Barry Graham explores why some Yes voters within his networks are moving towards No when polls are showing a surge in support for Scottish independence post-Brexit
SINCE the EU referendum result there have been some staggering conversions from No voters to support for an indyref2. Others have covered this extensively, so I won’t waste your time.
However, within my Yes networks there are also conversions the other way, Yes to No. I want to address this as it makes no sense to me.
Let’s start with a simple premise. The indyref was fought on a basis by the majority of Yessers, on Scotland staying within the EU. It was a key plank of our argument and many thousands of lines of print were argued over it.
The indyref was fought on a basis by the majority of Yessers, on Scotland staying within the EU. It was a key plank of our argument and many thousands of lines of print were argued over it.
Better Together said it wouldn’t happen, they dragged in former EU presidents and other allies to poo-poo it. The Yes movement had its own allies who said the opposite. However, the truth is no-one could say for sure what the status of EU membership would have been. Unsurprisingly, as a Yesser, I believed that we would continue as EU citizens. However, that is irrelevant.
The point I am making is that the majority of Yessers voted Yes in the full knowledge that the intention was to either try and maintain our EU member state status or at worst be fast-tracked back in.
Now let us look at the point of independence. It was/is to allow us to take a different political direction from WENI (Wales, England and Northern Ireland). It was not purely to create more of the same, otherwise what would be the point. Let me repeat that as this is key, the entire point was so that politically we can take different decisions from rUK.
So with that established, can we just look at a hypothetical scenario? Scotland votes Yes in September 2014. Negotiations went well and earlier this year as planned, Scotland re-entered the world stage as a fully fledged nation that had maintained its EU membership.
Let me repeat that as this is key, the entire point was so that politically we can take different decisions from rUK.
rUK/WENI then, as has just happened, votes to Leave the EU. Would those Yes people be seeking a mandate to re-join the rUK? Because that is the only place I can take the logic of the argument I am seeing from former Yessers that say they would vote No to indy if it involved us being in the EU, but WENI is not.
It simply can’t be any other way. So if that is the case, why did they vote Yes in the first place, if the point is to allow us to take a different direction from WENI? I thought we wanted to build a better society for all of us that is not tied to decisions taken by political forces that are going in a different direction to those in Scotland.
If these people really do want Scotland to retake its place in the world, this is something they need to confront. We will take major decisions that put us on a different ideological path from WENI. At other times we will be an agreement, but not always, and sometimes the decisions will be on a global or continental scale as per the EU referendum.
If they can’t live with that I don’t understand why they ever voted Yes.
Picture courtesy of Kyoshi Masamune
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