WITH reference to the discussion on the way forward for the SNP in the depute leader contest, for moving the agenda to be less reverential towards the existing elites and to motivate the majority of our people on being positive towards independence, I make the following observations and suggestions on the issue of the fear of poverty which underlies all the current debate on independence, Brexit etc etc.

Apparently landowners in Scotland can make more money from planting trees in their border estates than they can get from tenant farmers. So some tenant sheep farmers are being evicted from their livelihoods, and others are facing 70 per cent increases in their rents. A new Clearances ... this time with the sheep making way for trees.

I have been advocating for the last three years, both within the SNP and to a wider Yes community, proposals that all non-domestic land be democratised and taken into the ownership of all the people via a Common Good Agency, with each citizen a shareholder and all land access rent revenues used to fund a Citizens Income of £11,000+ to every adult, child allowances of £4,000+ and individual heritable Pension Funds worth £15,000+/annum, all from the £50 billion each and every year going into the maws of at most around 30,000 people or corporate entities.

Each elector – you, me, the majority, the We the People – only have to vote for these things. It’s like independence ... once you see past the smoke and mirrors and start asking the right questions, the answers become obvious.

It’s high time we stopped accepting the rules made in centuries past by a discriminatory and lethal violence-dealing elite and took back our country, literally.

The natural environment belongs to us all, equally.

It is the privatisation of the natural environment by the few that enables poverty, in fact it is the most crucial desired effect of the privatisation. The threat of the conditions of those in poverty permits the few to coerce the majority into paying for the necessities for life by working the hours they wish us to work, at the rates they wish to pay us, and then we must give back most of those begrudged “earnings” to them at the rates they wish to charge us for the resources for life that they have engineered full control of.

Only members of the human species pay other members of their species to access the natural resources for sustaining and maintaining life. All other species just access freely.

The new Scotland must not just be the UK writ small with our own homegrown landed, financial, administrative, judicial and political Powers That Be. A self-regarding elitist, vested-interest group of puppet masters still calling the shots behind the smokescreen of “electoral democracy” where the only real choice open to the people, we plebs, is who we elect to play their games with our lives this time round.

I vote for independence because I wish for real change in the way we organise ourselves socially. I want real equality of opportunity for all, I want real freedom of choice for all, I want real social justice for all. And to get that we must remove the ability of the elites to coerce and engender fear in the majority on the basis of our needs.

Every citizen should have a guaranteed independent source of a basic income, free of work, which can provide to each the ability, at a minimal level, to be able to feed, clothe and house themselves in any way they choose to do so. Real choice in real things.

I don’t want a free Scotland.

I want a free people in a free Scotland.

Robin Clunie
Glenrothes