
Scottish independence convention would bring 'energy' back to movement that's become 'too abstract'
Ash Regan warned that for many Scots the idea of ending the Union was "drifting into an abstract concept".
A summit on how to make Scottish independence a reality would help inject "energy" back into the campaign, an Alba MSP has said.
Ash Regan warned that for many Scots the idea of ending the Union was "drifting into an abstract concept".
John Swinney last week insisted "the time is right" for independence despite fears of a global recession sparked by Donald Trump's trade war.
It comes as the First Minister will this week host a summit of political and civic leaders to discuss how to "lock-out" the far-right from Scottish politics.
The event is a reaction to the rise in support for Reform across the UK, with polls suggesting Nigel Farage's party will make a substantial breakthrough at next year's Holyrood election.
But Regan, who will attend the summit, said voters should be inspired by independence as an alternative to the UK's economic woes.
She also took a swipe at the Scottish Conservatives for choosing to boycott the event.
The Alba MSP said: "We are close to only one year out from the Scottish elections, but for too many independence is drifting into an abstract concept.
"I will be attending the First Minister's summit on Wednesday - as unlike the Tories I think it's important to be in the room, instead of harping on about grievances outside the room.
"However, it isn't a summit aimed at locking Reform out of Scottish politics that we need. It is time for the Scottish Government, and Holyrood, to seize the political initiative on independence.
"An independence convention should be called this summer. It would bring energy back to the movement and allow for the constitutional imperative of independence to be reconnected to the economic necessity of delivering it as an immediate priority.
"With independence we would have control over our own resources to address people's concerns about the lack of investment in public services and the lack of support with their cost of living.
"Importantly, with independence we would have control over our own borders and immigration. That means that we would have an immigration system that suits the needs of Scotland and not a one size fits all model imposed upon us by London.
"The Scottish Government must signal that they are serious about taking Scotland forward to independence and bringing together representatives of civic society and Scotland's parliamentarians for a summit on independence is the way to show intent."
An SNP spokesman said: "The SNP is the party of independence.
"We are focussed on delivering for people across the country and making the case for taking decisions in Scotland for Scotland with independence."
Russell Findlay, the Scots Tory leader, last week said he would not attend an "anti-right wing" summit being held by the First Minister.
He claimed the event was "not required" and accused John Swinney of using the meeting to "deflect from the SNP's dismal record".
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Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
EUAN McCOLM: Farage has tickled the tummies of Nationalist voters. He won't win the next election...but he may end SNP's reign
Reform leader Nigel Farage was supposed to be the perfect bogeyman. As last week's Hamilton, Larkhall, and Stonehouse by-election drew closer, First Minister John Swinney implored voters to back the SNP if they wished to keep Mr Farage's brand of politics out of Holyrood. A vote for Labour, said Mr Swinney, would hand the constituency to Reform. In the end, it was Labour's Davy Russell who took the seat, made vacant by the untimely death of sitting nationalist MSP Christina McKelvie, nudging the SNP's Katy Loudon into second. Reform's Ross Lambie came a very close third. Mr Swinney's claim that the by-election was a two horse race between his and Mr Farage's parties could not have been more wrong. Within minutes of last week's result being declared, the briefing against the First Minister was in full swing. SNP insiders muttered darkly about strategic errors and poor campaigning. Former SNP health secretary Alex Neil was among senior nationalists calling for Mr Swinney to go. The result, said Mr Neil, showed the current SNP leadership needed to be replaced, urgently. Political leadership requires the ability to be bullish in the face of disaster, something which Mr Swinney attempted during a SKY News interview. Speaking on Sunday Morning With Trevor Philips, the First Minister said, if current polls were to be believed, the SNP was on course to win its fifth consecutive Holyrood election next year and to remain - 'by a country mile' - the largest party at Holyrood. Snarkier sorts than me might be tempted to point out that, before voting opened last Thursday morning, Mr Swinney reckoned current polls showed Labour hadn't a hope of winning in Lanarkshire. It is routine for politicians, when confronted with polling that looks bad for them, to declare that the only poll that counts takes place on election day. Surveys, they