The National:

I AM writing this before the election results in Scotland or elsewhere are known. I am doing so quite deliberately. I think that whatever people vote today, and whatever the surprises the results might bring, there will be a profound crisis to face come Saturday morning.

What is more I suggest that this will be true not just in Scotland, but throughout the whole of the UK as it now is, with massive ramifications for Scotland.

However well nationalists do - and I sincerely hope they will - the crisis that corruption has brought centre stage into UK politics as a whole is not going to be resolved by the elections. I cannot find a single prediction suggesting that the Tories are going to be punished for the quite astonishing abuses of power that have been the hallmarks of Johnson’s period in government.

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The hardcore of Tories in Scotland remain hardcore. In England polls suggest that more than 40% of the electorate support a government that is glaringly obviously rotten to its core. The fact that it is now even possible to say that, knowing that the evidence overwhelmingly supports that claim of corruption, suggests just how bad things are. The constraints that once existed in this area have gone. 

But the repercussions have not. The Tories are still in power. Their support is strong. The normal rules of government have come to an end. The checks and balances, and the basic moral decency that I have presumed would apply throughout my life, have disappeared, and some people do not seem to care. A hardcore of Tory support seem dedicated to proving that for evil to happen all that is required is that good people look away, which is precisely what they are doing.

This matters. It most especially matters for Scotland when I have no doubt that debate on when independence might be decided upon is reinvigorated by whatever election result there might be this week. It matters because in London there will be a government opposed to that independence for its own, deeply embedded English imperialist reasons, and it will be entirely indifferent to breaking the rules to achieve its retaining control of Scotland in that case. It would be naive to think otherwise. The Tories do not just play dirty, they play a different game to all the rest of us now.

The question then is what to do about that? My message is straightforward. It is that, hard as this will be to swallow, if nationalists want independence they may have little choice but help reform the rest of the UK first, with support for the right to be independent in England and Wales (Northern Ireland being a special case with its own pre-existing rules) being a condition of that.

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This is going to be hard. What is required now is a coalition against corruption and for good government, including the right to independent government, right across the UK. Persuading Labour that it is history will be the difficult part in this process. If ever a party has had wholly inappropriate tribalism written into it that party is now Labour. But the stark reality is that Labour has not a hope of stopping the pernicious power of corruption when acting by itself anymore, and deep down most of its members know it.

What they will also know is that there is a decent majority in the UK, most profoundly seen in Scotland, that wants an end to this corruption and all that goes with it. And, they would undoubtedly vote for that outcome if they had the chance.

Important as independence is then, and important as party differences are, my suggestion is that by the time Saturday dawns all of us who crave good government, the right to choose, and the end to corruption will have to realise that none of that will happen unless those who want to destroy the basis of democratic choice in what is still for now the UK are removed from office.

I have a dream. It is that finally the time has come for a grand coalition that sweeps away the triple curse that is corrupt politics biased to the wealthy, that delivers austerity and real hardship, and which denies real choice.

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This will not be easy to achieve. But there are moments when politicians must come together. Whilst Scotland remains in the UK, and most especially if it wants to leave it, then it must work to establish freedom in the UK as the precursor to freedom in Scotland.

The UK faces an existential threat as big now as any seen since 1940. But this time that threat comes from the Government in Westminster. It’s in Scotland’s best interests to be rid of it. It must call on Labour and others to join it in freeing us all from its yoke of corruption. That is the task from Saturday. Peaceful, enduring, unchallengeable independence depends upon it.