News from around the Yes! Movement….
AUOB is quick off the mark after the GE result and is now organising a march through Glasgow on 11th Jan leaving at 11.30 from Kelvingrove Park and heading through the city centre to Glasgow Green
PROCESSION ROUTE:
Kelvingrove Park, Kelvinway, Gibson Street, Eldon Street, Woodlands Road, Sauchiehall Street, Pitt Street, Blythswood Square (S), West George Street, Renfield street, Union street, Jamaica street, Clyde Street, Bridgegate, Saltmarket, Glasgow Green.
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:
And look – Glasgow Pensioners for Indy were there too!
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.
Haven’t seen any estimates for the numbers at the Galashiels March yet. But P4Indy were there!
So far we have photos of our Glasgow and Edinburgh Group uploaded into our slideshow here. If you were there with another P4Indy group, send us your photos please!
The stall was run by Sheena and her team from our Glasgow Group. And as well as making jewellery, Sheena had been baking including our favourite Scottish sweetie – tablet! Val, another Glasgow group member, recounts this very funny story that happened at the stall…
On our Pensioners for Indy stall today a wee girl wanted some tablet but shook her head when Sheena asked : “Have you not got any pocket money?” So we just gave her some anyway. Ten minutes later back she comes she with a wee boy who asks: “Is this where you get the free tablet?” Wee lassie pipes up: “Only if you haven’t got any pocket money…”
The kids are in good company this is our FM demolishing a plateful of tablet a few months back!
This is a Wee Ginger Dugcast where Paul Kavanagh is talking to Elaine C Smith about her own Journey to Yes, about their reactions to losing the 2014 referendum, about how the Scottish Independence Convention (SIC) has evolved since then, about the large numbers of supporters who have attend SIC events, about the success of the SIC crowdfunder and about what is emerging from that. P4indy is one of the SIC stakeholder groups. One of our National Co-convenors is on the SIC Board and the other co-convenor is on the Executive.
By 25 minutes into the podcast, Elaine is describing the process whereby the SIC Board employed Tangent Ltd to develop a range of possible Yes campaign strategies and then test them among Scots who are neither convinced No voters nor convinced Yes voters. SIC describes this as having “a particular intent to listen to people who haven’t made up their minds about Scottish independence or who support the union but have had their faith undermined by recent events”. It’s called the Voices for Scotland initiative.
Paul and Elaine talk about the best ways to get to those people we need to persuade. What works and what doesn’t?
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