Wednesday 6 November 2024

Trump's Highland Charge


There is a tendency in certain Scottish nationalist circles to obsess about the Scottishness of vegetables. If a bag of potatoes fails to have a Scottish flag on it letters will be sent to the National and the possibility of a unilateral declaration of independence will be investigated to save the tatties from a fate worse than being eaten otherwise known as being described as British. 


Someone with a name like Faf de Klerk or Naas Botha may sing the just learned words of Flower of Scotland because of a distant relation from Achiltibuie that he is unable to find on the map and of who he was unaware until a week ago, but he too is as Scottish as Humza Yousaf when he pulls on the Scottish rugby shirt. 





But one man is never Scottish. 


Angus Robertson may have had a German mother and have been born in Wimbledon. Lesley Riddoch may have been born in Wolverhampton and grew up in Northern Ireland, but apparently having a mother whose first language was Gaelic from the Isle of Lewis does not a Scotsman make. 


Donald Trump has just become only the second President of the United States to win non-consecutive terms after Grover Cleveland. Poor Grover was descended from English ancestors so you would think the Scottish nationalist potato worriers would be going on about the first Scottish president to win non-consecutive terms, but strangely they are silent about the Donald’s Scottishness even if it’s hard to think of a more Scottish name than Donald except perhaps Humza. 


Why the horror when potatoes are called British when they are, while no objections at all are made when Donald Trump is not called Scottish which he is? Joe Biden based his Irishness on an ancestor who moved to America in the 1840s. Since then Joe had ancestors from everywhere else including heaven forfend England to the extent that his gene “Kelly” was liable to drown in the rain of Englishness. 


But Donald Trump is half Scottish. He does not need to invent a new tartan. It may not be quite as Scottish as the Yousaf tartan, but Macleod is rather more Scottish than either de Klerk or Botha. 


The reason of course why we have to ask Donald where’s your Scottishness rather than where’s your troosers is because the average Scottish nationalist as well as the average BBC journalist and Labour MP is this morning making a journey up the river into the heart of darkness where they meet Colonel Trump and find “The Horror, the Horror” that he has been elected President of the United States.


Trump may have more flaws than a lump of glass pretending to be a diamond, but his ability to drive the Left to distraction is absolutely flawless. 


I think that Trump may be rather good for the US economy. He may be rather helpful to Britain as at least he doesn’t hate us. He will support Israel and be very good indeed at opposing both terrorism and mass migration. We will have to wait and see how he deals with Ukraine. 


The free world faces two threats. The external threat comes from the alliance of Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and other jihadists and malcontents. It is important that these are detached from each other and contained if not defeated. Israel has done more to do this in the past year than anyone else and must be encouraged and supported until it finishes the job entirely. 


China can be tempted away because its primary interest is economic and because China will be pragmatic. Trump can perhaps make a deal that contains North Korea while protecting Taiwan by making clear that any Chinese aggression would have economic consequences. 


Russia needs to be brought back to the fold of normality whereby you don’t go around poisoning people nor invading other countries. Normalisation of economic relations should be the prize offered to Russia for behaving itself. 


The free world faces an internal threat that is at least as great as the external threat. The USA has for some decades been importing people indiscriminately without knowing who they are and what their intentions. The character of the USA has changed beyond all recognition much more than any country in Europe. There are parts of the USA where the majority language is no longer English. 


But a country is not a landmass it is the people who have lived there over the centuries. You cannot radically change the nature of that people and expect the country to remain what it was. 


The free world has become weak and decadent, obsessing about nonsense like men becoming women, apologising for our history, colonialism and slavery reparations. If you want an apology for colonialism then ditch all the computers, mobile phones and cars that colonialism brought you. 


Perhaps President Trump can begin reversing some of this, because it may be in the decades ahead that we will need to be much stronger in order to defeat China, which is rising like Japan in the 1930s. 


China does not apologise for anything and it does not have mass migration or asylum seekers. It does not obsess about gender and it is homogenous and united in a way that the United States no longer is. 


China would be willing to take a million casualties in a war because it would not even notice the loss. The USA was defeated at the Battle of Mogadishu after losing 18 lives. It is not serious. It means that the free world can barely even compete. 


Trump is a mad highlander charging the redcoats at the Battle of Prestonpans in his underwear. It’s a crazy way to fight a battle against muskets, but as the redcoats saw Trump getting closer waving his claymore you can understand why they wanted to run away. 


The danger of this way of being a president is that it can all go horribly wrong. It’s not Lincoln, it’s not FDR and it’s not Eisenhower, but nor is it weak. It is the most Scottish way of being a president even if the SNP disowns Trump. It’s the presidency as Highland charge and Trump might just triumph over all his enemies. We need him to. 



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Tuesday 15 October 2024

Salmond created the SNP's failure

 

For the past few days nothing of any worth has been written about Alex Salmond. De mortuis nil nisi bonum is a maxim that applies even to Nicola Sturgeon, but if it applies even to your greatest enemy it makes for very dull reading.

But the problem with Alex Salmond is that there is already too much mystery without adding yet more statements that we don’t mean. Above all with dead public figures we owe them the truth.



