JIM Sillars has to realise that the Unionist media is only interested in him when he is attacking the SNP. Similarly, Kenny MacAskill has to do the same. One could say the same for all those couch potato and facelessbook warrior “Yes” fronts who are always sounding off at the SNP and Nicola Sturgeon from the safety of their laptops and from behind their living room sofas.
As Patrick Grady, returned MP for Glasgow North and SNP Chief Whip, said to me at his victory celebration in Curlers Bar, “If any of her critics can find a shortcut to independence, Nicola says she will be glad to take it”. No matter how good any individual is, or was, they cannot rest on their laurels and are only as good as this week’s pay packet, as any worker will tell them. There are no Laurels for being Hardy on their own.
READ MORE: Kenny MacAskill should keep SNP policy criticisms to himself
Kenny may have an excellent record, particularly in standing up against the lying establishment on the Lockerbie affair and their anxiety to send a prosperous and caring Libya into the dust and the Stone Age. They are still playing the assassination games that could plunge us all into war, and have upset the Middle East for countless generations to come. But Kenny will have to realise that character assassination could also lead to his own demise and he could end up like Jim. Whisperers in the movement will still be there after independence, waiting to sabotage and wreck whatever and whenever they can. He should not be flattered by their attention just now, as they will just as surely dump him when the time comes for them to do so. I say this in friendship, not in enmity.
Kenny was mainly responsible for the SNP giving up their huge annual Bannockburn Rally on the nearest Saturdays to June 24th, on the grounds that “rallies were for protests and the SNP was a party of government”. Not yet Kenny. We still have a wee way to go and need maximum unity to get there. The Scottish Republican Socialist Movement only took over the annual Bannockburn rally in the interests of continuity against Labour’s Public Order Act, designed to stop any protest against them. We had plenty protest about under Labour, who relied on their tame union bosses to make strikes against the austerity measures and zero per cent pay freezes of Labour Lords Wilson and Callaghan “illegal” and “unofficial”. They managed to make “Maggie, Maggie” look like a liberal and the prevaricating reformist “Oh Jeremy Corbyn” look like the revolutionary socialist that the Tories pretended he was, to frighten the horses and their servants in the Labour movement.
READ MORE: Nicola Sturgeon should respond to Kenny MacAskill, not a spokesperson
This year the rally will be great again under the auspices of AUOB, who knows what position we will be then? Scotland has need of you yet.
Keith Brown spoke out, excellently, at last year’s Bannockburn rally and will do so again this Saturday in Glasgow Green, with Nicola, protesting against the British part of the same build-up, with Nicola leading the movement at home and abroad to add to the pressures and avenues open and closed to us at the moment.
We can take the defeatist attitude that Uncle Boris and the other subservient Unionist parties will stand against the inevitable march of time and refuse us their “permission” to leave an “equal” and “voluntary” Union. Or, we can unite and fight together for independence, which no-one will hand us on a plate.
We will surely lose if divided. As Old Abe Lincoln once said, when they tried to oust him in the midst of the Uncivil War, only a bam would try to change horses midstream. Who better than Nicola, who has the international recognition and popularity, plus the nous, to get us as far as we have and to get us to the final (manifest?) destination.
Donald Anderson
Glasgow
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