Artists for Independence
A new group has just launched hoping to bring new creative energy and ideas into the independence movement as the campaign for Scottish democracy has a re-boot and a re-launch. We’ll be covering the new projects as they emerge over the next few weeks.
Not since the National Collective has there been a formal organisation dedicated to bringing together artists who support independence. The group is open to designers, playwrights, illustrators, actors, musicians, poets, writers, photographers – or whatever category of artist you are. This includes organisers, curators and producers.
Artists for Independence is an invitation, but it’s loosely held with the emphasis on collaboration, self-organisation and action: “As an artist, how you contribute is up to you. Get involved with ideas you like. Suggest ideas. Do your own thing. Ask for help.”
There’s a starter pack on BlueSky and a community to collaborate on Discord if you want to get involved.
All the details are HERE.
Great to see. Come on the artists.
It’s a real shame that Dick Gaughan is no longer performing due to ill health. He has always done so much for independence and political awareness
Why artists for independence?
I’d love to see a brickies/electricians/plumbers/cleaners for independence.
What’s so special about ‘artists’?
Why NOT artists? And there is nothing to stop folk setting up groups of other workers – and acknowledging that creativity is a part of that.
Great idea John. Why dont you set them up?
It is easy to do.
Steps:
1) Get a relevant BSky account for group with branding.
2) Send out posts asking if people want to join your community Starter Pack.
3) Once you get 7 people agreeing to join (remember to take note of who they are with their profile links – suggest Google Sheets) you can setup the Starter Pack.
4) Once you get the Starter Pack you can promote promte it. I suggest pinning promo with “please join message”.
5) Contact Independence Live and ask them to add the group account to their Community Starter Pack of communities with their own Starter Packs of members.
6) Now is the cool part. Once you have your 7 you can then contact them with a private message on BSky to see if they want to get further involved. If they say yes add them to a WhatsApp group for further discussions.
7) Then you can get really creative depending on the needs of the group. You could build a website. Setup a Discord channel with categories (Projects) and channels (Topics). Anything.
Through “Bulding Communities” we have setup multiple groups that are run by their members including Nurses, Retired Teachers, Scots Abroad, Academics (got website), Artists (got website) for Scottish Independence.
It is all about firing up the Indy movement.
Looking forward to your efforts.
INDEPENDENCE LIVE – TELLING SCOTLAND’S STORY SINCE 2013
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What’s on Guide – Events – Shows – Podcasts:
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Oh yeah and farmers.
Nothing ‘special’ although in many other independence movements (such as Ireland & many others), writers and playwrights have played a pivotal role in giving voice to peoples hopes and history.
Great news!
My “new idea” for the independence movement would be – at least on the Left – to reorientate ourselves towards a decolonialisation perspective: we need to acknowledge our very shocking colonial past and make the case that by freeing ourselves from the British imperial State, we are contributing to the decolonisation of the world…
Colonisation and modernity and genocide are intimately linked. To some extent, you might argue it started in earnest on Culloden moor…
I welcome this new group, but casting a decolonisation eye on Scotland’s artistic traditions might be a place to start, opening up whole new angles, rather than just accepting it / revelling in those traditions….. that includes our much vaunted universities…
The other day, the university of Aberdeen announced they had returned the skull of a Tasmanian boy to an Australian group who advocate for the Tasmanians posthumously so to speak, as they were exterminated by the British…
Now, what would a Scottish university want with the skull of a boy from the other side of the earth? Answer: racial theory…
How many more skulls of indigenous
people are kicking about our “glorious” universities (” best education system in the world”, “proud to be scottish” etc etc)
I remember being amazed by how many of the academics and uni professors Edward Said disparages in his seminal “Orientalism” were Scots…
We have a massive workload here, enough to give rise to a whole movement…. and a decolonised, independent Scotland at the end of it…
Great idea Douglas
@Douglas, in Recovering Scotland’s Slavery Past: The Caribbean Connection edited by T M Devine, Chapter 2: Yonder Awa: Slavery and Distancing Strategies in Scottish Literature by Michael Morris is worth reading on this topic. Walter Scott’s 1817 novel Rob Roy set in 1715 features limes in Scottish brandy punch from a farm “yonder awa”. Missing is p42 “the violence at the heart of empire: the genocide of the Amerindians and mass transportation of enslaved Africans, perpetrated by Scots, among others, yonder awa in the West Indies.” Malika Booker’s poetry brings the enslaved black ants back into view.
https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-recovering-scotland-s-slavery-past.html
The author makes the important point that Caribbean literature typically represents Scots differently from their artistic self-portraits (as military aggressors against the Maroons, for example).
