I READ the letter in last week’s Sunday National by Isobel Delussey in which she says that the message of independence should have been amplified from after the last referendum in 2014. What is really interesting is that Isobel, a former fellow member of the Inverclyde and Greenock SNP branch, knows that this is precisely what has been happening. Soon after the referendum, our branch took the decision that we would not let the fires of independence die out and produced a strategy to keep them burning.
Over the years since the last referendum our branch has organised more than 20 meetings with various speakers on a large number of topics, all of them related to an independent Scotland and how it could move forward. Guest speakers have included Kate Forbes, Keith Brown, Lesley Riddoch. Michael Russell, the Wee Ginger Dug, Tommy Shepherd and Callum Baird (below).
As Isobel also knows, all of these meetings were open to the general public and not just to SNP members. She also knows that in all of their speeches every speaker strenuously pushed the case for an independent Scotland. We have also run a series of workshops with Andy Anderson based on his excellent books Moving On, Currency in an Independent Scotland and A Clean Currency for a Prosperous Scotland. In these workshops Andy again made a convincing case for an independent Scotland and how its finances and currency should operate.
I have read, and kept, every copy of The National and Sunday National and your paper is constantly telling us about events where SNP branches and Yes shops and hubs are making the case for an independent Scotland known to everyone who will listen. So for Isobel to say that the case has not being getting made, and made since not long after the last referendum, is quite clearly not the case. Before the last referendum, when I wasn’t even a member of the SNP, Yes supporters did not sit back and wait for the SNP to do everything. We worked hand in hand with each other and with organisations such as Yes Scotland to make the case for independence heard loud and clear. This time we must, and are, doing the same by working with other SNP branches, Yes hubs and groups across Scotland and particularly with the excellent campaign being run by Believe in Scotland.
Since the 2014 referendum, the SNP has won Westminster and Scottish Parliament elections. We have also had the devastating Covid pandemic, which has taken up much more of everyone’s time than we would have liked. Yet, despite these factors, as I have shown above the message about Scottish independence is getting out all across Scotland.
Isobel says we were promised independence in the event of any material change in circumstances. We were not promised independence, we were promised a referendum on independence. It is not for the SNP to tell the people of Scotland what to do, only the people of Scotland can decide if we want to be independent.
Isobel says that we have lost a generation who have not heard or been inspired about independence. I am sorry Isobel, you are doing the young people of Scotland a disservice by saying this and it is not what I am hearing from my daughters and their friends and from youngsters who first got the vote at 16. If anything they are more inspired by independence even than our generations have been, they have seen first-hand the dishonesty and injustices and greed of the Tory governments that have been forced upon them against their will and they are absolutely raging at what has happened and are determined to make their voices heard in a referendum.
Perhaps we all, including Isobel, need to ask not just what can the SNP do for independence but what can we as individuals and groups do for independence?
Finally, as someone whose father worked in Ferguson’s up until just before he died in 1966, I am not in the slightest apologetic about raising it here. Whatever people’s thoughts might be about how the issue of the two ferries has been progressed, the fact of the matter is that if the Scottish Government hadn’t taken over the yard, then there would not be a yard and there would not be a skilled workforce, including apprentices attending our local college, and yet another industry would have been destroyed in Inverclyde!!
Tom Tracey
Greenock
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