| If Independence is so great, why hasn’t it happened yet? |
| Wednesday, 18 March 2009 14:33 |
| It is up to the people of Scotland to decide their future, and it is the task of a party like the SNP to convince more and more Scots that the best people to run Scotland are the people who live here. It is significant and encouraging that people in Scotland have a growing confidence in their national identity, with the overwhelming majority now preferring to describe themselves as primarily Scottish rather than British. In 1979, a survey (McCrone and Paterson) was still able to find 38% of people in Scotland who classed themselves as more British than Scottish. By the time of the British Social Attitudes survey of 2001, this group had declined to just 7%. Our work is to raise Scots’ confidence in themselves as a community. The task of the unionist parties and their friends in the Scottish press is to undermine that confidence as much as they possibly can. Labour MP Martin O’Neill accurately, if rather cynically, defined Labour’s great political task in Scotland: “Our biggest problem is lowering the expectations of the Scottish people”. (“Radical Scotland” June 1984) Labour campaign manager Douglas Alexander MP put it another way: “We have got to engender fear of the SNP.” (leaked memo, 1999) However, despite the propaganda, people’s confidence is growing – along with their expectations. Scotland is already impatient for more power to be given up by Westminster. We believe that the logical next step for Scotland to take is Independence. That is what the SNP is working to achieve. |
Network
