Wings Over Scotland

Ultimately, we will win independence at the ballot box. That is not to say there is no place for the grassroots campaign that caused UKG to change its collective underwear ten years ago. There is, obviously. However, we cannot ignore the necessity of elected officials being in place to make the will of the people a reality.

“Ultimately, we will win independence at the ballot box”

I am sorry, but I do not think we will. We will be denied that independence and we will be given a litany of stupid excuses for that denial. We ALREADY won that independence at the ballot box on the 8th May 2015, 8 June 2017 and 12 December 2019. We already sent an absolute majority of anti-union MPs to Westminster not one but three times.

On top of that, Scotland categorically voted against removing the UK out of the EU. Yet, Scotland’s expressed democratic will was not ignored, it was stomped all over. Forcing Scotland out of the EU was an imposition of absolute rule and therefore a direct violation of the Claim of Right. It should have ended the union right there and then. Yet, it did not because Scotland is represented by invertebrates rather than MPs and MSPs.

Actually, the union should have ended in 2015, in 2016, in 2017 and in 2019. Four times over by now. Yet, did you see any change? No.
What we saw was the political fraud Sturgeon and the brigade of useless SNP MPs transforming the SNP with their inaction into an overt labour operating under a fake brand.

We also gave multiple democratic mandates for a referendum on independence. Yet, did you see any change?

We are denied democracy, yet, allegedly, this union continues “by consent”. Well, Scotland removed its consent for this union to continue the minute the first mandate for an independence referendum was issued. And it is not just me who is saying this.

The following interesting quotes are from Ciaran Martin Professor of Practice in the Management of Public Organisations at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford. Before this was a senior UK civil servant. From 2014 to 2020 he led the government’s work on cyber security, founding and leading the National Cyber Security Centre, a subdivision of the intelligence agency GCHQ. He worked as Constitution Director in the Cabinet Office between July 2011 and January 2014.  He actually helped negotiate what would became the Edinburgh Agreement and was even present at the table when the agreement was signed. The quotes were extracted from his paper “Resist, Reform or Re-run”, published in April 2021 in the context of the potential result in the Scottish election of 2021 for a pro-independence majority elected on a manifesto for a independence referendum:

“In the middle of the noisiest electoral campaign in the short history of the Scottish parliament, one important fact is being overlooked. The formal position of the government of the United Kingdom appears to be that there will be no lawful or democratic route by which to achieve Scottish independence for an unspecified number of decades. This is irrespective of how Scotland votes in May, or at any subsequent election during this unspecified period”

“My principal contention…is that should events transpire…that make this currently rhetorical position a firm constitutional reality, then the Union as we understand it will have changed fundamentally. In effect, it would change the Union from one based on consent, to one based on the force of law”

“It is very possible – some say highly likely – that in May, or at some other point in the future, the Scottish parliament will have a majority elected on a very specific commitment to hold another independence referendum. Whether it is made up solely of Scottish National Party MSPs, or SNP plus Greens, or Alba – or, hypothetically, 65 non-party independents – is of zero constitutional or legal significance. A majority is a majority, and – as we shall come to – no one has attempted to define a different threshold for a trigger for a referendum”

“In the event of such a clash, the UK government and its parliament has broadly three options for how to respond. These are as follows:
• Resist a referendum, by force of law (this is the UK government’s current policy);
• Reform the United Kingdom, and Scotland’s place within it, alongside that resistance, with the aim of providing an alternative to independence capable of overcoming its current position in opinion polls (which is, by historical standards, very strong);
or • Re-run the 2014 referendum, or some variant thereof, having abandoned the resistance policy in the light of the electoral mandate”

I would argue we are already on option two: “Reform”. This is what the stupid SNP is dragging us towards: more devolution and why it is trying to get in bed with Labour.

The following quotes are also taken from the same Mr Martin’s paper:

“Although some academics had pointed out some years earlier its potential for use as a route to holding a referendum, Section 30 was not designed for existential constitutional issues. It was designed to iron out mistakes in the way devolved and reserved powers work in more mundane matters, such as road transport, and to provide flexibility for new developments”

“Ultimately there are no constraints on what Westminster can do to block a lawful path to Scottish independence if it’s so minded” 

“There are, in effect, only two things that matter. One: The law is in Westminster. Two: The votes are in Scotland. So if these two forces clash, one has to give way to the other. But there are no rules as to how such a situation should be resolved”

“A vote next month, or at any time after, in favour of any majority – however constituted – of MSPs elected on an explicit pro-referendum mandate, in effect puts Scotland’s consent for the Union on pause. We have no other means by which to measure that consent”

