One battle down means another is on horizon

Millions of SNP leaflets are in the nation’s recycling bins, and the big yellow battle bus, decorated at great expense for only six days of use, has returned to its former life as the Glasgow Celtic football team bus. Election bills will have to be settled – something the SNP may find harder than in previous elections.

The party’s electoral casualties are many. Most had survived previous battles in 2015, 2017 and 2019 but the antics, in recent years, of their Edinburgh-based colleagues ensured their demise. Gender recognition, police investigations, ferries, SNHS waiting lists, A&E waiting times, failed recycling schemes, men put in women’s prisons, protected marine areas, and the sudden exit of two first ministers all rounded off by a less than well timed iPad-related saga have been the very effective weapons of the Unionist armies.

No amount of leaflets, targeted letters, posters and door-knocking could combat these issues which have come to dominate the nation’s TV screens on a daily basis for some time. The political casualty list is no respecter of individual work rate. It includes many SNP MPs – including my own – who have worked hard over the past years.

SNP leader John Swinney is now retreating to our remaining stronghold at Holyrood. It is a safe haven only in the short term as Unionist forces will very soon begin to lay siege to it in preparation for a final assault in less than two years’ time. The question is, who should lead that campaign? No doubt some of the MPs who fell in Thursday’s battle will miraculously be revived just in time for the 2026 Scottish Parliament candidate selection process.

READ MORE: The National view on the election: A new start for independence?

For someone who joined the SNP in the 1970s, it is frankly heartbreaking. The political clock has been turned back 50 years, and decades of work have been undone by attempts to appeal to a minority of the Scottish population at the expense of the majority and a perceived lack of basic competence in government. The battle of Holyrood 2026 awaits. I live in hope but I fear for the worst.

Brian Lawson

Paisley

WE’VE got two years to get it together. From an indy perspective, these election results don’t look too good. Any way you look at them – seats, total indy voters, tactical voting, turnout – the figures tell me one thing. Indy parties need to get their act together. Any tendency of the parties to publicly broach the word “co-operation” is always couched in terms of criticism of the other parties’ positions. They should instead start from the aim of a majority of indy MSPs in Holyrood in 2026.

The voting system provides scope for that outcome. In our D’Hondt voting system, there are two elections – First Past The Post (FPTP) and Single Transferable Vote. It is well within the capabilities of number-crunchers in all three indy parties to devise the best way to maximise the overall indy vote in 2026. They just need to get in a huddle and go about the task objectively and not from a “MY party” point of view.

For Yes voters, it’s not YOUR party, it’s OUR party, whether Green, SNP or Alba. Approaching this from the numbers angle will give scope for the parties to knock their heads together with one aim in mind. The movement in 2014 demonstrated the qualities of consensus, co-operation, inclusive, strategic, positive, single-minded, etc. These are the watchwords for the Yes parties over the next two years.

Remember US president Lyndon Johnson and his take on co-operation: “It’s probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.”

I see the options for 2026 being twofold. Either parties will co-operate and agree upon putting only one Yes candidate in either the FPTP ballot or the regional/list ballots but not both. Alternatively, each party will devise their own strategies without discussion or agreement.

Regardless of which they choose, candidates and parties should label themselves as indy parties (such as Yes Greens or Yes SNP) so voters are in no doubt what the priority is. Meanwhile, party members should urge their branches and leaders to get heads together urgently and focus on indy as the number-one strategy for 2026.

A resurgent Labour Unionism can be easily rebuffed if the indy movement gets together. Let’s face it, tactical voting – as demonstrated by the Unionist parties on Thursday – was a winning formula.

Sandy Carmichael

Moray

WAKING up after the worst election result I can ever remember, I worry that nothing has changed – autocratic Unionist government, effectively elected dictatorship, means democracy for Scotland will continue to be denied – and dread that austerity is now cemented into our political make-up.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment for me is that, put to the test, a huge swathe of Scots “reasoned” that in order to punish the worst, most draconian British government in history, the perceived solution was to turn to the other Unionist party rather than understand that the only real avenue for change is the full fiscal and political control of self-governing independence

The SNP can’t say they weren’t warned. They weren’t listening. They took their eye off the ball of indy, and off serious government with their dalliance with the pernicious Greens and their diversionary policy shenanigans. However, the SNP’s biggest mistake is in not making the case that devolution is failing Scotland.