say, are nothing more than a snapshot of a moment in time. With this in mind, perhaps the First Minister should spend less time focusing on opinion polls and more examining last Thursday's result. The numbers make for fascinating - and surprising - reading. Mr Swinney has expended considerable effort over recent months attempting to build the case that Nigel Farage's politics is anathema to Scots. His disruptive approach is cruel and unfeeling while we prefer something more compassionate, more progressive, more downright baby-boxy. Even a cursory glance at last week's result shows many take a different view. In fact, the numbers show a substantial number of Scots are more than happy to vote for Mr Farage's party. Reform won 26.1 per cent of the vote in Hamilton, Larkhall, and Stonehouse last week. Not bad for a party contesting a seat for the first time. Unsurprisingly, much of Reform's support came from people who had previously backed the Tories. But a drop of 11.5 per cent in the Conservative vote, compared with the result of the 2021 election, doesn't account for the level of support achieved by Mr Farage's party. It must, then, have been disillusioned former Labour voters who got behind Reform, mustn't it? It would certainly suit Mr Swinney for that to be so but a drop of just two per cent in Labour's support doesn't make up the shortfall. What does balance the books is the fall in support for the SNP. Last week, the nationalists' vote share plummeted by 16.8 per cent. Add that to the Tory and Labour losses and the Reform result is explained. It would appear that Nigel Farage is able to tickle the tummies of voters who previously sought to express their disillusionment with 'the establishment' by voting SNP. If this is so - and some Scottish nationalist politicians believe it to be - then the chances of another Scottish Parliamentary election victory have slimmed down. As the 2014 referendum campaign kicked off, support among Scots for the break-up of the United Kingdom sat at below 30 per cent. These voters - die hard nationalists - were of the 'independence at any cost' variety. Nothing could have shaken the belief of those voters that Scotland should stand alone. During the referendum campaign, support for independence rocketed. No, the Yes campaign didn't prevail but it took 45 per cent of the vote, a result which emboldened the SNP to believe it was just a matter of time until its separatist dream came true. But were the new converts to the independence cause true believers whose loyalty would remain unshakeable? Doesn't look like it, does it? Eleven years ago, then SNP leader Alex Salmond enthusiastically fomented great anger among a section of the electorate. He encouraged the belief that a distant political elite had abandoned ordinary voters and - to an extent - he did so very successfully, indeed. For some, a Yes vote was less about self-determination than it was about furious rejection of the status quo. And, so long as 'Indyref2' was being denied by big bad Westminster, those supporters looked like they'd stick by the SNP. These days, even John Swinney accepts there will be no second referendum any time soon. That reality makes the SNP offer less appealing to the hacked-off voter who wishes to 'shake things up'. The more self-aware among the upper echelons of the SNP know that the same dissatisfaction which boosted the independence cause in 2014 also drives support for Reform. Understandably, senior SNP figures take succour from a recent poll by Norstat which revealed that - once undecideds are removed - support for Scottish independence sits at 54 per cent, with just 46 per cent in favour of maintenance of the United Kingdom. Surely such a result shows the independence dream is very much alive? Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. One SNP source cautions colleagues against agitating for a second referendum, now, on the grounds both that the party - and wider independence movement - is unprepared and that support for breaking up the UK is not concrete. 'In the last few years,' said the party insider, 'we've seen polls which say people are in flavour of a second referendum and lots of our people get very excited. The thing is, though, that when you get down into the detail, it's usually been the case that people would be happy to see a second referendum at some vague point in the future which means we're just stuck in a time-loop where a referendum is always in sight but always out of reach.' The SNP moved from the fringes of Scottish politics to become the dominant party by persuading a substantial number of voters that it was an insurgent, anti-establishment force. After almost 20 years in government, the SNP is very much part of the establishment and that makes it vulnerable to the sort of attacks it once launched on Scottish Labour. Nigel Farage's Reform won't win next year's Holyrood election but the result in Hamilton, Larkhall, and Stonehouse suggests it could help end the SNP's reign.


Daily Mail
2 hours ago
- Daily Mail
STEPHEN DAISLEY: A report card to make the SNP squirm. Is this REALLY what 'stronger for Scotland' looks like?