All Salmond’s achievements happened prior to September 2014. In the last ten years of his life, he achieved nothing whatsoever except see his reputation tarnished and like a contagion he found that that reputation infected others around him including Nicola Sturgeon and eventually the whole SNP.

The cause of the SNP’s success as well as its failure is ultimately due to Alex Salmond.

Scottish nationalism has never got further than “Scotland is a country not a county”. But the weakness of this argument is best illustrated by the fact that no one would dream of saying that “France is a country not a county”. If Scotland were a country in the same way that France is there would be no need to keep saying it. No one in any of the world’s countries asserts that theirs is a country rather than a county.

Salmond’s argument is obviously Scotland is a country and so should become a country. But this is the same as saying Scotland has four equal sides and so should become a square.

The word “country” in the case of Scotland clearly means something different from the case of France. In the case of France it means independent sovereign nation state, in the case of Scotland it means something more like Scotland used to be a country and is still called one and in a few instances like football acts like one. But you cannot use one definition of country to justify becoming another. That would be like arguing a rectangle ought to be a square even if it lacks four equal sides.

The Scottish nationalist argument is both powerful and trivial, but it depends on a dishonesty about the nature of Scotland a sort of self-deception that involves pretending that we are already an independent country in order to justify our becoming one. But it is not the only lie upon which the foundations of the SNP were built.

From the beginning of Salmond becoming First Minister there began the cult of personality that developed still further under Nicola Sturgeon. There were no dissenting voices when Salmond was leader. There were no leaks. It gradually became clear that so long as he offered nationalistic minded Scots the prospect of independence, he could do no wrong as they were completely indifferent to any other policies.

He began the process of conflating Scotland with the SNP. He expected employees of the state to act in his party’s interest. He began to argue that disagreeing with the SNP especially on the issue of independence was unpatriotic.

It was this that created the two Alex Salmonds the public and the private. We have a record of what the former did, but we know little about the true nature of the latter.

Something must have happened while Salmond lived in Bute House, which led to him being charged with a variety of offences against women who worked there. It may be that Salmond was lucky to avoid conviction or else it may be that his behaviour was exaggerated by the witnesses against him. But the important point is that nothing was said in 2013 or 2014 that might damage the cause of independence or its leader.

Salmond must have known when he was First Minister that no one would complain or leak anything to the newspapers. It must have given him a sense of power that meant he could get away with anything. He could lose his temper or say something dubious. He could try to pick someone up and if he succeeded it was fine and if he failed it was fine.

It was his pathetic little argument that Scotland is a country that gave him this power because it meant that anyone with any objection against Salmond would reflect that this is the leader of the independence movement and so would keep silent out of party loyalty and patriotism.

But Salmond did not realise that the monster that he had created was not merely his monster, it would be Nicola Sturgeon’s monster too and she could use it against Salmond not least because it became still more powerful under her rule.

Salmond should have stayed leader of the SNP and First Minister after 2014 unless somehow, he was forced to resign. The cult of personality under Sturgeon got worse. The secrecy increased and in time the same sense that she could get away with anything grew to consume her.

But this time what Sturgeon thought she could get away with was something quite different from what Salmond thought he could get away with. He could get away with straying hands a temper and one drink too many. She could get away with rather more.

“Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” someone once said and soon appeared some loyal knights willing to do just that.

What Salmond himself created almost destroyed him. But then it went still further and destroyed both Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP.

It’s all very well appealing to people’s nationalism, but you had better mean it too otherwise they will feel foolish and turn again and rend you.

So long as the SNP remained a nationalistic movement dedicated to independence as it certainly was under Salmond then people would ignore all his faults, but under Nicola Sturgeon it became something quite different.

Scottish nationalists began to realise that Sturgeon was using “Scotland is a country not a county” to get away with anything and to gain everything and so they turned against her and her party as this was the only antidote to their previous folly in believing her.

Scottish nationalism is like birch bark it is thin and shallow, but it can when lit give a brief bright flame. Salmond did not realise that he had to provide more substantial fuel to win the argument. After all no one to my knowledge has ever claimed Scotland to be a county.

But during that brief bright flame the danger of nationalism is that it’s leaders can indeed get away with anything and gain everything. Salmond blew on the dry kindling and created the conflagration that almost enveloped him and indeed the rest of us.

Only now is it dying down. Perhaps in time we will find in the ashes of Scottish nationalism some truth and some justice. But the form of the branches of the Scottish legal system need to rise from those same ashes if we are to find either.


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Saturday 28 September 2024

Do you suffer from Islamophobia?


We need to make a distinction between the believer and what he believes. It is wrong for me to discriminate against Jewish people or to act in a hateful way towards them. But I ought to be allowed to say what I please about the beliefs of Judaism. I can point out for instance that I doubt that God parted the Red Sea or created the world in seven days. 


So too it would be wrong for me to discriminate against Hindus or to express hatred towards them. But I ought to be able to say what I like about the Bhagavad Gita.



While it would be sectarian if I expressed hatred towards Catholics, I ought to be able to say what I like about Catholicism. It is not sectarian to criticise the doctrine of transubstantiation or to doubt the infallibility of the Pope. 


No one thinks it is antisemitic, anti Hindu or sectarian to criticise and speak freely about the religious beliefs of Jews, Hindus or Catholics. 


