If the aim is global media exposure, the best strategy is clear
both a parliamentary candidate and a national office-bearer for the SNP. In 1984 there was an allwomen contest for deputy leader which Isobel lost by the respectable margin of 60-40 to Margaret Ewing. Isobel has also been a long-term participant in the campaign for nuclear disarmament.
Roseanna Cunningham – she was the victor of the Perth and Kinross by-election in 1995 and two years later made history by becoming the first ever SNP by-election winner to retain the seat in a General Election. Like Margo MacDonald and Margaret Ewing before her, she went on to become deputy leader of the party, a position she held for four years. An MSP from 1999 by the time Roseanna retired at the Scottish Parliament election of 2021 she had become the longest-still-serving parliamentarian in Scotland.
Let us hope similarly inspiring women continue to emerge.
Ewen Cameron
Glasgow
Let us hope inspiring women continue to emerge
A REPORT last week stated that the UK “plant” within the IRA, Freddie Scappaticci, caused more deaths than he prevented. He was given the power to murder in order to safeguard the UK’s interests in Northern Ireland
The UK’s use of spies, and their willingness to undertake the most heinous of crimes in order to safeguard the unity of this “precious union”, goes back hundreds of years and even involved the author Daniel Defoe in the 18th century.
Northern Ireland isn’t a country rich in oil, gas and renewables and doesn’t have the UK’s nuclear weapons stored beside its largest city. Isn’t it wonderful that the UK’s security services were not involved in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, in which all of these priceless assets would have been an irreplaceable loss to Westminster had the Yes vote won?
Alasdair Forbes
Farr, Inverness-shire
PAGE 24 of Saturday’s National provides an important snapshot of the current debate in the family of independenistas and offers two alternatives: stay and fight in the cesspit of Westminster or come on home and start an independent country.
The real issue between the two arguments seemed to be one of media exposure, but for me the defining comment was John Jamieson’s “make no mistake, the UK Government is facing the greatest ever threat to its sought-after position of global influence and dominance of its precious Union.”
However, I’m with Jim Taylor: it’s not running home to mama with the ball, it’s focussing the world’s media on a small country clearly determined to be bullied no more when its representatives are outnumbered 11 to one and impotent in the face of a first-past-the-post system with 562 Unionist MPs.
After all, Stephen Flynn’s principled approach to the Hoyle episode didn’t last long in that same Westminster spotlight.
The SNP face an existential threat at the forthcoming election, not from a tsunami of the unprincipled Labour Party or an onslaught from George Galloway and the Workers Party of Britain but from an electorate completely turned off by a hopeless Holyrood record and politicians who never seem to listen.
The subsequent loss of the “short money” available from Westminster with a diminished cohort of SNP MPs will inevitably enhance the prospects of bankruptcy for the party, quite apart from the irreparable harm done to the independence cause for some considerable time to come.
There can longer be any pretence that we are nothing more than a northern colony of Englandshire, certainly not the often-vaunted union of equals.
The SNP need to demonstrate both national self-respect and political self-preservation in this fag-end of a parliament characterised by a revolving door of prime ministers and others whose only guiding principle is self-preservation. They need to free themselves from a system over which they are impotent, that uses archaic and inappropriate Henry VIII powers, that drafts laws to overcome fundamental principles of human rights enjoyed by modern societies elsewhere in our continent and which are coming to the fore with the Rwanda Bill.
A strategy that offers a retreat from the Commons bear pit – and demonstrates that the Union of the UK of Great Britain is no such thing, and lays bare the fact that it is nothing more than the parliament of England – is bound to ensure that Scotland would not in fact disappear from the glare of the world’s media.
Certainly not if an independence-focused SNP retired to Edinburgh and participated in a formal constitutional dialogue in the style currently under discussion by the Independence Forum Scotland.
When we declared we’d had enough, that the union of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was on its uppers and that we wanted no more of the spivs, city slickers and arms dealers of the City of London, manipulated by serial oligarchs as prime ministers, that would be a very rich seam of media stories.
We have but a few months in which to seize the opportunities with which to rid ourselves of the worst period of UK government this century before the next worst comes to power with equally few principles and an avowed distaste for Scottish independence.
Two options, Mr Jamieson, and I know which one is the better to attract the attention of the world’s media.
Iain Bruce
Nairn