It was a day of reckoning for the SNP, a rendezvous with a governing record 18 years in the making. The pace of revelations was relentless, as one damning report after another rained down thunk, thunk, thunk on ministers' desks. The statistics were bleak and their mounting volume, accumulating by the hour, meant they could not be spun away. It was all there in grim black and white: death by a thousand bar charts. There was the Crime and Justice Survey, in which the former was more in evidence than the latter. Violent offences were up 73 per cent since 2021. How could this be? Ministers have repeatedly assured us that lawbreaking is on the decline. No wonder it seems that way: eight in ten offences are no longer reported to the police. Eight in ten. House-breaking is on the rise, one in ten of us have been defrauded, and criminal violence among children is climbing, too. Hardly surprising, then, that only 45 per cent of Scots rate the job their local bobbies are doing. The figure used to be 61 per cent before the 2013 shotgun wedding of the old constabularies into Police Scotland. No one doubts the hard, usually thankless, work the rank and file do, but the force's reputation has been tainted by constant gaslighting about crime trends, the decision to stop investigating 'low level' criminality, and the perception that the police have become politicised. Too many tweets investigated, too many pronouns shared, and the scandal of a senior officer attending John Swinney 's anti-Reform summit. Yet nothing has debased public trust in the thin blue line like the SNP's complacency over officer numbers. The Scottish Government has hindered Police Scotland's crime-fighting ability and left the constabulary to take the blame for it. SNP ministers have presided over a collapse in public confidence in the justice system, and who could blame the public when judges are told to jail criminals under 25 only as a last resort? When 56 per cent say punishment doesn't fit the crime, they are delivering their verdict on a soft-touch set-up. The SNP's many inadequacies are more than just a political talking point. In some instances, they are a matter of life and death. Another statistical update that landed yesterday was the quarterly release on drugs deaths. At 308, they were up by one-third on the previous quarter, the highest spike since 2019. It is easy to become inured to the scale of lives lost when you live in Europe's drugs death blackspot, but the human toll is not diminished by indifference. This is a social catastrophe that ought to be as unthinkable as it is unconscionable. For ministers, the misery did not end there. Hospital records laid bare the crisis in emergency care: just 65.5 per cent of patients are being seen within four hours at A&E. The target is 95 per cent. The labour market data was next to take a swing. Not only had unemployment leapt by 14,000, but it had done so as the number of taxpayer-funded Scottish Government staff had ticked up higher still. The coup de grace came with the emissions figures. Remember how ministers ditched some of their key climate targets? Lucky for them that they did because yesterday brought the news that they would have missed them anyway. The government's opponents will seize on all these numbers, but it ought to be ministers seizing on them first. When the cabinet sees this litany of failures, its first instinct should not be how to spin the problem, but how to fix it. One day Scotland will have a government that thinks first of solutions rather than PR strategies but it won't be today. The government we're stuck with, at least for now, met an overwhelming body of evidence with an underwhelming series of excuses. Does it not embarrass them that, after 18 years under their control, Scotland's public services are in this state? Do they feel even a skerrick of shame for having promised so much only to deliver so little? Is this what 'stronger for Scotland' looks like? The SNP is accomplished at politics and abject at policy. It knows how to win power but not how to use it, and so asks to be judged on inputs rather than outcomes. What matters is not that ministers consistently miss their targets but that they introduced the targets in the first place. Government by good intentions might give off positive vibes but it is unpardonable vanity, prioritising the feelings of politicians over the material realities face by ordinary people. There is nothing progressive about promising what you cannot or will not deliver. It is a cruel deception that drives cynicism and frustration deeper into the hearts of the electorate. The SNP thoroughly deserved to squirm as it received its report card in real time, but the people who rely on the police, the NHS and other public services do not deserve the outcomes meted out to them. They will continue, however, as long as this feckless, hopeless shower remain in office.