The problem with the concept of Islamophobia is that it goes beyond this. While it is clearly wrong to discriminate against Muslims and to express hatred towards them simply because they are Muslims, it ought to be possible in the same way as Judaism, Hinduism and Catholicism to criticise Islamic texts and beliefs. But it isn’t.


What Muslims want is not merely that we don’t express prejudice against them or act towards them in a hateful way. They want also that we refrain from saying anything critical or indeed hateful towards Islam. 


But this is quite different. There is no such thing as Judaismphobia, Hinduismphobia or Catholicismphobia and adherents to these religions are quite happy for everyone else neither to follow the rules of their religion nor to be respectful towards it. I can hate Judaism, Hinduism and Catholicism with impunity so long as I don’t hate Jews, Hindus and Catholics. 


I can burn a copy of the Torah, the Bhagavad Gita or the New Testament and no one will pay much attention. I can mock God, Moses, Krishna, Vishnu and Jesus and depict them in a satirical way in any way I please and no one will call it a phobia. But if I do the same with the holy books of Islam or if I make even respectful pictures of the prophet let alone satirical ones Muslims want to call this Islamophobia. 


This is the danger of this concept to our shared society where equality before the law is so vital. Muslims don’t want to be equal, they want their religious beliefs to be protected in a way that no one else’s are. But you cannot have equality before the law if one group and one group only has rights that no one else has. 


Muslims like everyone else ought to have freedom of religion, but they cannot demand that non-Muslims must follow Islamic laws and duties. Jews do not demand that everyone else follows Jewish rules regarding the Sabbath, diet, or clothing. But Muslims demand that the Muslim rules of not depicting the prophet or the respectful treatment of the Quran apply to non-Muslims. If we don’t follow these rules we are Islamophobic. 


But this is like saying if I don’t go to Church on Sunday I am being Christianityphobic or if I don’t wear a kippah I am Judaismphobic.


We must make a sharp distinction between the believer and the belief. While not being prejudiced against Jews, Hindus and Catholics I ought to be able to say what I like about the history of these beliefs or indeed how believers act today. 


It is not Judaismphobic or indeed antisemitic to be critical of Israel so long as I don’t apply a standard of criticism to Israel that I apply to no one else. So too it is not Hinduismphobic to be critical of Hindu nationalism or the government of India. I should be able to say what I like about the history of Catholicism and how Catholicism is expressed in Catholic countries. 


But it is just here that Muslims demand something that no one else has. If I express criticism of the history of Islam or how Islam is expressed in Saudi Arabia or Iran I am liable to be called Islamophobic. 


But this is intellectually dishonest and makes free speech impossible. While the sacred texts of Christianity have been criticised and while the history of the spread of Christianity has often been condemned as colonialism, while Zionism and the process by which Jewish people moved to the Middle East is condemned, there is no similar criticism of the spread of Islam. There were after all no Muslims nor Arabic speakers in Palestine prior to the prophet. 


It ought to be possible for British people to be critical of Islamic texts and Islamic history. It ought to be possible for us to mock and satirise Islam in just the same way as we do with Christianity. But if anyone were so foolish as to do so, he would be liable to arrest by the British police if indeed he survived long enough to be arrested. 


It is not Muslims who need to be protected with regard to free expression about Judaism, Hinduism or Christianity. They can say what they wish about these religions and they will neither be arrested nor threatened. It is non-Muslims who need to be protected to speak freely about Islam. Here the threat is so real that merely showing a picture of the prophet to a class sends a teacher into hiding while no one who threatens him is sent to jail. 


It is quite reasonable for this teacher to feel Islamophobia because he is indeed threatened and it is not as when someone has a phobia about something that is not dangerous. In this case the fear is well grounded as was the fear of danger that Salman Rushdie felt, which eventually saw him lose an eye in an attack which he was lucky to survive.


If I lived in Iran I would live in a theocracy. If I were a homosexual secretly living there or if I secretly brewed alcohol I too might have Islamophobia on the grounds that if I were caught Islamic laws might punish me quite severely.


But if I live in Britain I should not have any reason to feel Islamophobia. Indeed until the 1950s I might quite happily have lived my life knowing next to nothing about Islam let alone fearing it. 


But many British people now view the continuing spread of Islam as something that brings with it new fears. 


The concept of Islamophobia demanding special privileges and protections did not exist in Britain prior to the arrival of large numbers of Muslims. As these numbers continue to increase these privileges and protections are liable to increase also, but it is no doubt Islamophobic to fear that this will happen. We must continue to believe that Britain won’t change at all even while we watch how it did.



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Thursday 26 September 2024

Reviving the SNP corpse

 

Scottish nationalism was decisively defeated in July 2024 when only 30% of Scottish voters chose to support the SNP and it won nine seats. Alba won 11,000 votes. But there are those who wish to revive the corpse with a form a necromancy called setting the goal posts for a second referendum and turning Scotland into Northern Ireland.

The truth however is that Scotland has already had its second referendum. The SNP announced on numerous occasions that the General Election was a de facto referendum. The terms of victory were various. Sometimes the SNP had to win a majority of seats, at other times it just had to be the largest party, at others it had to win more than 50% of the vote. There is little doubt that if it had won any of these it would have demanded a referendum on independence. But it lost whatever variant of the de facto referendum it might have chosen. So, it is reasonable for the rest of us to point out that you have now lost two referendums so it is now the settled will of Scottish voters that Scotland remain part of the UK.


