VOTE INDEPENDENCE:
Promoting the non-partisan, positive case for Scottish independence
In Scotland we have the chance to build something new. We have a choice: to pass over a momentous opportunity that history has given us, or to retain a status quo in which no one feels they are well served.
The possibility of a genuinely new, genuinely better society, is something that human beings have been striving for throughout the centuries. It is a possibility that has taken humanity to the darkest of places, but it has also led to its greatest achievements.
In Scotland we have the chance to build something new. It is an opportunity that will not involve prison cells, battlefields or gulags, but will rather take the form of the mutual repeal of a piece of legislation, conducted between two peoples with countless bonds, and a mutual admiration for each other. Yet this building is not a new process. History does not happen overnight with the signing of documents. Scotland’s story is a long one, stretching back to times that may be easily forgotten, but that have still left an indelible mark on who we are and who we want to be.
It is a story that has seen our poorest scattered across the globe. It has been debated by the great free thinkers of the Scottish enlightenment, and it remembers the radicals deported for the idea of democracy. It tells of a workshop of the world, a land of skill and ingenuity: the brilliance of many hands at work underneath the tall cranes of the Clyde. Its voice is in that first murmur of the sovereignty of the people in the rhetoric from the monks of Arbroath. Its tale has lain bloodied in the mud of two world wars, and while watching the death of those empires for which they were fought, it retained a sense of what it was.
It is the story of a people, a national community, imbued with the idea that those two terms, nation and community, may as well be one. And while its slow movement over geological time is ancient, those same geological formations now offer us the chance to meet the newest of challenges, and create the best of futures.
More and more, there is a consensus among those with a truly progressive outlook, that independence for Scotland is the only way in which both England and Scotland can move forward and not backwards. While many of those voices may be little heard in the mainstream media, they are there, and they will be heard, as they should be, as the only minds with an alternative to the increasingly distant voices from London.
History can erupt with a volcanic ferocity, and change can become fraught with bloodletting and sorrow. At other times it can move with the inexorable force of continents. The former makes for gripping television coverage that catches our eyes, and we are left terrified by the world that we live in. The latter can be achieved while hardly registering, it can be disregarded right up until the moment that we decide to look around ourselves at a changed landscape.
We are a country that prospers in countless ways, economically, culturally and socially. We are a country with strong traditions of working together, of thriving on that togetherness. Yet we remain riddled with poverty of Dickensian proportions, with slums that have re-grown in the course of a century. All of this has happened within the supposedly privileged position of being part of the same state as the City of London. The same state that spends untold billions on never to be used weapons to end life on earth, and tells those who seek to make that life better to tighten their belts.
The tired game of party politics may offer few solutions, reflected in ever decreasing voter turnouts. We may be destined to be part of a country in which there is no such thing as society, and in which democratically elected leaders can lie to their own people and never be brought to account. Such thoughts are for today, it is what we do tomorrow that will be remembered. For we have the chance to build something new.
Vote Yes, Vote Independence.