We too have our illusions. For 30 years, British politicians mistook historical conditions for universal truths. They believed in progress — an improving world, the common rationality of humanity, the better angels of our nature —  and they believed in power, the unquestioned power of the British state. Mired in these illusions, Westminster politicians did something extraordinary — they aided and encouraged the secessionist parties of Scotland and Wales. Heedless of history, careless of the future, most MPs now greet devolution and nationalist power with equanimity or indifference. This equanimity may yet be tested. Yesterday, another poll showed a majority of Scottish residents support independence. In truth, the breakup of the United Kingdom would be a catastrophe — a catastrophe for the British people as a whole, and a catastrophe for the residents of Scotland and Wales. To understand why, we must look away from the constitutional tribulations of the British state, and consider instead the darkening world in which we find ourselves. 

If you are not worried about the future, you have not been listening. Over the following decades, our world is likely to be marked by runaway automation, resource competition, environmental degradation, state collapse, and the mass migration of people. The only mechanism through which the people of Great Britain can navigate these challenges is that of the state. Only the state can extract and redistribute revenue from foreign tech firms, only the state can defend our borders, and the state alone can maintain the popular legitimacy required to achieve both. To Balkanize Britain is to destroy our prosperity and security; no policy goal of Right or Left is strengthened by weakness and disunity.

More from this author

Death and glory at the Isle of Man TT

By James Kingston

We cannot presume that we are heading for a more prosperous future. Artificial intelligence is driving profound changes to work, economic activity, and the distribution of economic value. As more and more tasks are rendered subject to automation, the relative value of human labor will change. Lawyers, accountants, financial planners, and other members of the UK’s service-heavy bourgeoisie are highly exposed. Analysts suggest millions of these jobs will vanish in the years ahead, but no plan exists for their replacement. Perhaps, it is argued, we should encourage our children to become plumbers and builders. Yet this too misses an important trend now heaving into view — the mass rollout of humanoid service robots. Such robots will be cheap, tireless, and unable to complain. Cloud-connected and AI-enabled, they will be able to access the compressed summation of the entire body of human knowledge. The competitive logic of inter-company competition means these robots will get better and better, with billions of dollars being poured into boosting their ability to manipulate the physical world. Where, exactly, are human workers meant to compete?

Scale provides bargaining power. In an era of AI, global tech giants, and unabashed geopolitics, Britain’s collective self-interest requires all the scale it can muster. A traditional argument in favor of automation is that automation brings its own economic rewards; the profits from high-producing firms will boost the tax base and spread throughout the economy. Yet here, too, we have a problem — for the United Kingdom is heavily reliant upon US tech firms. It lacks its own AI models, and it lacks a strong robotics sector.  Foreign-owned technology will be taking British jobs, and there is no guarantee that new British jobs will emerge to absorb the unemployed. The only entity capable of extracting resources from foreign companies, and the only entity capable of doing this while also representing the public interest, will be the state. To split the state — to create one, or even three, new weak and fractious states upon Great Britain — is to smash democratic leverage over foreign capital.  

Managing technological change requires a strong state; so too does environmental breakdown. If automation is transforming the basis of the economy; global warming is transforming the material basis of society. By the 2050s, the world is likely to reach 2C of global warming. At 2C, sea levels will rise, droughts will increase, and crop yields decline. Yet 2C is itself a consensus scenario; other forecasts posit a rise as high as 3C or 4C. A few decades on, the earth will be even hotter. Under conservative estimates, we can expect the planet to be 3C hotter by the 2070s. Much of the world will be rendered uninhabitable; productive areas will suffer severe environmental stress, lowering agricultural productivity; major cities will be underwater. 

Environmental collapse will breed political instability. Within the more vulnerable regions, economies will falter and fail. Failing states will descend into conflict, and migrants will move in their millions. In October 2025, the UK Joint Intelligence Committee found that “every critical ecosystem is on the pathway to collapse.” Such collapse will drive migration, and however far away it may seem, such turmoil will affect Britain. Collapsing supply chains will affect our food security. Migrant flows and climate breakdown will increasingly affect international politics, and with it the security needs of the British state. 

