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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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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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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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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Indyref; or tis ten years since. Part one

 

From the beginning I have used the subtitle of Scott’s Waverley to reflect on the years passing from the independence referendum. It is becoming more appropriate as the parallels become clearer. The defeat of the Jacobites in 1746 was a decisive moment in Scottish history. There would be no further rebellions. It is for this reason that it was so appropriate yet peculiar that Scottish nationalists called themselves “the 45”. It not least showed their inability to count. They won 44.7% of the vote. Worse it showed their identification with another lost cause mentality for indeed the cause was lost ten years ago. It just took us ten years to find this out.

Scottish nationalism’s best chance was in 2014, but it wasn’t ready, and the referendum came too soon.

It was entirely unexpected that Alex Salmond should win the absolute majority in 2011 that David Cameron considered necessary to reward with an independence referendum. Both Salmond and Cameron were surprised and in their own ways not ready.

Of course it was not necessary for Cameron to grant a referendum. An absolute majority in a devolved parliament cannot logically give the SNP a mandate over a reserved matter that is outside the remit of that parliament. The SNP could not use that majority to abolish nuclear weapons even if it was in its manifesto, because defence is reserved. So why could the SNP use its majority to abolish the United Kingdom even it was in its manifesto?

But Cameron was unwilling to use this argument. It had been traditional in British politics to suppose that secession was the right of any part of the UK if a majority wished it and few at the time questioned this. It took the independence referendum to change this view, which meant that after losing the SNP found the task suddenly much harder. There would be no more David Camerons and the attitude of British politics to secession would decisively change after getting a shock in 2014.

While both sides were not ready, the SNP had the advantage of having two first rate politicians working together. Alex Salmond was close to his peak in the years leading up to the referendum. Nicola Sturgeon’s peak arrived slightly later when she became First Minister, but the advantage the SNP had in the years leading up to the referendum was that Salmond and Sturgeon were working together as indeed was the independence movement.

There were no splits in 2014. There was no Alba. Writers like Stuart Campbell who developed the popular Wings over Scotland site did not differ from the SNP and were not as now opponents.

There was no Pro UK equivalent of Wings over Scotland, and this was a disadvantage. Most of the grassroots campaigning was on the Yes side. People who were happy to remain in the UK were initially complacent and until almost too late largely uninterested. Like Cameron they thought the SNP would be easily defeated. They were very nearly wrong.

Cameron goes down in history as one of the great fools of British politics. He thought he could defeat the independence cause easily and so gave the SNP control over the timing of the referendum and the question. His government then proceeded to campaign badly and came quite close to losing in September 2014.

He repeated the same “Project Fear” method in 2016 and actually did lose the referendum on EU membership. We are quite fortunate that this did not happen two years earlier.

If Cameron was set on granting Salmond a referendum, he should have made clear that it was to happen almost immediately and with a neutral question that did not involve Yes/No.

A question such as “Should Scotland leave the UK or remain in the UK?” given to Scots soon after Salmond won his majority would have seen a decisive victory for the Pro UK argument.

Instead, we had a very long campaign indeed, which the SNP used cleverly to build support from around 25% to nearly 45%.

The UK government stupidly allowed itself to appear negative by absolutely denying an independent Scotland a currency union, when it ought to have said that these matters were uncertain and would depend on the negotiations.

There was no need to deny Scotland anything, much of which just got Scottish nationalists angry. Uncertainty would have done the job just as well as saying No with far less rancour.

For instance, the British government might have argued that an independent Scotland might have to begin life outside of the EU, in which case it might not be possible to maintain a currency union as EU laws would not allow there to be a currency union between a member state and a non-member state. This would have been true, but would have involved the EU saying No. It would have pointed out that leaving the UK would mean Scotland’s leaving the EU and that leaving would involve all the issues with borders and trade deals that we have learned about since 2016.

The problem is that no one had yet arrived at these arguments. The fact that leaving the UK would mean leaving the EU and beginning negotiations with the EU from scratch upon becoming independent was never fully accepted by either side. The assumption was that Scotland would somehow be able to negotiate EU membership while negotiating leaving the EU. It’s only later because of our experience of Brexit that we have discovered the full falsity of that argument at least in theory.

In practice of course we don’t really know what would have happened if Yes had won in 2014. It would have had the cooperation of the British government, and that government might have considered for financial reasons that it was best for everyone to cooperate closely with Scotland. If the failure of a few banks could bring down the world economy in 2008 it would have been in no one’s interest for either the Scottish or the former UK economy to be damaged seriously. There might have been deals with the EU. The Americans would have put pressure on Scotland to allow nuclear weapons to remain in Scotland. After a few years there might have been a close and friendly relation between Scotland and the former UK like between Austria and Germany.

This was the prize on offer in 2014 for Scottish nationalism and this prize was never available afterwards.

The difference in 2014 was this promised cooperation from the British government. Securing the agreement with the British government over a legal referendum and the promise that the British government would help implement the result, was precisely what the SNP lacked in all its subsequent arguments in the years since.

