IF you’ve not seen it, please go see the documentary To See Ourselves. I was fortunate enough to be in the audience in the Cameo Cinema in Edinburgh for a showing followed by the Q&A with Jane Mcallister and her father. The emotion, anger and regret at what could have been, and should have been! But now, we’re at where we’re at, as they say. Honestly though I don’t think I know where that is for me!

From the many points brought up in the question-and-answer session, one that fired me up was: is the denial of a referendum (if a referendum is the sole legal route) the denial of a civil right: the civil right we should enjoy within a democracy? That took me back to when we exercised our civil right to vote and we returned that previous majority of 56 pro-indy MPs. I think we failed to further the indy cause to any great impact, far less actually regain our independence. So just what will any number of pro-indy MPs in Westminster achieve? There is a democratic deficit that our population will never overcome in first-past-the-post, something we need to accept and move on by employing different tactics.

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No matter the outcome of the General Election there will still be a Yes movement, so what does the future hold? What of our Holyrood parliament come 2026? Will we secure a clear pro-indy majority and what would we do with it?

For me, the continual question is still: how do we engage with “people”. I’m not just thinking of voters pre-elections with leaflets and stalls, marches and rallies, no matter how vital these are as part of the bigger picture. But where is the vision, what is that bigger picture?

Indy certainly won’t be achieved through the combative attempts to score points in debates over “ideology” and party politics, far less overcoming personality politics. I am minded of Canon Kenyon Wright and the inaugural meeting of the Scottish Constitutional Convention, when he said: “What if that other voice we all know so well responds by saying: ‘We say no, and we are the state?’ Well we say yes – and we are the people.” It’s “the people” again!

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Is it time for people’s assemblies across Scotland informing a national convention? Open assemblies, not drawn from political parties, but broad based, and representative. People’s assemblies that would engage in bread-and-butter issues from their lived, local experience, addressing poverty, transport, local government, health, food, economics.

Whilst focussing on Scotland’s future, such “local” input would inform first Scotland at national level and then further afield internationally.

Scotland’s future isn’t far away, it’s tomorrow. Who, what would inform the assemblies beyond ourselves? What could we hear from other people from other countries and their experiences? Perhaps near neighbours such as the Nordics, Iceland, or nearer still Ireland. The latter uses such assemblies and as recently as October 2023 an assembly presented its final report including 36 recommendations for a new Irish model to reduce harm caused by illicit drugs use. Drug use/misuse so familiar to a reserved/devolved tied-up Scotland!

We know now from recent ten years’ experience that we can’t expect politicians to deliver independence. Such civic engagement across Scotland could lead to a mass movement of politicised people telling Holyrood, Westminster and the wider world that independence isn’t off the agenda, not when we the people of Scotland are determining our own future for ourselves.

Selma Rahman
Edinburgh