The Herald

I've sent this to the Herald though they may not publish any part of it. 

Until the other week, I was the person on social media encouraging my fellow-independence voters to show respect to unionists, to avoid name-calling and to try to set up some form of dialogue with people we have to win over if Scotland is to gain independence. I’ve just given that up. The Scottish press is the reason, and in this the Herald must take particular responsibility because of its reach.

Your front page only ever seems to have three headlines:

-        Education in Scotland is a mess

-        The police service in Scotland is a mess

-        The NHS in Scotland is a mess.

These headlines attacking public services are recycled day after day. It is disappointing that the Herald shares the same characteristic as the BBC Scotland online news: the ability to pick up on issues that no other news outlet has identified as a problem. Not because these issues are ‘scoops’ but because they are by and large invented or irrelevant to the lives of people in Scotland. It’s worth saying here that most people don’t believe our public services are a mess – and from personal experience. Yes, there are problems, mainly financial, and we can disagree over how to resolve them but they can be resolved. And they are a bit more complicated than ‘SNP bad.’

Your letters pages are frankly poisonous. Few letter writers in favour of independence get space on these pages. I imagine a lot, like me, have given up trying to control the tide of unpleasantness and personal comment that now dominates them thanks to a handful of constant contributors. I admire Ruth Marr for her determination to keep writing. I have identified other writers who have an undeclared political agenda (for example, as former candidates for a particular political party) and I don’t even bother to read their letters.

The heraldcomment.com section seems to have been similarly taken over by unionists, some deluded and rarely challenged, others determined to turn every comment into an anti-SNP, and specifically anti-Sturgeon diatribe.

As for your Agenda column, all too often I know as soon as I see the headline and the name of the writer that the tone will be anti-Scottish. Today’s effort dedicated to mixed-ability teaching, while scattered with statistics, is written by a former university professor who shows little understanding of how schools work. Mixed-ability teaching isn’t new: teachers have been doing it successfully for 30 years or more. If there’s a problem with CfE, it’s not at Higher/National 5 level.

And please note: my objection is not that the Agenda writers are anti-SNP (I’m not SNP. I’m a Scottish Green), but that they keep on giving readers the idea that Scotland is a failing nation, that it can’t stand on its own two feet, that the only way forward is to abandon our current commitment to social democracy and – presumably - follow what is happening in the UK - and that includes leaving the EU.  

So for those of us who want independence, what do we do now? As I see it, we’ve been overtaken by the unionist anti-independence campaign, which has gone on while we pro-independence people were nodding. We must now go on the offensive, without waiting for the SNP government to declare a date for the second independence referendum. All the groups that operated before the 2014 vote need to swing into action. We need to start fund-raising. And we need to start challenging the misleading information appearing in the media.