IT’S difficult to know where to begin with Andrew Wilson’s latest piece (Next Scottish white paper will learn from 2014 – and Brexit failures, February 14).
If this is kite-flying for the SNP high command then I fear for all my fellow foot soldiers and our efforts as bands of Yes leafleters, high-street-stallers and indy marchers over the past four years, because we are definitely moving in opposite directions.
Not for the first time is Andrew proffering a false proposition with his idea of the need for a prospectus and rigorous plan before we can begin to think of independence. Can somebody remind Andrew that it’s because of messages on the side of a big red bus that deceitful Brexiteers won the referendum before we ever got close to the start of Brexit negotiations?
READ MORE: Andrew Wilson: Next Scottish White Paper will learn from 2014 – and from Brexit
If Brexit has taught us anything it is that clarity of the respective starting positions and the willingness to give and take is the essence of constructive negotiation. Ask Messers Barnier, Juncker and Verhofstadt – oh, and what opportunities did Mike Russell get to exercise his negotiating skills of late?
At a time when Scotland had 56 SNP MPs in the English parliament courtesy of the 2015 landslide, this was still insufficient to get any amendments adopted to the Scotland Bill, and that turned out to be just the starting point for Albion’s current reign of perfidy. There will be no agreed Section 30 for indyref2, the basis for negotiation as Andrew sees it. How can this fictional fair play arena exist for independence negotiations when the sides have no common ground and one side not only has all the levers of state which we need to access but has the sheer force of numbers to bully and promulgate their doctrine of entitlement?
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Then there is the obscenity of Trident, despite all the opposition in Scotland. Scotland’s MPs are powerless to do anything about it, and were even when we had 56 SNP MPs.
We must never forget that the playing fields of Eton are breeding grounds for the dark arts of foul play. Yet Andrew’s entire piece is predicated on fair play and reasonableness. He writes: “In financial negotiation we offer a means to secure our responsibilities and obligations to the rest of the UK in an Annual Solidarity Payment meeting our fair share of debt interest, aid payments and other shared services.” No, Andrew, we won’t because they won’t relinquish their grip on the billions generated by 74% duty on our whisky. And that’s all without mentioning the hydro carbon resources west of Shetland that are not supposed to exist, our water resource and our renewable energy resources.
His example of currency and the idea that “Scotland will start with the existing arrangements and then, in time, will have its own currency” is a classic case of maybes aye, maybes naw, hedge our bets of a Union jockery lacking in self-confidence and the self-respect of adults in an international community.
Not only would his approach hand the London financial markets a free run at ruining the fragility of the nascent economic development of our newly free state, but it is an essential requirement for admission to the EU that members have an independent currency and their own central bank.
His proposition of (the) “beauty of building strong foundations” is naive, as it’s a basic law of physics that foundations of any kind depend on the stability of the underlying strata, and with the accelerating deterioration of democratic accountability on show in the Mother of Parliaments last week we have no basis on which to build foundations firm or otherwise.
The SNP are overwhelmed in Westminster by both red and blue Tories. We really are in the end game of the United Kingdom and neither prevarication nor procrastination will serve us well. I had the benefit of seeing the documentary film Nae Pasaram for the second time last night and if ever there there was an example of the importance of self-respect and taking a stand against bully boys it was that group of engine fitters at East Kilbride. Last week there was plenty of passion on show by the 80-minute patriots in Edinburgh. Now is the time to galvanise our self-respect and to stand up for our democratic rights against the Westminster bully boys, and to take our destiny into our own hands before the elected dictatorship of xenophobic England attach their chains and lead us into economic slavery.
Iain Bruce
Nairn
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