Ten years on

On Wednesday it will be the tenth anniversary of the independence referendum. This is always a poignant time of year for me, not only because of the what might have been had Scotland grasped the thistle and chosen independence on that fateful day, but because this time of year is also the anniversary of the death of my late husband Andy, who finally succumbed to vascular dementia on 3 September 2014. It’s only because I had to give up work in order to care for him that I started blogging and writing and that resulted on eight books, a series of Celtic language maps, travels across the length and breadth of this heart achingly beautiful and oft-infuriating country of ours and regular columns in Scotland’s only pro-independence newspaper.

I’ve remarried and am very happy, but sadly the dug is no longer with us and I am learning how to live life as best as I can as a disabled person following the massive stroke I suffered back in October 2020. I’m not going to lie, it has been challenging emotionally, psychologically, and physically and I would have been utterly lost without the support of my husband Peter.

But there’s nothing to gain by greetin about things lost or things that might have been. The point is to be realistic where we are now, and to move forward. That is true whether you are coming to terms with the lifelong disabilities you have been left with due to a massive stroke that took out most of the right parietal lobe of your brain, or you are gazing at the wreckage after Scotland’s largest pro-independence party took a kicking at the most recent election.

Brains don’t recover but the good news is that political parties do recover from their electoral reverses, sometimes surprisingly quickly, and also that support for independence appears to be unaffected by the travails – which are all too often own goals – of the SNP.

The SNP will eventually get its act together, the sooner the better. It will be aided by the rapidly growing disaffection with the Labour party, which won 37 Westminster seats in Scotland in the recent general election. However Labour’s recovery in Scotland has very shallow roots. Labour piled up seats due to the vagaries and unfairness of the first past the post system so beloved of Westminster but did so while winning just 36% of votes cast.

The SNP will not achieve independence by itself but rather as a core component of a broad based independence movement which is centred on the grass roots. The party is needed to create a political presence for independence, and it’s needed as a placeholder for independence votes, which, being denied access to a straight referendum by a Westminster which is terrified of the independence question, is how that wider movement will express majority support for independence.

The question of independence has been politically normalised in Scotland. In the interminable and often bitter debates about process which have occupied the independence movement over the past ten years we sometimes forget just what a monumental achievement that is. Labour politicians and their allies in the Scottish media might like to tell themselves and us that an electoral defeat for the SNP means a permanent defeat for the cause of independence, but they are delusional.

Labour’s electoral honeymoon is already over. Starmer’s promise of change is already revealed as being as hollow as the fine promises made by the Better Together campaign in that referendum campaign ten years ago. Starmer himself has been found out as a charlatan and a hypocrite with a penchant for expensive freebies, clothes and Taylor Swift and football tickets. Since 2019 Starmer has accepted a reported £76,000 worth of freebies. Starmer is addicted to grift. The question is what do those who gift him so much expect to get in return. They must be getting something as they keep on giving him stuff. This is social media influencer level of freebies.

Starmer is a man who is literally a millionaire and whose earnings put him comfortably within the top 1% of the population yet who wants us to believe that it is reasonable for him to get a party donor to shower him and his wife with expensive designer clothing at the precise moment that he has stripped pensioners on low incomes of their entitlement to the winter fuel allowance and tells families in poverty that they can only receive state benefits for two of their children.

On Monday Starmer was in Italy cosying up to that country’s far right leader Giorgia Meloni and seeking to ‘learn from’ her hard line immigration policy, a version of the UK Conservatives’ Rwanda plan, in which the Italian government sends asylum seekers and undocumented migrants to Albania for processing and which relies on deals being struck with Libya and Tunisia from where small boats crossing to Italy originate.

Human Rights Watch has accused Italy and the EU of being “complicit” in crimes carried out against migrants in Libya, reporting cases of “murder, enforced disappearance, torture, enslavement, sexual violence, rape, and other inhumane acts” in the north African country.

Albania is one of the poorest, most violent, and most corrupt countries in Europe. Italy’s agreement allows up to 36,000 migrants – rescued by Italian ships including the coastguard or border police – to be sent to Albania each year. Two Italian-run migrant centres are being built in in Albania, one in Shengjin and the other in nearby Gjader, both about 45 miles north of the Albanian capital, Tirana in the centre of the country. Critics have denounced them as Italy’s Guantanamo. Officials are confident the centres will be ready within a few weeks.

Assuming that the Scottish Government can get its budget passed in December and avoid an early Holyrood election, by the time the next Scottish Parliament elections are due in May 2026, Keir Starmer and the Labour party are likely to be very unpopular indeed. By then many thousands of Scots will have come to realise that Starmer’s promise of change was just another of his many lies, and that change is not possible under Westminster because Westminster’s entire raison d’être is to prevent change from occurring and to protect and defend entrenched privilege. That will present a big opportunity to the SNP and the independence movement to mobilise and give voice to public anger and turn despair into the hope of independence. If we seize the chances that Starmer’s sleaze and lies present us, in ten years time we won’t be looking back at what might have been, we will be building a new and better Scotland in an independent nation.

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My Gaelic maps of Scotland are still available, a perfect gift for any Gaelic learner or just for anyone who likes maps. The maps cost £15 each plus £7 P&P within the UK. You can order by sending a PayPal payment of £22 to [email protected] (Please remember to include the postal address where you want the map sent to).

I am now writing the daily newsletter for The National, published every day from Monday to Friday in the late afternoon.  So if you’d like a daily dose of dug you can subscribe to The National, Scotland’s only pro-independence newspaper, here: Subscriptions from The National

I am also now selling my Cornish language map of Cornwall which was produced in collaboration with Akademi Kernewek, the umbrella body for Cornish language organisations. The approximately 1200 place names on the map were researched and agreed by the Akademi’s place name panel. The map is A1 in size. The Cornish maps cost £15 each plus £7 P&P within the UK.  P&P to the USA is £16 and P&P to Europe is £12. You can order by sending a PayPal payment for the appropriate amount to [email protected]  or by using my PayPal.me link PayPal.Me/weegingerdug
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/weegingerdug Please remember to include the postal address where you want the map sent to and clearly mark your payment Gaelic map or Cornish map). Alternatively contact me at [email protected] for other means to pay.

Within Cornwall the map is available at Kowsva, 6 Artists Muse, Heartlands, Poll/Pool – The Kowethas shop. They are also available from The Cornish Store in Aberfala/Falmouth. Other outlets in Cornwall will follow soon.

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