| Putting the standard of event speakers aside this is surely the maddest Scotland in Union, zoomer, moment.
Yes, it’s the time they started a petition to stop the *Oxford English Dictionary* sneaking out ‘SNP propaganda’. And yes, you read that right. Andrew Skinner, an SiU founder, is also known for some pretty cringy tweets.
4. Rugby Yoonion
The time they used some of the massive cash reserves donated by their rich backers on a high profile billboard campaign themed around the British and Irish Lions rugby tour to New Zealand. The idea was to suggest that, like the Lions, Scotland benefited from neighbours working together. Neighbours, including… independent Ireland. Typically for SIU, however, it didn’t go to plan. Controversially, not a single Scot was picked by the Lions coach Warren Gatland.
To add further embarrassment- Scotland managed a successful tour, independently- beating Italy in Hong Kong and Australia in Sydney.
5. Data leakage
Having had his door battered open, a disgruntled SiU ‘development manager’ was arrested in an early morning raid and reported to prosecutors for leaking information about donors, donations and associations between people.
In an attack on the normal idea of democracy much of the money they raised was coming from outside Scotland. The content was highly revealing and embarrassing to the wealthy and powerful, landed, Anglo-Scottish aristocracy it identified.
In the end advice from lawyers meant that the content was only briefly posted online by the pro independence websites it was sent to. We did, however, get to see an amusing email conversation about a secret newspaper letter writing group featuring some well known twitter characters. 5,000 letters published in the Scottish press in two and a half years apparently. They needn’t have worried about any bans from the editors of these papers finding out. They’re still going strong, years later.
Why it matters
On one of his BBC shows talking about the IndyRef, Andrew Neil said the Yes campaign was ‘fighting a ground war’ whilst the No campaign was ‘fighting an air war’.
Meaning the Yes campaign was resplendent with the enthusiastic grassroot activity of people organising their own events and talking to other people, but had to cope with, almost constant, hostile British media coverage. Better Together, meanwhile, was reliant on those same big media organisations to get their messages out in print and on the airwaves.
That was true and, while there’s little Yes campaigners can do about newspaper ownership or tv news editorial decision making and fairness, Unionists have, for their part, tried to conjour up some grassroots activism from their older, less enthused, base. The part of the base that isn’t the actual Orange Order or SDL, obvs.
At one point Scotland in Union was being touted as genuine respectable grassroots, even as a body that could organise eye catching public events for the next No campaign.
A bit like ‘No Borders’ was during the indyref, until investigation quickly revealed its totally fake nature and it disappeared from view again.
But with all the awful speakers, gaffs, weak arguments and leaks, SiU have shown themselves as badly incompetent. And as we found out the nature of their backers we have seen they’re just as fake as No Borders.
They’re a tiny group of people funded by an even smaller number of the old wealthy British elite with, and here’s the point, very different interests to normal people actually living here.
