This photo was taken as part of the latest campaigning trip to Aberdeenshire, Fife and Perthshire: it was taken by a key Labour activist, and features councillors from several different parties, and myself - as we came together to make the case for the Union. I was in the village of Dunning and we canvassed all the village finding 80% in favour of the Union. What was noticeable was the cross party goodwill on a very important subject. If you want the ultimate embrace of alternative parties then look no further than the impassioned and eloquent plea of George Galloway MP at the recent Spectator dinner: extracts from the speech I set out below:
‘We are people together on a small piece of rock with three hundred years of common history, and that’s what they want to break up. This is the first time ever that people in a small country, where everyone speaks the same language are being asked to break up, and break up on the basis that they don’t have a currency to use. There will be no pound.’
‘The difference is we have come together temporarily at a moment of national peril. The nationalists on the other hand are permanently together for they have only one purpose, to persuade you that Brian Souter, the gay-baiting billionaire, funder of their campaign, is someone more worthy of looking up to than J.K.Rowling.
“I am tired of being called a quisling, or a traitor…I’ll go wherever I like in these islands or anywhere else and speak my mind. There’ll be havoc if you vote yes in September, havoc in Edinburgh and throughout the land, and you’ll break the hearts of many others too. Who wants to mortgage their, and their children’s future on a finite resource that will soon be finished and the price of which is simply incalculable?’
‘They want you to re-fight a battle seven hundred years ago between two French speaking Kings with Scottish people on both sides. I prefer to remember a rather more recent battle…If we had not stood, but capitulated, like others had done before us, we’d be having this meeting this evening in German, if we were going to have it at all.’
