---
election_year: 1983
party_id: snp
party_name: Scottish National Party
party_leader: Gordon Wilson
political_spectrum: centre-left
victory: false
government_outcome: opposition
document_title: Choose Scotland — the Challenge of Independence
edition: contemporary-summary
source_work: The Times Guide to the House of Commons, June 1983
source_url: https://archive.org/details/timesguidetohous0000unse
source_pages: "351"
sections:
  - economy
  - energy
  - defence
  - welfare
  - democracy-and-constitution
---

> This is a contemporary summary printed in *The Times Guide to the House of Commons, June 1983* (p. 351). It is not the complete manifesto.

The Scottish National Party manifesto *Choose Scotland—the Challenge of Independence* said:

The British political system offers Scotland no hope of improvement. A further term of Thatcherism will devastate the Scottish economy, concentrating more wealth and power in the South-East of England. The weak and divided Labour Party is powerless to protect Scotland, and has failed us too often in the past to be trusted.

But there is an alternative—to choose Scotland. Never has the need for an independent Scottish Parliament and a Scottish Government been greater.

Only with our own Government will Scotland have the will and the resources to reverse our economic decline and end mass unemployment. Only a Scottish Government will remove all nuclear weapons from our soil. Only a Scottish Government will be able to tackle the appalling social conditions in which many of our people have to live.

The Scottish people have the right to self-determination — only by exercising that right will we have control over our country’s destiny.

When the SNP wins a majority of the Scottish seats in the UK Parliament, we will invite the other Scottish MPs to co-operate in negotiating the orderly transfer of power from Westminster to Scotland and the preparation of a Constitution.

The SNP rejects the belief that mass unemployment is inevitable, and has produced a detailed, fully-costed plan to reduce unemployment to the low levels found in other small European countries.

The SNP Jobs Plan, with a net cost of less than one-tenth of revenues from Scottish oil, would aim to create 220,000 new jobs within three years, reducing Scottish unemployment to about 5 per cent.

Scotland has seen little benefit from the oil bonanza. An SNP Government will set up an Oil Development Fund to invest oil revenues in job creation and industrial regeneration and establish a Scottish National Oil Company to ensure direct benefit to the Scottish public from oil development.

The SNP will build no more nuclear power stations, but retain existing stations and prevent the dumping of any foreign nuclear waste in Scotland.

We propose to introduce a statutory minimum wage to protect low earners and introduce a programme of industrial democracy, including worker-participation and profit-sharing in private and nationalised industries.

A Scottish Government will cancel the Trident nuclear programme, which will only fuel the arms race and increase our danger, and remove all nuclear weapons and foreign military establishments from Scottish soil and territorial waters.