BARCELONA CONSEU MEETING

I have had the honour of being invited to Barcelona this weekend as part of an International Advisers Council set up by CONSEU, which is the annual conference for stateless nations.

We'll be looking at ways to help make the next CONSEU conference even more effective and also discussing the situation with the various other independence movements in Europe. My Independence First colleague Lloyd Quinan is probably the main expert we have in Scotland on this as he keeps tabs on a lot of developments amongst other stateless nations in Europe.

Lloyd has mentioned CONSEU and their parent body (which receives funding from the Catalan devolved Government) on a number of occasions so I am very pleased to get the chance to make this trip. It will be a bit odd going abroad without my other half but it will also be exciting to discuss the experiences of other nationalists.

I know that the Basque country is having a particularly hard time just now with two more political parties banned recently and some Basque activists being given ridiculous prison sentences for the 'crimes' of organising political rallies. What the Spanish Government does is claim that the activists actions have been ordered by the armed Basque group ETA. They don't offer any evidence of this, they don't need to. Batasuna, the left wing political party has been completely banned and most of it's leadership have been arrested by the Spanish Government and are now being tried on trumped up offences. It is a very difficult situation and I think people are quite pessimistic about what will happen next.

The PNV (a sort of right of centre pro business Basque nationalist party and the only one which is allowed to campaign) are in power in the Basque parliament and are campaigning on the prospect of holding a referendum on independence. Some observers doubt whether this will actually happen however as they could have done this some time before. The worry is how the Spanish army might react to such a plan, we can tell from recent pronouncements that Spain is not particularly interested in other countries rights to self determination and the Spanish army has carte blanche under the Spanish constiution to protect the existing state.

Catalonia is also of course moving slowly but surely towards independence. Hopefully I will get a better idea on my trip exactly what stage they are at.

Closer to home of course we have Wales (moving forward at a similar rate to Scotland, although Britain cheekily provided them with an inferior devolution package Plaid Cymru are in power with Welsh Labour and have gained cross party agreement on greater powers for their Assembly) and Cornwall whose case has unfortunately been completely ignored by the British Government. Some Cornish activists have been in touch recently, apparently the local police are giving them some harassment by making dubious use of new anti Terrorism powers. some more information about Cornwall is available here and I will be updating this page within the next few weeks.

It should be a very interesting trip. I'm taking my video camera so look for a video on youtube fairly soon. Shortly after I get back Independence First will be organising a conference (on March 1st) to help push the new independence petition which has been launched by the Independence Convention.

Sadly the media completely ignored the recent launch (not a shock but still annoying) so we will have to rely on word of mouth and knocking the doors to get the signatures in. It will be difficult but it will also be worth it. I hope all the Scottish parties and pro independence activists will pitch in on this, certainly IF locally will try and do our part.

I had a chat with Lloyd this week about CONSEU as he has attended previous gatherings, when I get back we'll have to get together with Kev, Ray, Simon, the two Kens, Chris, Eric, Anja and the other local IF guys and figure out own own strategy on the ground. Hopefully I'll be able to get an article or at least a few letters in the press prior to the Glasgow working conference.

This is a bit different from my usual postings of opinion bits but it's been all right so expect the odd post from 'real life' in future!

Cheers, JOE