Election is most important yet
We are now only a few months away from the Scottish Parliament elections and they are shaping up to be just about the most important in the 22 years of Holyrood’s existence.
Twenty polls in a row have shown sustained majority support for independence with most of the Scottish people now of the view that we will soon be an independent nation.
There is absolutely no doubt that this election will be a verdict on whether Scotland should have a referendum or not.
There are a number of reasons why the Scottish people now want Scotland to be an independent nation.
Prime amongst them is the decision to take Scotland out of the EU against our national collective will.
There are also the sustained attacks on our Scottish Parliament and the UK Government doing all it can to constrain our democracy and diminish the devolution settlement.
There is also the response to the pandemic and the leadership shown by our first minister.
The Scottish people have compared and contrasted the candid, reassuring and responsible approach of Nicola Sturgeon and compared it to Boris Johnson and rightly concluded that this is how Scotland should be led.
There are also people considering how we recover from the economic devastation cause by the pandemic.
An increasingly isolated Brexit Britain discovering the harsh realities of ending freedom of movement and the disastrous decision to pull out of the single market is now beginning to be felt in our fishing, agricultural and manufacturing sectors.
As the realities of Brexit kick in, the full force of the Brexit debacle is only going to become even more apparent.
However, there is another thing that is driving support for independence, and that is in the arrogance of the UK Government and Boris Johnson in their belief and assertion that they can simply say“no”to Scotland’s ambitions.
Even if a majority of the Scottish people say that they want a referendum and accordingly vote to have one, the Tories would try and deny it.
The Scottish people have watched events across the Atlantic and they have seen another diminished leader in the Whitehouse try to deny democracy and they will not accept it here.
The idea that the Tories can deploy this Trumpian approach and stand in the way of our right to determine our future is simply absurd and they know that if we win big in May, a referendum will take place.
The world has dramatically changed since the last referendum in 2014.
Scotland now is out of the EU and all the promises of ‘near federalism’have been replaced with an attack on our parliament’s powers.
The Scottish people must be given the choice whether they want to continue being led by governments we don’t vote for, or have all the decisions about our future taken here in Scotland.