IT is a mystery to many people why, given the overwhelming evidence of Tory lies, incompetence, corruption, and hatred of Scotland, people still vote for them. It was Bertrand Russell who told us that “most people would sooner die than think, in fact they do so.”

People convinced of the need for Scotland’s independence seek it for the purpose of freedom, but the problem is that far too many people don’t really want that kind of freedom, because it will involve taking responsibility for our own actions and they are afraid of such responsibility.

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Independence will require us to face the inevitable difficult choices and decisions that will come with having to govern ourselves in a new political, economic, and social system, and having to live with the consequences of them, and providing solutions for them, when we get it wrong – as we surely will on many occasions. That scenario is, for many people, too scary and too much like hard work. It would require them to have to think.

Thus, why burden ourselves with such problems when we don’t have to? Such people, in an understandable longing for security and the comfort that comes with the familiar, are happy to shift such burdens and responsibilities onto someone else and, as we are all too familiar with, will make excuses and lie to themselves for people like the Tories and other Unionists who promise them that they will be well taken care of and will not have to look forward to an unfamiliar and scary future.

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Remember, Brexit was not so much portrayed as a bright new future, but as a return to a mythical past, the Tory version of Make America Great Again. The Unionists amongst us are all too happy to embrace such people, even though they don’t actually believe them. They are afraid – of the future, of the unknown – and that is understandable and is not a criticism. They therefore want the unavoidable and difficult decisions to be taken by other people they imagine are better, stronger, and more capable than they are, and are actually afraid of those who ask them to embrace a new reality that will perhaps require them to take responsibility and make decisions for themselves. Independence requires you to think; voting Unionist doesn’t.

What the independence movement has to do is show such people the real scary future, the elected dictatorship of the lying Number Ten psychopath that Ken Clarke – himself a high Tory grandee – warned about just this week.

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We need to demonstrate that the unknown is actually not unknown and is in fact a myth. That following independence the sky will not fall, our freedom will not result in the loss of our security, food will not magically disappear from the shops, and people will still receive their pensions.

We need to counter Unionist propaganda and lies with a relentless campaign of rebuttal and the calling out of lies and liars as a necessity; we must be as ruthless as the Unionists inevitably will be. As Sean Connery told us in The Untouchables, you don’t bring a knife to a gun fight. A democratic society must always be ready to counter and suppress the enemies of democracy and refuse to tolerate the enemies of tolerance.

If we seek to be nice and accommodate those who would refuse us our democratic rights and freedoms then we will lose both. We must gain the people’s trust and expose the true Westminster character to those who still trust them. That is the choice facing us.

Peter Kerr
Kilmarnock