THIS is the last Sunday National before the General Election. By this time next week we will know a little more about what our future holds.
It will come as no surprise to our readers that our advice to Scottish voters is to vote SNP or, where it would be tactically advantageous to the cause of independence, for the Scottish Greens.
We support this course of action simply because we support independence and therefore believe that voting in that way would bring independence closer.
Certainly independence is our prime aim. It has been since The National was launched in 2014 and it will remain so until independence is ours.
But there are other factors in this, certainly the most important General Election in decades.
It is vitally important that we make sure that Boris Johnson wakes up on Friday morning to find himself out of a job. If we fail in that task, so much that so many have worked for will be at risk.
Not least of these, of course, is the NHS. Donald Trump’s intervention last week, when he insisted he had no interest in making money from our health service, should make any sensible person more worried rather than less. Boris Johnson and the president of the United States share the same rather tenuous relationship with the truth.
But it is not just the NHS which would be at risk from a Johnson victory. So too would be workers’ rights, much of the welfare state and many of those gains wrested from the Tory elite by previous progressive governments.
It is too late to believe that the Labour Party is capable of transforming the United Kingdom into the country we would want to live in. Only independence can do that, by putting the power to shape a new Scotland into our own hands.
But Labour policies are closer to our own beliefs than those of Boris Johnson’s right-wing cabal and we should hope for a result that protects those south of the border from the worst ... even if our own best interests ultimately lie in a different constitutional arrangement.
Why are you making commenting on The National only available to subscribers?
We know there are thousands of National readers who want to debate, argue and go back and forth in the comments section of our stories. We’ve got the most informed readers in Scotland, asking each other the big questions about the future of our country.
Unfortunately, though, these important debates are being spoiled by a vocal minority of trolls who aren’t really interested in the issues, try to derail the conversations, register under fake names, and post vile abuse.
So that’s why we’ve decided to make the ability to comment only available to our paying subscribers. That way, all the trolls who post abuse on our website will have to pay if they want to join the debate – and risk a permanent ban from the account that they subscribe with.
The conversation will go back to what it should be about – people who care passionately about the issues, but disagree constructively on what we should do about them. Let’s get that debate started!
Callum Baird, Editor of The National
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