We can also call out today’s historical-geographical fiction if it misrepresents, whitewashes, misattributes or omits colonial/imperial crimes of the past. As I have done, on occasion. And we can certainly interrogate the works and reputations of artists who have glorified such crimes (often moral rather than legal, of course).
A PDF of the intro is available here:
https://www.euppublishing.com/userimages/ContentEditor/1439477738863/Recovering%20Scotland's%20Slavery%20Past.pdf
The “Introduction: Scotland and Transatlantic Slavery” by Tom Devine
“Between the early decadeS of the seventeenth century and the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807, ships of the Empire carried over 3.4 million Africans to a life of servitude, and often an early death, in the plantations across the northern Atlantic. That figure accounted for as many slaves delivered to that part of the New World over the period as the vessels of all other European nations combined. At the peak of the business in the 1760s, annual shipments reached an average of 42,000 slaves a year. As far as the history of black slavery in the northern Atlantic was concerned, Britain by all measures was the dominant force.
“The system of bondage practised was chattel slavery, where the enslaved became the property of their masters until death, like their beasts of the field or their household plenishings, with no legal right to be treated as humans and with all the potential for exploitation and degradation which could accompany that helpless condition. The progeny of enslaved women also became the property of their masters at birth, either to be sold on from the plantation where they had been born or to spend their lives in hard labour within its bounds in perpetual servitude.
“Those modern sceptics who consider the contemporary poor at home, often eking out a miserable existence, or the indentured white servants in the transatlantic colonies, to be just as oppressed as black slaves, fail to take account of that stark and fundamental distinction. Colonial servants were bondsmen, indentured to labour, often under harsh conditions, but their contracts were not for life but for specific periods, usually an average of four to seven years, and were enforceable at law.”
Of course I have read “Scotland and Slavery” edited by Tom Devine, it’s one of the literally TWO OR THREE books in the entire history of Scottish letters which have been written about the Scots enslaving and killing people, stealing their land, stealing their riches and then getting drunk and writing poetry about how brilliant we are…
The Univeristy of Aberdeen had, in its possession, right up to this calendar year, the skull of a human being who had been murdered for purposes of study, and you have to really ask yourself, who the hell the people are who have been running Aberdeen University for all these years, because apparently there was a request for the skull to be returned back in the 90s, and the people at Aberdeen REFUSED to return the skull of a dead boy from a dead tribe, becuase it was theirs TO STUDY, and, to all extents and purposes, not human..
Who scrutinises the universities in Scotland? Who scrutinizes the legal apparatus?
How are we ever going to be independent when the Scottish professional class think it is okay to be hoarding the heads of dead indigenous people which, if anything, should require the intervention of Police Scotland? Because it’s called MURDER when it’s white people…
Fckin UNBELIEVEABLE…
And if every university in Scotland had a few bones or skulls etc, who would be surprsied?
Watch HUNGER by Steve McQueen. See what the republican community in N Ireland had to go through even to get where they are now. And then compare that the cheerleaders of National Collective, who, if they didn’t have pompons and leggins, had everything else…
The “savages” are the people who have been running Scotland’s universities for the last 3 centuries…
This kind of rank speculation about every university having stolen bones and skulls and calling people who run universities ‘savages’ for 300 years, apart from being untrue, will help nothing.
One has to question exactly what decolonisation seeks to achieve but one thing it should not be about is thinking giving some artefacts back and saying sorry somehow means Scotland (or anywhere) can then move on to a ‘proper’ independence, because a) the two things are unrelated and b) you cannot ‘decolonise’ by giving back artefacts. Decolonisation is a mindset and I think it a grave mistake to think the focus is about things in museums, much as I think it right to return stolen items in an acknowledgement of wrongdoing.
The universities of Scotland, England, France and Germany created from the late 19th C onwards an entirely bogus racial theory of history which led directly to the conquest and mass extermination of numerous peoples in the world and ultimately to the jews during the Holocaust…
They wrote the theory which justified the mass slaughter of millions and millions of human beings and when not, their conquest and brutal exploitation..
Darwin was a student at Edinburgh University where he was taught by a Scot who filled his head with this nonsense whereafter he wrote “The Descent of Man” in which he forumalates a racial view of human development….
John Knox the doctor is known to us as the man who paid Burke and Hare for corpses, though he was also a psycopathic racial theorist who claimed the anglo saxon race to be superior to all others….
