Top Secret Speech Leaked

This blog has received a top-secret leak of Nicola Sturgeon’s forthcoming speech on IndyRef2. Here’s the draft:

Journalists, and people called ‘Ruth’, ask me every day whether I will give up on a second independence referendum.

I’d like to give a simple, direct, once-and-for-all answer:

No.

Let me explain why.

The clue is in the name of the party I lead – the Scottish National Party. The SNP is here because we believe in independence for Scotland. Our primary purpose is to let the people of Scotland govern Scotland.

There are many ways that might be achieved. It might be via a brief Act of Parliament – that was how Canada became independent in 1931 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Westminster_1931), and Malta in 1964. Or it might be via a treaty, which is how the Philippines became independent in 1946 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Manila_(1946)). Or it might be via a referendum. All of these ways can be democratic, fair, representative routes to independence.

So, no. 

I am not going to give up on a second independence referendum. Or on any of the other ways in which the country I call home can, finally, return to the fold of independent, democratic states governed by and for the people who live here.

I am especially not going to give up on any of the ways of winning independence in the middle of the Brexit negotiations. The Tory party has chucked Britain to the dogs, destroying jobs, driving many of the migrants who contribute to our economy out of the country and cutting our universities off from funding. David Davis will use everything we have – our fisheries, our farming, renewable energy, our whisky and our tourism – as pawns in a negotiation that is designed to save Tory skins, and to keep London’s all-powerful financial industry alive. It is the biggest constitutional and economic change of this generation and will have repercussions for our children and our grandchildren. The people of these islands are resilient and resourceful, but they will need every ounce of that resilience to survive and then adapt to the changes that Brexit could bring.

Two specific changes illustrate the problem. The first is a dramatic change in the way that we are governed. Scotland has a devolved parliament at Holyrood. There is much that this parliament lacks, but within the strict limitations laid down by the devolution settlement it does give the people of Scotland a measure of autonomy.

That is about to change. When the UK departs the EU, powers that are currently held at Brussels (on food and packaging for example) will be brought back. But not to Holyrood. They will stick – as Theresa May has made clear – in Westminster. The new ‘UK single market’ will be dominated by the interests of London, not those of Scotland. This will be bad for all of us, but perhaps especially bad for the fish industry in Scotland (see https://www.strath.ac.uk/research/internationalpublicpolicyinstitute/ourblog/march2017/brexitpowersandthescottishparliamentthecaseofagricultureandfisheries/). 

The people of Scotland are about to see their parliament dismembered by Brexit.

The second change is worse. Because it will affect, one way or another, every family in Scotland. Brexit will smash the economy. We will lose the EU grants that have helped to pay for our roads, ports and infrastructure. Our universities will lose research funding, and we are already suffering from a brain drain and a carer crisis as EU nationals look for jobs in countries that allow freedom of movement. Our workers will lose the protection that EU safety and workers’ rights legislation has brought them. And, ironically, our hospitals and care centres will lose the EU migrant staff who provide a bedrock of care. Companies will lose the ability to recruit specialists across the wide EU talent pool – and that will mean a further erosion of productivity for Scotland’s businesses.

All of this because David Cameron could not bring his Tory party round to understanding the benefits of EU membership. Perhaps now he realises the damage he has done. Then again, given the Tories’ instant conversion from ‘Remainers’ to ‘Leavers’, perhaps not.

How can Scotland escape from the turmoil and damage of Brexit? We can't. We will be hit just as badly as our friends and families in England. But we can allow ourselves one glimmer of hope. A tiny light at the end of the dark Brexit tunnel. That light is shining on an independent Scotland, able to stand up and take its own decisions on how it wants to be, how it wants to relate to our many friends across the water in Europe. 

So no, I will never give up on any of the democratic, transparent, honest and fair means we have of winning for the people of Scotland the right to govern their own country. It is, truly, the light at the end of the Brexit tunnel.

Confidence Trick

Theresa May is a skilled politician. She knows how to win power, and to yield power.

She is confident that the Tories will win the next election, and the one after that. In those elections, Scotland is meaningless - its single Tory MP a toothless man in a beard. Labour too is meaningless, lost in its self-flagellation.

