'A Way Forward', Robin McAlpine, Bellacaledonia, 1 October 2014

 […] Our first priority must be to remove as much of the unionist powerbase in Scotland as we can, as quickly as we can. It is very sad to say but unionism means full support for the British establishment. Not one of the unionist parties is proposing any fundamental change to the economic or social order in Britain. I admire some Labour politicians and many party members, but they are now in the institution which is the biggest barrier to social change in Scotland. As we saw over the last two years, Labour’s primary function is not to fight on behalf of working people but to channel the votes of working people to support the neoliberal economy of the City of London. So long as Labour can continue to channel the votes of working people in the interests of financiers and right-wing media it will be difficult to achieve any real social change in Scotland. […]

‘Don’t rock the boat’ was tried as a strategy. It didn’t work. We now need to create a devolved agenda in Scotland which is not small-c conservative but big I inspiring. If we want to make a cast-iron case for more powers then we need to push much harder at the boundaries of the powers we have now. And if we are pitching Scotland as different politically than Westminster, holding back from implementing the worst of Westminster policies is not enough. […]

With the best will in the world to the White Paper (which I maintain had a lot of good stuff in it), it wasn’t nearly a full implementation plan for independence – and we suffered because of it. […]

At its heart (in my opinion) we must accept that we can’t ever go into a campaign again wholly relying on a narrative that involves a currency union we can’t guarantee. Scotland lacks a really strong monetary economist. I’d like to see us (probably the Scottish Government) recruit a world-class monetary economist now with a three-year project to develop a really bullet-proof plan for an independent Scottish currency. And everything else too, from a plan for pensions to a tax model. […]

We then need to make sure that the movement does not dissipate. We are going to need it to be ready to take the next campaign forward in a couple of years. Many people have ideas about how to do that. We’ve outlined some of our thinking at Common Weal – creating places (‘The Common’) to meet and organise and socialise (socialising is important to keeping movements together), creating a powerful social media site (CommonSpace) to enable people to connect, communicate, organise, share information and materials, train and so on.

Beyond that, we all need to find roles, person by person, organisation by organisation. We need to be very careful not to slip back into protest mode – only marching and shouting against austerity which we cannot stop in Scotland is simply asking people to get involved in a campaign that hasn’t in the past reached a wider public and which is doomed to failure. Of course we must do it, but we need positives to win – nationally, locally, community by community.

[…]

We need documentary, discussion, news and much more. This movement definitely has the ability to produce it. But it must be good and we must make sure that it amounts to something coherent and consistent. […]

So regularly promoting international comparative statistics, setting targets to bring Scotland up to the level of performance of countries other than Britain and so on. […]

'A Way Forward', Robin McAlpine, Bellacaledonia, 1 October 2014

http://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2014/10/01/a-way-forward/