Where are the Yes women?

There’s an article in Wednesday’s National: “Thanks to SIF for backing the National during Crisis.”

Now you – like me – may have no idea who SIF are or even that those letters stand for Scottish Independence Foundation, but you are undoubtedly aware of what they do. SIF, it turns out, are the reason we have so many successful Yes marches. They help fund them. SIF also provide the ‘seed’ money for Broadcasting Scotland and Independence Live so we can have video footage of every Yes march. They also provide funding for the uniforms of the Saor Alba pipes and drums*.

The National article gives a lot more information about SIF. And there’s a full description of SIF online, but look it up under Scottish Independence Foundation rather than Sif or you’ll be knee-deep in Norse gods.

Now SIF are backing the National in a time of crisis, when all newspapers, many much less deserving than the National, are about to go under.

(And no, frankly, I don’t give a rat’s bahookie what you think of the National. It’s ours. It’s well-meaning. It’s the only pro-independence paper we have. If you don’t like it, stay and reform it. Don’t let it shut down. Get your priorities right.)

But I have a complaint about SIF and it’s about their ‘board’. It looks as if the whole show is about ‘Five Guys Called SIF.’

Something has gone badly wrong with the independence campaign since 2014. Some of you will remember attending presentations given in scout halls and community centres to women by other women from the organisation called Women For Independence. This was a consciousness-raising organisation and it delivered: women went out to vote for independence; they marched; they stuffed envelopes and manned the Independence hubs. A lot of women who became aware of independence as an issue for them and their families are still online, on Facebook and twitter.  I’m grateful to my friend Lorna for telling me about WFI at the time and talking me into going to a packed presentation in a scout hall in Clarkston. Thanks to Lorna, in a short time, I heard Lesley Riddoch, Jeane Freeman and a whole host of clever, thoughtful people.

Women are still working for independence. Have a look at every Yes group you belong to on Facebook. Check the twitter feeds. The women are there. Sometimes angry, not always able to put their anger into words, and far too often ignored by the blogger boys, the ones who rate their success by the numbers of hits they get online rather than by the difference they make to recruiting Yes voters.

But women are not on the independence internet. As far as I can see, there are maybe three women blogging for independence. One of them is Lesley Riddoch. A second is Fidelma Cook. Where are all the other women? The ones who were so active in 2014.

Well, they’re not on the SIF board. The Five Guys Called SIF include a convener, a vice-convener and a chief executive. Sometimes guys crease me. They love their bureaucratic stuff.  I’ll bet SIF also have minutes and standing orders. Maybe a minute secretary. That may be a woman. It usually is. What should be a revolutionary organisation is thus reduced to a set of rules and procedures. Just the kind of nonsense a lot of women don’t have time for in every sense of that word.

What SIF don’t have is a single woman on their board. I know these are desperate times for the National, but in their place I would only agree to cooperate with SIF if they had at least two women on their board – preferably women appointed by the National – and one of them in a named job that doesn’t involve taking the minutes or making the tea..

This is a purely practical suggestion: women make up just a tad over 50% of the electorate in Scotland. They have the power to make the difference when it comes to IndyRef2. If Yes doesn’t muster the support of women, there will be no independence. Ignore them at your peril.

  

Somewhere, in my long working life, I came across this comment and it relates as much to women as to the poor, the sick and the excluded:

They made a circle that cut me out, so I made a circle that drew them in.

*Are the women drummers going to get uniforms too?