It just doesn’t work. The Scottish Parliament is an administration without power. It is a function of the status quo – not a force for effective governance. It disburses inadequate funding to patch over problems without any prospect of solving them.

Whoever holds the purse strings holds power. And that’s the autocrats in Westminster. If we are right and this really is a red-Tory Labour government, then we have two years to prove this to Scots.

Two years to get the real arguments over. Two years to answer the concerns of voters about Scotland’s ability to go it alone. And two years to drive home how Scotland’s resources prop up the Union and we’re exploited. And most of all, the movement needs to unite with real purpose and leadership that is focused on freeing us from the corset that is the UK Union.

Unionists think they’ve won a chocolate watch and indy is dead for at least a generation.

We need to show them they’re wrong.

Let’s get it done.

Jim Taylor

Scotland

THE UK General Election results don’t bode well for Scottish independence. As of writing, the SNP retained just nine seats and English Labour gained 35 in Scotland. Alba barely registered on the electoral Richter scale.

The SNP did so poorly because they stopped fighting for Scottish independence the moment Alex Salmond anointed Nicola Sturgeon. She blew every open goal she was given – Brexit and a weakened British state with a string of disastrous Tory PMs, and committed the mindless blunder of asking the UK Supreme Court for permission to legislate to hold another independence referendum.

She pushed bills like the GRR that ended in disaster and continued to publish the fictional GERS that portrays Scotland as Westminster’s dependent. Then she was succeeded by the hapless Humza Yousaf and the grey man John Swinney. In addition, the party was probably infiltrated by UK spooks who found stooges willing to collaborate to keep Scotland in its place.

(Image: PA)

The British state designed devolution to keep the Scottish administration under its control. It was given no real powers and no independent media. Tony Blair was right that it worked. Should the SNP demonstrate any recalcitrance, Westminster could yank its chain to remind it who was master.

Even if a pro-independence party had won each of the 57 seats in Scotland – reduced from 59 – Scotland’s voice would still be drowned out by 543 – increased from 533 – English MPs.

That’s how this Union works. The Westminster Parliament was intended to muzzle and marginalise Scotland. Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe, was also an English spy sent to Scotland to push for a Union with England.

When he succeeded, he wrote: “The Scots will be allowed to send to Westminster, a handful of men who will make no weight whatever. They will be allowed to sit there for form’s sake to be laughed at.”

He was right. In 2015, the SNP should have taken a leaf out of Sinn Féin’s book and boycotted Westminster when it had 56 seats.

What can be done? The Scottish people must recognise that the Claim of Right 1689 says they are sovereign over parliament which means they are in charge. This is at odds with England’s Bill of Rights 1689 which asserts parliamentary sovereignty over the people.

Because the two constitutional positions are incompatible, the Act of Union made the Claim of Right a condition of the treaty in perpetuity. Westminster acknowledged this in 2018. So, the Scottish people must assert their sovereignty and bend the all-too-flexible politicians to their will.

That’s the challenge. When English Labour fails miserably to deliver the “change” they are promising, the Scottish People should finally flex the power they’ve had all along.

Leah Gunn Barrett

Edinburgh

IT is disappointing that in criticising the excellent letter of Winifred McCartney (Letters, June 29), John Baird (Letters, July 2) seeks to justify his attack on the SNP by repeating Unionist propaganda – including derogatory language – in falsely equating the Scottish Government’s financial failings with those of the UK Government.

Of course, like all governments around the world, the Scottish Government could have done better in spending public money, but the £10 billion scandalously wasted by the UK Government on PPE alone (and for which the public has received nothing, except ashes, in return, while rich Tory party friends and donors profited) would have paid for 50 dual-fuel ferries. Even if one were to obligingly ignore the catastrophic financial consequences of the Liz Truss Budget, a conservative estimate of profligate expenditure under the Tories is in excess of a hundred billion (not million) pounds which equates to the building of more than 500 ferries.

In other words, while the SNP in government have made mistakes and must improve their performance, at least those mistakes were seemingly made with good intentions (such as the aim of reinvigorating shipbuilding on the Clyde as well as better serving our island communities) and relatively amount to a small fraction of the cost, even just to Scotland, of demonstrably bad decisions made at Westminster.

(Image: Pixabay)

As long as advocates for self-determination don’t provide appropriate context, including the moral perspective, in comparing the relative performances of the Scottish and UK Governments, regrettably a large number of “undecideds” will remain unconvinced of the merits of independence in spite of the many compelling arguments.

Stan Grodynski

Longniddry, East Lothian