One sleight of hand which I have noticed recently by the SNP and other YES campaigners is the instance the entities are not and should not be considered interconnected, despite:
i. YES events are packed to the gunnels with SNP members and representatives, sometimes even admitting to be so.
ii. The public face of independence is led by senior SNP figures. When were Denis Canavan or Blair Jenkins last featured before SNP luminaries?
iii. Two consecutive Holyrood elections ballot papers showed “Alex Salmond for First Minister”, and in seven years of Government the same faces have remained in senior ministerial positions turning offices of state into personal fiefdoms.
iv. The White Paper read like a Party manifesto, and one which just so happened to look like the SNPs.
I am happy to concede any point if this not been the intention. Supercilious put-downs of the public and telling them they are just too thick to understand things in the way enlightened minds like YESers do is not the way to go to change minds.
Related to iv., writing at Left Foot Forward, Peter Russell fulminates about a recent YEScotland poster campaign.
Russell’s first objection was the portrayal of families in poverty as unkempt and unwashed, which as one of five children and whose alcoholic father who, when he was not drinking family money, was smoking or gambling it, I find just as problematic. Commenters responding to Russell also appear to reach for the immediate outrage at his describing himself as middle-class and middle-aged without considering his bio.
Unless he is misrepresentating himself, he can be seen to be a post-45 child who left the upper to unskilled working class background his parents and made full use of the meritocratic education system to rise to an affluent professional life. I certainly do not consider there anything noble or enviable about the experiences of poverty and peripatetic existence which the commenters would have had him remain in or compel his children to return to. It may have been different if he were Billy Bragg arguing from afar for Scotland to vote YES and become the naturally social democratic constituency which some think her to be, unless the electorate splits post-YES into a tableau of left-of- and right-of-centre voters – as I have seen predicted by some YES theoreticians – which would contradict the parallel belief in an unhindered route to ersatz socialism.
Redolent in the poster campaign also is the belief that child poverty in Scotland is both relatively greater than elsewhere in the UK and distinct from post-industrial economies, in addition to absolute and not ‘merely’ relative as an early YEScotland article stated.
Also, and most pertinently in my view, that a YES vote undoubtedly would reverse/alleviate it. This is a specific manifesto promise from YEScotland complementing, amongst others in the White Paper, promises of fulfilling SNP progressive childcare policies. As such, it is beholden on those making such a promise to outline how it could be achieved rather than those advocating the status quo to justify why they do not wish to change.
In other news, Fish-heid McMoonface’s plodding sub state nationalist mind has revealed itself in all its banality in promising to meet with Ukrainian community activities following his fawning remarks over Putin’s restoration of Russian national pride (the sort of national pride which is about nice shiny things like sporting events, not what Russian nationalism means to tens of millions in Eastern and Central Europe).