An independent Scotland, possessed of nominal armed forces, would be unable to extend effective protection over its own territory. This would harm the people of Scotland; it would also harm the interests of those further south. Scottish independence also poses problems of hard power. Should it secede, the remnant United Kingdom would lose one third of its landmass, over 80% of its oil & gas production, most of its offshore wind resources, and 8% of its population. These figures are not artifacts of academic curiosity — they speak to the core security needs of the British state, and the British people as a whole. The only construct with the collective power and the popular legitimacy capable of navigating us through the storms ahead is that of the nation. As such, it must be rebuilt. The fact we need to rebuild it at all speaks to a fundamental constitutional failure — devolution.

Devolution has failed. It has failed not only because it was wrong; it has failed because it was stupid. Its planners and progenitors imagined it would strengthen the British Union, and provide better local government. They were mistaken, and misunderstood what a nation actually is. The classic account came from Benedict Anderson, who typified nations — nations, not ethnicities — as “imagined communities”. A nation is a group of people who, despite multitudinous variations of place, class, language or religion, imagine themselves to be, in some crucial sense, the same. Imagination brings them together, and imagination sustains them. Imagination is sustained and spread through stories and institutions, and rituals — the shared consciousness created by a “national” newspaper, participating in a “national” elections, or enjoying “national” sports. A nation is not an inevitability, one brought into being by the ineluctable forces of history; these forces do not exist. A nation is a choice, a discourse, and a project.

Elites build nations, for it is they who create and shape the institutions and stories which bind them together. Bismarck created modern Germany; Cavour constructed Italy; Ataturk wrought Turkey from the ruins of Ottoman collapse. Kings, presidents, and prime ministers rely in turn on the civil service — the teachers and administrators who, fanning out within their territorial borders, inculcate their people in the patterns and practices that will bind them together. From Egypt to Vietnam, the modernist states of the 19th and 20th century sought to engage in nation-building, to wield coherent peoples from their disparate groupings of faith, dialect, geography, and occupation. 

Britain’s elite, however, has done the opposite; it has chosen to dissolve the British nation. Blind to the lessons of the past, heedless to the risks of the future, Britain’s leadership class has spent 30 years reifying new nations within its borders. In devolution, and in the devaluing of Britain’s institutions, our leaders are dissolving the ties that bind this island together. The United Kingdom is a composite polity, one born in the union of different jurisdictions, ethnicities, and creeds. Scotland, Ireland, England and Wales existed long before the United Kingdom, as did the local identities of their inhabitants. The United Kingdom, and with it the British people, were born in the Union of these entities. It is the peculiarity of the British elite that they chose to limit their own nationhood via devolution — to place back in these pre-existing forms the power of imagination, the ability to create community, and the story-building institutions of political and institutional life. 

Devolution did more than strengthen local government — it created and strengthened new “imagined communities”, communities away from and in direct contrast to Britain as a whole. The advocates of devolution showed a basic failure to consider history, institutions, and human nature. They failed to consider that newly-created parliaments, populated and staffed by ambitious new legislators, might naturally seek to increase their own power. It is in the nature of institutions to seek power, and of individuals to seek power within them. The new Scottish Parliament was founded in 1999; the Welsh Assembly was opened in the same year. Devolution handed core responsibilities of the state over to the new parliaments. In both cases, but particularly so in Scotland, local nationalists have used these powers to begin corroding the British state. We see this more clearly in education and in health. 