…and yet, Scottish universities have never acknowledged any of this at all, never apologized and the only redress I am aware of is a token scholarship fund from Glasgow Uni… It’s not good enough
You seem to think that the head of a young Tasmanian boy is akin to the Elgin Marbles or something….
Well, it’s really not, obviouslt.
The Tasmanians were wiped off the earth by the British, something justified in the universities up and down this land for decades…
It’s absolutley incredible…
Sounds like you should join SteveH and his hatred of graduates. You certainly sound as obsessed in your hatred of higher education establishments. D
Universities like anything reflect the time they are in. Many of the attitudes of much of the 19th century / Victorian era are anathema to us now even though we still benefit from them in all kinds of ways. But your retrospective, highly selective anger is misplaced – being so angry at current HE establishments is unjust and pointless. It sounds hollow and not really about stolen artefacts, even children’s heads, at all but about your general hatred of universities and what they stand for: ‘capitalism’ founded on 18th / 19th century colonialism.
For transparency, I work in one and have done for 25 years, and am used to the endless dissing of higher education and the places it happens in – I remember being berated as long ago as 1982 for being a ‘f***ing freeloading student’ by a disgruntled local. Now? Its those who see them as bastard pillars of the terrible establishment, but from totally opposite perspectives of what the establishment is – irretrievably colonialist edifices of class and racial repression, actively maintaining the status quo of the inequalities of capitalism, and . . . culturally Marxist centres of the woke mind virus, infecting society with their wildly ‘progressive’, radical and dangerous ideas, and that want to trash our glorious past achievements.
Funny thing is, both can be true at the same time because universities are, and should be, a melting pot of both opposing and complementary ideas and perspectives! Who knew?
You really do your best to mischaracterize me, and it is no surprise you work at a university.
These are very, very powerful institutions which receive a good deal of public money, they ought to be scrutinized, surely? Their role in promoting for decades racial theories of white superiority ought to be axknowldged, apoligized for and addressed.
I am a graduate of Glasgow uni, which at least has done something.
I am not moved by hatred, but outrage. I am outraged at the injustices of capitalism, and dismayed that I had to read a Swede Lindqvist, and a Palestinian, Said, to find out just how deeply Scottish academia has been complicit with the mass extinction events of the last 150 years…
Universities are not run by ‘savages’, your words. If you don’t want to be mischaracterised then better not to speak sensationalist falsehoods. You say I sound like I work in a university, fair enough, but you sound like someone who actually knows very little about the sector. I generally find people do not, and as a result they have become the scapegoats for all sides..
How do I justify that? Well, how powerful are universities? It entirely depends on what ones you are talking about. Most in fact have very little power and these days are fast going bankrupt as they desperately seek to attract students, any students. If you mean the few big name, old institutions, maybe, but there you are talking about the elite, not the rank and file. Lumping the whole sector together makes no sense, especially for your arguments, as many institutions were only formed in the last 50 years!
Well, I wasn’t surprised you work at a university because you obviously like lecturing people, that much is crystal clear..
My point about Scottish universities, and all our big public or semi public institutions, is strictly about our colonial past and their role in the development of race theory, the ideology necessary to justify an imperial project which lasted for centuries, and only unravelled because Britain was bankrupt after WWII…
Steps ought to be taken to decolonize all our public institutions, which includes returning things which were stolen from colonized peoples, just like you have to give back stolen property in civil society, even if it has come into your hands legitimately…
And do I really have to explain to you that I wasn’t being literal when describing people who run our universities as “savages”, ie, these are institutions which came up with racial hierarchies with “savages” at the bottom and white anglo-saxons at the top? You didn’t get that?
As for the end of decolonisation and its goals, it can only be to END CAPITALISM which is absolutely synonymous with colonialims, racism, war, mass extermination and the brutal exploitation of 90% of the world’s population by the 10% white minority…
Scottish universities are an integral part of the capitalist system and an absolute fckn disgrace to the country IMO…
@Douglas, I haven’t read it (yet) but the author of this book seems to argue similarly:
“Climate breakdown, she says, is the mutant offspring of European scientific racism and colonialism, conceived in the suffering millions of Africans, Asians and Indigenous Americans endured at the altar of capital accumulation.”
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/mar/28/dark-laboratory-groundbreaking-book-argues-climate-crisis-was-sparked-by-colonisation
But it’s worth pointing out that the methods of Enlightenment and global science are the tools commonly used to discredit these race theories as (at best) pseudoscience. There’s plenty of completely unscientific racism, after all.
