Alex Salmond flushed out
11 January 2012
Alex Salmond has been forced to announce Autumn 2014 as his preferred date for the Referendum on Scottish independence.
The pressure of the debate “to name the date” led the First Minister of Scotland to announce the date in an interview with the BBC.
In spite of being asked to name the date in the Scottish Parliament, this lover of the Scottish people decided not to announce it to the Parliament of the Scottish people, but to the BBC for which he has so little regard.
The debate is heating up. The first question is about the legal right of the Scottish Government to conduct a referendum on a reserved matter without the permission of the Westminster Parliament. A second matter is that the coalition of the main Westminster Unionist parties are opposed to two questions in the Referendum announced by Alex Salmond at the SNP Conference in Inverness in October 2011.
Bannockburn fervour
A third matter is the SNP plan to include 16 and 17 year-olds in the Referendum, which exposes the emotionalism of their coming campaign. The date of the Referendum was predicted by the Scottish Christian Party on the basis of this nationalistic fervour. Alex Salmond hopes he can cajole Scotland into voting for Independence with a dose of nationalist fervour, employing the enthusiasm and idealism of youth. Already they have used the Scottish Youth Parliament to kick start their unpopular campaign to redefine marriage.
The Scottish Christian Party, for the duration of its short existence, has treated the possibility of Independence with the seriousness it deserves. The constitutional question of Scotland’s Christian constitution has been a central concern to which neither the SNP nor the political pundits have paid any attention. Possibly this is not surprising, as it has taken the main Westminster parties five years to treat seriously the threat of Independence and the SNP surge, and only after the SNP wiped the floor with these parties in the Scottish 2011 election.