Last week, according to that week’s daily pre-going-to-press informal conference calls between the editors of the anti-Scottish independence media, to ensure a consistent attacking front, we, in the Indy Movement,were in the middle of a chaotic destructive civil war liable to lead to the question of sovereignty being put on the shelf for years to come.
I jest about the conference calls but it is remarkable though how they can all come up with the same assumption-based headlines gleaned from a connected story (the Salmond complaints) so consistently. Don’t you think?
Then this week by the same process of coincidental reporting across the pro-British nationalist media, now that parliament is back in session in Edinburgh, our democratically elected government has ‘ run out of steam’ according to every news source apart from the National and the Carronshore Bugle.
What will it be next week? New baby box scare as tests prove that if you drop one from a ten storey building the thing is deadly because it doesn’t have an airbag and a parachute. The Scottish Government negligent again?
Anyway, in the cold light of day there is very little we can do about that other than to keep floodlighting nonsense when they report it and have a laugh at them when they really go over the top. As a movement we’ve become superb at utilising humour to show just how ridiculous British state media coverage can be of a mass movement within a country’s natural and perfectly normal assertion of its rights to be a sovereign nation can be. We’ve had to be good at it.
In the real world however we’ve a lot to be enthused about when it comes to the continuing path to self-government, and our opponents are clearly aware of this too.
The massive and diverse grassroots movement is just itching to get started on a campaign aimed at a date not yet revealed for the ultimate vote. Many renewing and re-invigorating their enthusiasm by communing with their peers at the now regular, highly successful and very visible independence rallies around the country organised by the likes of All Under One Banner.
The polls are looking like they are starting to turn in our favour, as last weekend’s 52% for Yes signified, one poll yes, but significantly during a period where there is no concerted official campaign activity taking place other than the work of the many grassroots groups, ordinary Scots whose enthusiasm and commitment to change the political landscape of their country cannot be questioned. Their resolve to discard the democratic deficit that the Union represents unbreakable.
We see too that incredibly the party of Scottish government, the spearhead of the independence movement, those that will open the gate to self-determination, have now achieved a party membership of over 125,000, from a political party that only exists in Scotland, and even more impressively a higher membership than the Tories have in the entire UK.
More and more Scots, born and by choice, almost all of whom never have had the slightest interest in politics, are waking from a slumber created by forty odd years of increasingly right wing policies in the UK (an era which has tried, but not quite succeeded, to destroy brick by brick Scotland’s intrinsic spirit of community, a time where people, as playwright Alan Bissett describes it, have been encouraged to become “Units of selfishness”).
This growing number of activists are once again stepping out of the shadows and taking on an almost evangelical challenge to achieve validation of their shared vision of a new Scotland. We all have our own personal vision of our Scotland but together our shared Scotland is governed by those it should be governed by, those that live,love, work and grow there.
A wee very wise man in India once wrote the following…..
‘Your beliefs become your thoughts. Your thoughts become your words. Your words become your actions. Your actions become your habits. Your habits become your values. Your values become your destiny.’
He wisnae wrong. We’re going there.
#DissolveTheUnion
itisintruthnotforglory 