Imagine there was an inquiry into a Government’s
handling of a sexual harassment case in another country and we were following
the details from afar. How would we react if we discovered that someone called
Fabiani was the chair of this committee, but she had previously been sacked by
someone called Salmond who was at the centre of what the inquiry was
investigating? This is the sort of thing where we used to look on and count
ourselves fortunate that we did not live in such a country where you could not
trust the referee to give an impartial decision. The Eastern part of Germany
might have called itself the German Democratic Republic, but the Government
controlled the media and everything else and the same party was elected at each
election and no one else had a chance.
It isn’t enough that people vote, and the votes are
counted for there to be a free and fair election. In lots of countries that are
not really democracies there are votes, but we snigger when they refer to
themselves as democracies. I wonder how many people are sniggering at Scotland if
indeed they are noticing us at all.
The Salmond Inquiry casts doubt not merely on whether
the Scottish Parliament is capable of investigating anything fairly, it casts
doubt on whether Scotland can be called a democracy at all. If such an inquiry
were investigating the poisoning of Alexei Navalny, we would snigger at the thought
that it could come up with a result that would imply that Vladimir Putin had
ordered the poisoning. At some point the Committee would have a vote on whether
it could read some evidence provided by Mr Navalny and it would vote along
party lines that it could not. Reading about this from afar we might not grasp all
the details of the case, but we would still have the smell of something rotten wafting
all the way from Tomsk.
But just as it will be impossible for Mr Navalny to
have a fair trial in Russia and just as it would be impossible for a committee
to investigate anything about Mr Putin and come up with a result that was damaging
to Mr Putin, so too it is impossible to have a free and fair election in
Russia.
Every day Mr Putin stands up on the state owned
Russian television channel and he speaks for an hour about Covid and uses that
hour to attack political opponents. He does this right up until the election.
The questions he receives from the press are carefully vetted. He hears them
all in advance and he controls the whole process of who gets to ask the
questions. If any reporter dares to give Mr Putin a hard time, then he finds
himself next day covering the husky races in Omsk. But it’s not Mr Putin that is
doing this. It is Nicola Sturgeon.
The desperation of independence supporters to achieve
their goal has tainted political life in Scotland. Now some of them are
revolting but it is too late.
In the early 1990s there was a brief window of
opportunity in Eastern Europe to get rid of tyrants some countries succeeded
others didn’t. In Belarus people looked on at the various revolutions going on
around them and decided not to take part. But by 2020 when they were faced with
yet another corrupt election, it was too late. Alexander Lukashenko had used
the intervening decades to control the police, the courts and the army and he
was willing to do anything to hold onto power. It was no use rebelling now
because decades earlier you had looked the other way as your country ceased to
be a democracy.
The two halves of Scottish nationalism, the Salmond
side and the Sturgeon side both looked the other way as she held mass rallies
with wee lassies weeping as they touched the hem of her raiment. They both
looked away as the Scottish media became ever more biased in favour of Sturgeon
and the personality cult developed. They
looked away because they thought it was in their interest because Sturgeon
would bring them their goal.
Now the Salmond side is revolting. Perhaps Sturgeon
only wants power and is merely using independence and our shameful hatred of
the English to keep it. Did she trick us
all along?
It’s unfair that the Inquiry is rigged, opponents are
liable to end up in court on trumped up charges and the media is doing its best
to ignore the whole thing anyway. But we only got to this position because
independence supporters looked away in 2014-2015 as Sturgeon built her empire
and began to control everything.
But independence supporters by creating Sturgeon have
also destroyed the one legitimate means they have for achieving independence.
If we can no longer trust elections in Scotland, we can no longer trust that the
SNP will ever have a mandate for anything. Sturgeon with her tame media machine
intends to keep on speaking every day right up to election day. Her civil
service which is supposed to be impartial during an election campaign will be
the same civil service that receives £76,000 in order to learn how to give the
correct answer to the Salmond Inquiry. But anyone looking on will realise that
Sturgeon would have no more democratic mandate than Putin or Lukashenko. So how
is the SNP supposed to progress to its goal? It can of course try to achieve independence
illegally. But what do we call a group of people who lack a democratic mandate
attempting to seize power? We call it a coup.
The Salmond Inquiry is chaired by a member of the SNP
Government with perhaps a grudge against Salmond. It has a Pro Independence stacked
deck and far from inquiring it is obfuscating. What do you call an Inquiry that
is trying to hide the truth? A cover up. But if we cannot trust the Salmond Inquiry,
the Scottish Civil Service, the courts and the Scottish Parliament itself, how
can we trust democracy in Scotland? The SNP may or may not win the next
Scottish Parliament election, but the result will have no more legitimacy than
a match where the referee has been bought.
We would look on and snigger at Scotland if we lived far away, but it’s not so funny anymore because we live here.