The SNP party state has utilized control of the education system to strengthen its power and to undermine the basis of the British state. It has developed school history curricula to promote anti-English and anti-British sentiment. In 2008, it announced free university tuition for Scottish Undergraduates and citizens of the European Union; meanwhile, English students had to pay full tuition fees. Whereas 30% of Welsh students and 20% of Northern Irish students go to university elsewhere in the UK, 93% of Scottish students remain in Scotland — meaning they do not have the lived experience of the British Union. Graduates now make the core of SNP support.

Health policy shows how devolution hacks at the core collective experiences of British life. It is a truism of British public life that the NHS is the closest we have to a state religion. Its needs, its rituals, and its requirements form some of the core issues of our politics, and a primary focus of public sentimentality. Yet “our NHS” is seen less and less as a collective enterprise. In 1999, control of the NHS in Scotland was devolved to the new parliament. During the pandemic, devolved control over health policy gave rise to endless opportunities for nationalist posturing. Sturgeon’s regular health appearances appeared designed to undercut those of the British Prime Minister. There were leaks of information, and pre-emptions of UK-wide announcements. More importantly, the ability of the SNP-led government to impose different lockdown rules to those of England and Wales further underlined and created the appearance of Scottish separation. In a very real sense, Scottish people had a different pandemic; a core collective experience was instead turned into an opportunity for separatist consciousness formation. Every time Nicola Sturgeon addressed Scotland on its pandemic policy, and every time Mark Drakeford made his own announcements in respect to Wales, a further blow was dealt to the imagined community of the United Kingdom. 

Westminster’s disregard for nation-building, its fundamental lack of seriousness, was further underlined in its haphazard and casual approach to the 2014 referendum. Whereas states with written constitutions require supermajorities for major constitutional changes, the 2014 referendum was allowed to proceed on bare 50/50 vote — leaving a decision of the utmost historical gravity prey to basic questions of turnout or rounding errors. Despite the UK’s centuries-long heritage as a unified polity, one marked by the movement and intermixing of peoples across its regions, the vote was restricted only to those who could claim Scottish residency. Scots resident in London, Manchester, Belfast, or Cardiff — in other words, the Scots who might most fully embrace the Union itself — were barred. By accepting the debate could occur only in Scotland, among those resident only in Scotland, the UK leadership accepted a fundamental weakening of its position, and an implicit dismissal of the idea of Union. In devolution, and in the Scottish Referendum, Britain’s elite gave an intellectual surrender.

Suggested reading

On patrol with Glasgow’s vigilantes

By Felix Pope

The UK has been and is capable of change. Tom Nairn famously viewed the Anglo-British state as “Ukania” — an absurd relic, frozen in premodern form by a premature bourgeois revolution. Far from being a modern nation state, he saw it as an essentially imperial construct, founded and maintained in order to undergird the far-flung hegemony of a London-led empire. His view is paralleled by that of David Edgerton, for whom pre-War Britain was not so much a nation state as the governing and coordinating node in a world economic system. To Edgerton, however, a “British nation” came into being during the 20th century. This British nation was born in central planning, the pressure of war, and a postwar emphasis on material self-sufficiency. Through these, and in the moral narrative of the Second World War, a distinctive new national identity was forged. 

Today, the British elite must once again learn to embrace nation-building. We must make people feel British, and promote or rebuild the institutions that encourage them to do so; only then can the UK endure. The collapse of the United Kingdom is not pre-ordained; nothing is. Instead, it is a matter of chance, contingency, and will. The UK may or may not be an absurd construct, as Nairn considered. But in a world without order, one shorn of higher powers, to live means to embrace the absurd. As a Frenchman once wrote: “The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning.”

Plowing through the early sections of the book, I started to understand the worry. There is certainly a startling mismatch between the former first minister’s famed communicative abilities and the descriptions on the page. For instance, if there’s one thing our author wants you to know, it’s that she loves books. The point comes up time and again: as a child, she was “bookish”; “rarely had her nose out of a book”; had a “fascination with words”. Early on, she became “immersed” in Jane Austen, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott. Later in life, no doubt thanks to all that reading, she describes herself as having the power “to communicate in a way that engaged both heart and head” and to understand “the importance in politics of telling a compelling story”.

