Independence will free us from leaders like Boris Johnson who view being Scottish as a 'political disability' – Laura Waddell

I welcome the announcement there is to be another Scottish independence referendum before the end of 2023. It’s time. Let’s go.

Here is our chance to rid ourselves of the Westminster system once and for all, a system so engrained, knotted, whorled and warped from centuries of elitism, that the current leader of the UK is another braying Bullingdon boy and even the Labour Party leader is a Sir. A system where any attempts at change are heckled by hyenas in the building and hounded by their compatriots in the press outside. A system that has held Scotland in outright contempt for hundreds of years.

Here is our chance to get away from a political system that could elect a man like Boris Johnson as leader, a man who, under his time as editor of the Spectator, allowed publication of a poem calling Scots a “verminous race”, who wrote himself that “government by a Scot is just not conceivable in the current constitutional context”, and who described Gordon Brown’s Scottish nationality as a “personal political disability”.

That’s what the leader of the United Kingdom thinks of you and I. That’s what Better Together walked us into.

And yet it’s not just about Johnson. After entertaining himself as leader of the United Kingdom, he’ll retire in comfort, but the machinery that got him into that spot will still be clanking away underneath the building, pumping its pistons in the service of privilege.

It’s time for Scotland to go its own way. But let’s get one thing straight: the point of Scottish independence is to seize the opportunity to build a better, fairer system, not replicate the old one. A progressive Scotland that strives to be better for workers, for women, for minority and marginalised groups, for refugees, for everyone – and in spite of those who would divide us, those who have as little faith as Boris Johnson does in the ability of Scots to come together and build something better.

The first step is defending the right of Scottish citizens to democracy. There will be attempts to deny us this referendum.

After entertaining himself as Prime Minister, Boris Johnson will retire in comfort, but the system that saw him rise so high will continue (Picture: Dominic Lipinski/WPA pool/Getty Images)

Those voices will come from the old system, the one we want to get away from, the one that sees us as merely subjects and not active participants in our future.

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