REPRESENTATIVES from across the Yes spectrum greeted Humza Yousaf’s plan for the upcoming General Election with a mix of scepticism, cautious optimism, and disbelief at a rally for independence in Stirling on Saturday.
Held to mark the anniversary of the 1314 Battle of Bannockburn, where Robert the Bruce scored a decisive victory in the First War of Scottish Independence, some 5000 people joined the march from Old Stirling Bridge to the battlefield.
Another 1000 people were waiting for them there to hear speeches from figures from the SNP, Alba, and Sovereignty to name a few.
The scorching heat made for a healthy crowd at both the march and rally, but it also saw the famed “Silent Clansman”, Paul Jamieson, faint and an ambulance called.
Jamieson recovered quickly from heatstroke, and defied his moniker to speak at the subsequently slightly delayed Bannockburn rally. He urged people to join the “Chain of Freedom” in October, where Yessers will look to form a human chain from Scotland’s east to west.
The rally also saw multiple poignant tributes to the late Winnie Ewing, who served as an SNP representative in three parliaments before passing away aged 93 on Wednesday.
Jim Fairlie, a former SNP deputy leader who spent more than five decades in the party (from 1955 to 2006) told the crowd of his personal friendship with Ewing and his memories of helping her to victory in the 1967 Hamilton by-election.
Fairlie, who now works with the pro-independence but anti-EU Sovereignty, spoke to The National afterwards about Yousaf’s proposals for the next General Election.
Over in Dundee, the SNP leader had told a special convention that “page one, line one” of the party’s next manifesto would say “vote for SNP for an independent Scotland”.
He went on: "If the SNP win this election, then the people will have spoken. We will seek negotiations with the UK Government on how we give democratic effect to Scotland becoming an independent nation."
Fairlie said that the plan “could go down well”, but he questioned how serious the SNP were in their resolve.
He went on: “A lot of that implies to some extent a willingness to go towards civil disobedience and they haven’t bitten that bullet yet. Jim [Sillars, another former SNP depute leader] makes a very good point. Civil disobedience is all very well but what happens on Monday morning when your pension doesn’t turn up?
“Are they prepared to go that far? Are they prepared to do a Sinn Fein, where they just refuse to have anything to do with Westminster? We’ll wait and see. But I doubt it.”
Neale Hanvey, an Alba MP who spoke at the rally, said that the SNP’s attempts to go it alone, without the support of other Yes parties, was not sustainable.
All Under One Banner Stirling ready for the off to Bannockburn 🏴#AOUB #ScotlandUnited pic.twitter.com/hD7N8ihlEZ
— Neale Hanvey MP ❤️🏴✊ (@JNHanvey) June 24, 2023
He said of Yousaf’s plans: “As I understand it, he’s adopted a position that we put forward some time ago, which is that a vote for – we said an independence-supporting party or candidate – would be a mandate to begin negotiations.
“I go back to the point from the legal opinion from Professor Robert McCorquodale, which is that that doesn’t work as a single party. It has to be Scotland united, and even that requires the establishment of an independence convention so that the people of Scotland are unambiguously represented in their totality to make that petition.
“You can’t do this one-party trick anymore. That is over. The SNP have effectively fenced that with the action to the Supreme Court. That, unfortunately, is just where we are.”
Neil Mackay, from the All Under One Banner group which pulled Saturday’s rally together, said that there was a vagueness to Yousaf’s plan to “seek negotiations” that wasn’t good enough.
He told The National: “I think it needs to be definitive. Without a real active campaign, without a real strategy that people can get behind and feels imminent, I think a de facto referendum has to be matter-of-fact. It has to be, not ‘open negotiations’, it has to be that if that’s a win for the SNP then that’s independence decided by the electorate.
“We need more clarity, but from everything I’ve seen so far, it doesn’t sound good enough.
“We need it to be definitive. The SNP are very good at talking about the merits of independence, they’re also very good at talking about the problems with the Union, but we’re at a point now, we’re at a juncture, where a definitive plan needs to be easily understood and have a clear goal in sight.”
The Salvo campaign group had a solid presence at the Stirling march, with flags and t-shirts holding their logo all around.
Salvo’s Sara Salyers said of Yousaf’s plans: “‘[A General Election win] is going to be a definite mandate to sit down and negotiate with the UK Government’. Excuse me? That takes us precisely where?
“There is no time to do this any more. We’ve run out of options, run out of time. In a Scotland where one in five children is living in poverty, where we have diseases of malnutrition, malnutrition in a country that’s potentially one of the richest in the world.
“‘We’ll wait. We’ll get a plebiscite, for the SNP alone to have this discussion.’ What are they going to do?
“They’d rather stay in power, get another mandate, have another discussion. They’re not reading the room.”
Salyers added that Labour gains in recent polls and by-elections are not due to that party winning people over, but because people are “losing faith in the SNP”.