But why, then, are her anecdotes from her childhood so plodding and banal? That time when she went to the “retail metropolis of Ayrshire” (i.e. Ayr), and her parents wouldn’t buy her a coveted Cilla Black record, but then… her grandad bought it for her instead. That time when her teenage boyfriend Sparky broke up with her: “it’s not impossible that in different circumstances we would have ended up together. Whether we would have lasted is another matter.” Even seismic events become comically flatfooted in her retelling: “It was from Uncle Dave that I first learned about death. He was thrown from a horse and killed during the annual Laminar (sic) Day celebrations in his hometown of Lanark.” So peremptorily and colorlessly does she rattle through various friends and acquaintances, it is as if she is ticking them off from a list.

An optimistic reader might suspect she is getting the boring stuff out of the way so she can get to the moment when life properly began: the fateful day when, aged 16, she knocked on the door of her local SNP candidate’s house and offered to help with canvassing. But even during the sections recounting her formative years as a political operator in a then up-and-coming party, narrative excitement remains elusive. For instance, the highlight of the 1989 Glasgow Central by-election, as far as she can recall, was a nightly “protest” — quotation marks hers — waged with her pal Shona against sexist bartenders at the Laurieston pub. “Every night after campaigning, we would perch ourselves on bar stools and loudly demand to be served, usually to no avail, leaving us to drink pints bought for us by our male friends instead”. Compared to this, Theresa May’s “running through fields of wheat” admission starts to look like glamorous juvenile delinquency.

Still, by the time we get to the heart of the story — that is, an allegedly unguarded recounting of the period between becoming deputy first minister in 2007 and her eventual resignation as premier in 2023 — there is some evidence that reading Robert Louis Stevenson has left its mark, however unconsciously. For a bit like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, there appear to be two different people battling within the breast of this book’s protagonist. Indeed, Sturgeon is sometimes herself aware of the tension: as when, in a climactic moment just after she has been made first minister, she describes listening to conference applause, and feeling “a sort of dissociation” between “the shy, dour, always self-doubting, frumpy girl… in the wings” and the “confident, articulate, almost stylish version of herself… [on] the stage”. Along with some readers perhaps, she wonders: “Who is that woman? Is she real?”

There are other, less self-flattering, dissociations evident in the book too. Its narrator keeps implying she is good at empathy and warmth; that she has been able to forge a “deep, almost emotional, connection… with a sizable swathe of the Scottish population”. Certainly, that is her public reputation. But warmth is in the showing not the saying, and there is little on show here; only robotic expressions of sadness and shock at various significant deaths and tragic events, before getting onto the more important business of how they might affect ongoing political maneuverings. Similarly, the official version of Sturgeon is admirably high-minded and principled, and particularly on behalf of women and girls. Constantly monitoring for the potential presence of misogyny, she can’t describe accepting a bunch of flowers from Govan trade union officials without noting “a touch of unconscious sexism in the gesture”. Yet at another point, she ruthlessly criticizes Labour leader Jack McConnell for having eschewed cheap sexist vibes and treated her with respect instead, describing his personal kindness to her as “naïve politics” and a “huge tactical error”.

Another mystery is why Sturgeon is a nationalist at all. Her main reflections on the question are that in 1987, when she first joined the SNP, the party was more of a natural home for her youthful socialist politics than Neil Kinnock’s Labour. Given the strength of social conservatism in the party back then, this is implausible; but more importantly, it is also underwhelming as a justification of her life’s work. Where are the traditional tartan romances, the misty-eyed misty glens, even just some memorized lines from Braveheart?

