IS SCOTLAND AN OPPRESSED NATION?

While most people would say no, after all we live in a secular democracy, have freedom of speech and are not physically intimidated from raising our political voice, in a very real way the answer is yes. That is in our 'national' media where the Scottish independence cause is given the lowest possible priority.

Yesterday MSP's on the public petitions committee decided to ignore over 1300 people who petitioned them on an independence referendum. The petition itself was deliberately ignored by the media with the Press Association not even acknowledging it's existence while it was running.

Despite this the referendum campaign group Independence First still managed to get around ten times the numbers of their own membership to sign this document.

Those 1300 actually represent a much larger amount, just over over 2 and a half million people, over 50% of our population who actually support independence for Scotland. Now as Press Officer for the campaign I am hardly unbiased but surely the disenfranchisement of over half the population is a story which is worth reporting?!

The reasons given for the rejection of the epetition ranged from lies (it was claimed by a Labour MSP that independence support had fallen at the last election, this is untrue, SNP support fell but the overall amount of independence supporting MSP's went up) to deliberate obstinacy. An election is around the corner, the people can vote for independence then.

In fact independence support crosses all parties and includes people from the traditional unionist parties (top Tory Michael Fry recently anounced his conversion) and a large percentage of Labour supporters support independence as do voters for the Lib Dems. All the Scottish based parties, the SNP, SSP, Solidarity and the Greens all support independence as do numerous small parties and groups.

Elections to any parliament are based on a wide range of issues. Independence is one of those issues but we cannot guarantee that the election will give any kind of clear indication on support for independence.

Since the clear indication is from opinion polls that support for the union is now in the minority it is a simple matter of democracy that the people of Scotland must be asked directly if they want the union to continue or not. Obviously this executive hope that they can ignore this issue and it will go away particulary if the press can be convinced to completely ignore it or treat it as a footnote.

The Press Association covered the issue yesterday but almost every newspaper has completely ignored it. What a disgrace, the Scots ARE an oppressed nation but because of our biased media, they don't realise it yet.