If the aim is global media exposure, the SNP's best strategy is clear

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.”

READ MORE: This is not the time for Scotland’s MPs to walk off the global stage

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.

READ MORE: SNP MPs withdrawing would highlight the democractic deficit

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.

READ MORE: Vote for Labour and Scotland will lose its voice at Westminster

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-focussed 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