WHAT arrogance. What utter contempt for democracy. If SNP members accept this, they will accept anything.
Despite the fact that support for an independent Scotland’s ratification of the United Nations Treaty On The Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) was approved overwhelmingly by conference delegates, and almost all SNP MPs and MSPs signed their support for this in the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons Parliamentary Pledge, Angus Robertson thinks he can just change policy if it suits his establishment-influenced position.
READ MORE: Independent Scotland not committed to treaty banning nuclear weapons, Robertson says
Is this supported by Humza Yousaf? If so, it is a big change on which he needs to be questioned, along with all other elected members. Who was consulted? I know it has come as news to most senior figures in the party.
The TPNW has been the most important disarmament initiative in recent years – not that that is difficult, since there have been so few. It grew out of the frustration of so many countries that no serious work was being done by the nuclear powers to roll back the earth-threatening arms race. On the contrary, we are in the grip of a new spiralling arms race. Despite intense efforts to stop them, many countries small and large like Mexico, Costa Rica, South Africa Ireland, Vietnam and New Zealand pushed ahead and negotiated the treaty and got sufficient support for it to become a UN treaty, which entered into force in 2021. To date there have been 93 state signatories and 70 have fully ratified it.
READ MORE: Nuclear ban treaty a 'golden key' in post-independence talks with UK
When Scotland decides to remove nuclear weapons, membership of the TPNW will ensure that this is done within the context of and with the support of a UN Treaty and its state parties. The fact that this gives us an internationally supported route to nuclear disarmament is exactly what opponents of the treaty dislike. And that includes Angus Robertson. Does anyone seriously think that he would ever stand up to Westminster and US pressure?
If SNP MPs, MSPs and members don’t vote to sack him, what does that say about principles and party democracy?
Isobel Lindsay
via email
I CONFESS that, having read the various articles in The National on the latest independence paper, I remain somewhat unsure as to the subtle difference signing or not signing up to the nuclear weapons treaty will make.
I also confess that, like 99.9% of the Scottish electorate, I do not care enough to read the actual paper. The independent Scotland it refers to does not yet exist. As Harold Wilson is alleged to have said, “a week is a long time in politics”. The actions of the Scottish Government and the SNP over the past ten years lead me to believe that independence is now a fair bit away and, at best, some time after the Scottish Parliament elections in May 2031.
READ MORE: Why SNP must support Nobel-prize winning anti-nuclear campaign
My five-year-old car came with a 750-page owner’s manual. I have read only a very few pages of it. I needed to know how the central locking worked, how to cancel the “change oil” warning light and operate the cruise control (which I have yet to use).
These independence papers are like the detailed owner’s manual for a concept car. A car that is still on the drawing board with sadly no guarantee it will ever be built. If it finally makes it into production, the world will probably be a very different place. In a few short years Covid, Gaza and Ukraine have changed the politics of the planet. Global warming will increasingly form part of everyone’s day-to-day agenda.
I do not know how many of these independence papers are still in the civil service pipeline. I fear the previous ones are already gathering dust on a shelf somewhere in St Andrews House. The General Election is only a few months away. 99.9% of the folk who will take the time to vote do not care if, at some point in the possibly distant future, Scotland will or will not sign this nuclear treaty. I suspect they care more about how they and their family will get through the next year or two, pay their bills, keep their job, are able to send their children to a decent school, see their GP when they need to, wait not too long for medical treatment, in essence live in relative comfort.
The SNP and the Scottish Government need to spend a bit more time helping them to achieve that aim.
Sandra West
Dundee
BILL Ramsay might be correct in his assertion concerning Angus Robertson and his eleventh white paper on Scotland’s independence. However, he seems to place his assertion concerning Scotland’s nuclear weapons policy in the present devolved situation, as opposed to Robertson’s reference to nuclear weapons in an independent Scotland.
Ramsay’s assertion that Robertson has no claim to develop SNP policy on nuclear weapons is a wee bit previous. Surely his white paper is simply a notion of what is an SNP government preference for the inevitable independence of Scotland?
READ MORE: Three key points in independence paper on 'Scotland's place in world'
Scotland’s people and the SNP have laid their argument against nuclear weapons, and nuclear power in more recent times, for many years with the fact that the nuclear submarine base and nuclear weapons storage at Faslane and Coulport is the result of an original agreement, imposed by the then post-war government and America, to use the deep waters of Holy Loch as the most suitable water for a nuclear submarine base.
Like Brexit and other Westminster policies, Scotland was never involved and so never agreed to this UK/America agreement. Scotland’s MP composition in the UK parliament has always been in the minority since that unholy union agreement inception of 1707.
Whatever the political arguments are in the white paper, between Angus Robertson, Bill Ramsay or even the CND, is for another day to sort out. What Scotland needs to know is that the SNP, for all its faults, is still the party fighting to rid our country of everything nuclear for when we become independent. Not before, as Bill Ramsay asserts, but on day one of independence when we will have the political clout to say so.
Alan Magnus-Bennett
Fife
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