Imagine walking into your workplace every day knowing that 92.62% of your colleagues didn’t like you.
Imagine every time you stood up to ask a question in a meeting you were booed and heckled and told to “go home”.
Imagine if no-one actually heard your question because of the noise.
Imagine you’d thought about the challenges, diligently brought sensible suggestions that were ignored, and imagine that the spirit of compromise you brought was met with contempt and derision.
Imagine being told by the chairman that your voice didn’t matter, and that the vote you had on the business’s constitutional arrangements seven and a bit years ago had to stand forever because someone who no longer works for the company once used a phrase – “once in a generation” – in a completely different context – which meant that the question could never be asked again. Ever.
Even if 80% of the colleagues of your department wanted it.
Even if larger departments were enacting bigger changes on a much lower support base. And imagine if all the time the powers and responsibilities you always believed were yours by right were being taken without your consent? And if your department couldn’t set a budget because the big house was so incompetent they couldn’t set theirs?
And imagine the big house – some of whose members actually live in your neighbourhood – tried to blame you because your conscientious stance had delayed a catastrophic outcome the people you represent never wanted?
Your self-respect would mean you’d leave the company and never go back. You’d think about calling the lawyer, but, ach, life’s too short, and why give them the satisfaction?
You’d set up your own company. You’d grow up. You’d move on.
Ok, I’ve laboured the point enough.
It isn’t working, people. Get us out of here, quick. This continuing participation in a demeaning charade has to end. It’s deeply embarrassing.
Every time we ask for what is already ours it weakens and demeans us and emboldens a majority government that hardly needs us to give it a confidence boost.
And while I’ve wanted to write an article about the red herring that is the kite flying exercise that is devo-max, I’ve resisted because plenty of folk better qualified than me have dealt with the issue and because the stooshie misses the point.
And the point isn’t the kite flying non-story of a ridiculously vague, non-mandated devo-max that is essentially a re-run of the panicked, purdah breaking “vow” of 2014 that led to a Smith Commission that delivered the square root of hee haw and ultimately paved the way for the post-Brexit power grab which is now happening in plain sight.
No. The point is this.
After everything that has happened. After being ignored over a Brexit that we rejected. After being continually dragged into austerity and illegal wars. After being huff’d and cuff’d and disrepeckit, to borrow from Burns, we still haven’t used the growing number of cast-iron democratic mandates that we’ve won to get ourselves the hell out. That is a disgrace.
In the end, the primary responsibility of any leader is the well-being of her people. Rule from Westminster presents an existential threat to Scotland and therefore the First Minister must with immediate effect remove us from this bouroch at the earliest possible opportunity by whatever means available. Not by the end of the decade. But now.
In the end, it’s always better to plough your own furrow. And the best and most honest thing is to be yourself.
This is about self-preservation. And, importantly self-respect. Because I’ll be damned if the Rees-Moggs of this world speak for me and mine.
Get it done folks. It’s later than you think.
Happy new year, people. I’ll meet you further on up the road.
Categories: Uncategorized
Well said Alec, couldn’t agree more.
I’ve been begging for us to walk out…and stay out…since we returned 56 out of 59 MP’s in 2015. There are politicians I respect, notably Philippa Whitman, who genuinely believe we can’t be an “abstentionist Party”… I get where she’s coming from. but for every vote we put in against the Tories in Westminster, we’re whistling in the wind, and the Tory machine trundles on, stealing more from us every day that passes. Tick tock. time’s up.
“… the First Minister must with immediate effect remove us from this bouroch at the earliest possible opportunity by whatever means available. Not by the end of the decade. But now.”
Great idea, I’d love that too. Slight problem – not quite enough people are convinced yet to vote ‘yes’ to quarantee the right result. That being the case, seems like the magic wand may be required in terms of ‘whatever means available’. I’m not at the spring chicken end of the demographic. If we push the referendum now and it goes against us, it’s game over for me ever seeing it happen. A bit of patience. We’ve been waiting 315 years now. Two or three more won’t kill us, desperate though the plight is in this broken UK. The young folk coming on to the voting register will give us that guarantee (and, dare I say it, auld yins, who mainly don’t agree with this auld yin, will be falling off their perches). No passaran.
