I am willing to accept that entirely, but that does not mean I have to stop arguing for it. Indeed, it was the hon. Gentleman’s party leader in Scotland who said it was legitimate, and even honourable, for the Scottish National party to continue advocating Scotland’s independence, and that is what I intend to do. I hope to turn the hon. Gentleman’s constituency around. I note that he did not mention the result of the EU referendum in his own constituency.
The point that Sir George Reid was making then, and it applies now, is that facts change and people are entitled to move. I want to come back to the point he was making about the facts. We should be looking at that, rather than allowing ourselves to be plagued by the positioning in trenches that poisons our politics and breeds cynicism, which is the least healthy thing we can have in our politics. It was Mandela himself who noted that cynicism must be opposed at all times.
There is a real danger that we will go back to a poisonous period in this Chamber in 1945, when the first ever SNP Member of Parliament, Robert McIntyre, was elected. He won his seat in a by-election for Motherwell. It took him several days to take his oath, because there were no two Members who would stand at the Bar of the House and allow him to approach the Table and take his oath. I do not want to see us return to that any time soon.
We are constantly being told that we are manufacturing grievances—indeed, the shadow Secretary of State said it earlier. I have much to be aggrieved about; I wish the shadow Secretary of State could be aggrieved about it with me. If that makes me a grievance monger, then frankly that is what my job here is to do. I am aggrieved by many of the things this Government do—some of which were adumbrated by my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss), who talked about drug consumption rooms and the awful immigration cases that all of us see coming through our constituency surgeries—and by the dreadful and quite regressive welfare measures that we see impacting on our constituents. You’d better believe it, I am aggrieved about many of those things.