[insert group name] for Indy

The Summer of Independence seems to be doing just fine without any assistance from party politics. In every village and town, city and shire of Scotland, the grassroots organisations that rose up in 2014 are getting their groups back together with the aim of further increasing support for Scottish Independence. Far from having voter fatigue from what seems like never-ending elections in Scotland since the first independence referendum, there is a definite spring in their step.

This time they are wiser, bolder, more experienced, better networked and much more media savvy. They are a force to be reckoned with. They are not bound by convention, by rules and regulations. They are independent.

The task ahead of the membership of these groups is fairly straightforward. Each yes voter from 2014 has to convince just one no voter to change their mind. They will not waste their energies on those who are solidly no. They will focus on those whose no vote was based on fear and on lies. The real aim is to bring voters over to yes by reaching out to those whose mind can be changed.

Brexit has given them an unexpected boost. They have already moved to capitalise on the fact that there are now those no voters who take the view, that the UK they voted to stay part of, is no longer planning to be in the EU. The welcome to the 'yes' side for these switchers has been warm and encouraging. Everybody knows someone who has changed their mind on Scottish independence because of Brexit. This has become the top 'material change' that has re-ignited the desire for Indyref 2.

The reason why there are so many different types of yes groups forming up is because this is not, and never was, about party politics. No-one voted yes for a political party. They voted yes for Scottish independence, for their nation to be free to decide what is best for Scotland.

Yes groups are reforming because there is work to do to change hearts and minds to yes and political parties don't have the reach to achieve that.

When Nicola Sturgeon is asked "when will you call Indyref2"? she always replies "That is a decision for the People of Scotland". 

That's you that is.

• The job of the grassroots is to connect and reconnect with Scots of independent mind.

• The job of the grassroots is to reach those whose only sources of information are the unionist broadcasters and unionist newspapers.

• The job of the grassroots is to bust unionist myths and scare tactics in our own communities.

• The job of the grassroots is to include no voters in their everyday discussions and to widen the sphere of 'yes' influence.

• The job of the grassroots is to recognise that people voted no for lots of different reasons and we need to find out what those reasons were (or are) before we can address them as individuals.

• The job of the grassroots is to paint a picture of an independent Scotland that the majority of Scots can buy into.

Branch meetings of political parties don't do that - they're not designed to do that. Branch meetings of yes groups are free to.

When you go along to a yes group meeting, you'll hear people talk of "the first independence referendum" like it was just their first attempt at independence. They are not going to give up after their first try. They are deliciously determined to see Scotland flourish as an independent nation. They are not just talking shops or echo chambers, they are hubs where you can gain the confidence to speak to no voters with the knowledge you need to get them to yes.

We don't get to be independent without switching no voters. We do that by starting the conversation "are you YES yet?" 

                              Print by Stewart Bremner      
                              http://www.stewartbremner.co.uk/


Some stuff to be getting on with:

Start by wearing your yes badge every day.
Find your local yes group on Facebook and Twitter and make contact with them.
Be ready.
Get connected to the National Yes Registry.

Click here

http://nationalyesregistry.scot/accessible/

Silly Season

It's the silly season and in the spirit of silliness, the Labour Party have gone absolutely batshitmental. Democracy... pah! They don't do democracy! They're using the huge pot of cash new Labour members have given them in membership fees to stop the new membership from voting in their leadership election.

And they have loads of cash to splash. From a worrying debt situation in 2015, Labour are now £55m in the black. And that's down to new members cash.

Heads I win tails you lose

Five new members have taken the Labour Party to court. Having won the right to vote in a High Court ruling, the membership now have the added cost of fighting Labour's appeal against their win. They appealed! Using membership money! Again! You couldn't make this stuff up. It's fascinating and cringeworthy in equal measure. 


Sticks and stones

Labour have started calling their new members "Jihadists", "Trots", "Dogs", "Rabble" and an "arm-twisting mob" and to add insult to injury, Labour have now grabbed a big brush and are furiously attempting to tar 350,000 new members as the "militant tendency" that Labour threw out in the 1980's.

Elementary my dear Watson

Tom Watson the deputy leader of the party has gone off on a tirade about Corbyn's street meetings as "weaponising boredom". Whit? What does that even mean? Watson has also gone off half-cocked with a ridiculous tale of a letter that Labour members are sending out to people to tell them how to infiltrate the party to ensure it's destruction. Trouble is, Watson used a letter from the 1980's that appeared in Michael Crick's book on the Militant tendency... from the 1980's. Do your homework Tom! Due diligence Tom!
The plotters are racking up a roll call of people who have ruled agianst them: The Speaker, the High Court, the Information Commissioner, the Royal Courts and the ASA. The incompetence is breath-taking.

