Andrew Coventry is one of our recent defectors from the SNP. He outlines his journey to the Libertarians.

I recently joined the Scottish Libertarian Party having left the SNP after 34 years. I will not lie this was not an easy thing for me to do. As the song says I had given the best years of my life to a party with which I had become increasingly disillusioned. It wasn’t only the relentless drift to the left or the blind allegiance to the E.U. although these reasons were bad enough. However, the final straw for me was seeing the growing nepotism within the SNP exemplified by the local M.P. parachuting his latest girlfriend of about 5 minutes into a council seat and the membership not raising an eyebrow about this. I had always been a vociferous critic of Scottish Labour for behaving in this manner and to see the party which I had served and supported loyally throughout my entire adult life behaving in exactly the same way as the discredited Scottish Labour Party was the straw that broke the camels back. I resigned my membership and although sitting as an elected SNP Councillor resigned the Whip and sat for the last few months of the administration as an Independent. At the council elections of May 2017 I was urged to stand as an Independent candidate by supporters and constituents even though my first intention was to simply walk away. Although I was not elected in the election I polled over 400 1st preference votes and came within a hairs breadth of being re-elected.
I then took a decision that I could never return to the SNP as my views were just too far removed from what that party stood for. I am a firm believer that human beings can only achieve their potential when given the freedom to do so and I felt that the increasing paternalism of Scottish Politics in general was literally strangling the country to the point where it was becoming progressively more obvious to me that the state is so pervasive and stultifying that Scotland reminded me of a Warsaw Pact satellite state before the collapse of the Soviet Union. The myth that Scotland is a ‘socialist’ country I simply do not accept. Neither do I accept the view that we are all enthusiastic supporters of the E.U. Indeed one third of those who voted Yes in 2014 voted Leave in 2016. This is a real problem for the E.U zealots within the SNP. To be honest like many others I had never heard of the Scottish Libertarian Party, however after coming across online articles about the party I took the plunge and joined in May of this year. Although we are a small party I firmly believe that there is a huge constituency out there who are sympathetic to our views; all we have to do is to begin working hard and getting the message out there as much as possible. We need to begin knocking on doors and speaking to voters, we need to begin putting out as much literature as possible. In short we need to begin making a noise about ourselves. Not everyone will agree with us, but that is politics after all. Nevertheless, if we can begin to get people into elected positions on councils then Parliamentary seats will follow. Only then will we begin to influence the body politic and making a difference. We need to be seen as the party that challenges the monolithic views of the establishment. We need to be arguing for what is currently considered to be the unthinkable in order to improve choice in health care and education, to properly fund and empower local government. We can’t allow ourselves to be seen as part of the cosy establishment we have to be the true revolutionaries. I really do believe that there can be a great future for the Scottish Libertarian Party, there has to be for the sake of our children and grandchildren.