by Randall Foggie

THE SALTIRE/Moneybag/Thistle logo of the SNP has been around since the 1960s. Here, I try to explain how it came to be and why it happened then…

In 1963 I was a student Scottish Nationalist at Edinburgh University. I was 22 and not bred into nationalism, although former leader Douglas Young was a cousin. To me, the SNP was a middle class, historicist, and romantic organisation, and just one part of the mishmash of nationalist movements of the day. I had drunk with all four of the “Scottish Liberation Army” in Rose Street and, in my opinion, they wouldn’t be able to fight their way out of a paper bag! I used to see Wendy Wood in full flow on her soapbox at the Mound and felt that also was not the way we were going to move nationalism forward.

The Covenant was spent. Two million signatures and nothing to show for it but that Westminster would do nothing unless it was done Westminster’s way. That pretty much left us with a guerrilla war – Radio Free Scotland, chalking freedom symbols on walls as CND were doing, or there was Roland Muirhead’s non-violent, noncooperative Scottish Congress. The only alternative lay in modernising the SNP, which would be a big ask as the SNP Conference could be held in an afternoon in half the ballroom of the Golden Lion in Stirling! We needed to stand out in that scrum of nationalists.