By Pilar Fernández
Colleagues at Newsnet Scotland have launched the first video of the Duggy Dug Project. Financed by private donations, its objective is to report on the most important themes of debate in Scotland now with the occasion of the referendum to be held on 18 September 2014. Duggy Dug will be responsible for explaining everything that relates to an independent Scotland in an educational, fun and simple way. The Scottish actor Brian Cox puts his voice to this very clever Scottish dog.
It is well known in Scotland how important the battle will be to inform the undecided and neutralize the disinformation and manipulation from the pro-unionist media, who, of course, are using the techniques and discourses of fear and disrepute as the basis for their campaign. “Better Together” are already well known in the world of social networks as “Bitter Together”.
But Duggy Dug is not the only initiative to be launched recently, Wings Over Scotland launched about a month ago an appeal for an independent poll, because so far the only published statistics on voting intention in the referendum come from the pro-Union media.
It all costs, and it’s not easy to raised the money, but in less than 72 hours 400 % of the cost to carry out the survey were raised. Wings Over Scotland explained that they had to send desperate messages via Twitter to ask people not to make more donations … What a phenomenon! Clearly the Scottish people need to know and they don’t believe the media reports.
The results of this first initiative of Wings (the second is already in preparation) reflects among other things, that 36% of Scots have already decided to vote NO, compared to 34 % who opt for YES, the remaining 30% have still not decided. Another of the results showed that 67% of the Scottish population knows that a negative vote to independence means no more devolution powers to the Scottish Parliament (an argument disputed by the platform ” Better Together”).
All activity is important and YES Scotland, which has just discovered that its email accounts were hacked (this outrageous situation is under investigation), keeps working very hard with informative meetings across the country, focusing on answering all the questions that arise from the Scots. Also, a Rally for Scottish Independence has been organised that will take place next 21st of September in Edinburgh. It seems that it’s going to be an event of some significance.
This will be the second major event to take place since the announcement of the referendum; last year was the first one that had a successful influx of participants. A plural and inclusive nature is one of the characteristics of the organization , as it is important to break the lie launched and repeated insistently by ” Better Together” – that the Yes vote belongs only to Alex Salmond and the SNP and not to all the Scots.
Looking forward to 18th September 2014, there is still a huge stretch to walk and many small and big battles to fight. Independence supporters are sure that these sorts of initiatives and others to come will push Scotland on to regain its own state.
This article first appeared in the Galician language publication, Sermos Galiza, and appears here in English translation with kind permission of the author.