But now we are beginning to hear certain voices suggesting that the government set out what would need to happen in order for there to be some sort of legal right to a second referendum and that Scotland should be in a similar situation to Northern Ireland where the Belfast Agreement says that if the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland believes that a majority of Northern Irish voters wished to leave the UK and join Ireland they ought to have a referendum on this issue and if a similar referendum in Ireland were successful the merger should take place.

But Scotland is not like Northern Ireland. There is one reason and one reason only why there is a Belfast Agreement. The IRA engaged in a three-decade long campaign of terror with the goal of forcing Northern Ireland to leave the UK. The IRA knew that it could not win militarily so it settled for being able to achieve its goal by means of the ballot box rather than the Armalite.

The British government made a major concession and chose to reward terrorism because it hoped for lasting peace. Nowhere else in the world where there are territorial disputes between nation states is there such a mechanism to change sovereignty by means of referendums.

Hungary does not get to argue that Transylvania should be ceded by Romania on the basis of a referendum. Austria does not get to argue that it should get back South Tyrol from Italy by means of a vote. Mexico cannot obtain the states that it lost in the 1840s by hoping that Mexican Americans will one day be a sufficiently large group that they will chose to leave the USA.

There have been numerous border changes following both the First and Second World Wars, but only in the case of Ireland is there supposedly a justification for reunification. No one thinks that Germany has the right to reunite with Elsaß–Lothringen [Alsace–Lorraine] or to regain the lands lost to Poland.

In the whole of Europe, the only border that can be changed by means of a vote is that between Northern Ireland and Ireland.

I have always felt dubious about the Belfast Agreement, because it is a concession to terrorism and a reward for bombing. Ireland has no more legitimate a claim on British territory than Russia has a legitimate claim on Ukrainian territory. It matters not one little bit that Crimea used to be part of Russia. One state ought not to seek to annex the territory of another.

But the idea that the future of Northern Ireland would be decided by means of a referendum was put to Northern Irish voters in a referendum and the majority chose to accept the Belfast Agreement. Irish voters agreed.

For a similar situation to obtain in Scotland therefore it would be necessary to have a referendum on the conditions needed to obtain an independence referendum and for it to succeed both in Scotland and in the other parts of the UK.

But the very act of doing so would itself undermine the sovereignty of the UK just as it has already been undermined by setting out the conditions for secession in Northern Ireland.

In Europe no part of any nation state has the right to leave by means of a referendum. It matters not one little bit whether that part was once itself an independent country. In every European state there are parts that at one point were independent countries. None of them have the right to leave. No one thinks that this is undemocratic.

The UK is gradually moving towards the same position. The Supreme Court decision after Nicola Sturgeon asked for the Scottish Parliament to be given the right to vote for a referendum is clear. Scotland is not a colony. Rather despite being called a country it is constitutionally a region of a unitary state called the UK in exactly the same way that Normandy and Burgundy are regions of a unitary state called France. If they don’t have the right to vote to leave France, then neither does Scotland. The legal position in international law is identical.

The UK has traditionally allowed a loose way of talking that treats its parts as separate countries, but we have discovered that it is just this that fuels nationalism. The danger of setting out the conditions for this nationalism to succeed is that it both undermines the correct view of the UK that it is unitary nation state and fuels nationalism by giving it a goal that it can work towards.

The idea that this would somehow make the constitutional issue in Scotland go away is preposterous. Having decisively defeated the SNP the one thing that might revive it is to give it victory conditions.

Secession was defeated in the USA not merely by force of arms but intellectually and legally by making clear in a way that was unclear before 1860 that states’ rights did not include the right to secede. After the Civil War the United States became “one Nation under God, indivisible” and precisely for this reason never again faced the threat of secession or civil war. Setting out the conditions for state secession in 1865 after defeating secession would merely have provided necromancy for the dead corpse of the Confederacy.

It is precisely this that certain voices want to do now in order revive the dead corpse of the SNP.


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Tuesday 17 September 2024

Indyref; or tis ten years since. Part three

 

For nearly three hundred years Scotland was quite happy to be part of the UK. The rise of the SNP happened for two reasons. One was Conservative rule in the 1980s, which Scots resented because we voted Labour. The other was the Scottish Parliament, which was both a response to Thatcherism and enabled the SNP to gain power in a way that would have been impossible before. But Scotland was never different enough from the other parts of the UK for Scottish independence to succeed. To choose to separate and partition a relatively small island where people are more or less the same always looked like an exaggeration and so it has proved.

Independence movements need a deep reason to succeed for it is natural for nation states not to split. These deep reasons may be that the people in one part of a nation state find themselves to be religiously, culturally, geographically or linguistically distinct from their fellow citizens.



It was natural for the USA to seek independence because there was the Atlantic Ocean between Britain and America. The same applies to Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

People in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia sought independence from the Soviet Union because they viewed themselves as fundamentally different peoples from Russians. But where is the same sort of difference between Scots and English people?