I agree 100%, climate breakdown is exactly that…
Gaza is a more extreme example of what the West has been doing to the global South for centuries. And now, they’re going to build these vast data centres for AI which will use up the water supply of whole countries so they can play with their new toy…
We humans lived in harmony with our environment for hundreds of thousands of years. But since the advent of capitalism about 200 years ago, we have been brutally exploiting it to the point it is breaking down…
As for Scottish universities, I think it is only fair to say that Glasgow Uni has actually tried to address at least in some shape or form its connections with the brutality of chatel slavery. Likewise, professor Tom Devine, at Edinburgh university has published the book you mention. But it’s really not enough. We really need full disclosure form all Scotland’s institutions. As I say above, what about the legal system?
I understand that when you say “end capitalism”, people think you’re a crazy leftie. But the alternative is to enter a period of mass extinction of human beings. Rising seas are expected to affect two BILLION human beings…
We don’t know anything in the West. We don’t know how people live in South. But more or less like slaves…
If the people of the global South knew the full extent of the brutality the West has treated them with for two centuries, they would rise up as one. But so many have neither the education nor the leisure time to read to fully understand why the world is the way it is…
And so it goes…
I recommend “Exterminate All The Brutes” by Sven Lindqvst, and the Raoul Peck TV documentary series of the same name…
I’d prefer a campaign for artists to be paid for the work they do. The prevailing attitude in Scotland as far as literary art is concerned is one of exploitation & class bias since the only people able to sacrifice the hours required to write what might be considered literary art are those in a financially secure position who ironically or intentionally enough are those least likely to produce anything that might be critical of the prevailing orthodoxy. The Scottish Nato Party are no doubt delighted with this state of affairs since it allows them to avoid any scrutiny of the fact that on their watch the dream of Scottish independence has sailed so far from being a realistic possibility it is now a barely discernible speck on the horizon.
I bet you do and every sympathy. I think the going rate for activism is around £0/hour -costs.
Yeah I agree it’s shit. You could always start a crowdfunder or contact SIF (Scottish Independence Foundation) if you feel an idea is going to need funding. There are a couple of projects already up on the Artists Discord server and the idea for those is to try to get funding for performers.
Anyway, let’s not get too negative. You need hope. Over 50%+ in polls and into the 60s if you say we can rejoin the EU (I know not everyone’s cup of tea but will give you a big majority).
You know what, you’ve given me an idea. I will contact SIF and let them know about Artists for Scottish Independence and requests might be coming through from them.
Join. Talk. Ask.
this independence debate is nothing but a bourgeois parlour game, folk like me do not ‘need hope’ what they need is food on the table
Aye it’s a middle class blah blah. Strangely enough I actually don’t know too many people who would fit that description. Generally it’s those with nothing that give and do the most. That said, all welcome with or without money. Rich or poor.
Anyway I will leave you to your misery. Rule Britannia and all that.
Your expectation that those with nothing should ‘give and do the most’ is of course a logical absurdity & is on a par with Marie Antoinette’s ‘Let them eat cake!’ Your aggressive & patronising tone is less than appealing & is entirely typical of frothing enthusiasts such as yourself who are always so quick to accuse non voters such as myself of in this case, in a remarkable transformation, somehow being on a par with an imaginary British naval commander that staunchly adheres to British imperialist values when all I in fact did was express the most reasonable scepticism regarding the notion of Scottish independence which most opportunists such as yourself know full well is about as likely to ever occur as the second coming of Christ. That is why I describe chief delusionists such as yourself as being engaged in a bourgeois parlour game which ironically enough serves no other purpose than to offer its adherents the pretence that there is some democratic choice within a British state which you are in actual fact only helping prop up thru your participation in that exact same charade. The fact that you know this to be true explains your swift retreat from this conversation & your over emotive reply to my previous comment.
I don’t think there was any ‘aggressive & patronising tone’ – all that is being done is campaigning to improve our situation, with, in this individuals case tireless work over many years.
hmm, well, when you’re taking from those with nothing it would appear obvious that it is not their situation you are improving
Nobody is ‘taking’ anything from anyone.
There once was a man
that worked for no pay
that was skin & bone by the Saturday
& by the Sunday he was dead,
for want of a bit of bread.
One can only wonder what happens when ‘those with nothing’ expire thru starvation, lack of basic amenities & adequate healthcare. Shall you be starting on those with very little in order to eliminate as many folk from the equation as possible?
Any country which fails to feed its finest writers is a mere barbarian dung heap !