Using an election to double as an independence referendum is the ONLY way independence can and will ever be won. Resisting it just delays the inevitable and causes needless pain along the way.

"The fact is that most Scots, pro-independence or not, accept without question our right to self-determination", says the SNP MP Seamus Logan in his latest column for The National.

"So for heaven's sake let's make sure we never exercise that right", is the subtext of the rest of his article.  

I don't know whether Mr Logan is speaking on behalf of the SNP leadership, and whether his column is part of a softening up exercise for an unpalatable message that will come more directly afterwards, but if so that would be extremely depressing.  He even resorts to what is by now the rather tired old Gotcha attempt of: 'If you think the UK government would never agree to a referendum, why do you think they would respect the result of a de facto referendum and negotiate independence afterwards?'. That always sounds a hell of a lot less clever and sophisticated once you remind yourself that it's an argument for giving up and doing nothing at all: neither trying to secure a referendum, nor trying to secure independence itself.  In fact, once you get to the nub of it, there are very few things in life that are less sophisticated than clarion calls for passivity and inaction.

Despite my disagreements with Alex Salmond towards the end, there was one thing I definitely did agree with him on, and I know that for sure because he said "correct" when I expanded the argument in a phone conversation with him two years ago or so.  It goes like this.  There are two things that need to happen for Scotland to become an independent country:

1) A clear majority of the people of Scotland need to vote in favour of independence in a democratic event - meaning either a referendum or a parliamentary election in which one or more parties have sought an outright mandate for independence in their manifestos.

2) The Scottish and UK governments need to negotiate an independence settlement, that is then ratified by the Westminster parliament.

We have no unilateral power to make 2) happen, because it clearly takes two to tango.  But we have absolute power (and by 'we' I mean the people of Scotland) to make 1) happen.  The UK government can block a referendum, but short of abolishing democracy altogether it can do nothing to prevent scheduled elections from taking place, so there will always be a way of exercising our inalienable right to an expression of self-determination, and of securing a democratic mandate for independence.  The obvious point is that if there's one-half of the equation you can do, and one-half that you can't do for now because it is being frustrated by others, you get on with doing the bit you actually can do.  You do that because winning a mandate for independence is an end in itself - it would be a historic moment in which the Scottish people take confidence in themselves for the first time in centuries.  But you also do it because it's an absolute prerequisite for the negotiation of an independence settlement to ever happen.

Mr Logan's argument is the equivalent of saying you shouldn't go to a train station because you can't force the train to turn up - when the rather more salient point is that if you never go to the train station, it is you and no-one else but you who is guaranteeing that you will never be getting on a train.  Winning an independence mandate will not force the UK government to grant independence or even to come to the negotiating table.  But it will completely transform the psychology of the situation and open up options that were not there before.  If, for example, the SNP regain a majority of Scottish seats at Westminster in 2028 or 2029, those seats can be used as leverage to back up an independence mandate from the people - either by means of parliamentary disruption tactics or by temporarily withdrawing our MPs from Westminster until the UK government agrees to negotiate.  There are still enough believers in democracy in the London media and establishment that there will begin to be a feeling that it not sustainable to refuse to negotiate when Scotland has clearly voted for independence and is going unrepresented in the UK Parliament.

A cynic might almost say that the reason the Scottish Government don't want a mandate for independence is not because they think there would be nothing they could do to press the mandate home afterwards, but precisely because they know there would be plenty they could do and would be expected to do by their own support base.  Perhaps the specific tactics they would be required to use in that circumstance make them feel queasy, and they would prefer never to be put in that position in the first place.  So they prefer to do nothing at all.  

But for anyone who actually wants independence, rather than to just use the distant prospect of independence as a tool to remain in power, that simply isn't good enough.  Seamus Mallon famously said that the Good Friday Agreement was "Sunningdale for slow learners" - in other words Sunningdale or something very close to it was the only agreement that was ever going to be available, and unionist politicians had wasted a whole quarter of a century before accepting the inevitable anyway.  In exactly the same way, the use of a scheduled election to win an independence mandate is the only option that is ever going to be open to us, and exercising that option is an absolute necessity if independence is ever to be won.  Anyone who resists the inevitability of going down that path is simply wasting time, completely pointlessly.

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Craig Murray is the latest in the long (pretty much endless) line of people to have been stabbed in the back by the Alba leadership.  He has been blocked from standing as an Alba parliamentary candidate, for two reasons:

1) His prison sentence.

2) His candidacy for the Workers' Party.

The first reason is absolutely ridiculous, given that he only went to prison in support of Alex Salmond, who praised him to the skies for his bravery.  As for the second reason, I pointed out at the time that standing for the Workers' Party should, on any reading of the Alba constitution, have led to Craig automatically losing his party membership, because the Workers' Party was putting up candidates in direct competition with Alba.  The fact that the party constitution was breached to allow Craig to stay a member, seemingly just because of a private chat he had with Alex Salmond, and at a time when lesser known Alba members were being expelled or suspended left, right and centre for fictional breaches of rules that didn't even exist, demonstrated that Alba is a tinpot dictatorship where the constitution and rules are just for show, and where all that matters is the whim of the leader and those around him.

To allow Craig to remain a member while blocking him as a candidate is logically incoherent.  Either you accept he broke the cardinal rule by standing for a rival party, in which case he shouldn't be an Alba member anymore, or you don't accept the rule was broken, in which case there's no reason to block him as a candidate.  Trying to have it both ways is an absolute nonsense.

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