The British government discovered in the years following 2016 that it could quite happily say No to the SNP when it asked for a second referendum and there was not a thing the SNP could do. Cameron of course could have done the same.

It’s one thing to argue for Yes when the British government has promised to cooperate, it’s quite another when a referendum would be unofficial, or a de facto referendum or a unilateral declaration of independence. At this point there would be rather less cooperation and the sort of deals that might have happened in 2014 were much less likely to happen.

The SNP’s best chance was in 2014. The Better Together campaign was disadvantaged by conceding the timing, the question and indeed the argument. The concept of being Better Together involves us being separate at least to some extent. A man and wife might be better together, but only because they are separate people with the possibility of divorcing if they decide it’s better to be apart. So, the Better Together argument already conceded separatism, all that was left was some lurid threats if Scotland chose to divorce and some bribes if it didn’t. Such an argument deserves to lose and so almost did.

In the years since 2014 Scottish nationalism reached its absolute peak in 2015 when it won nearly all the seats at the General Election. The votes for Scottish independence in 2015 would have won in 2014, which goes to show that the referendum was too early for the SNP. But it’s also one thing to vote for Scottish independence in theory another to vote for it when if you win, it will actually happen.

The biggest mistake that the SNP made was the split with Alex Salmond. Without any inside knowledge my impression is that everything that has happened to Salmond was unnecessary. The SNP and Nicola Sturgeon in particular destroyed themselves by going after Salmond and for no real reason.

There were not going to be any complaints to the police let alone a court case against Salmond because of whatever he did or did not do while living in Bute House. If he had won in 2014 there is no way at all that anyone was going to dig up such issues.

It was Nicola Sturgeon’s decision to attack Salmond with the full force of the Scottish government. It is astonishing that Salmond survived.

Imagine a possible world in which Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Salmond were still friends. He would be an elder statesman giving welcome and useful advice. He might have a seat in Westminster or a role in the Scottish government. Scottish nationalism in that case would still be like it was in 2014. It would be united.

Instead, we have rival pro-independence parties we had the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon, the uselessness of Humza Yousaf and the dullness of John Swinney and finally the decisive defeat of Scottish nationalism at the General Election in July.

What is the source of this division? The fallout between Salmond and Sturgeon. Everything follows from this, even if we don’t know all the details.

This is the tragedy of the SNP. In all the years that the SNP has existed it has produced really only two first rate politicians. They came together in 2014 and came quite close to winning.

Since then, gradually and then suddenly the goodwill and trust that gave the Yes campaign a grassroots movement has gone. It has gone because first Sturgeon attacked Salmond and then she thought she could get away with anything. It is a classic tale of power turning the head of wee lassie who would have been nothing whatsoever if Alex Salmond had not found her amongst the dregs of Dreghorn.

If there were to have been a second chance for Scottish nationalism it would have to have been in 2016.

I realised that the best chance of stopping Scottish nationalism was for the UK to leave the EU. Gradually the argument became clear to everyone that the UK’s leaving the EU made Scottish independence impossible. That is one of the reasons that we are where we are now. The SNP has never properly addressed the consequences of Brexit for its argument.

But in the summer of 2016, there was much anger in Scotland over Brexit. If Sturgeon had organised a referendum or even if she had used the Scottish parliament to unilaterally declare independence like Catalonia, there is a reasonable chance she would have succeeded. If she had gained EU support for such a move, then she might have achieved both the cooperation she needed and the support of Remainers who might have used such a move to keep the former UK in the EU as part of the deal.

I think that was the moment of maximum danger, but Sturgeon was too cowardly to do more than bluster. If Salmond had remained First Minister, he might have gone for it. He is a gambler after all.

You don’t need a referendum to become independent, few countries have become independent in this way. You need to seize an opportunity and a moment like the Bolsheviks did.

I think Sturgeon realised that the moment had passed for which reason she campaigned for independence without seriously thinking it would happen. But the pretence involved in this became dishonest when she encouraged money to be raised for an independence campaign when she already knew there would not be one. From there everything that subsequently happened follows.

We are left with might have beens. What if we had continued on from Derby towards London? No one will ever know. We can speculate about counterfactuals but that is all it will ever be.

The UK was lucky in 2014. It was certainly the closest it has been to ceasing to exist. If the referendum had happened in 2015, we might have lost. Negative campaigning and conceding the SNP’s argument almost did.

Scottish nationalism has many advantages. Most Scots feel much more Scottish than they do British. Nearly all Scots think that Scotland is a country like France. These are decisive winning arguments in favour of independence nearly everywhere geographically and historically. And yet Scottish nationalism now looks like an historical blip. We are very near to the time when we were children when Scottish nationalism amounted to breaking the goal posts at Wembley and not much more than wearing tartan fringes on our trousers.

Despite our separate identity, we don’t quite feel separate from our fellow countrymen. While Better Together conceded the SNP’s argument, the SNP conceded the Pro UK argument by arguing that it wanted in reality independence within the UK. Salmond didn’t want to lose anything connected with being in the UK because Scots liked lots about being in the UK and was unwilling to concede that anything really would really change for the worse and that anything would be lost. But this is to argue for staying in the UK.