She enjoys power, so it is no surprise that, as she announced yesterday, she will be grabbing it back from the Scottish people and our Parliament. When power returns from Brussels it will stop in Westminster, where she can control it. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland can go hang.

(In the process, she has also hung out Mr Mundell. He had clearly not been briefed about Theresa's speech to the Scottish Tories when, this week, he said that Scotland would have a more powerful parliament after Brexit).

Theresa knows that a week is a long time in politics. The two years since the Vow is an eternity, and anyway that was a Vow made by three men who are now, politically, dead. She is not, you may be sure, waking up at night to worry about devolution of power to Scotland.

Brexit has shone a laser light on the democratic deficit in Scotland. The Sewell convention is meaningless. The Vow was just a newspaper gimmick. And now, like it or not, Holyrood will be reduced to setting the price of parking tickets, and little else; less power than a Parish Council.

Time for Scotland to wake from the Tory nightmare, and win back its independence. Time for a new Referendum.

Contempt of Parliament

Three stories last week illustrated the Westminster view of Britain.

In the Supreme Court the Westminster government made plain - for anyone who still had any doubt - that the entire farrago of the Scotland Act, the Vow and the Smith Commission was just an exercise in duplicity. The Sewell Convention was only "a political restriction upon Parliament's ability to act, no more and no less than that" and in no sense any "qualification or inhibition upon parliamentary sovereignty" - [Richard Keen QC Advocate General for Scotland (i.e. Westminster's point person on Scottish Law), with comment from The Lallands Peat Worrier].

This is a story of Westminster lies. Of economy with the truth. Of purposeful deception of the people of Scotland.

We were told we would get power to run our country, or at least to run some elements of our country...and now we are told that in any circumstance that the Westminster government deems not to be 'normal' we will lose that power.

Brexit is not 'normal'. Would a sudden economic collapse, or a war breaking out in the Baltic, or a 'terrorist threat' be 'normal'? The Westminster government and its Coalition predecessor sold us on a Vow, then on the Smith Commission, then on the Scotland Act.

All of it was just a load of make-believe.

Meanwhile, Twitter lit up with Theresa May's £995 leather breeks. A silly season story. But one that shows how Westminster leaders think. They think that it is OK to be photographed relaxing in ostentatious wealth. For the price of her trousers, Ms May could have fed 100 families at the Trussell Trust foodbanks, or provided a person in need with four months of Disability Living Allowance.

Ms May's trousers illustrate the gap between people and power. Ms May has no conception, no care, no interest in how a hungry person would view the self-indulgence of £995 trousers.

And then there was the data from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation showing that there are 13.5m people in Britain living in poverty, of whom 960,000 live in Scotland. Almost a million people in Scotland living in poverty, with more than half of them in working poverty. Working hard, but on incomes so low that the family lives in poverty. The proportion of people - one in five - who live in poverty has not shifted in the last ten years.

Looking down from the Elizabeth Tower at Westminster, our Imperial Masters fail to see all of this. For them, the poor, the families surviving on foodbank hand-outs, and anything north of Hadrian's Wall are of no interest.

Scotland is too wee, too poor to receive anything other than the contempt of Parliament.

It does not have to be this way. 

We could have our own Parliament, led by a government we can believe in, by politicians with an ounce of empathy alongside the blather. We could have an independent Scottish Parliament, built on social inclusion, social justice and as much honesty and empathy as we can hope for, from politicians.

We could be independent.

Top Down

Dear Elites

You got us into this bloody mess. Now fix it.

It was you, the comfortably wealthy, the private-school educated, the home-owners with the Volvo for the weekend cottage, the beneficiaries of Westminster's obsession with The City and finance. You who supported the neoliberal politics that first Margaret Thatcher and then all of the main political parties espoused. You who decided that 'immigration' was suddenly a big enough issue to vote Leave. You, who read the Daily Mail or the Telegraph,  who watched the hypnosis of Sky, your news intake controlled by Nondoms and aristocrats. You, whose brothers across the pond voted for the right-wing hawk who will Trump us all.

