By Dave Coull
“Rebels in secret indy plot ahead of SNP national conference” says the headline. But it’s then reported that FORTY THREE LOCAL BRANCHES of the party, from all over Scotland, are involved; they’ve already been in communication with each other; and they’re planning a face-to-face meeting at St Matthews Church in Perth, on Saturday the 9th of August. That doesn’t sound like a “secret plot” to me. It sounds fairly open and democratic.
That very narrow No, eleven years ago, on promises which were soon exposed as false, settled absolutely nothing. Just two years later, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage got a majority of voters in England against Europe. Despite a pro-Europe majority from every part of Scotland, we were made to suffer the consequences of that foolishness. The case for a new, non-party-political, referendum on Independence for Scotland was iron-clad. That is true REGARDLESS of how you feel about Europe. But the Westminster political parties all said no, and Tony Blair’s recently-invented so-called “Supreme Court”, in reality just a corrupt ruling class sub-committee, rubber-stamped a permanent ban on non-party-political democracy for Scotland. The UK ruling class was exposed as the corrupt dictatorship which, in practice, it has always been.
Just two countries in Europe still use the First-Past-The-Post system of elections. One is Belarus, where Alexander Grigoryevich Lukashenko has been President for the past THIRTY ONE YEARS, making him probably the world’s longest-in-office ruler. The other one is the UK. Hoping the FPTP route can lead to independence is just foolish; non-party-political referendum has been permanently closed; in these circumstances, some of us say confrontation between Scotland’s working class and the corrupt UK ruling class is, sooner or later, pretty much inevitable.
First-Past-The-Post can often lead to MPs who have been “elected” with a MINORITY of votes. These SNP “rebels” have come up with an idea which doesn’t involve FPTP. They suggest a majority sum of votes for pro-independence candidates can be a mandate for independence.
Well, that does sound better than FPTP. But it’s not “non-party-political”, it still depends on voting for politicians representing political parties. It still excludes some who don’t want to support any political party. So, not ideal. But the corrupt UK ruling class has created a situation where nothing can ever be ideally democratic. This is THEIR mess; and their mess is pretty sure, sooner or later, to lead to confrontation.