Her avowed heartfelt desire for Scottish independence is certainly not due to any deep knowledge of her country’s history: the occasional forays into this territory sound heavily mined from Wikipedia. It doesn’t seem to be informed by political theory either: there are no detailed discussions of the ideals of democracy or sovereignty here. It is clear Sturgeon loves Scotland; who could doubt it, faced with a sentence like: “Standing on the shore, looking out at Ailsa Craig — the uninhabited island about sixteen kilometers west of the mainland, home to puffins and gannets, and from which microgranite is quarried to make curling stones — still gives me a sense of peace and tranquility that I don’t find elsewhere”? But still, as she occasionally acknowledges rather grudgingly, many Unionists love their country too.

In Stevenson’s novella, Mr Hyde kills an elder father figure; and in a way Sturgeon does the same. The passages describing her complex relationship with Alex Salmond are among the book’s most engaging, though bound to infuriate his supporters. Whatever the truth of her involvement in the investigations he faced for alleged sexual misconduct (he was eventually cleared of all charges) — she says she had none — it is clear that she had to get out from under the charismatic politician’s spell to become the leader she did.

She owed much of her initial success to him, and she knew it: he plucked her from the crowd to serve as his deputy, which led seamlessly to her becoming first minister after he resigned. At the same time, he was everything she was not — a witty, risk-taking gambler, big on charm and low on detail — and the fact obviously annoyed her intensely. Her infuriated tale of writing a crucial White Paper during the highly pressured referendum period, then fielding a phone call from her boss at the racecourse, tipsily promising he would definitely read it before the big launch, will resonate with every i-dotting, t-crossing female employee ever faced with a slipshod superior.

Sturgeon’s own approach was very different: obsessing over minutiae, micromanaging underlings, staying up all night fretting nauseously about how things might go wrong. This seems to have worked well during her time as health secretary: when she was set clear objectives, she was all over her brief (at least, as she tells it). But once put in charge of overall goal-setting as first minister, she seems to flounder. Unable to bring about a second independence referendum, and apparently devoid of concrete ideas to deal with Scotland’s overwhelming social problems, she adopts a generic, vibes-based playbook and hopes for the best: some renewable energy and child welfare here, a bit of gender reform there, free university tuition fees all round. When Covid hits and she is able to return to full technocrat mode, you can sense her relief, even if the huge responsibility nearly breaks her.

But here, too, there are significant omissions. Despite her professed concern for children stuck in poverty, she offers no reflections about how lockdowns might have grievously affected them, making a bad situation even worse; nor about how social isolation might have led to a generation of unhappy teenagers falling deeper into an online world. And speaking of which: in the end, the gender reform thing didn’t work out so well either, indicating another puzzling split in the Sturgeon psyche.

Early on in the book, she tells readers, perfectly accurately, that “building common ground isn’t possible without compromise” and that “it is always a good idea to know your audience”. Yet in practice, Sturgeon plowed ahead obtusely with plans to reform gender recognition processes along self-identification lines, deaf to reasonable objections, and blind to the way her stance would be perceived by ordinary voters. By the end of the book, discussing the fallout from the Isla Bryson scandal — which saw a rapist heading to a female prison because he said he belonged there — the bad-tempered, stubborn version of Sturgeon seems to have vanquished the more politically astute one. Through gritted teeth, she attempts to admit to her own mistakes in this area, suggesting she should have “hit the pause button” on gender reform in order to develop consensus; but she still can’t help monstering her opponents at every turn. They are on the same side as Orbán, Putin, Trump; they stand alongside “raging homophobes”; they deny such facts with “brittle defensiveness” and “howls of outrage”.

Meanwhile, her attempted justification of her own position on the nature of womanhood is made even funnier by the fact she thinks it is “too technical” for people to properly understand: namely (drumroll) “there is no need for a man to claim to be a woman to commit acts of abuse or sexual assault” because “the threat to women comes from predatory, abusive and misogynistic men, not from trans women”. In other words, her new, post-Bryson assumption seems to be that, as soon as a trans-identified man becomes predatory or abusive, “she” ceases to be a woman — QED. Indeed, in a recent interview she has said that a rapist “probably forfeits the right to be the gender of their choice”. Ironically, this is a case of what is known as a “no true Scotsman” fallacy: the circular idea that “no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge” isn’t falsified by the sight of Hamish from Glasgow wielding the sugar spoon over his oats; because all this really shows is that Hamish from Glasgow is not a true Scotsman after all.