If you have lived in both England and Scotland, you will find life in each remarkably similar. Moving to England is not remotely like moving to Denmark, or France. There is no culture shock. There is no need to adapt to a different culture and language.

Scotland was very different from England in the eighteenth century. Our form of Presbyterianism was rather different from the Church of England. People still spoke Scots in the lowlands and Gaelic in the Highlands. The Scots spoken by Robbie Burns or Walter Scott was at least as different from English as Dutch from German or Czech from Polish. But since then both Scots and Gaelic have declined.

Now Gaelic is spoken as a native language by a tiny number of people in the Skye and the Outer Hebrides. Scots as a distinct language has ceased to exist. There is a Scottish accent and there are some different words, but very few Scots speak anything other than English with a slightly different pronunciation and a few Scots words added at times for flavour.

I grew up speaking Aberdeenshire Scots or Doric, but my vocabulary was always limited. If I learn Polish, I can speak about anything in Polish as I have the grammar and the vocabulary to do so. But I run out of Scots vocabulary very quickly and if I find myself needing to give a talk about physics or mathematics, I find myself reliant on English vocabulary and try desperately to find a Scottish pronunciation and spelling of these English words which is quite inauthentic. To suppose that modern Scottish people actually speak Scots is to show a lack of knowledge of actually speaking a foreign language. It is a wholly different experience involving learning thousands of words and a distinct grammar.

The rest of the Scottish culture that Scottish nationalists rely on to create a distinction where there is no real difference is to rely on things like playing bagpipes, wearing kilts and a selective view of history that has nothing much to do with modern Scotland. People in ordinary life do not usually wear kilts or play bagpipes. The history they rely on to demand secession from England is far more remote to Scots than England is.

We would struggle to communicate with the people who fought at Culloden let alone those who fought at Bannockburn and would find their views on almost everything quite alien.

Scottish nationalism desperately tried to create a difference by means of Gaelic road signs, perverse attempts to speak Scots at Holyrood and marches involving dressing up in costumes from the past. But it is precisely this that meant the SNP was unable to properly speak to Scots living now.

Sometimes a political difference can divide a population so much that they seek independence. A good example is the southern states in the USA who universally did not vote for Lincoln in the 1860 presidential election. After several decades the USA was unable to solve its political differences democratically and so fought a war of secession.

But the differences here were quite momentous and the experience of living in the Confederacy was quite different from living in the North. The issues that divided them including states’ rights and ultimately slavery could not be reconciled democratically because the majority in the South had one view, the majority in the North another and so it came to war. But we can see that from the perspective of the southern states secession was justified even if the attempt to retain slavery clearly was not.

But where is a similar difference between Scotland and England? Thatcher ruled while Scotland went through a period of deindustrialisation, but this happened also in the north of England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Scottish voters chose Labour while English votes chose Thatcher in the 1980s, but this was a temporary difference and is a feature of all democracies.

It’s only on the assumption that Scotland is already independent that it can be viewed as unfair if Scotland is outvoted in a UK General Election. No one thinks that it is unfair if California votes Democrat but gets Donald Trump as president. To suppose that it is to make democracy impossible or to treat Scottish votes as more important than a similar number of votes in another part of the UK.

Likewise, the argument that Scotland was taken out of the EU against its will is to assume that Scotland joined the EU. But we didn’t. The UK as a whole joined because of voters everywhere. It took a majority of UK voters to join, and it took a majority of UK voters to leave. Scottish voters individually had as much say in the decision both to join and to leave as everyone else.

Again, it is only on the assumption that Scotland was already independent that it could be considered unfair as if the Netherlands voting to leave the EU dragged Luxembourg out. But Scotland is not Luxembourg. It is not a sovereign nation state, and it was never a member state of the EU either.

Scotland could reasonably complain of a lack of democracy if we did not have free and fair elections, or we elected fewer MPs per population than England does. But we don’t. We have just the same amount of democracy as people in a part of England with five million people. We have just the same number of MPs we have just the same chance to influence political decisions. Our five million will naturally be outnumbered by 10 million elsewhere, but the same could be said for any grouping of voters in the UK. It is not unfair if parts of the UK that vote Conservative are outnumbered by other parts that vote Labour. That’s how democracy works.

The failure of Scottish nationalism and the SNP also is due to independence being an exaggerated response both to differences between England and Scotland that are largely manufactured, and which simply do not fit in with our lived experience. We do not view English people as foreigners because they are too similar.

Humza Yousaf may argue that it is hard to think of someone more Scottish than he is. He was born in Scotland. He was educated in Scotland. But Humza Yousaf is far more similar to Sadiq Khan and far more different from me than I am from the average person who happens to live in England Wales or Northern Ireland. Where are the grounds for separation if one person’s family chose to migrate to London while another’s chose to migrate to Glasow. To suppose that they can’t bear living in the same country because of the one’s Scottishness, and the other’s Englishness is to beg the question how people who are dissimilar can manage to form the population of one country? But if Scots can’t manage to live in the same country as English people, how are we all going to manage to live with people whose origins are from the whole world and who have when they arrive nothing whatsoever in common with the people here already including a shared language?

