Still dreaming

My subconscious mind must have been busy dealing with the anniversary of the independence referendum: Last night I dreamt that I was in a pub with Blair Jenkins, telling him we had to start campaigning for independence again; he agreed with me, and suddenly he stood up, press photographers appeared out of nowhere, and he announced his successor as leader of Yes Scotland (it was somebody famous, but I had forgotten who it was by the time I woke up).

Like other Yes campaigners, today I’m flying a Saltire from the house and wearing my good old Yes badges. Of course, like many other people I never removed by Yes and Bu Chòir stickers from my car, so it’ll look the same as always.

The UK hasn’t been fixed (in fact it’s even worse now that the Tories have an absolute majority), and although it’s looking like Scotland will get slightly more new powers than I had expected, it’s still nowhere near home rule. And of course, once you’ve set your sight on independence, nothing else will ever be good enough.

Like many other people, in the past year I’ve thought about various things that we could have done better: We should have tailored our messages better in Edinburgh and the North-East, Yes Scotland made many errors, the Yes campaign to a large extent ignored EU citizens, and we should have tried to make postal voting less vulnerable to fraud.

But more than anything, we need to start campaigning for independence again. We don’t need to wait for the next referendum to be called — that’s a technicality that can be dealt with once we’ve got 60% support in the polls. At the moment, we’ve got the people, we’ve got the ideas, and we’ve got the momentum.

The dream will never die, and we can make it come true soon!