploring new ways of managing the party's internal affairs and campaigning which utilise the potential of the web while keeping costs to a minimum. We are drafting - tinnitus permitting - a party constitution which guarantees the members ownership of the party while preventing the kind of hijacking by some faction which has been the downfall of other parties. We aim to be a very different kind of political party. A genuinely new party for a new, liberated Scotland.

This is important because, notwithstanding the understandable desire to eschew political parties altogether, we have to accept that they are an essential part of the democratic system through which we must work in order to restore Scotland's independence. There is no way to restore independence which bypasses the Scottish Parliament. It is the only institution which possesses the democratic legitimacy to speak and act on behalf of the sovereign people of Scotland. Only the Scottish Government can initiate the process by which the Scottish Parliament legislates an end to the Union, subject to a vote by the people of Scotland in a democratic event wholly under the auspices of Scotland's own democratic institutions.

Governments are formed by political parties. Political parties are the device by which we, the people, access effective political power. It is not political parties per se which are wrong, but the cliques and factions which come to run the parties when the members fail to stop them.

We are constatntly reminded that Holyrood is merely an executive branch of Westminster. This is true. But it is also true that the Scottish Parliament is directly elected by the people of Scotland using a system of proportional representation. And it is true that the people of Scotland are sovereign. The Scottish Parliament is therefore in every regard identical to the national parliament of an normal independent country other than that the parliament of England-as-Britain claims superior authority over it. The Scottish Parliament is our national parliament! But, like so many of Scotland's political and cultural institutions, it has been usurped by a colonial power. Break Westminster's stranglehod on Holyrood and it instantly becomes the fully democratically legitimate national parliament of Scotland.

So, why don't we do that? Well, you'll have to put that question to Scotland's political elite. In fact, you must ask that question. And you must ask what concrete and credible proposals they have for making it happen. New Scotland Party intends to demonstrate what a genuine party of liberation looks like. By doing so, we hope to bring about a more rapid shift to that new thinking by both Scotland's people and the existing Scottish political parties.

Scotland's independence movement needs a party political arm in order to access effective political power through Scotland's democratic institutions. The existing parties have failed. They have not been up to the task. Yet they still insist that their way is the only way. New Scotland Party intends to show the folly of this by being a model for the party that Scotland's independence movement needs.

Sadly, we have not mad much progress towards that end in the past week. That is entirely my fault. I intend to do better. With a little help from the people who have opted - some quite hesitantly - to join me in this project.

We will have our second Zoom meeting on Thursday 15 August, commencing 19:00. Invitations and links for this meeting will be going out before close of businesss today (Monday 12 August). If you would like to join us and have not already put you name on the list, please email contact@newscotlandparty.scot putting 'Meeting 240815' in the subject line.

Now, I better get back to work.