The idea that anyone just by arriving in Scotland could immediately and automatically be as Scottish as any of its previous inhabitants was both necessary for Scottish nationalism to remain respectable, but also fatally undermined the argument. If Scottishness is such that it can be put on like a new coat, then where is the need to separate? What indeed is the reason to treat Scots both as a separate people whose votes must be counted separately and where they live as a separate country? Civic nationalism thus either collapses into ethnic nationalism with kilts and bagpipes or else it ceases to have any reason for that nationalism and collapses into nothing.

The political issues in the UK including Thatcherism have been resolved successfully politically. If you want to get rid of Thatcherism you don’t need to vote for independence you just need to vote for Labour. So too far more English people were disappointed by leaving the EU than Scots and if sufficient number wish to rejoin the EU, we will do that.

Scottish nationalism looks back to times when Scots and English people genuinely were different to the extent that we played different musical instruments, spoke different languages and worshipped at different churches. But we do none of these things now. If you go to work or walk down the street in Scotland the clothes, we wear the culture we have and the language we speak are almost identical to anywhere in England. Scots can move to England and immediately fit in and vice versa.

The vote for independence was always unwarranted. It was an exaggeration based on a view of Scotland that is itself an exaggeration. Scotland was a separate country long ago, but it is not one now. The SNP had to assume Scottish independence in order to prove it otherwise there was no reason to complain about Scotland being outvoted.

But this view of the UK as a sort of mini EU confederation made up of separate states failed as a justification for independence because you cannot become independent when you already are. It undermined both the need and the desire for independence. Why go to all that trouble just to become to become independent if you think you are that already? The SNP therefore fatally undermined its own argument.


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Friday 13 September 2024

Indyref; or tis ten years since. Part two

 

Just as we have to assess why Jacobitism failed so too will future historians try to assess why Scottish nationalism failed. It is to be hoped that they will have information that is not available to us or at the very least that they will be able to write more freely about these matters than we can.

It is astonishing to realise that almost everything that we have been through from 2007 to now did not need to happen. It is quite likely in 2026 that the SNP will be the largest party at Holyrood, but without a majority and indeed unable to form a majority. In this circumstance no one think that John Swinney or his successor will become First Minister. The Pro UK parties will vote for Anas Sarwar and informally keep him in power. The SNP will be shut out even if it is the largest party.


But this is exactly the situation that obtained in 2007 when Alex Salmond won 47 seats one more than Labour on 46. He needed an informal deal with Annabel Goldie the Scottish Conservative leader to become First Minister.  Can you imagine the level of stupidity required to make Alex Salmond First Minister?

But it was a different world in 2007. No doubt Goldie thought her task was to defeat Labour rather than protect the UK from Scottish nationalism.

So, it might well have been that instead of Alex Salmond as First Minister we could have continued with Jack McConnell. It may then have been that Labour continued in power in 2011 and that there was no independence referendum in 2014. The SNP may never have governed. Scotland need not have had nearly twenty years of Scottish nationalism to deal with.

Alex Salmond changed everything. He used the power that Goldie gave him to change the Scottish Executive into the Scottish Government and he began the process of treating Scotland as if it were already independent as a means of obtaining that independence.

If there is one figure responsible for the rise of Scottish nationalism and the success of the SNP it is Alex Salmond. No one else comes close. Nicola Sturgeon reached heights of personal popularity that Salmond did reach, but if it had not been for Salmond she would have remained a long-forgotten SNP MSP or perhaps not even that.

It was Salmond’s skill as a politician that first made him well known in Scotland, much more so that previous SNP leaders. He and he alone turned the SNP from a strictly minority party to a party of government. He then used that power as First Minister to turn a minority into what ought to have been impossible an absolute majority and this into the still more impossible independence referendum. Sturgeon despite her undoubted skills and ability to communicate emotion, did none of these things.

This is where we come to some unknowns. These unknowns are the reasons why Scottish nationalism ultimately failed. They are to do with the relationship between Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon and why they went from being apparently the best of friends to the worst of enemies and I must briefly digress.

There was at the time in Scotland a new university with a new history department. Solomon Alexandersen became head of that department, and his deputy was Stuart Nicholson. Now Solomon and Stuart were great friends and there was speculation that they might even have been more than friends. But Solomon found that he did not need Stuart anymore for recreational purposes as being head of department gave him access to all the girls he could require. This sort of circumstance has been quite typical in universities. The head of department has a certain attractiveness, and it can be quite useful to go to bed with him if you want some help with your exams or with a reference or indeed with a promotion. It may be sleazy, but such sleaziness goes all the way back to Plato’s symposium.

Now it might be that later when Stuart became head of department, he resented the success of Solomon and perhaps felt personally betrayed. Stuart might then have decided to investigate whether any of the girls were willing to say anything about what Solomon had got up to.

A powerful man who picks up young girls in part because of his power is not uncommon, but it is very easy indeed to turn an entirely consensual relationship albeit based on an imbalance of power into something else.

Here we have another imbalance of power if Stuart put pressure on these girls to discover that a consensual relationship was not consensual. You just need to exaggerate a little. Who after all can know what happened between you and the head of department in private years ago? That job you want is just waiting for you or alternatively you will get nowhere.

This is the problem when some years afterwards there is an investigation into the rather sleazy goings on in the history department. Who is to know what really went on? There can be corruption both during the reign of Solomon and during the reign of Stuart.

