Aivin Oan Till Victory!!

Delivered as a speech to the Arbroath Declaration Commemoration April 9th 2017

"Welcome to Arbroath those from further afield from Radical Independence Campaign Angus & Mearns

I was told I had tae make a speech today a while ago and I put off writing it till this morning, there's been so much going on in the world.

I promise I won't be long as I've sat through too many boring harangues in the past from people who should know better.

These are interesting times to live in as the ancient curse goes. I have been coming to this event for years and never has the alignment of history been more in our favour.

Those of us for whom Independence is not an end but a beginning have every reason for optimism.

Independence is coming. The dogs on the street and even the Bookies know it!!

More and more we see the old Labour Party, the party of the aristocrats of labour being disowned by people who can now see through their falsehoods. Who see them in disarray in what was once their heartlands, hand in hand with the Tories on every issue, abstaining on austerity their only policy being to say “snpbad”.

We see the Tories aye, the Tories marking Labour's Orange Card from the right and the rest deserting to vote for the SNP and the Greens.

Tories are still as unpopular as ever despite what the Daily Mail scum have to say, or that fine paper the Daily Express, owned by a pornographer, written for by dowplickers and read by racists.

We see working people in Scotland becoming more conscious, more aware, more sure that things need to change.

In the meantime, as a class, we bear the brunt of the class war. 

 Austerity is just a fancy name for class war. We live in a system which is based on the theft of workers labour on the one hand and the theft of the resources of oppressed nations on the other.

They get handouts for their banks and we get food banks; There are Millions for the Millionaires and crumbs for the rest of us; Billions for Trident and a “two child” rape clause for the rest of us; Sanctions kill the poor while the Rich rake it in.

It is a system with war as a default. Trident isn't a useless anomaly, it creates fortunes for the companies that make it. 

When Donald Trump launched 59 Tomahawk missiles the other day, he forgot to tell us that he has shares in Raytheon which makes the the things. He wins twice over.

We live in a system where every promise that was made to us to by the British State to get us to vote NO in 2014 has been broken. And these lies were made to be broken.

Breaking up that British state is our historical privilege.  What was once the premier Imperialist power in the world is creaking, on its last legs, to call it the "sick man of Europe" is to overstate the reality.

The British State becoming a federal state? The idea is laughable.

If 56 out of 59 Scottish MPs can be ignored with impunity, what's the point? People aren't daft. The writing is on the wall.

Our National MPs should remember that the Irish National Party, the party of Dillon and Parnell had a majority of the Irish seats in the House for Commons for thirty years and achieved little for their pains.

I started by saying these are interesting times. I'm not a fortune teller. No-one can predict the future

What we can do is to make the future.

Every one of us here, whether Radical Independence Campaign whether Scottish National Party whether Green whether Scottish Republican Socialist Movement need to be aware of the task before us.

We need to challenge unionism wherever we find it.

We need to support struggles against austerity and for the rights of our class.

We need to ask the awkward questions of those who propose to lead us.

When Independence is won it will be the working class that wins it. Whether it is through the ballot box in a referendum or whether there is another solution, it is working class Scotland that will safeguard our new-won liberties.

When the rump British State tells our constitutional campaigners that they cannae have another referendum, then it will be the workers of Scotland who can give these campaigners the bottle to say “no, our people are sovereign!”

The working class will win Independence, that class needs its reward. That's why we see Independence as a beginning and not an end. This is what John Maclean and James Connolly understood.

All of us here understand it too.

There is a well-known Cuban slogan “Hasta La Vittoria Siempre” - Ever onwards to victory.

Here's it in our language.

Aivin oan till Victory

Thank you!"