KENNY MacAskill is one of the good guys. I remember sharing a Pay No Poll Tax platform with him at the start of the nineties in Dunfermline, alongside Tommy Sheridan and the rebel anti-poll tax Labour MP Dick Douglas. Later, he earned my admiration for his bold, correct and humane decision to release alleged Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al Megrahi on compassionate grounds.
He has certainly earned the right to his opinions, and I’ve no doubt that he has the best interests of independence at heart.
But I cannot agree with the strategy he proposes in this week’s National column (Want independence? Help save England from Brexit, October 24).
The Scottish Government has a right to put forward its views on Brexit, of course (although I personally disagree with most of them). Where I DO agree with Kenny is that a negotiated, “deal” Brexit is better than no deal.
However, that does beg the question as to why those who insist a no-deal would be a disaster are so determined to undermine negotiations and the UK negotiators, and thereby help bring about the very “no deal” they claim will be a hard cliff Apocabrexit, replete with ration books, tumbleweed and cloned zombies of Ruth Davidson gobbling your children’s brains up.
As Kenny himself points out, up to a third of indy and SNP voters also voted to Leave the EU. Many others wonder at the sense of a strategy – the so-called “people’s vote” – that sets a bad precedent for when Scotland does vote to become independent. (One can imagine the Unionists and their media props demanding a Scottish “people’s vote” on the final independence deal with relish, while their right hand at Westminster does not negotiate in good faith and does its best to “punish” Scotland for voting the “wrong” way).
So, to further concentrate on “saving England from Brexit” at the expense of building the fantastic broad, general and democratic case for independence – a case which is capable of uniting both potential Yes Remain AND potential Yes Leave voters – seems utterly counter-productive from where I stand.
READ MORE: Saving England from Brexit is the best route to independence
Instead, let us all – including the SNP – build and argue for the broad general case for independence, and promise the sovereign Scottish people the gift (and right) of choice.
We can have our own referendum on whether to join/rejoin the EU, or EFTA, or not, ONCE independence has been achieved.
Our good neighbours, meanwhile, have a perfectly democratic route to re-enter the EU if they so wish: elect a political party that seeks a mandate to hold a second referendum on the question. That won’t happen, of course, because despite a large crowd on the streets of London at the weekend, any party promising to backtrack on Brexit will lose as many seats as they gain and won’t be able to form a government.
Perhaps that’s why Remain fanatics like Tony “I’m a straight kind of guy” Blair are so desperate to undermine the vote of 2016 and behave like Michel Barnier’s useful idiots.
One final point – if you’re in listening mode, Kenny. You really let yourself down with the cheap tribalist shot about Corbyn’s “Stalinist” vision of “socialism in one country”. Jeremy Corbyn is not above criticism, of course, and his attitude to Scottish independence is wrong. But he does not propose in any sense a version of “socialism in one country”. And to mention him in the same breath as a mass murderer like Stalin belittles yourself and your argument.
It will also do nothing to win Labour-supporting voters to the cause of independence.
So, to sum up – every extra minute the Scottish Government and Scotland’s biggest independence party, the SNP, waste mired in the divisive Brexit argument is an extra minute lost to making the broad, general case for independence, and delays the coming day of Scotland’s national self-liberation.
Let’s concentrate on winning our own freedom and let that be the internationalist legacy and example we set to our next-door neighbours and all the other inhabitees of this planet.
Steve Arnott
Inverness
READ MORE: Sturgeon fears no deal Brexit is 'most likely outcome'
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