All we know is that no one sought to complain about Solomon when he was head of department and that the complaints only arose years later when Stuart was in charge.

But with such division in the department, with investigations and charges is it any surprise that the history department lost sight of its goal of investigating history.

Nicola Sturgeon led the SNP to perhaps its greatest success in 2015 when it won all but three of the seats at the General Election. But it was not her success. If Alex Salmond had remained SNP leader after losing the referendum in 2014, he would doubtless have achieved the same success in 2015. Indeed, if Nicola Sturgeon had been hit by a bus in 2014 and any other SNP MSP had become leader this person too would have achieved the same success.

Scotland in 2015 felt guilty that it had not chosen independence when it had the chance. There was also a matter of momentum. Support for independence had grown very far and very fast from around 25% to 45% and it was not surprising that it grew a bit more in the few months after 2014.

It was much easier to vote SNP to assuage your guilt knowing that Scotland would not become independent and that the General Election of 2015 was not about independence.

But what did Nicola Sturgeon do with her MPs apart from stand in front of the Forth Rail Bridge with them? It is hard to point to one significant thing that any of these MPs did.

In 2016 the UK voted to leave the EU. Although the SNP had not made any great contribution to the Remain campaign it tried to use the fact that Scotland had voted by 62% to remain in the EU to justify another referendum. How close did Nicola Sturgeon come to achieving this goal? Not very.

The route that Sturgeon chose to go down was to try to pressurise the British government into granting her a referendum based on the support that the SNP obtained either at a Scottish parliament election or a General Election. But this route turned out to lead merely into a cul de sac.

The independence referendum of 2014 changed the circumstance that had existed prior to then. This is something that the SNP did not realise at the time.

In the 1930s it was impossible for the King to marry a divorcee, but by the time we arrived at King Charles III not only was it possible for Charles to marry a divorcee it was possible also for him to be one himself. No one suggested that he needed to abdicate.

So too what the SNP needed to obtain independence or even a referendum on the subject changed from the 1980s when a simple majority of MPs would be enough to frankly nothing being enough at least not now, because you have already had your referendum.

The British Prime Minister whether Theresa May or Boris Johnson discovered that it was quite possible to say No to the SNP leader without a new Jacobite rising occurring. Nothing very terrible happened when Nicola Sturgeon banged on about her party having a mandate and there was nothing much she could do. Her impotence merely showed that she did not have a mandate.

Most Scots were happy about this. A few Remainers flirted with Scottish nationalism, most Pro UK people were delighted, and many independence supporters were in the make me holy camp God but not yet.

Scottish nationalists marched, but not in large numbers. The marches were a good-natured chance to dress up and play bagpipes, but they never persuaded anyone that there was some hidden majority of Scottish nationalists just waiting to overthrow the UK. The marches merely demonstrated the paucity of support for independence and so were really marching for counter productiveness rather than secession.

Support for the SNP fell in the 2017 General Election which rather undermined hopes that Brexit could be used as a lever to separate England and Scotland. Scots might have been angered about being outnumbered by English people, but it wasn’t entirely clear what if anything the English should do about this? Perhaps Scotland could have as many MPs as England despite having a tenth of the population. Perhaps there could be a cull of English people to reduce them to the population of Scotland. The SNP argument amounts to England is a big boy and we are a wee boy and it’s not fair.

Nicola Sturgeon fatally undermined her own argument when she campaigned for a Second “People’s Referendum” on Brexit. She didn’t realise that if the SNP ever won a referendum on leaving the UK there would immediately be a campaign for a second chance. Worse she allowed her SNP MPs to conspire with Labour and the Lib Dems in Westminster in attempting to thwart the Brexit vote.

We discovered at this point for the first time that a referendum was merely advisory and that it was up to parliament to decide whether it wished to be advised or not.

Fair enough this was implicit in our understanding of parliamentary sovereignty, but it stuffed the SNP because it meant that even if it won a referendum on independence a parliament in which the SNP was always going to be outnumbered could overrule it. If it could do so with Brexit it could equally well do so with Scexit.

Sturgeon became more popular during the pandemic, but the substance of her argument became worse. Scotland received its furlough money from the hated Tories and its vaccination too. Sturgeon made her Scottish rules different from the British ones, but these merely caused confusion rather than saved lives. About as many Scots died proportionally as everyone else in the UK and all we got from Sturgeon was the usual emoting rather than anything that made a difference.

She kept pushing the line each year that next year there would be a second referendum, but it is entirely unclear if by this stage she herself believed it any more than the rest of us. It became merely a way of keeping the party faithful happy like Labour singing the Red Flag without anyone believing that there would be any red flags next year let alone any revolution.

Sturgeon felt the need to keep pushing it by devising schemes such as a de facto referendum at a General Election but finally pushed herself into the “cullest” of cul de sacs by demanding that the Supreme Court give her the right to hold a referendum on independence.

In a devastating ruling the Supreme Court denied that Scotland had the right to self-determination and made clear that Scotland was to the UK as Aberdeenshire is to Scotland. Neither have the right to a referendum on independence. Scotland is not a colony. It is not even really a country. That is merely a way of talking. Scotland was a country in the same way that Burgundy was a country, but this has no political significance either in France or in Britain.

