ONE of your letter-writers a few days ago wrote “We must all wait until the time is right”. Why is the time not right?
I put to your readers that the “time IS right; is now”. We cannot, must not wait one month longer … since:
- The Covid-19 pandemic in Scotland, in practical terms, could be over in two months’ time, as seems probable;
- Scotland’s economy will be back to pre-Covid levels by year’s end, as many economists forecast;
- the MSM and BBC are aready on the attack, and our main hope, the social media is already heavily infiltrated by new, effective and sinister trolls;
- Boris Johnson may very well see the opportunity for an early General Election within the next three months, which would with some certainty delay an indy2 referendum for a further 1-2 years;
- expansion of the Scottish Office is leading to further, blatant, critical expropriation of existing Holyrood powers;
- we don’t know what Michael Gove and his ‘Whitehall psychodrama team to save the Union’ is up to (his record so far is no credit to his Scottish education, so perhaps we should not be too worked up here);
- the opportunist, dull-witted and ill-thought out ramifications of Brexit are already seriously biting in terms of the ecomonies of our fisheries, agriculture, exports and imports, universities’ intake, labour and tourism … so far – there’s a lot more to come;
- Holyrood has apparently little appetite for the construction of a Scottish Constitution, which we see as a logical neccessity
READ MORE: Michael Russell to update SNP NEC on independence campaign drive
BEFORE any indy2 referendum takes place (this will take time for ‘the people’ to have their say, but it would help if our elected MSPs would show some support; much has been written in The National, but I have no Government reaction);
- the Scots voter has scant idea of not only what an independent Scotland is going to be like, but what it could be like (it is not just about the currency; it is also about citizens’ rights, governance, economy and trade, planning and infrastructure, energy, land title, agriculture, aquaculture and forestry, businerss and industry, education and culture, health, welfare and ‘wellness’, sport and leisure, retirement and pensions, settlements and communities, air, sea and land transport, security and defence, foreign policy, immigratioin and emigration (our 25-40 million Diaspora!), environment and climate change, and law and order); l the vote for our independence ‘divorce’ from our so-called ‘partner’ down south is fraying, with no evidence of all Indy heads getting around the table to head off the further fracturing of the YES vote; and
- England, having failed to bring the Cup “back home”, piqued if not enraged at Scotland’s huge support of Italy, are today feeling that they’ve heard enough and English independence is the way to go.
We talk in business today about “task management” and “task sharing”. I put it to our present SNP government that what has been mentioned a number of times in your readers’ letters, whilst the pandemic has to have priority, the comprehensive planning for the indyref2 must be underway now; and transparently seen to be.
Michael Russel has been appointed as the SNP independence campaign chief, and a new Economic Council has been appointed. Whether this will be enough we won’t know until we hear now what they are going to bring to the table, and when.
But I come back to the lack, in public eyes at least, of the essential multi-tasking that has to be not only done, but to get voters on-side, also seen to be done. Whilst appreciating Nicola’s commitment to bringing the pandemic under control, we cannot accept that our government is only capable of handling one issue at a time.
We have to do better. We cannot “wait till the time is right”; it will never be “the right time”; we have to be masters of our own fate.
Gordon Benton
Newburgh, Aberdeenshire
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