NOW YOU SEE IT, NOW YOU DON'T

Some time ago I presented a case for the structure of a national convention. It went down like a mug of cold sick. Everyone seems to have a view of how to get there but none can lay out the path. The ideas are hollow regurgitations of the past, ideas that had no currency even at the time they were first aired and certainly have none today. Perhaps we should all take a step back and examine exactly why these ideas keep surfacing.
One obvious answer is that after promising to lead the way after the referendum, the SNP could find no path to do so but were holding out the promise that the elected representatives in Holyrood were the means to do so. The only means as it quickly became. What should have been a people’s movement became entangled in party politics and the popular supporters were given to believe that this was the only way. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
In consequence we have a movement which is fragmented and becoming factional. Worse, perhaps, is the failure to understand what needs to happen in order to prepare us for independence and the path to self-determination. It may be that another problem was the failure of communication. It’s hard to pin the blame on any one individual or organisation for this but the key information on preparing for an independent future was always there and is there today, still largely neglected.
Take, for example, a comment made by Alex Salmond in 2014. Lost, perhaps, in the excitement of the last days of the run-up to the referendum, he warned that, in the event of a yes vote, we should not behave as if September 19th was independence day but that a process of examination and development would follow before full separation could be put in place. In 2018 Robin McAlpine published his Guide to Starting a New Country. Again we were exhorted to debate and research every aspect of what we wanted to see in our new state.
In short, a national convention is essential before we can take any real steps to self-determination – a much better description of what we want rather than the blanket term, independence.
So why, despite much talk on the subject, has it not happened? Confusion and obfuscation on the part of politicians is part of the answer but also the confusion within the movement in general and a lack of understanding about how such a convention can be taken seriously or even paid attention to at all. Meanwhile campaigns to do this that or the other rise and fall, real progress is mired in the mud while every campaign is celebrated as the next step to independence only to fall back to join the others in failure and inconsequence.
But something new is just beginning to happen. Please, everyone, take notice of RSS and please join in. While it looks as though this is a grass roots movement (which it is) the process of self-determination is spreading from the local to the regional and ultimately the national level – it’s all connected, all part of the same process.
A full and extensive examination of how a national convention needs to be constructed and the constitutional means by which we can side-step Westminster interference is available here and I shall publish excerpts from it in future blogs.
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