When you’ve been watching Scotland playing football for 50 years of your life, you become accustomed to disappointment. You expect disappointment. Anything better than disappointment becomes a bonus.
The SNP released their general election manifesto today. We’re not going to link you to it, because we don’t want to be responsible for wasting your time. This is everything it has to say on the party’s (cough) strategy for achieving independence.
It deserves much, much less respect than we’re giving it. Tomorrow, ice lolly reviews.
We’re still trying not to pay attention to the election because it’s so tedious and awful and pointless, but this is worth putting on the record because it’s in The National and otherwise nobody’s going to read it.
Because we’re still more than two years out from the next Holyrood election, and it’s really hard to see how it’s going to pan out. So let’s throw some figures around.
These are strange and grim times for the Scottish independence movement, but we never thought it’d ever get so strange that we’d be quoting Effie Deans.
Since pretty much day one, Wings has said that the only honest and honourable way to campaign against independence would be for Unionists to say Scotland isn’t a country, but a mere region of the UK. But they lack the courage to admit what their true beliefs are, and so they fall back on fear and lies disguised as concern, all cloaked in “proud Scot” protestations.
While that might be a miserable way to conduct yourself, it’s understandable, because the moment that you acknowledge Scotland as being a country, all the debating lines against independence crumble to ashes. They’re powerless in the face of the principle that countries should choose their own governments, for good or ill, because that’s what democracy is, and few people are willing to stand openly against democracy.
And what Effie Deans’ concession of this site’s cornerstone argument reveals is that Unionists finally feel safe against any threat of independence in the foreseeable future, and with good reason.