Scottish nationalism is a very odd form of nationalism indeed. We feel separate from the other parts of the UK and are desperate to emphasise our difference even to the extent of dressing up in clothes we don’t normally wear so that everyone knows we are Scottish and so that the French ladies go “Ooh la la” he’s got nothing under his kilt. But our separatism is not serious. The least disadvantage of leaving will see us stay.

No other independence movement in the world has ever worried about currency or pensions or indeed borders.

In 1745 we fought for the divine right of kings because it was our duty to do so, having lost we settled into the smug prosperity of the Scottish enlightenment and sixty years later Scott wrote about the romanticism of the Jacobites. But everyone was secretly glad that the Stuarts lost while still putting their fingers oer the water as they toasted the king.

We will repeat this until fifty years from now someone will write a novel called Indyref; or tis sixty years since and perhaps only in fiction will we discover what really happened in the years that led up to and the years that follows that brief moment in September 2014 when “in our youth our hearts were touched with fire.”

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Vote Reform get Labour. It's very simple arithmetic

We now have a left wing Labour government. If we are on the right our task is to defeat Labour and elect a right wing government. How are we going to manage to do this? It’s really a matter of simple arithmetic.

Labour won 411 seats with 33.7% of the vote.  Support for Labour increased only 1.6%. 

Conservatives won 121 seats with 23.7% of the vote. Support for Conservatives decreased by 19.9%.

Reform won 5 seats with 14.29% of the vote. 

If you add 23.7% to 14.9% you don’t get 126 seats. You win a landslide.

So what is the cause of us having a Labour government with a massive majority? It is not that support for Labour has massively increased. It is only just higher than it was in 2019 and much lower than it was in 2017 when it won 40% of the vote with Jeremy Corbyn leading. 

So what is the change between 2017, 2019 and 2024? The answer is that in 2017 and 2019 there was no large scale voting for an alternative right wing party either UKIP or the Brexit Party. This is the reason the Conservatives were able to form a government after each election. 

In 2024 however the right wing vote was split.  23% went for the Conservatives 14% went for Reform. The result was a Labour landslide with a paltry 33% of the vote. 

Worse the Lib Dems won 72 seats with 12.22% of the vote. In order to get a right wing government we would need to overcome those seats also. The Lib Dems would be happy to form a coalition with Labour. So there is at present an overwhelming left/centre majority in parliament?

How do you overcome that? 

You can continue to do what we did in 2024. Let’s say Reform doubled its seats at the next election and then doubled its seats at the election after that. By the time Reform wins a majority we will all be dead. 

Perhaps Reform will completely destroy the Conservative Party and take over all the Conservative voters? But Reform was supposed to destroy the Conservative Party in 2024 and failed. The Conservatives are the opposition. Reform is with the others. The Conservatives have 25 times the seats of Reform. 

So it is unrealistic for Reform to expect to overtake the Conservatives. If Nigel Farage ceased to be interested in Reform/UKIP/Brexit Party or his smoking and drinking caught up with him then Reform would retreat again to 3-4 %. 

Even when the Conservatives were truly awful they still won nearly 24% of the vote. This is the Tory floor. It isn’t going to change. 

So if we continue as we are at the next election Reform and the Conservatives might just take some vote share from Labour and the Lib Dems. We will all be sick of Labour by then. But it won’t make any difference. Labour will still win and if it doesn’t win outright it will still be able to form a coalition with the Lib Dems.

So what do you do? You can either have an electoral pact between the Conservatives and Reform or the two parties can merge or one can cease to exist or become so tiny that it doesn’t matter. 

Reform voters and right wing Conservatives hold almost identical views. We are Thatcherites. The best hope for Thatcherism still lies with the Conservative Party. After all it was the Conservatives that gave us Thatcher. The membership of the Conservative Party is still right wing. After all, it chose Liz Truss. She blew her chance, but someone else might not have. 

Ours is a two party system and will stay so as long as we have First Past the Post. The last time that changed was 100 years ago when Labour replaced the Liberals, because Labour was offering something radically different to liberalism. But Reform is not offering something radically different. It is offering Thatcherism, which many Conservatives already agree with. You can’t expect to replace the Conservatives with conservatism. 

I don’t think the Conservatives will give way to Reform or make a pact or even an informal deal. Why should they? They are the opposition. You have 5 seats. It would be like the Conservatives merging with the DUP. That’s just not going to happen. 

So unfortunately we are going to have to reproduce the 2024 election until Reform voters learn simple arithmetic. One splitting the right wing votes gives you a Labour government. Two having 5 seats stops precisely zero rubber dinghies crossing the Channel.

The far left got nowhere with the Socialist Workers Party, but was able to take over the Labour Party and came close to making Jeremy Corbyn Prime Minister. The task for the right is not to create a right wing equivalent of the Socialist Workers Party called Reform, it is to take over the Conservative Party and make it Thatcherite again. 

Unfortunately explaining this to Reform voters is like explaining simple arithmetic to infants, they struggle for a while but eventually they get it. Meanwhile the rest of us have to endure a permanent Labour government.

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