SARA Salyers, one of the driving forces behind a push to have Scotland “decolonised” by the United Nations, says she is “hoping for a miracle”. She is also hoping for a break.
Her years in the trenches fighting the decidedly unfashionable cause have left her exhausted, she tells the Sunday National.
But she wouldn’t be where she is – at the forefront of an organisation which claims 17,000 members and which she says can raise £40,000 in cash within a week – without drive and optimism.
The 67-year-old, a former TV producer who lives outside Dunfermline, Fife, believes that the focus on the Scottish independence movement should be on the international stage.
To this end, the campaign group Salvo, which she helped found, has backed a push by Liberation Scotland to present a petition to the UN to have Scotland recognised as a “non-self-governing territory”.
This would open the door to a UN-mandated referendum, in which neither the Scottish Parliament nor Westminster would have any say.
Critics say this is a cop-out which prefers a legal solution to a political problem.
But Salyers insists that getting the UN to recognise Scotland as a colony is merely the first step, one which will open the political floodgates.
People are divided, she says, into two camps. Either they believe that the international argument is “irrelevant” and it is about domestic politics or they believe that appealing to the international community is a silver bullet which will make Scotland independent virtually overnight. “That’s completely wrong,” she says.
“In every single case of independence, decolonisation requires a democratic event,” she says. For her and her fellow travellers, the appeal to the UN is the route to that democratic event.
“We will keep going till it happens,” says Salyers.
“We’re optimists – if we weren’t we wouldn’t be where we are now. I’m hoping for a miracle.”
It perhaps reveals a sense of the scale of the challenge Salvo and Liberation Scotland have set themselves. During our interview, Salyers refers to her desire to change Scots “grooves of thinking” about the country.
She references the work of the psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who examined the impact of colonisation on the psyches of colonised people. Scots, she believes, have suffered many of the same indignities the Algerians did under French rule.
A controversial statement, no doubt, but it is not an argument Salyers shies away from, stressing her profound belief that Scotland is as much of a colony of Britain as was, say, Ireland or Trinidad.
It is in reference to the latter country – where she lived with her father who ran a power plant during that country’s passage to independence – that one of Salyers's most provocative arguments arises.
Trinidad and Tobago became independent through negotiation with the UK Government, but had it been down to a referendum, Salyers argues, her father should not have had a vote as he was not from there.
So must it be for “passers-by and temporary residents or people with two homes who happen to come up to Scotland sometimes”, she says, in the event of a second Scottish independence referendum.
Salyers would prefer the template provided by the New Caledonia referendum, where voters had to prove they met one of eight criteria to cast a ballot for or against remaining part of France.
That cast a fairly wide net, though did require voters or their parents to have been born in the territory.
If Liberation Scotland’s push at the UN is successful, the path to independence is still by no means clear.
But if it is rejected, Salyers seems unlikely to want to throw in the towel.
“We’re kind of conditioned by a referendum that you win or lose, to see everything in those terms,” she says.
“It’s not always like that, in fact, it very rarely is. It’s very rarely like the verdict in a court or a black-and-white outcome.”
Salyers says that neither she nor her colleagues draw a salary from their campaigning work, “and nobody gets expenses, I’ll tell you that”.
Their motivation comes down to a sense of hope that she says is absent from the mainstream Scottish independence movement, who have “packed up their bags and gone home”, in her words.
Instead, they hope to offer an alternative to the arguing with “that big, blank wall of Westminster”, says Salyer.
At the moment, much “stock” is being put in the UN General Assembly meeting in New York this September, which may provide the point at which Liberation Scotland hands over their petition to officials to have Scotland recognised as a colony.
Salyers is hoping that things fall into place once that hurdle is overcome.
Labyrinthine bureaucracy at the UN means that something as simple as changing the mineral water sold in its Manhattan headquarters can take “four years”, says Salyers. “However, it can also turn on a dime.”
The grandmother-of-one certainly hopes that Scotland’s case will be a sea change moment.
“My ambition is to have done my part, seen this happen and sit back and actually be retired and spend some years of my life learning to keep bees and go for walks and being able to stop,” she says.
“I’d be very discouraged if I thought this was going to take a decade.”
Salyers may be waiting some time. In her New Caledonia example, the territory had been on the UN’s decolonisation list since 1986. To date, the South Pacific islanders have had four independence referendums, the first in 1987.
At the most recent, held in 2021, New Caledonians voted by 96.5% to 3.5% to remain part of France.
