Reasons to be cheerful

There has been a certain amount of turbulence in the Scottish Independence movement of late. This has been due to a tendency to allow party politics dictate the terms of the debate in the absence of a referendum campaign in which we can all find common cause.

When considering long term outcomes like Independence, various groups and interests can see it as a vehicle for their own particular aims and objectives, even if these are mutually exclusive over the short term. And so diversity of opinion can co-exist with unity of purpose. Competing visions of a future Scotland can co-exist because they all share the same mechanism for becoming a reality. With one voice we can call for our different priorities to be heard. I have called this the Future Scotland Forum elsewhere.

But when the focus shifts and we are forced to choose between visions over the short term because, for example, an election is imminent, and crosses must be put in boxes on a ballot paper, there is a risk of falling-out. The bed becomes too narrow for the bed-fellows. The struggle to be standard bearer risks the loss of the standard.

Of course, the opponents of Scottish Independence are counting on this effect. They will be quietly sitting in their club on Pall Mall, nursing a single malt no doubt, enjoying a Cuban cigar, surrounded by Victorian spoils of conquest congratulating themselves on the success of another imperial divide-and-rule gambit, as momentum is lost and relationships turn sour in another remote rebellion.

However, they are forgetting one thing.

As I have described when suggesting IndyRef 2020, the recent referendum campaign was the cause, and the subsequent electoral success of the SNP was a consequence, of a crucial decoupling of the credibility of Scottish Independence from the competence of any particular party that advocates it. The turbulence we are experiencing at the moment is actually a very good and healthy sign. It is a symptom of the emergence of the multi-party pluralistic democracy that we require to be mature and functioning in time for the first parliamentary elections in an Independent Scotland.

In the meantime, to be clear, I advocate voting SNP on both ballots as the best route to a second referendum.

The fate of Scottish Labour will depend on whether they are able to re-align themselves as participants in this process, offering an authentic choice as a potential government of an Independent Scotland, or whether they will remain, as they currently are, mere managers of industrial decline in an imperial outpost, making sure no-one has any unrealistic hopes or ambitions for themselves beyond access to the imperial pap in London. And it is not enough to merely cease and desist from the betrayal they have perpetrated for generations. There must be acknowledgement, apology, truth and reconciliation, for their transformation to be accepted as genuine. At the moment the free reign still given to the vaulting yet petty ambitions of its careerists does not bode well.        

So what we are seeing is not the stagnation and fragmentation of the Independence movement. On the contrary, the turbulence arises from the energy and vitality of the movement.

And the tensions we are experiencing are birth pangs.