Bin the Referendum Bill?
Today I received an e-mail from the party with a link to a petition. The petition reads as follows:
We call on the First Minister to Bin the Independence Referendum Bill. The Scottish Government should put recovery from the pandemic first.
In the lockdown last year, the First Minister suspended all government work on independence, but she has refused to suspend that work now that the country is in lockdown again.
Thousands have lost their lives, many more have lost their job and the NHS is under threat so the Government should have a needle sharp focus on the recovery from the pandemic, not another campaign for independence.
It does seem an odd campaign to pursue, for three reasons.
The first of these is that it suggests lockdown should require political parties to cease campaigning for what they believe in - or, if they are parties in government, to cease any legislation for anything non-pandemic related. Lest we forget, the Liberal government of Lloyd George enacted such ground-breaking legislation as the Representation of the People Act, the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act, the Ministry of Health Act, the Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act, the National Health Insurance Act and much more besides - all during the H1N1 pandemic. For some of that time, the Liberal government also had a war to think about, but that didn't serve as a barrier to implementing progressive legislation. The idea that a focused government must sacrifice all else to "put the pandemic first" doesn't hold much water.
Secondly, the suggestion that the government must act the same way during this lockdown as it did in the first is equally absurd. The picture is very different. Our focuses and priorities are now very different, not least because of the vaccines we have available. There's also the little issue of a national election around the corner in which political parties should be able to put forward their respective visions for the next four years. I don't think we have to support the referendum proposal to accept that the SNP (or indeed any other party, such as the Scottish Greens) have the right to put it to the electorate just as we have the right to put our own proposals for federalism to voters. It's interesting that I don't hear the same calls to abandon our recently-launched task force headed by Menzies Campbell in order to be more focused on the pandemic; we understand perfectly well that it's possible to address multiple issues simultaneously.
Thirdly, it's odd for that very reason - we've just appointed Menzies Campbell to oversee a new initiative on federalism and we're demanding others give up promoting their own visions for Scotland's future. This might make some sense if federalism was simply a case of "tinkering around the edges", but it would in fact be a radical overhaul of the way the UK works. Aren't we being a bit hypocritical here?
Fourthly, constitutionally speaking any Referendum Bill will be for parliament to discuss, debate and vote on before potentially requiring Westminster's consent. It does seem odd that a party usually so in tune with constitutional matters would seek to use a petition (with no legal standing whatsoever) to pressurise a goverment to drop proposals for a referendum (whose legal status is purely advisory), thus denying a vote to the democratically elected Scottish parliament.
As a party we may well not support independence. We may well feel our own vision is more positive than that being put forward by the Scottish government. But using the pandemic as an excuse to delay the conversation is disingenuous and sends out the wrong messages. If there is a time when competing visions should be discussed and presented to the electorate then it is most certainly in the weeks before parliamentary elections - elections after which, should pro-independence parties secure a majority, it would be undemoratic to deny parliament the opportunity to debate the matter..
Messaging matters. I have been encouraged by a lot of our messaging of late, especially as far as federalism is concerned. Instead of telling other parties what they should and shouldn't talk about, how about promoting our own vision with real gusto?
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