“Mr Cameron and Mr Moore correctly recognised in 2011 that the pro-referendum parliamentary majority was the principal legitimate measure of the view of the Scottish people at that time”

“No political argument should override the democratic mandate. If, as the present Prime Minister has argued, a referendum is not the priority of the Scottish people, they can indicate this by voting for one or two of several parties who do not wish to hold one. Indeed, a referendum is far higher up the agenda in the 2021 election than it was in 2011, when it was barely discussed”

“The other argument that can be expected is that not enough time has passed since the 2014 referendum. This, too, is an entirely political argument. Quoting back remarks from that period that it was a “once in a generation” experience is just politics: it’s just a slogan, with the same constitutional standing as the famous promise of £350 million per week for the NHS that was made during the Brexit campaign” 

“If the Scottish government proceeds with its so-called Plan B – legislating for its own referendum because Westminster has withheld its consent – then the UK government will be dutybound to challenge it in court.

Arguments about the priorities of the Scottish people, or slogans from 2014, will not feature in the courtroom. Instead, UK law officers will have to say out loud that, although they like to describe Scotland as a nation in its own right in a great multinational partnership, the country has, in fact, no legal right to self-determination.

In the event – in my view, an unlikely one – that the Scottish government won the case, the UK parliament could pass any legislation it wanted to prevent the Plan B referendum anyway, thus removing any doubt about who is in control of the Union.

Overruling a democratic mandate by force of law, however it is done, would have two profound implications. First, a century of union by consent would effectively come to an end: the Union would become an entity sustained by law alone….Secondly, and relatedly, the UK government would be telling Scottish nationalists that there is no lawful path by which to achieve their objectives, at least until such time as the UK government gets round to deciding what it thinks “a generation” means”

“It is therefore not hyperbole to say that the UK government’s position is that there is, and will be, no lawful, democratic path to Scottish independence for an unspecified number of decades, regardless of the wishes of Scottish voters during that period”

“What matters, however, is that hundreds of thousands of Scots who quite clearly support independence have been told throughout their lives, however old they are, that if they succeed through lawful, democratic parliamentary politics – of the type pursued by the SNP and the Greens, for example – then their objectives will be realised.

Now, for the first time in our lifetime, the UK government is saying that this is no longer the case, and that for an indefinite period, the lawful, democratic pursuit of a legitimate political objective cannot result in success, no matter how many people vote for it, and however often.

Such a position is not, in and of itself, undemocratic: plenty of democracies do not allow secession. Spain is a democracy, and Article II of its constitution thunders that “The Kingdom of Spain is indivisible.” … But Spain does not pretend to be a voluntary union of different nations; the United Kingdom does.

So could the United Kingdom still be a voluntary partnership, if those who pursue independence for Scotland lawfully, peacefully and reasonably are left with the choice of, in effect, taking it lying down, or setting out to test the law and the political process?

It is not hard to see how this could do terrible damage to trust, not just in government but in the Scots’ sense of participation in a union of equal partners – this being the core historic principle of the Union.

A union is not a union of equal partners if the bigger partner does not allow the smaller one the option to leave”

From this paper, it is not difficult to see why the political fraud and the unelected crown representative Lord Advocate fought the Keatings case and did not allow a full blown court case to establish if Scotland has the right to self-determination or not. The political fraud and the lord Advocate were simply avoided the crown the embarrassment of having to admit publicly to the world that the uk is a dictatorship that is consistently and systematically violating the Claim of Right and therefore violating the treaty that gave birth to the UK itself.

So I do no longer believe and will never ever again believe that politics in the UK is or will ever be the way to achieve independence.

Politics is the tool that has been systematically used to deny us a referendum for which we gave several perfectly legitimate mandates.

Politics is what has been used to deny us Scotland’s independence despite a majority of native Scots voting for it and despite having sent three stupid majorities of anti-union MPs to Westminster.

Politics is what has been used to force Scotland out of the EU despite the people of Scotland categorically voting against it.

Time and time again, politics is the tool that is being used to systematically deny democracy to Scotland. I will therefore never believe such deliberately flawed tool can ever be used by Scotland as a democratic vehicle to achieve anything worthwhile, unless of course it is in the interest of the British or American establishments.

Bringing this entire fake and rotten political edifice that is acting as a straight jacket to Scotland right to the ground is, in my opinion, the way to go. If that is not possible, then it will have to be bypassed, but never engage with it.

Mr Martin is a unionist and very much part of the establishment. He sees the UK as “a country” and accepts the English only convention of “parliamentary sovereignty”. I do not. I believe in the power of international treaties.

