WITH reference to the recent proliferation of letters in other newspapers lambasting the performance of Nicola Sturgeon and the Scottish Government over the last decade, it is sad to witness those who would deny the people of Scotland the right to choose their own destiny so desperately clutching at the straws they see as “evidence” of the demise of the SNP and the entire movement for self-determination.
The incredible rise in membership numbers following the narrow loss in the last referendum, when by some accounts the SNP had the largest number of individual members across the whole of the UK, was not proclaimed as evidence that the Union had deceased. Yet, when through a pandemic and cost-of-living crisis (driven by the UK Government) member numbers drop less substantially, it is illogically claimed by some that independence is dead. If some actually believe that membership numbers are indeed so significant, why are none of these “desperados” calling for all UK political parties to release their membership numbers for, say, the last ten years?
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Apart from political opportunists and misguided journalists looking to create sensational headlines, does anyone seriously equate the identified internal management issues of the SNP as having even the slightest equivalence with a party that has hidden the report on Russian interference in UK politics and has furtively awarded its donors/cronies contracts worth many billions of pounds of taxpayers’ hard-earned income for unusable PPE? Given the economic catastrophe of Brexit and the complete financial shambles of the UK Government under Liz Truss, does anyone honestly believe that shortcomings of the Scottish Government can credibly be considered comparable?
Under the self-serving and dishonest Boris Johnson and ideologically right-wing “Home Secretaries” such as Priti Patel and Suella Braverman, the UK has internationally become a pariah state with an apparent moral code falling far short of the values to which the majority of the people of Scotland aspire. The general public in Scotland have repeatedly proven that they know which people are genuinely attempting to meet their needs and wishes as opposed to those who are essentially working for the benefit of a wealthy minority largely domiciled in another country, and that will not change whatever transformation is undertaken within the SNP or the wider “Yes movement”.
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Irrespective of who becomes the new First Minister, all those who support independence should be encouraged to constructively voice their views on the change that they see as necessary to progress self-determination while respecting the political mandates repeatedly granted previously by the electorate to the SNP and its leadership (which they correctly perceived as being broadly competent, honest and standing up for the rights and interests of the people of Scotland).
The wider “Yes movement” will struggle to make further progress if independence supporters resort to disrespectful denigration of that previous leadership and by implication denigration of those that for more than a decade have trusted the SNP with their votes.
Stan Grodynski
Longniddry, East Lothian
EVEN if you don’t like the “career wing” of the SNP, you have to admit that it was a petty impressive achievement for them to have got the party to position where they could lose 50,000 members and still be by far the biggest party in Scotland and have roughly the same number of members as the third-largest UK party.
Alan Thompson
via thenational.scot
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