And now you can't step back from your cliff-edge. You have created a monster that is bigger than all of us, the fear-monster of foreigners at the picket-gate. So you add to your neoliberal austerity a regime of migrant control and visas. Government cuts, and, by the way, no visas for the Polish plumber or the French lorry driver or the Catalan software engineer, so your economy is under a double yoke with no real government spending, and no way for businesses to expand and grow.

I'm talking to you, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. And all your cronies in the UKIP-Tories.

But hang on, old chap. 

I too went to a private school. I own two cars. I live in a nice house in the country. I have a (fairly) regular wage, food on the table, a comfortable job. I use social media owned by tax-dodging multinationals (yes, this blog is on a site owned by Google...) I, in an earlier life, voted for Tony Blair thinking that he could bring fairness to Britain.

I am part of the elite. I am part of the problem.

I, we, made the mess we are in. All of us in the comfortable classes, the blog-reading classes, the 'Just About Managing' JAMS...we got it wrong. We did not stand up and shout when we were favoured with lower taxes, even though we knew, if we had given the maths a moment's thought, that less tax meant less help for the poor. We did not protest loud enough, or in big enough numbers, when Westminster took us into its stupid wars in Libya and the Levant. We thought it broadly OK that the government of the day should privatise services previously thought essential - rail, water, telecoms, health, transport.

We have built the monster that is neoliberal, racist, Brexit Britain. We must slay it.

How? By changing us, first. By recognising that people in poverty are more important than a penny off income tax. By realising that our private schools are the nurseries of a permanent elite, and thus that we must close them or convert them into truly 'public' schools. By not buying that extra bottle of chilled Prosecco and giving the money to a foodbank instead. By reading more, and more widely, than the madness of the Daily Mail or the bias of the BBC.

And then by changing  our government. Scotland has shown that it can be done, kicking out the Red and Redder Tories and replacing them with politicians who don't get it all right all of the time, but at least move the ship of the Scottish state in the right direction.

Changing the government of England is very hard to imagine in our lifetime. And while that government is led by the elites of England it is not going to let the rabble of Scotland build the society that the people of Scotland want.

Dear elites, there are two clear conclusions. The elites of Scotland - me, you - must stand alongside the poor and fight for a socially just, international, welcoming Scotland. We must stand up for an independent Scotland, free to build the society its people want. A society built by all, for all - not just for us in the elite.

The elites of England will have to decide for themselves whether they want more Prosecco or less poverty. I hope, for their sake, that they wake up and vote for the latter.

Red Tories

Imagine the scene. It is November, 2020. England has Brexited and immigration controls are in place.

You are the boss of a small software company in Shropshire. Your latest computer game, Zombies on Mars, has gone viral and you urgently need to recruit games animators and developers. No-one in London seems to wants to work in Shropshire, so you plan to recruit people from Spain, Poland and Germany.

These people, post-Brexit, need a visa to work here.

You apply to the new Ministry of Work. They tell you that the 2020 quota for software engineers has now been filled and that you must reapply in January 2021 and 'join the queue.' 

You complain to your Member of Parliament. How can you grow your business if you cannot recruit these people? She replies that it is 'our Government's duty to ensure England's jobs go to English people.'

The Ministry of Work website says that there are still visa places available for;

• Dog Groomers
• Ball boys (tennis courts)
• Polo pony Stable Assistants
• Golf Caddie drivers
• Beaters and Gun-porters for Hunting and Game Estates

If you enjoy golf, polo and shooting, you can employ anyone. But if you want to run a business, you are throttled by the Ministry.

The light starts to dawn. You now live in a planned economy in which a central government body is controlling the flow of the one resource that all businesses need - people. 

The Ministry of Work becomes increasingly powerful, for it dictates how the economy will function. Lobbyists work hard to persuade the Ministry to favour their industry, and senior civil servants are offered sexual services (provided by migrant sex workers) as part of a widening scandal of corruption.

As part of the government's Northern Powerhouse programme, the Ministry of Work announce that unemployed people 'who do not hold British passports' are to be moved to northern England where they will be employed in vast new factories to make golf balls and 12-bore cartridges. People refusing to move will have their benefits cut off, and if they continue to refuse will be moved by the police.

