A GUEST POST BY LEANNE TERVIT.
I left the SNP mainly due to the lack of internal democracy. The gerrymandering of their NEC and their candidates. I left Alba for similar reasons. The engineering of their NEC to get their preferred committees. Parties, by design, are undemocratic. Their power remains at the very top.
My vision of democracy is entirely different. Independents for independence all over Scotland would be my preferred system. People who are standing for their own folk. Their own communities towns and cities. People who understand the local area. The employment. The infrastructure. The services. The problems. The personality of the area.
Both Eva Comrie and Sally Hughes are the ideal choice for their own folk. They live and breathe independence. They are locals with huge knowledge of how their areas tick. They cannot be whipped. They do not need to toe a party line. They can speak up on behalf of their constituency time an time again no holds barred. Their responsibility is to their country and their communities and nobody else.
I was asked if I would stand as an independent, but I have a job right now that is more important to me. To my kind of folk.
Through Schemes For Indy I intend to have activists from the schemes, in the schemes from here on in. Encouraging their folk to become politically aware. Educating them that their situations are a failure of governments, not a failure of themselves.
I hope that in a couple of years time that some of these scheme activists will be emboldened by their communities to stand in the 2026 elections.
Finally the working class folk from the Council Estates in Scotland will have someone to vote for. Someone they know and trust. Who speak their language. Understand their situations. Suffer the same losses. Face the same struggles.
And yes, I am certain some will be elected.
Then we will have true democracy. My vision. Independent Independence Representation from all classes. Local people who answer only to their own folk. Local people with the trust of their communities to deliver.
Parties dont listen to their electorate. That is clear. It has been proved time and time again. Power ultimately lies at the top
The future I see is in Independents from every walk of life and experience. Where the power is with, and will remain with, the people.
The dearth of working-class representation in Scotland these days is dire. It seems that everyone is from a middle-class background. However, a lot of people have migrated out of working-class backgrounds into middle-class ones and you hope that they still remember their roots.
The SNP in my youth was largely a working-class movement, with even the middle-class people at the top still from working-class roots. That is becoming rarer and rarer across all parties as private school/university candidates appear to take every slot.
The huge working-class vote in Scotland has dwindled, too, as folk are becoming more and more scunnered by a system that offers them little, and Labour, now a managerial, middle-class party in its own right, is no longer the answer to Scots’ prayers – if it ever was.
You put your finger right on the problem: the sense of local and community cohesion is gone; the understanding of local issues and points of view is gone; everything is now churned through a central machine to be spat out as pellets of disconnection with the lives of ordinary people. Everything and everyone around any form or level of government is a professional, managerial type that is the same wherever you are. They are interchangeable.
The call to bring back the burghs has been given short shrift be cause they are ‘royal’ burghs and be cause they tend to be rural, but that applies to huge swathes of Scotland, so the same problems of local communication, activism and connection have been lost here as well as in the big towns and cities. Problems are different for cities, but the schemes are like burghs in their own right and are a way to retain the local as against the national.
Scotland is a small country in some ways, but not in others, but it needs to get back to the local to connect once again with the people our parliament is meant to serve (I know, don’t laugh). Change is always with us, every generation, and it seems that every generation becomes disenchanted with change, the problem being that so much change seems to be for its own sake, becomes too rapid for people to keep up and ends up by tripping itself up and pleasing no one. I actually find it hard to believe that the Scotland I grew up in is the same country in which I now live.
Thatcher did not just change society, she did it in such a way that the working-class became alienated from its roots over a period of no more than ten years or so. Every ill that has beset us stems back to her time – hers and Blair’s, because he was in the same mould, but from a Labour perspective. Thatcher was lower middle-class, Blair middle-class. Neither knew anything about the lives and aspirations of ordinary people and their ideologies became all, destroying a post war consensus that was built on the strongest of ties.
I’m not talking about social change which was necessary, but the deliberate and totally unnecessary switching of the nation’s accumulated wealth away from working people into the hands of speculators in order to pretend that the UK was not a sinking entity that was going to disintegrate eventually. The transition from world power to ‘has been’ could have managed sensitively and compassionately, but it was not, and the working-class lost everything, even its innate pride in its ability to endure and keep smiling.
The ‘woke’ of today – almost exclusively middle-class – are the inheritors of the politics of illusion, delusion, of puddle-deep sincerity for causes that they can actually do sweet Fanny Adams about, or actually want to do anything about, but feel that they must virtue-signal, like sheep in wolves’ clothing, because, in reality, they care nothing for anyone or anything apart from themselves and their own shallow lives. Their very existence is pure performance, while poor people struggle in front of them.
You go for it, Leanne. You encourage your people to fight back against this pernicious non-life that we are all being forced to live against the backdrop of utter bile water. We need another working-class revolution and a woman’s revolution in this benighted country of ours.
Comment of the day,week and month!
The Old Labour Party of the 40s, 50s and 60s are long gone. What happened to them? They are no longer made up of ordinary working people, no longer do they work their way up from the factory floor, the pits, the shipyards or the steelwork, through the Union, the traditional way to progress into politics and representing their communities. They have become Professional Politicians, been to University, then become researchers or political assistants or been in one of the professions. Most have lost touch with ordinary working people, if they ever knew them at all. No social conscience, no integrity and no understanding of the lives of the people they are supposed to represent.