YOUR correspondent Alistair Galloway (Letters, May 11) suggests that the SNP should seek a mandate for UDI in future manifestos. Your readers might like to consider the following example of what happens when you take people’s votes away, as he suggests.
When the National Union of Mineworkers was set up following the post-war Labour Government’s nationalisation of the coal industry, it was decided that never again would the miners go into national strike divided. To prevent this, it was decided that there would be popular vote in form of a mandatory pithead ballot on any proposal for a national coal strike. This process resulted in the successful strikes of the early 1970s under Joe Gormley.
However, when Mr Gormley’s successor Arthur Scargill proposed national strikes to the membership, he was defeated. His response was to change the NUM constitution so that a national strike could be called by a delegate conference, and in due course he secured the strike that he wanted through such a conference. As a result, the union was divided, the miners’ strike of 1984-85 did not hold and was defeated, pit closures accelerated and deep mining is now extinct as a major industry. Possibly worst of all, many mining communities were bitterly divided and remain so in the memories of all concerned.
Scotland has been bitterly divided too, by the 2014 referendum and its continuing aftermath, in which the First Minister and her Government perversely fail to represent the two million Scots who voted to stay in the UK. It is not hard to imagine the outcome if those two million were to be betrayed and led into UDI, having cast their ballots in good faith that their vote in 2014 was decisive and would settle the issue of independence for a generation.
Mr Galloway has made it clear on many occasions that he supports independence at any price. For most people, however, I hope that it is more important to put Scotland back together again in honouring the outcome of 2014 than in promoting further – and potentially catastrophic – division and bitterness.
Peter A Russell
Planet Pedro! 