Clerkin steps back from independence campaign to protest Growth Commission
● Report described as a ‘right wing, neoliberal document’
He is one of Scotland’s best known street campaigners, a man notorious for staging a series of small-scale demonstrations at venues ranging from the Tunnock’s factory in South Lanarkshire to the Spanish consulate in Edinburgh.
But Sean Clerkin, the public face of the self-styled Scottish Resistance movement, has announced that he will no longer agitate for independence following the publication last week of the SNP’S Growth Commission report.
The 57-year-old, who made headlines in 2011 after forcing then Scottish Labour leader Iain Gray to seek refuge in a Glasgow sandwich shop while out canvassing, described the document as “the worst thing to ever happen to the independence movement” and said its publication means he can no longer bring himself to play an active role in the independence movement.
Mr Clerkin told The Scotsman: “I cannot campaign for Scottish independence at this time. The Growth Commission report is a right wing, neoliberal document. If its recommendations were followed we would not have real independence. We would not control monetary policy.
“The whole report is about serving the needs of the London money markets. This report offers no incentive for working class voters to go out and campaign for Scottish independence.”
Mr Clerkin, from Barrhead in East Renfrewshire, stressed he was speaking in a personal capacity and added he had not quit the Scottish Resistance, the group which has held several attention-grabbing protests in recent years.
The informal collective has attracted a mixture of scorn and amusement from across the political spectrum for its events, which generally take place mid-afternoon at an unlikely destination in front of bemused passersby.
In January 2016, Clerkin and two others picketed the Tunnock’s factory in Uddingston with a lion rampant flag and handed out tea cakes made by rival Scottish firm Lees in response to Tunnock’s “betrayal” of its Scottish roots by running an advertising campaign for the Great British Tea Cake.
In the same year he was also captured on camera trying, and failing, to set fire to a Union flag at the launch of a splinter movement, Action for Scotland, before plaintively asking: “Will somebody help me?”
Last year six members of the Scottish Resistance entered the reception area of the Spanish consulate to demand the country recognised the Catalan regional government’s right to hold a referendum on independence.
Mr Clerkin has now called for an alliance of left-wing, pro-independence groups to stand against the Growth Commission.
“The SNP leadership are trying to foist this document on the Yes movement,” he said. “I am not ruling out a return to campaigning for independence in the future. But the left has to get its act together first.”
However, in a move that sug- gests Scottish politics has not seen the last of one of its more colourful characters, Clerkin will be in Glasgow today to destroy a copy of the Growth Commission report, although he stressed this will be a personal one-man protest and not part of a wider campaign.
Mr Clerkin was convicted of wasting police time in October last year after claiming he had been assaulted at a Tory party election event in April 2016.
“The whole report is about serving the needs of the London money markets. An independent Scotland would require its own currency from day one” SEAN CLERKIN