The SNP leadership could argue for Independence and make plans for it? They could also bring all together and make agreements on the institutions we don’t currently have but will need post Independence. Then campaign relentlessly on why they are required.
What is the reality? Until covid is over? Until England grants permission? They’ve consulted/employed Murray Foote, Nicholas macPherson, envoys from the land classes and just about every other pro Westminster grouping in Scotland and they say..what exactly? They have probably told our FM that the MSM in Scotland need another 9m quid.
Amen to that. The time is now. Slainte Mhor.
Here’s the rub, Brexit was to be the game changer that triggered the demand for another referendum. Yet opinion polls indicate there is no majority in favour of another vote taking place.
The ridiculous situation over the border in Northern Ireland gives some indication of what would lie in store for an Independent Scotland within the EU.
I have no worries about the chest thumping calls for another referendum. It won’t come to anything.
Sturgeon is too timid to call one even if Westminster conceded.
I am more concerned over the stagnation of Scotland’s economic, educational and civic governance. Like a dictatorship, Hollyrood has taken control over all these institutions and only time will tell what long term damage they have inflicted on us.
The scottish Goverment most remove it self from Westminster and set up the government in Edinburgh as it is not working in England and let the world see the way we Scots are Treated by this English lieing Torys
Take our Independence and get us out of this corrupt shit show
It is interesting to read the insightful and profound comments offered by the nationalist supporters of this article.
In any other mature and democratic country apart it seems in Scotland, the term nationalist is a pejorative one reserved for the ignorant and uninformed.
We got into this mess in 1707 by a corrupted vote in the then Scottish Parliament. It follows therefore, that only a vote by the current Scottish Parliament, as the elected representatives of the Scottish people, should be required to end the Treaty of Union. Holyrood as a devolved entity, doesn’t have the Constitutional Powers to do this as a creation of Westminster. The Scottish MP’s at Westminster do have those powers, as they are the legally legitimate elected representatives of all the Scottish people, and hold a majority of 48 or 49 out of 59 parliamentary seats from Scotland. Margaret Thatcher in her biography stated that all that was required to end the Union was a majority vote by Scottish MP’s to end it. Whether those Scottish MP’s at Westminster, agree with it or not, they still are the continuance of the 1707 Scottish Parliament now sitting at Westminster.
Politics today, although we do nothing about it, something HAS to be done URGENTLY, to correct this poluting aberration.
Our children watch television and they see a doctor or a dentist explain why they should buy this that or the other, if they want to stay healthy.
They witness a family group, really happy in acquiring a new…. well, you name it, but hese people are liars for money.
They get paid to lie.
They are actors and they are acting a part for which they are paid but that is not what our child sees!
And now it seems, it is not what adults see either!
We have second rate actors playing their parts as ministers of state, selling a story, just like any advert.
As actors, there is no need to believe in what they are selling, or even have an interest in it.
Their scripts contain outrageous lies, which they deliver with impunity.
Yet, despite the daylight robberies concering the public purse, we seem to have become immune and just absorb the lies, as we do with all the other advertising we are bombarded with.
The public are flooded with ‘box sets’, which keeps them occupied and away from questioning the criminality in the governance of the UK, the robberies in plain sight, the copious contracts given to friends and families of these high flying liars, the ever clearer line of the ‘One law for them and another set for us.’ and the complicity of the police in all this!
The sheer number of lies coming from that place seems to be overwhelming everyone!
What is wrong with the English that they let this happen?
What is wrong with Scottish governance, that it too, lets this go on with severe detriment to the people under its charge, without rising up and taking our freedom, so very often promised?
These lies and thefts are, by their very nature, more damaging to Scots and Scotland, due to the disproportional allocation of our own Scottish funds and resources.
And we Scots lie here being abused and slandered, robbed and laughed at because our own government is feart to act to protect us!
Those thieves laugh at Scotland and its political representatives because, no matter what the tories do or say, no matter how much they steal, our political response is to simply turn the other cheek.
That is NOT good enough!
The downward pressure on Scots and Scotland has been relentless since that terrible mistake in 2014 and has grown worse year on year.
The time to act was yesterday, but no, our politicians, charged wit delivering independence have let another few years drift by , let countless other Scots die because we don’t have control of our own affairs, because we can’t buy or afford the drugs to tackle the situations developing.
Our subserviance has to stop now!