YES #IndyRef2020 – Glasgow Rally

On Saturday 20,000 people (according to the organisers) or 10,000 people (according to the police) squeezed themselves into Glasgow’s George Square to listen to an array of speakers on the theme of Scottish Independence.

As is usual it was all videoed by the IndependenceLiveStreaming team and if you missed it, or couldn’t hear it, you can listen again now.

It was quite a line-up:

To help you find each of the speakers here are the timings in the video:

  • @ 18mins: Mhairi Black MP
  • @ 34mins: Maggie Chapman, Convenor of Scottish Independence Convention
  • @ 44mins: Valentina Servera Clavell from Catalonia
  • @ 1h 6mins: Patrick Harvie MSP, Scottish Greens
  • @ 1h 16mins: Paul Kavanagh of Wee Ginger Dug
  • @ 1h 26mins: Suzanne McLaughlin, Women for Independence
  • @ 1h 34mins: Janey Godley, Isa MacNamee and a’ the Sandras
  • @ 1h 42mins: Mike Russell MSP, Cabinet Secretary for Government Business & Constitutional Relations
  • @ 1h 51mins: Humza Yusaf MSP, Cabinet Secretary for Justice,
  • @ 2h Nicola Sturgeon MSP, First Minister of Scotland

And look – Glasgow Pensioners for Indy were there too!

Brechin Yes Hub : Blether In

Recently we’e been in contact with some of the folk who run the Brechin Yes Hub.

Here’s what they said:

The Brechin Hub, the aptly named Blether-In, was opened roughly two years ago in premises we rent in the centre of the town. The membership fund its operation by  some monthly direct debit payments and some annual donations.  Our finances are healthy.

It is staffed every Thursday, Friday and Saturday where  we get a steady drop in off the street from people who want to know more about the Indy movement. We get the odd Unionist too from time to time and enjoy trying to persuade each other!  

We sell a wide range of Indy and Scottish literature and goods and we are regularly involved in Flag days on the A90  and leafleting and canvassing in the Brechin area. There’s tele in the window, switched on every day from 9am until 8pm showing everything we think is topical  and humourous.  A lot of passer-byes stop to watch and some come in.


Roughly speaking our Hub team are 75% SNP members and 25% Independendistas and we work well together. Though maybe of real interest to the Indy Pensioners Movement is that all the staffing is done by pensioners.  Our  Tele and Internet guru is a pensioner and when the phony war ends the real hard-nosed, knowledgeable and committed door knocking brigade are all of our vintage too.

Of late we feel Indy movement has spent a lot of time talking to itself.  We have decided that to win next year we must get the pensioner percentages up to at least the low 30%. Do that throughout Scotland and we are there.

Here at Pensioners for Indy, we completely agree : swing the pensioner vote a bit further over to Yes – 40% ? – and we’re there. We hope our new leaflets will be appearing up in Brechin soon. And here is the Brechin Yes Team’s own leaflet If you live up that way, it might already have dropped your letterbox.

SNP Conference Passes Motion on State Pensions

By coincidence, in the same week as we have been promoting our new leaflet on Pensions, a motion was passed at the SNP Conference calling for an increase of State Pension in an Independent Scotland to the same level as the OECD average and supporting the commissioning of a Scottish State Pension Plan. The data referred to in the motion echoes much of the information on our leaflet.

You can download a PDF file with all our data on State Pensions and how ours compares to other developed countries: Pension Data

Or for a quick idea of how another small country much the same size as Scotland is doing with their State Pension, this will give you the general idea:

There are two UK State Pension: Men born after 6Apr 1951 and women born after 6Apr 1953. are eligible for the new state pension, now £168 / week. Anyone born before that date receives the basic pension rate, now £129/week.. Ref: at Gov.Uk Pensions

Now I bet most of us would be pleased if our State Pension was the same as Ireland’s. But Ireland’s State pension itself is still below the average for EU countries. Here’s how UK, Ireland compares with average State Pensions:

OECD Figures Source for EU28 Countries. The graph shows the percentage of state pensions to pre-retirement earnings for each country..

The UK pension is 29% of average pre-retirement earnings. We’ve used the data for men only as the current changes to women’s retirement age makes their data more complex. Ireland’s pensions is 42% of pre-retirement earnings. But the average EU Pensions is 71%. In other words EU average pension is almost two and a half times ours, in terms of pre-retirement earnings. If you use £145 as UK Pension, ie somewhere between £125 and £163, then we’d be receiving £355 a week.

Is this going to be possible in a newly independent Scotland? Well, certainly not immediately, but at least we’d have a Parliament at Holyrood who’d likely be trying to get us up to that level. SNP would be trying to do that and it’s not a stretch to surmise that the Scottish Greens, Labour and maybe LibDems would also support it. And that would be much better than what we have at the moment : State Pensions are not devolved to Holyrood but are instead in the hands of Westminster and whoever the English electorate votes into power. A Scottish State Pension Plan is the first step. Oh, wait, the first step is an independent Scotland.

Our New Leaflets Are Out!

Last week saw us take delivery of two new leaflets.

The Generations leaflet is a way of asking older Scots who are not yet convinced about backing independence to compare their concerns for the future with the concerns that their grandchildren, grandnieces & nephews have for the future. We hope it makes an important point. Sometimes the older generation, who mostly voted No in 2014 and who are still mostly No inclined, are portrayed as being in opposition to younger Scots. The leaflet makes the point that when you look at the different concerns of different generations, those concerns are actually inter-related. And independence can solve them for all of us. More info here and a higher resolution file you can download and print out yourself. It’s A5 size.

The Pensions leaflet highlights just how low the UK State Pension is compared to EU countries. Yet Scotland has a thriving and diverse economy and massive natural resources. How much better if we had the power to use those resources and our economy to do things like raise the State Pension to even the average level in developed countries. A great deal of effort went into gathering all the data to back up the statements on the leaflet. You can find a link to that data here, along with a higher resolution file which you can download and print out for yourself. The leaflet size is A4. Our print run has it folded to A5 size.

Or, If you would like to order these leaflets to give to your friends, your group or to drop through the letter-boxes in your neighbourhood, send us a query via our Contact page. We’re offering them at cost price, plus any postage.

Dr Philippa Whitford : Brexit & the NHS

Philippa Whitford became MP for Central Ayrshire in 2015. She is the SNP spokesperson for Health at Westminster. If you ever watched her quizzing Jeremy Hunt when he was Secretary of State for Health, you’ll have enjoyed her grasp of detail, persistence and dry humour and the obvious discomfiture of Mr Hunt when faced with someone who knew more about the NHS than he did. Before her entry into politics Philippa was a consultant breast cancer surgeon working in Ayrshire.

She has given this talk in many places around the country. This is from 2019. But it’s still well worth watching.