Bite the hand that feeds

One of Labour's master election strategists, John McTernan, has called upon the Tory Govt (whom he occasionally does gigs for) to crush the RMT. The Labour Party! The Labour Party that was founded by the Trade Union movement as their political arm! This guy is a card carrying member of the Party... and a Blairite.

Caveat Emptor

The Advertising Standards Authority has just ruled that Labour are in breach of their Advertising Standards code by offering membership which offered a vote and then denied a vote for the leadership contest. Look out for the ASA's announcement on their website.

Gie's a go

You're sitting down right? 

Owen Smith has asked Corbyn if he can come along to his rallies and address the crowd cos he canny get people to come along to his public speaking events without laying on free ice-cream.... 

Meanwhile.... in "Special Branch"

The remnants of 'Scattish' Labour have gone off into the red corner and the blue corner and are not talking to each other.... so there! The hapless Ms Dugdale who leads the Accounting Unit is diametrically opposed to her deputy Alex Rowley. She's a Blairite, he's a Corbynista. It's messy. Ice cream and jelly all over the place.

The Banning Blair Affair

Labour's NEC have banned the word "Blairite" and you now can get kicked out of the Labour Party for calling a fellow member a Blairite. 

Instead of appointing QCs and Barristers to stop the membership from voting in the leadership election, they should appoint divorce specialists because Labour isn't a big tent... unless you mean a circus.

Cybernats are my MSM

There it is again. The thrum. The drum.The tut, tut tutting noise.

The tut, tut tutting noise.....
"The dreadful cybernats are going to jeapoardise independence."

The tut, tut tutting noise of 20th century politicos....
"The rabble who demonstrated outside the BBC are bringing the YES movement into disrepute."

The tut, tut tutting noise of people who think MSM is to be respected not questioned.
"It's time Nicola Sturgeon dealt with the anti-media paranoia in her party."

Get a grip of yourselves guys. You're like embarrassing uncles.

Yesterday's tut-tity-tut-tut came from Mr Andrew Collier in his capacity as ex-Comms guy of the SNP.

EX SNP COMMS GUYS TELLS THE CYBERNATS TO STFU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

http://stv.tv/news/politics/1361970-nicola-sturgeon-must-tackle-anti-media-paranoia-in-snp-says-andrew-collier

Embarrassing Uncle

I'm sure you're a nice guy Andy Collier. But you're well out of order. Calling those who use Social Media "at the medicated end of the national cause" is about as embarrassing as it gets... for you.

He goes on....

"Believe me, I know about this stuff. I spent years working in communications for the SNP and the Yes campaign, and it plagued me and others endlessly. It was intensely frustrating to work on carefully building relationships with the so-called MSM (mainstream media) only to see the cybernumpties try and undo it all again."

We are not part of your campaign Andy. We don't pander to the MSM. We question all of it.
The only way that information gets out and about in Scotland is via "cybernats".
Most if not all stories start of as 140 character Twitter gems or as a wee 'perfecto' meme in a backwater of Facebook.

The SNP is not the YES Campaign. Some of the best Independence tweeters belong to no party.
Insulting us on an MSM platform proves to us all you care about is the MSM platform.

And then you have a go at the families who mounted a friendly protest outside Pacific Quay in Glasgow and paint them as if they were an angry mob?

"These angry, bullying and highly negative manifestations of a victim mentality were the very last thing we in the Yes campaign needed just before the most vital vote in Scotland's history. We can only speculate how much damage it did in those last hours in swaying people back towards No".

Everyone that was there - including the cops had a peaceful enjoyable protest.
The Police Officers even had their photos taken with pandas. The protests were well attended and well behaved. The staff at the BBC were waving out of the windows at the Grannies and bairns in pushchairs below. 

You say our attack on lies from the MSM is  "a draining, unpleasant pressure they (journalists) neither need nor deserve". Tut tut tut tut. 

Here's a tiny violin for you Andrew. 

You can play it while we slay unionist MSM lies.

The F word

I hate to say it, but I am going to have to use Facebook to get through to the over 50 demographic of Scotland. It's a hotbed of Grannies and Grandpas. Research from silversurfers.com says Facebook is the top Social Media site for the over 50's.

I have a natural aversion to Facebook and it's cheesy meme sharing. I canny help that. I'm not a fan of cheesy memes... unless they have raccoons in them... obviously.

Fundamentally. my true reticence to do Facebook forays is because I have friends on there who use it to display their outrageous wealth in the most vulgar fashion and that, gives me the boak.

