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Trying to figure out WTF is going on

Lego or jigsaw puzzle?

Peter A Bell

Mar 25

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Oh, look! Karen Adam has come up with a new rationalisation for the SNP / Scottish Government's failure to progress Scotland's cause! It seems we've been thinking about it all wrong. We've been thinking of independence being restored the moment the Union is ended. Apparently, independence is something that can be 'built' even while making no moves towards ending the Union. It's not that there has been a complete lack of any action on the constitutional issue. The 'correct' way to look at it is that whatever the SNP / Scottish Government does should be regarded as 'building' independence. From this perspective, even the ghastly mess of self-id is rightly perceived as part of the process of 'building' independence. Even the idiocy of referring the draft Referendum Bill to the UK Supreme Court has to be seen as part of the 'building' work.

Here we were, foolishly relying on the evidence and our own intellect to conclude that zero progress had been made towards the restoration of independence in over a decade, when we should have been ignoring facts and using our imagination to see everything the SNP / Scottish Government does as a great leap forward for Scotland's cause. Or should I say, another stage of the construction process completed?

All that stuff about 'paths' and 'routes' and us being on a 'journey' with independence as the destination? Forget it! Forget all of it! A better analogy would be playing with an endless supply of Lego pieces; constantly adding components of different sizes, shapes, and colours in what might appear to the uninitiated as a random manner but which we must always believe is creating a shape that is independence no matter what shape we see when we look at it.

What Karen Adam is peddling here is the notion of devolution as 'building independence'. It is an argument for resigning ourselves to devolution by telling ourselves it is like adding pieces to a jigsaw puzzle and that if we don't yet recognise the picture as independence then we just have to be patient while she and her colleagues get paid handsomely for pondering which piece to add next.

But it is a curious jigsaw puzzle. There are no edge pieces. The puzzle is never finished. The picture is never complete. But if the people tasked with working on the puzzle tell us it's a picture of independence, it's best to just accept this lest one be accused of being stupid or treacherous. Best to let them keep on working at it for another five years.

Aye, right!

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