I READ former MP Tommy Sheppard’s article in Monday’s National with increasing anger and frustration. Tommy, it seems, has now invented a four point master plan to revive the SNP’s fortunes just in time for the 2026 Scottish Parliament elections – in which he perhaps intends to stand as a candidate. Those fortunes would not require to be revived if they had not been allowed to slide, over the past ten years, to their current lowest point since the 1970s.
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Clearly the rot set in around 2015. Anyone looking for a starting point need look no further than Mr Sheppard’s own maiden speech in the House of Commons. The whole speech is readily available online, but skipping forward to 7 minutes 30 seconds Mr Sheppard admits “we have not come to this chamber to argue the case for independence” swiftly followed by “we come here not to disrupt” and “we come here to be good parliamentarians”. These tactics clearly did not work and the Scottish electorate, including many thousands of SNP supporters, finally lost patience and faith in them, and Mr Sheppard, on July 4.
The SNP cannot continue to moan about the Union without presenting a far more attractive vision of what an independent Scotland will look like and how we are going to pay for it. The party was gravely injured on July 4. It is currently on life support in need of some possibly dangerous surgery, including some degree of political amputations, to save its life if it is to sufficiently recover to face the prospect of another battle in May 2026.
Brian Lawson
Paisley
TOMMY Sheppard writes in his column on how to win back the half million lost SNP voters who abandoned the party during the recent Westminster election, resulting in the near wipe-out of SNP representation there. It is an enormous number.
It is clear to me that the SNP have reaped the result of their abandonment of any coherent or enthusiastic independence policy over the last ten years, when open goals such as Brexit and the Johnson government were spurned in favour of pointless social engineering which was of no interest to the majority of their supporters.
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The appointment of an independence minister, since abandoned, resulted in only the production of a few white papers on aspects of independence which seem to have vanished without trace, and no effort was made to address the broader electorate.
A cheap and simple campaign of advertising hoardings in former SNP strongholds would have been far more effective in getting the message out. Posters stating, for example: “Why do small countries like Ireland and the Netherlands have much higher pensions than Scotland?” (and give examples); “Why is Scotland excluded from the benefits of the EU?” (give examples); “Why does little Denmark, with fewer resources than Scotland, manage to have one of the world’s highest standards of living?”
I could go on. But without a campaign addressing the concerns of the average voter instead of the small political elite in Holyrood, the decline of the SNP is inevitable.
James Duncan
Edinburgh
IN Thursday’s National, Michael Follon pointed out that one sentence in my letter on August 6 was not valid. I write to confirm that Michael was correct and to thank him for addressing this.
On reflection, and re-reading my letter, I can confirm that the claim I made that “under the UN Covenant (ICCPR) an individual could complain directly to the UN” was poorly worded and was inaccurate as it was written, Michael is correct in that.
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The point I was trying to make, and made badly, was that if a country has signed up to the UN Convention, as Scotland did when the UK signed it in 1976, and if this country then put the terms of the Convention into its domestic legal system, then this provided for an individual in that country to have a right to challenge the civil and political rights as applied to them.
This, I understand, is correct. However, this right is not exercised by a direct application to the UN, as I said in my previous letter, it is exercised by the individual using his/her domestic legal system, which, if the domestic legal system had incorporated the Convention provides for the state involved to have access to an appeals system to have this individuals claim adjudicated at UN level.
I hope this clears up any confusion I caused by my inaccurate wording in my letter of August 6.
Andy Anderson
Ardrossan
AS the dust settles on the Westminster election and we take stock, not just of the result, but the actions of the new Labour government in the first month, these are surely a warning of what is to follow. It is imperative that the SNP now focus on 2026 and the Holyrood election. The 2024 election was always going to be difficult for the SNP with Labour in the ascendancy and a huge anti-Conservative vote, well deserved, but we must now learn lessons and look forward.
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Should the SNP have any prospect of holding onto power at Holyrood, we need to focus on devolved matters first and foremost, no ifs, no buts. No more trying to cover up the damage being done to Scotland by Westminster by introducing mitigating measures – Scotland voted Labour and we in the SNP must make voters aware of the consequences of their vote.
Scotland simply cannot afford to continue on the mitigation road, covering up for Westminster’s austerity. Consider this: the Scottish Government are still mitigating the Bedroom Tax introduced more than 10 years ago, costing Scotland more than £600 million. This approach of focusing on devolved matters first and foremost can only benefit our prospects in 2026 and ultimately our goal of independence.
Catriona C Clark
Falkirk
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