"Here we are getting 1-2-1 cookery lessons from Tom Kitchin while we sup Taittinger and tomorrow we fly to Norway to see the Northern Lights". I jest not.

Also, I find it quite creepy. I sometimes feel I'm being forced to be someone's stalker as I watch them check in to Morrison's then the 'Old Pig and Whistle' and then McDonald's.

The stats tell me Facebook is where people share the most stuff and, from my reading of "Project Fear" by Joe Pike, it's where the unionists head first to spread their misinformation.


                                  

While Twitter is the rapids, Facebook is more of a slow moving backwater of social media and it can take days or weeks for people to get up to date - which means that people are less quickly informed on this platform. Unionist misinformation can hang about for ages.

I'm going to have to get a MrMalky Facebook account for the next push.

It shall have cheesy raccoon memes and it will slay unionist lies.

Summer of Independence

I have been greatly inspired by the book " Summer of Independence" (Stories from a Nation in the Making) by the fabulous map maker and founder of National Collective, Mr Andrew Redmond Barr.

It's a lovely wee book chronicling all the events of the summer of 2014 and the lead up to Scotland's first independence referendum. Get a copy. It's our history.

It's inspired me to think of all the activities we can engage in to further our goal. But first we need to think about how we approach our next steps to independence.

Who will be our troublemakers, our ambassadors, our shining lights?

Well that would be you and everyone you know and everyone they know. It's time to reconnect with your local YES group, your Women for Indy Group, Grannies for Independence and all the other fabulous groups within the YES family. Oh and get your YES badge back on. Declare your independence every day.

The media will try to sell you that YES equals SNP and that SNP are bad. YES is not the SNP. The SNP is one of many vehicles to an Independent Scotland. The media will demand that there be a face of the YES campaign and no doubt there will be another suit appointed to service that MSM demand - but we are all the face of the YES campaign and we need to make sure we are jolly ambassadors.


What resources will we need?

We need our alternative Scottish Media to thrive. It's message needs to be non-party political. It needs to be independence driven. We need people like the Independence Live team filming events, we need to support our own news websites and that means putting our money where our mouth is. There are indy news outlets to suit everyone's needs from Newsnet, Bella Caledonia, CommonSpace, iScot, Wings over Scotland and for ex Herald readers, the only independence supporting newspaper in the land, The National.

They all need money to do that - and let's face it they're not going to get lottery funding.

How we going fund our campaign?

If you believed the MSM then all the YES campaign had last time was a generous donation from the lottery winners the Weirs. In reality, the events portrayed in Andrew Barr's book, were funded by wee hotbeds of determined YES campaigners. We are going to have to fund this ourselves. We need to put the hat round now.

There are millions of people across the globe in our Scottish diaspora who we can approach to crowdfund our next YES campaign. In Canada alone there are 4.7 million people of Scottish descent. We need to network our big Scottish family across the world and get them invested in the next campaign. Our greatest export was (and is) our people. They are all Jock Tamson's bairns.

How we going to get our message across to those reliant on the BBC for their news?

We need to have our voices heard on the MSM. And if that means calling Kaye on her BBC Radio Scotland show to bust some unionist myth, then let's get on with it.

BBC Scotland has shelved their Scotland 2016 programme, but be sure they will find a replacement if they think that their "precious precious union" is in peril.

Our game should be to create content that the MSM cannot ignore. We need airtime for new voices and new faces. The MSM's address book is unionist laden. Let's make some noise. Let's get bums on studio seats.

Without the BBC and the unionist MSM, they'd have never secured a NO vote in 2014.
Check out  Mary Pitcaithy's face. She got an extra £37,000 in her paypacket for this.

In 2015 I watched a presentation by Rob Shorthouse the Director of the Better Together campaign, on how he targeted the 40% of persuadable people in Scotland. Did you catch that? He reckoned there were 40% of the electorate who were willing to be persuaded to vote against their own Nation's independence. Here's the link to that 20 minute presentation. He tells you how he did it.
First rule of war - know thine enemy.

We have the 'material change' of being dragged out of the EU against the will of the people of Scotland and we have the 'material change' of having to accept Trident when all but one of our MPs voted against it's renewal.

The UK Labour Party is in a fankle. It will split. It already has in Scotland. It's a sorry sight indeed.

There must be serious amounts of Labour voters now willing to admit that the only way we can avoid Tory rule of Scotland is to back independence. Go speak to them. They are hurting.

The time is right for another Summer of Independence.

Taps aff. Let's get this party started.

I'll see you in Glasgow on 30 July.

Be more Brechin

Until last night, I'd never been to Brechin. If you haven't visited before it's a beautiful ancient Cathedral City with lots going on. Put it on your to do list. Do that. Now. Seriously.

