The National Conversation

A few weeks back I was on a bit of a rampage with the whole Scottish Independence topic after a die hard SNP supporter said that 'Scotland needs England'.

Enraged, I decide to see where we were with the whole 'National Conversation', the government's attempt to get feedback from the nation on where Scotland should be heading.

I ended up over at www.anationalconversation.com where I found there was a debate being held at Ayr Academy by MSP John Swinney, perfect I thought, somewhere to find some answers.

I arrived to see the majority of the 100 people were old folk, I think this was probably down to the piss poor advertising of the event as opposed to no one wanting to attend.

The format turned out to be a Q and A session for the hour long event, the majority of questions coming from local Councillors trying to promote their own causes to the Finance Minister.

The one decent point made from the audience was about 'Quantitative Easing' (give or take the Bank of England printing money) and why the money was going to banks instead of local authorities, a great point that received a round of applause but completely off topic and pointless since Mr Swinney has absolutely no control of the Scottish economy.

On topic there was a question about how Scotland would handle Scots abroad since we won't have any embassies for people to go to. The thing about that was the person asking mentioned that the embassies were owned by the Queen meaning that a separation from Westminister wouldn't have any effect on the embassies so therefore answering her own question. Mr Swinney was quick to say that the separation from the English government was not a separation from the Queen and the rest of the monarchy.

All in all there wasn't much else said of value, a lot of people didn't really ask questions on topic and one person that did sounded as if he had just came out of Lockside after watching Braveheart. (lol)

OK, so that's pretty unfair, I never asked a question since everyone else seemed to be away on their own tangents and that Mr Swinney probably wouldn't have been able to answer it there and then.

So I decided half way through the event to contact My Swinney directly with the question...

'In an independent Scotland, would our annual budget be more or less than the current amount we receive from the UK treasury via the Barnett formula?'

AND

'Can you breakdown an independent Scotland's budget, naming the incomes and forecasted amounts?'

I've emailed him the questions so I'll post back when I receive an answer.

As for this 'National Conversation', well first of all it wasn't a conversation, once someone had asked their question and Mr Swinney had answered it wasn't returned to, surely there has to be a dialogue for it to be a conversation.

The event was terribly organised, I only found out about it on the Friday by accident and never received a reply to my request for a seat, I just turned up and was lucky that there were 20 or so seats left.

Bottom line? The National Conversation isn't working, I'm worried that we might fuck this up, everything else is falling into place (Tories winning election down south will give SNP support and the SNP hopefully getting their Independence referendum through the Scottish Parliament) but if we don't build up enough support and continue the independence momentum we might be left with England controlling us for the next 300 years from the shadows courtesy of the Calmann report.

We need to get our fingers out.