Amnesty International publishes photographs of the new 'factories' and reveals that they are surrounded by razor-wire. Amnesty compares the camps to the Gulags.


Welcome to the planned economy of Stalin's England. The Ministry of Work is now in control and she or he who runs it, runs the economy. As Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang pointed out in '23 Things they don't tell you about Capitalism', controlling the supply of labour controls the economy by controlling wages; 'Wages in rich countries are determined more by immigration control than by anything else.'  ['Thing 1', page 5]


This is, finally, the supreme irony. The Conservative Party is now the party of the planned economy, the party that tells you what you can do and where you can do it. The party that will be faced with a choice between visas for care workers and visas for stablehands...and will favour the horses over the nurses every time. These are the real Red Tories.



Back in Shropshire it only takes the boss a few minutes to work out that the best thing she can do is relocate her firm to Scotland. In newly-independent Scotland there is free movement of labour, and open access to the vast market of the EU.

This is the independence bonus, the huge boost to Scotland that will come when England Brexits and an independent Scotland Remains. Let's get there.

Vote Right

Scotland is a tiny, poor, meaningless appendage on the edge of Britain, whose tenement-born population are condemned to Tory rule for the rest of their lifetimes.

That's the depressing picture this morning.

Westminster now has the most right-wing government in a generation. Amber Rudd and Jeremy Hunt have made racism OK.  The mainstream media, controlled by a handful of right-wing barons, will take up this theme and soon we will have lynchings in the streets. Rupert Murdoch and Lord Rothermere, who between them control 60% of UK print media, will (ironically, in Murdoch's case) bang the no-foreigners drum.

As the excellent Dr Tanja Bueltmann has pointed out, they - the barons and the Tories - are shining their Tory-blue spotlights on 'foreigners' and 'immigrants' in order to distract our attention from the bigger issues.

The bigger issues are much, much more important than the bash-the-migrants distractions of the Tories. They are as big as the millions of refugees fleeing wars created, in part, by Westminster governments. As big as the poverty that affects 220,0000 children in Scotland, or that means poor Scots cannot warm their homes this winter. As big as climate change.

The people of Scotland did not vote for this right-wing mess. Scotland's view will be ignored while Westminster plunges into the Dark Ages of a 21st century Fortress Britain.

One More Munro

We have one more hill to climb. It's a Munro, old and craggy, with boggy burns blocking our path, impossible cliffs and dangerous scree slopes.

This Munro is right in the middle of Glasgow and Edinburgh, Stirling, Inverness and Perth. It's all over the Fife and Ayrshire coasts, and it's out in Gullane and St Andrews.

It is the Munro of the older Scots. The population over 55 who appear to be voting as much as 80:20 against independence.

We can stand at the bottom of the hill and rant and rage at it, shouting at the people on the top that they are not thinking about the bairns, about their grandchildren and the future. But that's not going to get us up there.

We have to study this mountain, listen to it, look for the climbing line that will get us there.

The SNP's listening project is a good start, but we will have to do more. Think about the concerns of the 75 year old who voted 'No' two years ago, her fears for her home, her pension. But also the image she has of a Great Britain that survived the threat of invasion and fascism, of the  people in her and her parent's generation who rebuilt Britain.  That pride in a unified British response to threat. And years of postwar Westminster governments that genuinely tried to bring the white heat of technology to every corner of the British Isles.

When she was young and interested in politics - like you are now - Britain under Labour and Tories felt like a fairer place. By the time the real unfairness arrived, as neoliberalism took hold of both main parties at Westminster, she had lost interest.

Her views haven't shifted much in the last thirty years. For her, today, independence means breaking up a place she still thinks of as 'Great'. Great enough to stand alone outside Europe - yes, she voted Leave in the EU Referendum.

She is the mountain. How do we help her to understand that the country she remembers has been ravaged by Westminster? How do we show her that she, and the weans, will be better off in an independent Scotland?

