WHAT SORT OF SCOTLAND BY JIM SILLARS

Iain Lawson’s article yesterday could be viewed in two different ways. It explains the agony facing an indy voter, who knows support for a good local MSP will be seen, when taken with all similar votes in the country, to be an endorsement of Nicola Sturgeon whose conduct he finds reprehensible. Or, he finds himself in a political blackmailed position, where he dare not do what he wants without unfairly punishing a good SNP MSP.

But what if others with an SNP MSP who is not a good one:  just one of the sheep on the backbenches who bleats unthinking support on demand of the leadership? Or one of the new  MSP candidates so obsessed with Woke issues that they would be oblivious to the £268m cut in social housing as set out in the SNP budget last week?  

The dilemma those  second group of individuals will face, as does Iain Lawson, is that when all their votes are counted together, they will be seen by the media, and claimed by the leadership, as solid endorsement of all they have done.  

That is the cost of “Wheesht for indy,” the national political  blackmail  wielded by the leadership. “You don’t like the way we have centralised power in the party, made a mockery of the previous party constitution, marched you up the hill and back down again on the referendum, rammed gender down your throats,  sacked the most able MP, attacked free speech, set out to ruin and imprison the former leader, but ‘Wheesht for indy’ because we are the only ones you can vote for.”

To say Independence voters are between a rock and a hard place, isn’t the half of it. SNP members and supporters who are not members but voters, are in the same position here that Trump placed decent USA republican members and voters in during his presidency and at the 2020 election.  “You are repelled by what I say and do, but you have nowhere else to go” was his message. Basically the same as “Wheesht for Indy.”

Unlike Iain Lawson I don’t have a good SNP MSP presenting me with his dilemma. I am, therefore, freer than he is to consider whether by my vote I am going to endorse an SNP government with its toxic  tentacles stretching into and around civic Scotland, and whose practices revealed in the parliamentary inquiry are shown to have debased the open, fair, just, democratic principles that the party was established on. The rectitude of the past, exemplified by Gordon Wilson’s integrity as leader, is no more. Can I, when the rot at the centre is unmistakeable, vote for it?  No.  

At present, as Iain Lawson demonstrates, party members and non-party indy activists are going to be trapped into endorsing what they do not agree with.   But does that need to be the case?  Yes, time is short, but it has not run out. There needs to be a revolt and a change in leadership, a real sweeping change.  The first action falls upon the NEC to demand and create the change.

If it cannot do so, and the party membership finds it has no means to do so, then all better get their heads out of the party sand, and the polls, they are in at the moment, and realise that others are not bound by the same ties, the people, and they will shortly be emerging from the smothering of politics that has been a feature of the Covid-19  pandemic.  The leadership, it is reported in the press, thinks the pandemic has meant the public has paid little real attention to the parliamentary inquiry, and it will quietly sink and disappear.  That is a self-serving error of judgment.

Although those who succumb to the “Wheesht for indy” rule cannot think beyond today,  and seem ready and willing to throw away their moral compass and do mortal damage to  the Scottish body politic, ripping to pieces the ethical standards that underpin a society where law and justice should be pre-eminent, it does not follow that the people will be so accommodating.

Widespread  vaccination will do more than protect us from the virus.  It will slam  open the doors and windows of politics to show a government misusing the limited devolution powers and patronage to pursue vindictive and unlawful actions against a single citizen whom it feared, with its legal arm going after two of his supporters. Will the public “Wheesht for indy,” turn a blind eye, or ask itself what would this group do if they had the full untrammelled powers that will come with independence? Will the public believe these leopards will change their dark spots?

What if the public ask, as I think they will, what sort of law and justice can we expect from this present lot if they are in charge in our future? The “Wheesh” merchants, if successful, will turn the SNP and the whole independence movement into an ideology akin to that in Stalin’s USSR, where the   “Wheesht for the party’s cause” enabled criminality to flourish, because the people who did know the truth stayed silent.  Vilification and persecution was the lot of those who did speak. Joanna Cherry’s persecution is mild, dismissal from a shadow job,  but the vilification is not greatly different from that dished out by the Kremlin’s stooges.

Of course it isn’t Stalin in Bute House, and her chief of staff isn’t Beira, nor are all those SPADS and compliant civil servants officers in the KGB.  But they are capable of using the system to send a man to ruin and the jail, whom they believed was in their way.  And the system they have created can put Mark Hirst through an eight month wringer, and put Craig Murray on criminal charges that somehow are not pursued against other journalists much more culpable, but who happen to take the side of the government’s complainers against Alex Salmond.

Once it emerges from under the blanket of pandemic measures, I doubt if the people will obey the “Wheesht ” order, and be content to vote for those who do.

Of course I could be wrong. The leadership bet is that I am. That the people are as willing to “Wheesht for indy” as much as the most fervent party member. But if I am right……………………well.

Ah but, I hear the “Wheesht” advocates cry, if all followed you it would put back indy; there would be no referendum by Christmas.  There are two answers to that: Mike Russell’s Christmas promise is utter garbage. He is playing to the indy gallery.  Two minutes thinking about the process and the logistics, shows it cannot happen in that timescale.

But let me deal separately with the much bigger issue, that failure to achieve an SNP majority will set back when independence will be achieved. So it will.  But a set back by a few years in the life of a nation is nothing. Independence will happen.  But just as important to that achievement is how it is achieved.  If it is to be in the immediate short term, and the price is to submerge, as if they are of no importance, the bedrock principles of a democracy  –  law, justice, decency, and fairness, then what kind of Scotland do we think will emerge?  One tarnished by how it was achieved.

Final point. Everyone is aware that the unionist camp is salivating over all the muck revealed. Whose fault is that?  Salmond’s? No. When he won the judicial review, he did not name Nicola Sturgeon or anyone else in the SNP. He deliberately sought to pin the blame on the permanent secretary alone. It was not he who landed himself in court in the ‘trial of the century,’ but those who, failing at the judicial review, set out to “get him”  by going to the Crown Agent and the police. It is in their lap the blame lies, and theirs alone.  Is Salmond, a man whose character was turned inside out for all to see during the court case,  not entitled to produce evidence that he was placed in that dock by people who conspired to put him there?  Alex Salmond got a fair trial, but there is a question as to whether he got the fairest trail. His defence was not allowed, by a judge’s decision at preliminary hearings, to bring forward evidence of the conspiracy.  In the public court of a parliamentary inquiry, it seems the same ruling is to apply against him again.  We should be ashamed of those who govern us.

COMMENT

I can only speak for myself but it is important to me to campaign for that better Scotland. A Scotland where justice and fairness is upheld and where their is no tolerance of bullying or state intimidation. That is what provides me with the energy, the determination to help bring Independence about. I greatly fear for the Independence cause at this time. I am despondent and disillusioned that a lot of SNP members think those values so minimal as to be unimportant and can be postponed to a later date. After Independence you say, but how do you ever deliver that if you have become uncaring, corrupt, an alien to justice on the journey?

I am, as always

Yours for Scotland.

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