Again, I must return to the unknowns. Please excuse the digression.

When Stuart Nicholson realised the pointlessness of studying history, he decided to play a game. He would tell the students that they would all get wonderful jobs if only they studied at his department, but what he would really do was fleece them as much as he possibly could.

The problem with dishonesty and trying to get Solomon Alexandersen arrested for what was at best an exaggeration of his misbehaviour was that once you have crossed the dishonesty threshold the temptation to use your power dishonestly becomes still greater.

Stuart ran the department. He had along with his husband absolute power over the finances and the accounts. He could buy what he wanted and there was no one to check. If the history department raised funds to study in this archive, it could instead decide to study in that archive, or indeed not study in any archive at all, because studying in archive was pointless if history was pointless.

No one dared question Stuart and his husband over the department’s finances. He cautioned that any questioning was detrimental to the department and liable to discourage fee paying units (students) from paying fees.

And so, the history department only pretended to be interested in history but became a sort of racket to con the students into studying history while really its only goal was to provide now vice chancellor Stuart Nicholson and his husband with whatever they wanted charged to the department and indeed to the university.

But unfortunately the fee paying units noticed and so they stopped paying fees and they stopped choosing to study history.

The immediate cause of the defeat of Scottish nationalism is the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon. If she had not resigned and was still First Minister, it is likely that the SNP would still have won a majority of MPs at the General Election.

We have no good explanation for Sturgeon’s resignation. She claims that she didn’t know what would follow. But in that case, we are left with nothing as a sensible explanation. Did she really want to spend more time with her family? Was there a job vacant as Prime Minister of New Zealand or UN Secretary General? No such job has followed. So why resign?

Humza Useless was useless, but it would not have mattered if the SNP had chosen Kate Forbes. She would have split the party and although she is much more intelligent than Yousaf it is not clear the result would have been any better.

But the immediate cause hides the deeper cause. The deeper cause is the loss of Alex Salmond.

The SNP requires above all for Scottish independence to be a realistic goal. This gives Scottish nationalists a reason to vote for the SNP. But if independence ceases to be a realistic goal, there is no point voting for the SNP. The SNP without independence is not dissimilar to Labour, so in that case why not vote Labour which at least has a chance of forming a UK Government as it just did.

It was Salmond who turned Scottish independence into a realistic prospect and gave Scots the chance to either make it happen or not.

Sturgeon at no point did anything similar to what Salmond achieved. She did not bring independence closer. Instead, she pushed and pushed until a point after the Supreme Court ruling where it is harder to achieve than ever.

Would Salmond have done better? We will never know. We don’t really know why he resigned in 2014. I wonder sometimes if he was pressured.

But what we do know is that the Sturgeon Salmond split divided the independence movement and severed its best asset (Salmond) from the SNP.

Worse the independence movement was turned into true believers (Alba) versus pretend believers (the SNP). Sturgeon destroyed the trust that they SNP had in 2014 by the perception that she was in politics for herself and her self-interest rather than for Scotland. No one thinks that of Salmond. It is the loss of trust that destroyed the SNP in 2024. SNP members became fee paying units who donated for a referendum that never happened and then the money was all gone.

Sturgeon achieved little despite the adulation that she received. It went to her head and made her think that she was better and more talented than she really was. It made her think she could do anything and get away with anything.

Salmond has a record of achievement that far surpasses Sturgeon’s. It does not mean that he could have achieved independence after losing in 2014, but if he had continued in the SNP and if the independence movement had remained united like it was in 2014 it would have had a far better chance.

The great mistake of Scottish nationalism is Alex Salmond’s unnecessary resignation in 2014.

The fuss about transgender and male bodies in women’s prisons merely distracts from the real reasons for the SNP’s decline. It is not the reason Sturgeon resigned nor for what followed that resignation.

Ultimately, the reason for the failure of Scottish nationalism has to be that when Scottish voters were offered a free and fair referendum that would have led to independence if they had voted Yes, they instead chose to vote No. The SNP never had the numbers and still does not.

Ours is a fake nationalism that fades like mist when the sun shines and the wind blows or we might not be able to watch Strictly come dancing. It is like the shops that sell tartanry and Jimmy wigs on the High Street in Edinburgh. Such things have nothing whatsoever to do with how we live. And so, when the Tartan Army comes home it puts away its nationalism along with its kilts.

Scottish nationalism is all huff and puff but without substance and that is why we voted No and blew their house in.

Once that had happened it was always going to be difficult to have a second chance because the UK Government knew that any second referendum would be a coin toss. There was no chance of a second David Cameron deceiving himself that he could win easily.  Even if Scottish nationalism was a bubble that could go pop, it could go from 25% to nearly 45% and who would want to risk it going further?

In the years since the British government and the courts have shown a willingness to say No to the SNP. It is still possible that if 60% of voters chose the SNP at an election this would lead to a second referendum. Even then the British government could say No. But support for the SNP at the last election was 30% which is about where support for independence was when we started. After all these years Scottish nationalists have declined 15 points for all their marching. They merely marched up to the top of the hill and then marched down again.

This feels like another lost cause like the Confederacy or Bonnie Prince Charlie. We can hope that Scotland doesn’t spend the next decades regretting Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg or wailing will you no come back again.


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