Ruth Wishart: Independence is a crusade or it is nothing as Labour lose their way

Like everyone outside of those Conservative MPs nervously eyeing the likelihood of a P45, I think it’s long past time for the electorate to have their say. Not just because no tears will be shed in this household if the Tories get their jotters.

Whatever the arcane self-serving rules of the Tory party say, whatever the lofty pronouncements of those who don’t seem to have noticed the UK doesn’t have a written constitution to cover moments of maximum embarrassment, the fate of a UK in crisis can’t be left to a party membership already shown to be detached from reality. Twice.

They’ve been popping up all over the airwaves these last drama-sodden days explaining how lovely, tousled Boris got a bad rap and could they please have him back again. Assorted MPs have joined in the chorus. It seems short-term memory loss has had an access all areas pass.

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For would that be the same lovely Boris who trashed all the long established Westminster rules, who philandered his way through several marriages and mistresses, whose relationship with the truth wasn’t so much semi as wholly detached?

By the time he’d lied and partied his way through serial scandals, no fewer than 50 members of his government fell on their swords, including two serving members of his Cabinet.

Och aye, let’s have bad boy Boris back and pour some more petrol on the embers of what used to be a passing respectable collection of nations.

Even those Conservatives for whom Boris unchained was a very bad dream, try to tell us that all they need is a few days to scurry around whilst they locate a couple of grown-ups to soothe the fevered nations. Sadly grown-ups, like so many of life’s essentials, seem to be in rather short supply within their tattered ranks.

While they racket around in their own cushioned bubbles, other voices on air threaten to be drowned out. A mum who only allows herself to eat three days a week so that her family can have some meagre nourishment. An elderly person fearful of using any electricity even to cook. A school meals superintendent talking about the children who arrive cold and hungry clutching empty lunch boxes.

That is the Britain that matters. These are the poor, tired huddled masses cast into poverty and want by a government only getting its undergarments in a fankle over which of its retreads should be handed the keys to an office once occupied by political heavyweights. Now a series of imposters and party pygmies has been permitted to squat. Off with their befuddled heads.

Back at the Scottish ranch, we have been indulging in the national past time of squabbling with our own. As events down south prove, a political movement possessing diverse views is nothing new. In fact, arguably, without such diversity, it becomes little more than a cult – which, not at all incidentally, is an insult regularly hurled at the Yes family by Unionist diehards.

Sadly, it is also a term utilised by supposed indy supporters who have somehow persuaded themselves that the road to statehood can only be travelled by those pure in policy heart. So long as it’s a policy they themselves endorse.

The publication of the latest paper covering the future of the Scottish economy is a case in point. This was much anticipated because the issues of currency and possible border checks are the ones most often raised by unionists as reasons to stay bound and gagged in a box to which only Westminster has the key.

And no question, they are vital both to raise, to answer and to debate. Unfortunately, there are some folks who regularly confuse incivility with wit. People who dream up a soundbite which is completely dismissive in tone and content and are guilty, in my book, of nothing less than crass self-indulgence.

The Scottish Currency Group which is more than 3000 strong, like Believe In Scotland, has a series of ground rules which assert that all contributions to their discussions should remain free of personal abuse, disrespect and unwarranted criticism. These are solid rules given the need to embrace adherents and contributors from all parties and none.

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Both of these groups have a wealth of talent and experience for which we, and for that matter the Scottish Government, should be properly grateful. Both have put in a lot of the hard yards necessary to build the foundations of a successful transition to independence.

Would that some commentators in other generally well-disposed pro-indy think tanks observed similar levels of restraint. Dismissing the latest Scottish Government paper on currency and trade, which provides much food for future thought and debate, with an earthy two-word putdown does little more than write the scripts of opponents of indy for them.

The late Harold Wilson once pronounced that the Labour Party was “a crusade or it was nothing”. That’s rather how I feel about the independence campaign. We are all engaged in the most important crusade of our lifetimes, to make Scotland the modern, just nation state we all crave.

Crusaders in this cause will come in all shapes and sizes. Some imbibed the cause with their mother’s milk, others came later to see that Scotland could only reach its full potential severed politically from an administration which, for so many decades, has seemed to slide downhill into an unlovely state of xenophobia and ill temper.

It is a hard fact of electoral arithmetic that, in order to unmoor Scotland from this unhappy ship, we need to bring on board tens of thousands of voters who have yet to reach a firm conclusion about where lies Scotland’s best chance of equality and prosperity.

Many of them are reluctant to detach themselves from those voters in England who also feel largely disenfranchised from Westminster governments whose values bear so little relationship to their own. That’s understandable. I too hope the polls are right and Labour trounces the Tories in the next General Election.

Yet that is a separate argument from the Scottish democratic deficit. Because we are the only nation which never votes Tory yet always gets a Conservative government. We are a nation rich in its own history and heritage, and in its human and natural resources. We are not a region. Nor a large conurbation.

It has to be emphasised that while a Labour victory will undoubtedly give hope to those of our English friends and neighbours who also long for liberation, it is not a solution to what ails Scotland.

The current Labour leader seems immune to the democratic imperative of an independence vote; to a recognition of serial election results in Scotland. He is apparently sanguine about the 2016 vote and vows to “make Brexit work”. That would be a clever trick worthy of the late Paul Daniels. Brexit is a problem and a running sore, not a solution.

Yet there is no acknowledgement either that Scots are overwhelmingly pro EU, or that a large majority of English leave voters are overwhelmed with buyers’ regret.

What matters to his party machine is that they regain those erstwhile “red wall” voters who were beguiled by both Brexit and Boris despite both winning thanks to cynical misinformation and downright porkies.

And on so many issues, like the deportation of asylum seekers, Labour has often mistaken right-wing rhetoric for political respectability.

So once again we face stark choices in Scotland. Standing on the sidelines hollering foul any time our personal masterplan is not adopted doesn’t seem awfully useful. Maybe we should be providing the grown-ups.