Robin McAlpine – writes excellent articles, up there with Grouse Beater for an intelligent and informing, often insightful, look at where we are and where we could be going. Robin wrote an article the other day that I would encourage you to make the effort to read and to stick with as you work through it. The article is about the potential opportunity within the reality of our current crisis, it’s about what it could mean for the independence movement, both opportunity and it’s risks.
It is cold and calculating to say that crisis opens up opportunity – but it doesn’t make it any less true. For climate change, for anti-poverty and for independence supporters, the rules of the game are about to change. We must adapt or fail. (Robin McAlpine)
Robin is spot on when he says this is the time that the opportunity is enormous for the independence movement in so many ways. Things are about to change for most of us, and the impact is potentially going to be devastating for those of us who live day to day and month to month, as Robin points out it is also going to pull in those who previously were isolated from the day to day grunge that most of us face, and those like us who either don’t vote or are just still sitting on the no fence.
The opportunity is enormous, but there is little reason to believe that this Scottish Government is capable of taking it. Unless it reverses its corporate asset giveaway, ends its Freeport madness, breaks up with the big housing developer lobby and buries the Growth Commission down a very, very deep hole, it will make itself irrelevant to the cause of independence ahead. (Robin McAlpine)
Anyone who reads this blog knows that I pretty much gave up on the SNP a long time ago to deliver us from the nightmare that is the UK (England) and it’s economic and social model. Blahfords tweet above highlights everything that is wrong with the SNP right now. As Robin states about Andrew Wilson and his
Growth Commission, a document which couldn’t have put more effort into telling people that the future would be nothing more than a very slowly improving version of the present.
The SNP, like Labour, are paralysed by fear, fear of upsetting the middle classes, the Daily Mail readers, fear of upsetting the corporate lobby. Fear of upsetting the right wing media and middle class privately educated BBC News Department who all sit on the right in the main, centre right being kind to many of them to be honest. The only difference between BBC News and GB News is that you can swear on GB News.
Robin is correct though, this crisis is going to be an opportunity in so many ways, a horrible, tough, heart breaking opportunity and while I don’t think for one minute the SNP and the sheeple will grasp it hopefully the YES community in the next few months can and get the message across that there is a different way that we can go, a different Scotland, a fairer Scotland can be built.
Check out Robins website here. My blog is short and sweet as I try to write about things that interest me in a way that mirrors the conversations I have with people in the main, it’s my opinion, it’s not particularly insightful, it’s also about trying to encourage others who don’t express an opinion to think about expressing an opinion as we all deserve to be heard but some websites and blogs inform in ways that I don’t, or can’t, Grouse Beater, Barrheadboy, Yours for Scotland, Munguin’s New Republic, Scot Goes Pop, Craig Murray, are all worth a go if you haven’t already.
So two posts today, hope you don’t mind but I wanted to bring what Robin had written to folks attention who may not have seen it.
grumpyscottishman.wordpress.com 
I’d already read Robin – I think ALL his articles are worth a read tbh. Hard times are coming and you’re a fool if you think the nuSNP will do anything to alleviate it. And yes I know most levers are held by Westminster. Which you’d think would light a fire under their bahookies in order to change that. Alas no, there is more than one set of comfy slippers in the SNP especially the Westminster group…
PP
Robin is excellent, I won’t pretend to understand all the concepts but def would encourage as many as possible to work through what he says as best they can. The article was excellent and really summed up the opportunity and risk that we now have and SNP poor governance could in some ways help this time if it gets people out there registered to vote if the wider yes message is not the SNP one. Only an independent Scotland will bring about the change that many of us want to see and this crisis might just focus the minds of people who have not engaged so far.
Thanks for commenting.
Bruce
Reblogged this on Ramblings of a now 60+ Female.
Robin also thinks you should have a WIG
Excellent summary, Bruce, thanks.
I think the Middle Classes are going to feel the squeeze this time, if they are not already. This might be key, as I think the Working Classes are already majority Yes, at least according to the sample survey carried out 7 years ago 6 months after the Independence referendum.
Why will the MC be more open to Yes? In the main, self-interest. A few of these I reckon are:
1. Brexit means a fall in Sterling therefore foreign holidays are more expensive for them.
2. Brexit makes it more inconvenient for travel.
3. Brexit means their kids can’t go to European universities as easily now.
4. Base interest rates were 0.1% in December 2021 and in August 2021 (now) these are at a level of 1.75%, a 17.5 fold increase so mortgage rate rises will be crippling for those who own homes.
5. Consumer price inflation is just under 10% now and is predicted to rise to 13%+ in the autumn so savings will be hammered (in real terms).
6. The food supply shortages cause by Brexit will continue to aggravate inflation so grocery costs will go higher still.
7. Energy costs have spiked and will rise sharply again in the next month or so so gas and electricity bills will go through the roof.
It took the execution of the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising to rouse the Irish population at large from their torpor. In Scotland, just over 100 hundred years later, perhaps some serious hardship will have a similar effect on raising awareness to our plight, especially among the middle classes.
We have to make sure that all these unwanted and unnecessary effects are seen as the price of dependence with the sole cause being the British Union and the only remedy being the latter’s dissolution.
Duncanio
All the reasons you list are valid, until the MC feel some of the pain they are usually insulated from, the grind that most people face on a daily basis, they won’t change. Tax cuts being proposed by the gruesome twosome in the scumbag race tell us all we need to know, tax cuts do nothing to help the poor but they might keep the middle classes a little happy and that is what they will try to do but maybe won’t get away with it this time because it won’t be enough. It is going to hurt most people if things are as bad as people suspect and if YES can play it smart it might just work in our favour if it is acted upon quick enough and that is the problem. Sturgeon looks like she is planning her exit now which means someone like Robertson getting the leadership, and that sets us back even more, and will be the final take over of the SNP by old Scottish Labour so time is of the essence.
Thanks for commenting.
Bruce