Monday, 7 September · 1,250 words · The Clarion holds exclusive access to the group's internal charter
You hear the march before you see it. The steady thud of boots on the A9, mile after mile, a rhythm that does not hurry and does not stop. There is no brass band, no chant being led, no choreographed outrage. There is only the noise of a hundred people doing the simplest and hardest thing there is: placing one foot in front of the other, all the way across Scotland.
They walked out of John o' Groats before dawn on Monday. They will walk in to the gates of the Scottish Parliament on Thursday. Three hundred miles. Not as a stunt, not as a gesture, but as a statement of function: the people who were failed are making the journey to the door that kept them out, and they intend to be heard when they arrive.
These are survivors of institutional abuse. Men and women — and, in some tellings, children still — who passed through the care of the state and the church and came out the far side carrying what was done to them. The group asks that we name the institutions, not the individuals. They know, better than anyone, the difference between justice and a legal verdict. They have spent decades watching reports get written, accepted, and shelved. What they carried all those miles is not a grievance. It is a single, unsentimental demand.
"We are not here to negotiate. We are here to be answered. We ask for a statutory public inquiry, convened with a survivor veto over the evidence."
— The charter, a copy of which The Caledonian Clarion has seenThat line — survivor veto over evidence — is the news peg. Everything about this march hangs off it. It is what separates this walk from the marches that come and go, the ones with the same slogans and the same polite disappointment. A statutory inquiry with a survivor veto would mean the people testifying get a say in what is believed. Not a say in the outcome, but a say in what the inquiry is even allowed to look at. It is a modest request, and a radical one. It is the difference between being the subject of an investigation and being a party to it.
You will hear, this week, that such a veto is impractical, precedent-breaking, that it would tie the hands of any commission. The survivors have heard that too. They have heard it for fifty years. They did not walk three hundred miles to be told it again.
What they carry is not just the demand. It is the ledger of the walk itself.
There is the man who walked the Cairngorms in silence for a full day because the hill, as he put it, was the only place where the noise in his head stopped. There is the woman who at the bothy on the Fife coast told, for the first time in her life, the account she had never said aloud — and then, when she finished, looked around the room as if she expected the roof to fall in. It did not. That is the thing about the walk that no press release captures: the geography does the listening.
The land is a character here. The Cairngorms, grey and patient, holding the kind of weather that makes you keep your head down. The Fife coast, where the light on the water is almost forgiving. The Forth at the end, the last river between them and the Parliament. There is a reason the route was chosen. It is not the most direct. It is not the easiest. It is a route that asks something of you, the way the journey itself asks something of everyone who reads about it.
"The land remembers."
No one is asking for pity. That is the first thing you understand when you stand near the march. There is grief in it, and there is anger in it, and there is — this is the quiet surprise of it — a great deal of love. They walked with love and solidarity as brothers and sisters, and the words are not soft. On the A9, solidarity is not a slogan. It is the person who falls behind, and the two who fall back with them, and the pace that adjusts so that no one is left alone on the shoulder.
The single demand will be placed on the First Minister's desk on Thursday. The group is not asking for a meeting in the afternoon, for a photo at the door, for the usual choreography of a visit. They are not even asking the First Minister to be there when they arrive. They are asking that the inquiry be established, and that the people it concerns be given the power they were never granted.
They carried the charter all those miles, and at the end of the walk they will leave a chair empty in his absence. An empty chair is not a threat. It is a fact. It is the simple statement that the person who could have answered them is not coming, and that they have walked across a country to find that out. That it will be left empty, and not filled by a substitute, is itself part of the message: the survivors have had enough of being handed to the official who was available.
The end of the walk is not the end of the story. It is the point at which the story becomes the question the rest of the country has to answer. The marchers will arrive on Thursday and the cameras will be there and the politicians will make their statements. The chair will be empty. And the walking — the long, unhurried, unsentimental walking — will be over.
Justice is not a destination. It is a pace. This week, Scotland keeps that pace.
Our letters page is open. These are the voices we carry with us.
I walk because my safe care was damaged. I was supposed to be looked after, and I wasn't. The place that was meant to keep me safe was the place that hurt me. They starved us. They used us. They made us feel like we were nothing, and for a long time we believed them.
I walk because the land remembers even when people don't. It remembers what happened in those rooms, and it remembers who stood outside the door and looked away.
I walk because I'm not asking for pity. I'm asking for the truth to be spoken — and for the people who lived it to have a say in what that truth is.
This walk is work, and it is unison. Nobody forced me onto this road. I am not walking it alone. I have my dogs beside me, and I have my brothers and sisters beside me too. We are walking as a family — the closest thing to home I have known.
We may have been enslaved, but we walk. We walked with, and sometimes without, food — and we did not hurt anyone. They know what they did to us.
When the bus and the public transport were not safe, we walked. We walked until we could have our own cup of tea, our own piece of control — while they dressed it up as a bandage. They stole from us. They assaulted us. They prevented us from trading, from earning, from being.
That is not the end of the story. I walk because it isn't.
The Caledonian Clarion · part of S·OS — Caring for No 1.