I’M sure Lesley Riddoch has been called many things, but I wonder if “antidote” has been one of them. I was fortunate enough to sit as she spoke to a packed room last week, for just short of an hour, courtesy Edinwfi and Marchmont and Morningside, sharing anecdotes, views and challenges around Scotland: past, present and future.

What an antidote to Penny Mordaunt, sword-carrier supreme-o, and her scandalous tropes.

Lesley’s latest book Thrive featured that evening, and reminded us or maybe informed some for the first time that Sawney Bean, “head of an incestuous, murderous family” of cave-dwellers in Galloway, was in fact fictitious.

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But as with Penny, we see the replaying of and building on myths started way back in the past, as early as from a tract and possibly a mistranslation from Saint Jerome, a canny soul, born in what is now Slovenia, and dying in Bethlehem around 420CE.

It’s doubtful he made a swing by Caledonia, but he’s quoted as believing that the people here “chose only the most fleshy and delicate parts for eating”! Parts being human flesh! Talk about getting the boot in early enough!

We should remember and learn from history: that to legitimise the destruction of your opposition, demonising them is a worthwhile tactic to be employed after the scorn, ridicule, belittling and humiliation. It’s a tried, tested and sadly successful methodology utilised down the centuries. As outsiders have mythologised us so unfairly for so long, we appear to have gone full circle, synthesised down to the simplified brainwashing slogan that sadly some still believe: too wee, too poor, too feart to take back our independence.

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And now we see internal factions coming in with life imitating art. I mean, are you the People’s Front of Judea, or the Judean People’s Front?

Wouldn’t it be a crime if it’s argy-bargy pro-indy politicians splitting the vote, enabling Labour back – not into government in October, but at least to claim that Unionism is on the up?

It’s obvious that there’s no question now of sufficient dissatisfaction with the old Union, its way and how it operates but fails to deliver, so are we challenging Westminster sufficiently whilst undermining ourselves? Ours to lose and not for the Union to win.

For those of us marching, leafleting, campaigning, trying hard to change the mind of one person, one vote, one at a time, are we giving out the right messages, making the appropriate cases for change? Some people still need to be convinced that independence will make “life” better, and if a clear route to get there has still to identified, shouldn’t the two be worked on? Identify that route, whilst demonstrating not what we would be doing differently but WHY we need to do things differently.

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We don’t need to remind everyone of the failure of the Union since we’re living it on a daily basis. We need to show and tell what the future would be like if we continue in the Union with its deeper detrimental life-changing outcomes.

A powerful campaign showing what Scotland will look like in the Union, identifying what would be our future: our quality of life would continue to deteriorate, our public services would decay and our parliament would be shorn of its limited powers. Is it time to move the emphasis on to showing the Union in its true light? Is it time to take the gloves off, metaphorically that is?

Selma Rahman
Edinburgh