I'd arrived early at the Caledonia Hotel for a meeting with the fabulous YES Brechin peeps and within 2 mins I was ensconced in a cosy conversation with an anarcho-syndicalist blacksmith. Result!

The SNP Branch meeting, which had been taking place in the room next door, gradually spilled out into the lounge bar, where they'd set up for the main event. Scottish independence supporters of all ages and backgrounds and parties were coming together to get a steer on our post Brexit situation.

The bar was suddenly bustling with folks grabbing a good seat to hear the guest speaker Craig Murray. Craig had moved to Scotland specifically to campaign for independence having spent his career in the Diplomatic Service of the United Kingdom.

Craig gave them food for thought alright -  a whole buffet. He covered all of the different options open to the people of Scotland and did so with a glass of fine malt in his hand. It was a warm, genuine address from a new Scot to his fellow Scots. There were lessons learned from Indyref 1, there were "oohs" and "aahs" and eyebrows raised. There were pennies dropping in everyone's minds. It was a joy to see an audience engaged in such possibility. The fire of independence was burning bright in their eyes, this was a 'game on' meeting.

In the theatrical tradition of: 'make 'em laugh make 'em cry make 'em wait', just after Craig's talk, the Master of Ceremonies announced that tea, coffee and sandwiches would be served before Craig would take the Q&A session. This was a brilliant move. The volume rose and the discussions began. Cups and saucers clinked, the happy meeting of new friends and old. I have rarely seen such a convivial gathering.

During the meeting we got the news that Jeremy Corbyn had made the leadership ballot and a round of applause broke out. We may be independence supporters, but we are defenders of democracy too.

The Q & A kicked off session two with purpose. We covered topics from currency to defence. We addressed the successes and failures of the Yes Campaign. We shared lessons from other Countries who'd won their independence. We pondered on how to persuade no voters to join the call for independence. Craig again delighted the audience with insights and observations that had them howling with laughter one minute and stroking their chins in deep contemplation the next.

I'm not going to bust Craig's patter here. I'd urge you to go hear him speak or get him to come along to your Yes group. I can highly recommend his indoor fireworks display.

My first visit to Brechin was an eye opener. If you think the Yes movement has subsided, then think again. These meetings are starting to take place all over Scotland. It's a grand night out and you'll make contact with people that will make your heart glad.

I was delighted to get the opportunity to get to meet people I only ever get to speak to online. I treasure moments like that. But my real take-away from Brechin was the idea that the only way we get independence is to get these meetings going in every pub, in every town, in every village and every City. We got gubbed in 2014. They cawed the feet from us. The time has come for us to get our confidence back and get out there and talk to each other.

No-one will give us independence. We will get there by inviting no voters to nights like this.

My thanks to the people of Brechin and it's environs for a great event. A special thanks to Paula Rose.

Be more Brechin.

                                          Photo credit: Bill Duff

Game of Thrawns

Brexit has begun and here we are in Scotland being dragged out of the EU against our will.
What the UK Government doesn't quite get about the Scots is our Thrawnness.

Thrawn: obstinate, resolute, perverse, ill-tempered. Don't you dare tell us what to do.

If you say to a Scot: "You're name's not on the list you're not coming in" you've made a foe for life.
If you tell us this is for first class passengers only, we'll laugh our socks off at you.

During the Holyrood election campaign I asked a hustings what they would do if we were taken out of the EU by the rest of the UK "would you back an Indy Scotland?"

The Better Together members of the panel which included Christine Jardine of the Lib Dems said "No". But if I were to ask them today, they'd say Yes.

The mood has shifted in Scotland. The improbable has happened. We have been dragged out of the EU against our will. We are meeting NO voters who are determined to stay in Europe and if that means Independence, then in the words of Angus Robertson at PMQ's "So.Be. It!".

Already the anti-Independence argument lines are being bandied around in an attempt to counter this rise in thrawnness.

You are too wee, too poor.
Your oil is worth nothing.
You don't have a currency.
You'll have to have a border.
England won't do business with you.

Project Fear does not work against thrawnness. When the Scots dig their heels in, they are solidly in. There is no argument that will shift the 45%. who voted YES in 2014. But this new dimension of being told "ye canny come in" by the EU is incendiary to the Scots who said no.

We have always been European. Since before the Union. Our historical ties are stronger in Europe than they are with rUK. We have auld alliances. And Europe wants to keep us.

In the UK, Scotland has always been in the cheap seats, never the dress circle. Lots of switching votes to YES are coming with that realisation.

We are Scotland and we are thrawn.

Scotland will stay in the EU. Scotland will be Independent. Nobody chucks Scotland out of the club.