THE Bible teaches us that where there is no vision, the people perish. The forces of independence have singularly failed to provide the Scottish people with is a vision, and our people are perishing for lack of it.

There is not, nor can there be, any visionary way forward for Scotland unless we address some fundamental structural truisms explaining why we are where we are, and the most fundamental and most immediate is the economic.

Under Holyrood’s governance there has been much focus on social, cultural, and political issues, and there is nothing wrong with that, but there has been little or no focus on the most fundamental of all, the economic. There are no meaningful solutions, nor can there be, any unless we take a radically different approach and abandon the dominant market model that has been the source of our economic and therefore our social and political problems under Westminster’s malign and destructive colonial mismanagement.

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We must give Scotland a vision of a future under an economic system that gives them hope and the promise of security and a meaningful standard of living.

Despite their impressive majority and the goodwill they will enjoy, Labour will fail, that is certain, because they have committed to that same demonstrably flawed and systemically fraudulent economic model. Thus they will never achieve their goals, even if they are serious about them – which they are most assuredly not – because Labour are as fraudulent as the economy they espouse.

The entire Westminster system, its parties, its personnel, and its economic model are all designed for, and committed to, the few. It is a systemic model that is exclusive, in that it is designed to exclude the majority of people from the fruits of their labours, designed to ensure that the fruits of the nation are harvested by the few, and what is also certain is that any programme for independence will similarly fail if it is wedded to that model. We must have a model that is inclusive, designed for the many and not the few.

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A perfect example is how, immediately following their electoral success, Labour in Scotland have committed to the Westminster goal of expanding the private-sector assault on the NHS. No economic model that includes private-sector exploitation of public services can succeed – that has been amply demonstrated in housing, water, railways etc and should need no further explanation. There have been no examples of success in Thatcher’s programmes of privatisation; all have been ruinous for the many and lucrative for the few.

All public services, and most importantly all sectors of health provision, must remain free from private rapacity and greed, and the dominant market model has no mechanisms that will ensure that, indeed its mechanisms are designed to ensure the opposite.

The brain-dead will immediately condemn comments like mine as socialism, as if that was some form of disease. But socialism simply means the mobilisation of the forces and resources of the social, the collective, for the benefit of that collective, for the benefit of the many, and if independence does not give guarantees that it will be founded on such principles then I will no longer want any part in it.

The independence community must cease to promote and support those personnel who still cling to the free-market model, no matter how prominent they are in the movement, because the free market and a prosperous independent Scotland are mutually exclusive.

Peter Kerr
Kilmarnock