Daily Mail
2 hours ago
- Daily Mail
SNP's day of shame as damning statistics lay bare failures on drugs deaths, violent crime and A&E waiting times
A long list of failings by the SNP Government across health, justice, the environment and the economy have been exposed in a 'day of shame' for ministers. The Scottish Government's own official statistics showed performance plunging in a series of key policy areas, while flagship targets were missed. It included a massive increase in the number of suspected drug deaths at the start of this year, soaring violent crime, an increase in A&E performance targets being missed, and growing anger about soft-touch justice. Carbon emission reductions also fell well short of previous targets, while unemployment soared by 14,000 in just three months. Scottish Conservative deputy leader Rachael Hamilton said: 'These stats constitute a day of shame for this desperate SNP Government. 'There's no hiding place for John Swinney and no way to spin these awful figures - from A&E delays to drugs deaths, crime to climate change, his government are manifestly failing the people of Scotland. 'After 18 years in power, the SNP have run out of road and run out of excuses. For the good of the country, they need to be removed from office next May - and that's what a vote for the Scottish Conservatives will help ensure.' Yesterday's flurry of damning statistics were discussed at a virtual meeting of the Cabinet chaired by John Swinney. The Scottish Government data showed there were 308 suspected drug deaths between January and March, which was 76 higher - or a 33 per cent rise - compared to the last three months of last year. The latest rise comes despite then First Minister Nicola Sturgeon announcing a new 'national mission' to reduce drug deaths in 2021. Official figures also showed that violent crime has soared by 73 per cent since 2021, while the Scottish Government's crime and justice survey found that 56 per cent of people were not confident that the criminal justice system gives sentences which fit the crime. In hospitals, the proportion of people seen within the target of four hours at an A&E ward fell to just 65.5 per cent in the week ending June 1, down compared to 67.1 per cent the previous week. The proportion of patients waiting more than eight hours increased from 10.5 per cent to 12.2 per cent over the same period, while five per cent had to wait more than 12 hours. Other data published yesterday showed that greenhouse gas emissions have reduced by 1.9 per cent between 2022 and 2023, and are now down by 51.3 per cent compared to 1990 levels. But this was short of the previous target for a 56.4 per cent reduction by 2023 before the targets were scrapped last year. Scotland's demographic pressures also increased as figures released by the National Records of Scotland (NRS) showed 11,431 children were born between January and March of this year, which was 3.9 per cent lower than the average for the first quarter of a year. James Mitchell, professor of public policy at Edinburgh University and a leading authority on the SNP, said: 'This data shows that it is all too easy for ministers to deliver speeches making promising and commitments. It is quite another to deliver on the promises and commitments.' He added the 'legacy of failures' were felt by communities across Scotland and continued: 'It is little wonder that the SNP does not want to contest elections on its record in office and tries to divert attention and blame others given this latest list of statistics. Even if there were improvements in the next year it is difficult to see enough change to justify past claims and promises. 'In Nicola Sturgeon's own words, she took her eye of the ball on the issue of Scottish drug deaths. This has clearly been true across a range of devolved policy areas as her energies and efforts were devoted to pursuing a constitutional agenda and seeking conflict with Westminster. 'If as much effort had been devoted to addressing drug deaths, problems in the justice system, the educational attainment gap, problems in the health service, poor economic performance as was spent pointlessly and damagingly, then we might not have such poor outcomes.' Scottish Labour health spokesman Jackie Baillie said the rise in drug deaths 'shows just how badly the SNP is failing the country's most desperate and vulnerable people'. On the crime figures, Scottish Tory justice spokesman Liam Kerr said: 'SNP ministers must urgently show some common sense, ditch their soft-touch agenda, get tough on criminals and properly fund our police so they can keep the public safe.' Dr Sandesh Gulhane, health spokesman for the Scottish Conservatives also said it is 'shameful' that more than a third of patients are waiting longer than four hours to be seen during summer, 'when the pressure on A&E departments should be easing.' During yesterday's Cabinet meeting, Health Secretary Neil Gray gave an update on 'health performance statistics', while Justice Secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville updated on the crime and justice survey. Asked about the level of concern about the figures, a spokesman for the First Minister John Swinney said: 'We want to make progress on all these issues.' Mr Gray said every drug death is a 'tragedy' but added figures showed a year-on-year-fall. He added A&E in Scotland faced similar pressures to those elsewhere in the UK.