What we must do now is look to the future, and that is what I hope to think about in this article — the future. At the beginning of this month, persuaded that giving both votes to the National Party would return a near-impossible majority, independence supporters voted for another five years of Ms Sturgeon’s painfully gradualist approach. This approach — a policy or non-policy of acquiescence to the London government — has, in terms of independence, achieved nothing in the last almost seven years.
Radical Independence?
Effective social and political campaigns, then, must be, by necessity, single-issue campaigns – or as near to single-issue campaigns as they can practicably be. This does not mean, as someone once suggested, that other important political causes are to be “sent to the back of the bus.” No one is saying other issues – like gender equality and the campaign to save the bees – are not important. Naturally, they are important – some crucially so. But the fact remains, that a campaign fighting every campaign is limited by finances, resources, and manpower (or people-power).
Independence and Internal Conflict
Scottish independence, as a political aspiration, is not an ideology. It is an idea shared by adherents of a number of political ideologies. The independence movement is a broad church; a political spectrum that stretches from one lunatic fringe on the far-right, with such blood-and-soil nationalists as Sìol nan Gàidheal and its ilk, to the other on the far-left, with the pseudo-academic disco of Marxists, Trotskyists, and Bakuninists. This is a movement that is as politically colourful...
Is it Time to Man the Barricades?
Feeding people is of course our number one priority. At a time like this feeding people is in itself an act of rebellion, but the foodbank must be militant – it cannot and must not feed people on a charitable and apolitical basis. It must not simply feed the hungry, but ask why they are hungry. Such a militant movement must use the soup kitchen and the foodbank as the mess halls of a revolution.
The Leftists Do Not Own Independence
Throughout the independence campaign in Scotland we have seen numerous attempts to transform the Yes movement into yet another “radical left” popular cause, with self-proclaimed leftists trying to subvert and commandeer what is in essence a national project. Every opportunity they have had we have seen and read of them condemning the "flag-waving nationalism" of independentistas from every part of the Scottish political rainbow, and we have to put an end to this.
Two Independence Movements
Gaining statehood, therefore, must not be seen as the end of the independence project. Independence is a process that begins in dependence and continues on to the very end of the life of the state. The problems we have now under British rule will for the most part remain after independence, with the only real difference being that we ourselves will have the freedom to provide Scottish solutions to Scottish problems – and the adversary then will be the same as we have now: International capitalism, neoliberalism, and the limitless avarice of the globalised plutocracy they have birthed.
Independence is not a “Left Alternative”
Scotland’s sometimes pro-independence left is not particularly large in terms of numbers. It would not be a significant threat to the stability and cohesion of the wider movement if this element decided to defect en masse to Jeremy Corbyn’s side, but we must also consider the weight this group has on social media. At present it seems safe to say that half – if not, more – of the movement’s bigger pro-independence blogs define themselves as belonging to the radical left, but they have been losing traction in recent months. The defection of these certainly does pose a problem.
Thinking Small: Critiquing the Media in Scotland
So Mike Small thinks we’re being terribly childish in our “one dimensional” critique of the establishment media. Bully for him. Right now it is just a statement of fact that we can’t do everything. It is not, as Angry Scotland once suggested on Twitter, that we independence-first types want to put all other issues – as pressing as they are – to the “back of the bus.” As grown-ups we just know that nothing will be achieved at all if we do not first win the most urgent front in the media war – independence from Britain and a proper Scottish media.
Random Public Journal 