A letter to Nicola

A letter to Nicola

Dear Nicola.

I was at your “public “ meeting last night in the Queens Hotel in Dundee and you might have noticed that I walked out of the meeting at the point where Joe Fitzpatrick who was “choosing “ the questions to be asked decided that I was not to be chosen to ask my question.

You will also no doubt have noticed that the questions you were asked were very “soft” questions and very easily answered and mostly from the usual group of SNP acolytes and general hanger-on’s and failed potential candidates for one thing or another.

Now you might be asking yourself why I think that I should have been able to put my question. Well I will tell you and to do so I will have to go back to when we started the campaigning for a Yes vote in the referendum.

I was at the inaugural meeting  of the Yes movement where you gave a speech to get the organisation off the ground .I am a fairly perceptive person probably brought about with my half century in business. It was the first time I had heard you speak live, and I remember thinking that I detected a hard side to you and mentioned to another SNP supporter at the meeting that we were looking at the next First Minister.

Ok so the campaign took off from there, the Yes movement was a great idea as it acted as a catalyst for the various grassroots organisations that spontaneously came into being as a consequence of the whole Yes movement.

At this stage I append my resignation letter to your husband Peter Murrell who is the Chief Executive of the SNP as this probably explains why I arrived at where I am today and why I was disappointed that my chance to question you last night was deliberately thwarted by the very politicians that I had done so much to assist, mistakenly believing that I was doing so as part of the ongoing fight for independence. It should be noted that I never received a reply to this letter of resignation, neither did I get the courtesy of an acknowledgment.

https://bobcosblog.wordpress.com/…/letter-of-resignation-snp

So back to last night. It is because of the foregoing that I thought I should have been given the courtesy of a chance to put my question and not been thwarted by your overzealous acolytes in hurriedly rearranging for the questions to be put on paper with the name of the questioner as opposed to the open question and answer session which I believe had been planned until I showed up.

So Nicola, here is the question which you will see accords to the case I have been making for the last 19 Months, since we lost the referendum.

You are an advocate of the Scottish people expressing themselves in a democratic manner and although you have said many times that they will let you Know when they are ready for another referendum, you have never actually let them know how you will accept this. You have of course stated, and I heard you doing it the other night on television at the leader’s debate that the no one should stand in the way of the democratic will of the Scottish people.

Now as you know, the most accurate way that the democratic will of the people can be expressed is through the ballot box and when people cast their vote they should be aware that this potentially gives the party voted for, a mandate to achieve whatever is contained in the manifesto that they have presented before the election. In this context you will note that in the 2011 election where you gained only 1 of an overall majority this was enough to force the British government to concede to the demand to “allow “a referendum to take place.

Now you have been making sounds about the possibility of addressing the concerns that lost us the referendum in 2014, AFTER the election but I am of the opinion that you are once again wasting an opportunity to get a mandate from the people to wrest the power to hold a referendum from Westminster to Holyrood where this power belongs( not necessarily to set a date for a referendum) If you had put this requirement into the manifesto for last year’s Westminster elections then things would have been different today and your MP’s in Westminster would have had some teeth to fight with instead of being humiliated time after time in parliament and in all probability had we been in the position of  power to call a referendum then in all probability we would not have been bombing Syria today.

So here we are one year on and again you have failed to put the very basic building blocks for a future referendum into place, as yet again you have shied away from asking the people of Scotland for a mandate through the ballot box, to force the British government to relinquish control of our right to hold a referendum, and quite simply that is the question I wished to put to you last night and was prevented for doing so by your self-serving acolytes.

You would I am sure note ,last night the contrast between then and the last time you came to dundee . The last time you filled the Marriott hall with many hundreds of supporters and several hundred who could not get entry , whereas last night you could not fill one of the small meeting rooms in the Queens hotel and if it had not been for the usual SNP acolytes and politicians it would have been a bare room indeed. I wonder if there is others who are similarly disillusioned by your lack of drive for independence.

So Nicola I won’t be voting for you on Thursday and I have looked at alternatives and haven’t been impressed by any of them. I could never in my lifetime vote for either the red or blue Tories or the Lib Dems because of the dishonest way they conducted the referendum campaign through project fear. The left wing parties are too left wing with  uncosted promises and the Greens who I had considered blew it when I heard Patrick Harvey saying that they would dismantle the oil industry.

So for the first time in my adult life I will not be voting for anyone. I will in all probability have a pint in Menies and watch the start of the results come in together with the exit polls, which for some inexplicable reason (which you might care to elucidate on) was not done at the referendum, but I will be doing that with a heavy heart.

You are the reason I will not be voting on Thursday Nicola as I really have come to realise that through either design or simply incompetence you have strayed from the road to independence.

Scotland will be independent eventually, with or without you, the choice is yours.

Bob Costello