We start by listening to the mountain. Her concerns and her prejudices,
in the positive and negative sense of that word. Then we try to give her an answer; help her understand that the Westminster that provided for her when she was young has lost interest in Scotland, that it has lost interest in anyone who is poor or dispossessed, and that Holyrood has taken on that mantle. That Scotland has been caught in another war, a hidden war, a battle of the classes in which, inevitably, the wealthy of South East England won. Now we have to rebuild Scotland, just like she and her sisters did after WWII. We need her help to do that.

One more mountain. From the top, I can see freedom.

Cha-ching! The HInkley Bonus

Thank goodness for the Conservative Party. Without them, Scotland's independence cause would be so much poorer.

The potential independence bonus just got £1.8billion bigger, thanks to the Tories and their utterly ridiculous Hinkley Point decision. That £1.8bn is the approximate population share of the cost that people in Scotland - a country which is now generating more than half its electricity from renewables - will pay for building a madness of a £18bn nuclear power station. 

That's £18bn at current prices. You may rely on the cost going sky-high (just like you can rely on the roof of the reactor going sky-high at some point, blighting Somerset and Western England for generations).

If Scotland were independent it would not have to pay for Hinkley Point.

Add to this the Scottish population share of the equally nuclear but horribly more murderous Trident missile system (our share would be around £10bn-£20bn, and rising), and you are looking at an independence bonus of perhaps £12bn-£20bn. 

That's an independence bonus of between £2,200-£3,750 per person.

It is equivalent to the total expenditure on health, wellbeing and sport in the 2016-17 Draft Budget for Scotland, planned for £13 billion. 


Independence will make everyone in Scotland better off. And by pulling Scotland out of the Tories' mad nuclear plans, we will be richer, more sustainable, and safer.

Scotland, UK

I found an old suitcase in the cellar yesterday, a battered, well-travelled old thing, covered in customs labels and dust. The luggage label, in my grandfather's hand, gives his address as 'Kilmacolm, Scotland, UK.'

The case was last used, I'd guess, in the 1960s.

Back then, independence for Scotland was the pipe-dream of a few, a very few, brave souls.

But the luggage label is a reminder that Scotland has always been seen as a nation, as something distinct in the United Kingdom. Even for my grandfather, who would have dismissed independence as "stuff and nonsense," Kilmacolm was clearly in Scotland, not just in the UK.

In the 'uncharted' territory after the Brexit vote, could Scotland remain in Europe, but also in the UK?

It's the topic of the moment over at Common Space. Kirsty Hughes had an article out on the options just a few days after the vote, and Nicola Sturgeon has spoken about independence as 'only one option' in keeping Scotland in the EU.

The idea - known as the 'reverse-Greenland model' - is attractive in part because it fits with what the voters have said; 55% voted for Scotland to stay in the UK in the 2014 indyref, and then two years later gave a firm Remain response to the Brexit referendum, with 62% voting to stay in the EU. If we could keep the kingdom united but also stay in Europe, mebbe we would not need an indyref2.

But it's going to be difficult to sell on the doorsteps.

Let's ask Mrs Marietta Cosmopilite*, of 14a Dunked Road, Bridgeton, Glasgow. 

Dave from the SNP is about to chap her door.

Dave: Hello Mrs Cosmopilite. I'm Dave from the SNP. I've come to talk to you about constitutional arrangements.

Mrs C: My constitution is quite the thing, young man, now awa and bile yer heid.

Conclusion: It's going to be tricky to sell the reverse-Greenland in Glasgow. 

Let's try another doorstep;

Nicola: Hello Theresa, I'm Nicola from the SNP.

Mrs May**: Get on with it girl, I haven't got all day.

Nicola: We'd like to be like Greenland, only reversed.

Mrs M: Ah, you mean cold at the bottom and all melty at the top?

An aide; Ehem, Ma'am, I think she is referring to our constitutional arrangements. This is the Scottish First Minister.

Mrs M: Ah yes, Nicola Davidson. No. We don't have a constitution to arrange. And thanks to BoJo we're all going down the Brexit Swannee together. Now b*gger awf.

Conclusion: Reverse-Greenland might look good on paper, but it's only independence that will allow Scotland to escape from the pit of egocentric snakes that is Tory Westminster.

* A fictional character, with apologies to the late, great Terry Pratchett
** Not a fictional character