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"We have to posit something that is radically different to what we have with Westminster," Jonathon Shafi, the co-founder and organizational workhorse of the RIC, told me. "This isn't just about waving Scottish flags, it’s about a modern democracy that doesn't have a queen or king as head of state. We demand a social alternative to austerity—a break with neoliberalism."Last year, Shafi's party's campaign began in earnest with an 800-strong conference in Glasgow, a city recently awarded the unenviable title of being the unemployment capital of the UK. Locating their first major gathering there was no accident on the RIC's part—it's people like Glasgow's unemployed who the RIC believe should benefit the most from independence.Kat Boyd, a trade unionist, is aiming to get the radical independence message into disadvantaged communities and workplaces. Well known for her firebrand politics, Boyd says she was wrongly accused of organizing the ambush of Nigel Farage, the leader of the anti–European Union UK Independence Party (UKIP) in Edinburgh last spring. But while she rejects the "rent-a-mob Kat" tag she's been given since, she says she supported the action because it showed the independence movement had "nothing to do with" nationalism as the libertarian-leaning UKIP knows it.
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