What does the Yes campaign have that No doesn’t? Arguably, No doesn’t have a campaign at all, just a series of commercial relationships with media outlets and one very long smear. It remains the world’s first manifesto for mass-inertia. The world’s shortest political programme, that can be distilled into four tiny hopelessly limiting letters: ‘UK:OK’ But what does Yes have? We are not one homogenous campaign, we are a huge diverse movement that is national and multifaceted. We have a huge reservoir of audacity, optimism and determination. In short, we are a movement, not a campaign at all. We don’t need to pay volunteers our supporters don’t need to declare that ‘they love Scotland’ or, ‘that they’ve always lived here’ or, most bizarrely, that ‘there children go to school here’. It’s a living breathing forward-looking grassroots movement brimming with hope and expectation, idealism and ideas. That’s why, from next week at 11 am each morning at the CCA on Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow, and for the last four weeks of the campaign beginning Monday 18 August the Scottish Independence Convention will host a media briefing at which all of the independent Yes campaigns can come together. All media will be invited. Over the next few weeks we’ll be hearing from: Generation Yes, Radical Independence Campaign, Women for Independence, Trade Unionists for Yes, National Collective, NHS for Yes, Farmers for Independence, Academics for Yes, Teachers for Yes, Labour for Independence, English Scots for Yes, Asians for Independence, Lawyers for Yes, Academics for Yes, Commonweal – and many more beyond. What do these groups have in common beyond a commitment to Yes? We are all working against the tide of cynicism and disillusionment and the common experience that your voice will not be heard, your opinion is not valid and you have no power. We are all trying to move away from a designed exclusion to an architecture of participation that creates structures that encourages people to be included in society instead of structures that renders people as passive consumers and good British subjects. The is the real campaign, self-funded and self-organised. To reflect the breadth and depth of the movement we are kicking off this Monday with the launch of Scotland Yet online. This documentary, the first feature-length film in Scotland financed solely through crowd funded donations, asks why a country, once at the heart of the union, now stands on the brink of irrevocable change. Eschewing many of the staples of referendum coverage: such as confrontations between political ‘big guns’ and the bear pit of party politics, Scotland Yet looks instead at a surge in grassroots political activity and brings together a vast array of voices from across contemporary Scotland.
Posted on: Fri, 15 Aug 2014 20:26:00 +0000
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