Targeting that treaty of union, rather than insisting in playing time and time again a rigged game of Westminster’s politics where Westminster sets up its rules and changes them when they do not achieve what it wants, is, in my opinion, the only way for Scotland to go. We can only win this game by getting out of it.

If there was ever any doubt in somebody’s mind, the following quotes from Mr Martin’s paper make it more than obvious that we will never ever be offered or allowed to follow an actual democratic route:

“So if events do bring us to the position of a second binary choice, either soon or in the more distant future, my third conclusion is that the 2014 template is broadly replicable for a further referendum. Should there be such a referendum, a high threshold should be applied to changing any of the arrangements that worked well in 2014.

It would, for example, be possible to vary the terms, or the franchise, or to insist on holding a confirmatory subsequent referendum following a ‘Yes’ vote in principle. But all this comes back to questions about consent, and in what way unionists seek to maintain the Union.

There are numerous ways in which Westminster could try to tilt the balance, to prevent Scottish independence from happening by democratic means. But none of them would be invisible. For example, extending the franchise to Scots living in other parts of the UK might gain marginal support for a ‘No’ vote…But such a decision would be prohibitively complex”

“If expatriate Scots’ votes proved decisive, it would hardly settle the matter. Similarly, we already know from the 1979 devolution referendum that a turnout threshold is liable to cause great resentment. And despite – given the Brexit experience – the allure of a second referendum on terms of exit, a requirement for a confirmatory referendum incentivises the following dreadful outcome: a heavy vote in favour of the principle of independence (because there are no consequences at that point) followed by very tough negotiations whereby London seeks to disincentivise Scotland from leaving; and a second referendum with a narrow vote to stay in the Union because the terms of exit are so harsh. It is hard to think of a better recipe for sullen Scottish discontent within the Union for decades to come”

So there we go. changing the franchise to rig the referendum and ensuring permanence of Scotland in the union is not just “considered” but actually expected and seen as “normal”.

Yet, here, we are being panned for demanding that only actual Scots and those living here for a significant length of time, take part in the vote. Funny that, huh?

“Nicola Sturgeon: vote for SNP is not vote for second independence referendum”

And here is my question:

What right did that woman have to put on hold the first article of the constitution of the party?

What is above what? The constitution of the party of the words of the charlatan of the day?

For the record, I blame the 56 MPs for following blindly the diktat of that political fraud instead of keeping their spines back in, stand for their country and show the middle finger and the door to the fraud.

Well, I got a positive vote. That means at least one person invested their precious time in reading it. That is good enough for me and I am very thankful for that.

Maybe that person is now reading the whole article written by Mr Martin, telling others about it and opening the yes of many others to how UK politics have only served to frustrate independence.

Should I include the link to the article?
Yes, I think I will. Thank you for reminding me that I did not include a link to the article in my previous comment.

In case anybody is interested in reading Mr Martin’s article, it can be found by following the link below:

link to bsg.ox.ac.uk

“How can you remove that obstacle?”

You have missed out option #3 Mia, stand for office yourself.

Make your manifesto a simple plebiscitary one for Independence, swear an oath you won’t be deflected if elected, and be prepared to back that up, going to prison if it comes to that.

It won’t be easy, far from it, but when was power and money ever easily won from the grip of those possessing it?

“the cowardice and the self-serving interest”

That’s an easy jibe to hurl from the comfort and safety of the sidelines.

Let’s be clear, Mia, I’m not saying it has to be you specifically, but somebody needs to stand up and be counted. Scotland only needs something like 100 committed patriots to get Indy up and running again.

#NoSellOutEverAgain

Ahhhh!

The Crank jibe !

The last resort insult of the over qualified under experienced snob who has just lost the argument..

Run back to yer Alma Mater shoulder to cry on for direction..

Mia is thriving with her independence and doesn’t require any parliamentary carrots to convince her that she doesn’t hold any sovereignty, nor possess the capability (unlimited power) to succeed –

Mia is a Scot Indy trailblazer (take note Scotland weaklings)…

“Politics as a route of independence is dead”

Oh well then, we’re doomed.

Unless …

Can we post stuff online and achieve Indy that way? If it’s never been REALLY tried, how can we say it will never work?

It won’t work because it’s not lawful and won’t be recognised.

You personally could take that stance, and I get the rationale. However, I’d seriously doubt there are enough people (and particularly importantly, enough people in a concentration in one area) to influence the outcome of a specific seat. My personal view is that strategies like this which only appeal to the most committed and serious of supporters are likely to appeal to 20/25% of the Scottish electorate. There are far too many people in the “nice to have, provided it’s not too much inconvenience” camp.

Bravo!
The point the lazy legalese here just don’t seem to want to grasp.
Wonder why?