Browbeaten Into A Tartan Ruritania

Tom Gallagher writes:

Alex Salmond has been giving a masterclass to foreigners on how Scotland ought to be treated. At the Scottish Parliament on Thursday, he rebuked Mariano Rajoy, the Spanish Prime Minister for showing ignorance by describing him as Scotland’s "President" and not First Minister and for daring to call Scotland a mere "region". The next day, Angus Robertson MP, the leader of the SNP at Westminster, went one better. 

He called on David Cameron to scrap the constitutional requirement to hold a general election by May 2015. Instead, he declared that the higher necessity of completing intensive negotiations for independence, required the Tory-Lib Dem coalition to remain in office until 2016, so that Scotland could smoothly exit the United Kingdom.

This peremptory demand by one of the more truculent SNP figures could be interpreted as saying: Up here, we play fast and loose with the democratic rules, so why don’t you join us and expedite the transfer of Great Britain to the knacker's yard? A glance at the Scottish autocracy being created by the SNP shows a desire to centralise and silence discordant voices that Britain never got close to during the Second World War.

Under Sir Peter Housden, the civil service has become a vehicle for SNP propaganda. To the fury of the major opposition parties, this obsequious Englishman has defended all manner of sharp practice by the government.

The bulging Scottish third sector has learnt that one of the best ways to guarantee its funding stream from the taxpayer is to provide numerous low-key services for the SNP. Even university heads now face pressure to slap down noisy academics.

On 5 November, Shona Robison, one of Salmond’s ministers, contacted the principal of Dundee University because the distinguished historian Professor Chris Whatley appeared at a pro-UK Better Together event. She wrongly assumed that because he was involved in a state-funded project, he could be easily gagged.

I have never applied for a single bawbee from the Scottish government. But as a critic of the SNP ever since I glimpsed in 2007 how Alex Salmond was prepared to radicalise Scottish ethnic minorities in order to create a power base among them, I can be got at more indirectly.

The excellent Ulster academic Dr Duncan Morrow is heading an enquiry into the staying power of sectarianism in Scotland. As the author of three academic books on the subject, the most recent this year, I expected to be called to give evidence. But when I glanced at the name of one combative SNP lady who was on the committee, I instantly realised that I should abandon any hopes of Duncan ever giving me a call.

The SNP’s proprietorial attitude to the state is very reminiscent of 20th-century Ulster. In the teeth of massive opposition, the SNP has recently centralised the police force. It was not surprising to hear one police official slap down local councillors recently by suggesting that they take a lesson from the police and amalgamate their councils into a few large formations.

The SNP’s attachment to firm government is bound to be appealing to ambitious people who hope that active compliance will boost their careers. Under Alex Salmond, the party oozes contempt for any who fail to see the separatist light. Angus Robertson’s demand to Cameron to freeze the general election merely confirms that. In effect he was saying: "It’s already our state: we can make up the rules because tomorrow most definitely belong to us."

There is cleverness behind the SNP’s disregard for electoral democracy. To achieve their goal of a post-British future in Scotland, the Nationalists need to desensitise a large part of the population; Scots need to get used to the bizarre and the grotesque. They need to realise that the old rules don’t apply anymore and the bold and unsettling will soon be the norm.

Through its Yes for Scotland franchise, the SNP is making an overt effort to detach Clydeside Catholics from their once solid Labour loyalties. It was thus no surprise to see that the iconic Irish republican, Bernadette McAliskey spoke at a large pro-independence gathering on 23 November alongside SNP MSPs.

It is unlikely that the SNP barred the folk-singer Eddi Reader from being put on BBC Question Time last thursday. She is not just a patriotic balladeer but the proud relative, and biographer, of Seamus Reader, the head of the Scottish wing of the IRA during the Irish war of Independence.

He operated on the wilder fringes of Scottish nationalist politics for several decades after that. When it craved respectability, the SNP would have moved mountains to keep such supporters out of view.

In the era of demure nationalism, the MSP Joan McAlpine would have had her knuckles rapped for condemning a ceremony in Glasgow to mark remembrance week as "a cynical attempt to boost Britishness ahead of the referendum".

Career suicide might have awaited her for writing in the Daily Record on 5 November that "the outburst of hysterical patriotism in 1914 represented the worst of British – arrogance, self-delusion and a desire to dominate on the world stage". But she remains one of Salmond’s closest confidantes.

Bitter hostility to the British state led some SNP figures in the 1930s to plan to assist a Nazi takeover. It is well documented in a book published this spring called Fascist Scotland. The author Gavin Bowd, an academic from St Andrews, made it clear that only a minority of Scotland’s inter-war fascists were in, or close to, the SNP. Yet an article he wrote for the newspaper Scotland on Sunday led to a petition with over 4,000 names on it demanding that the paper be referred to the Press Complaints Commission.

The SNP now employs a large and growing portion of journalists and PR folk thanks to creating a large propaganda machine in the civil service. This move springs from the belief that since we are truly virtuous, we deserve to control absolutely everything.

The able pro-SNP journalist, George Kerevan, has warned his party that "the centralisation of power can be addictive and result in bureaucratic conservatism, inhibiting all experiment and reform". Jim Sillars, a former deputy leader, observed in 2012: "If I did not know better, I would easily believe the leaders had been schooled in the old communist party … Totalitarian would be a fair description of Scotland's majority party."

Thankfully, the SNP does have figures who still think for themselves and are prepared to tell Alex Salmond to get lost on a few occasions. One of these was on 20 November when several of its MSPs voted against the gay marriage bill he had proposed (by contrast only one Labour figure did so, Elaine Smith MSP).

The demand to David Cameron from an SNP MP that a British election be postponed is sinister and deserves far more attention. It shows that Mr Salmond and his lieutenants regard the voters as chattel, useful idiots who can be seduced or browbeaten into endorsing a Tartan Ruritania where there will be space aplenty for deep dungeons.