There was a time just after the 2015 general election, now hard to picture, when the wider world went mad for the progressive vibes Sturgeon was emitting, her party having just wiped Labour out north of the border. For a while, the first minister was mobbed and fawned over like a “rockstar” (her words) wherever she went — including by journalists in London. But looking back, it seems the whole thing was a comparison-based trick of the light: she looked more organized than Salmond, more authentic than Cameron, more effective than Miliband, more down-to-earth than Corbyn. Things got even easier for her in this respect when chaos merchants Johnson and Trump arrived.

But while she had diligence in spades, ultimately, she never made a dent in the most pressing national problems — rising drug deaths, falling education standards, terrible public health, violent crime in cities — and that’s partly because, in terms of her capacity to understand the bigger picture, her intellect was always too limited, tempting her towards the superficial gesture as a substitute. If Frankly is anything to go by, then, strictly speaking Sturgeon never did have imposter syndrome. To have that particular malaise, your nagging suspicion you aren’t really up to the task has to be wrong.

Scotland’s current gang war can feel like a Netflix series, from the mob dynasties and the firebombing to the villains-in-hiding nicknamed “Miami”. The current bout of feuding apparently concerns the theft of a cocaine shipment worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. Yet amid the social media threats and the Costa-del-Dubai exiles, the country’s gangsterism is actually a lot like Hay Drive itself — a strangely retro throwback, to a time before mass migration and when gangsterism was strictly local. It all speaks to the relative isolation of Britain’s Celtic fringe, and offers a useful reminder that not all our problems can be blamed on foreigners.

Much like the country itself, English organized crime is increasingly cosmopolitan. Dominated by multinational gangs, it’s a teeming bazaar, chaotic and transient. Loyalties change and business models adapt, all to the buzz of 24/7 TikTok commentary and grime crews. Criminal intelligence analysts find tracking this stuff like nailing jelly to the wall. By comparison, the Scottish underworld has a vibe reminiscent of a Berkshire high street circa 1995: dependable and dominated by big names. The Daniels and Lyons, two of the long-standing crime families involved in the current feud, might as well be Debenhams and The Gap. To paraphrase another retro classic, it’s a case of two tribes go to war.

More from this author

Surrey cokeheads are lining up chaos

By Dominic Adler

I’ve had a taste of crime north of the border. Serving as a London detective, I was sworn in as a constable at Glasgow Sheriff’s Court. It felt curiously like being in an old Western, swearing an oath like a deputy and signing a register. Working on a corruption investigation, I was given local police powers; English cops have no jurisdiction in Scotland (except for specific offenses, usually around terrorism). As a London copper, Glasgow felt reassuringly familiar, and not just because it’s my favorite Scottish city. Prior to the 2013 amalgamation of Scottish forces into Police Scotland, the city’s police were part of the Strathclyde force, known as the “Scottish Met”.

In my experience, Met officers enjoyed a good working relationship with their Glasgow counterparts. And, like the Met, surrounding forces saw Strathclyde as overly dominant. They were happy to see it taken down a peg or two. Many Glasgow coppers lamented its passing, as police are wont to do whenever change occurs.

Even so, criticism of the new force is about more than nostalgia. Politics often trumps operational effectiveness, with performance-obsessed restructuring sucking up organizational bandwidth better spent on crimefighting. Relations with a deeply political SNP administration have occasionally been strained too — and that was before the investigation into Nicola Sturgeon. Some officers have also felt the SNP are more focused on independence than bread-and-butter issues like education, health, or indeed crime. Did this mean the police took their eye off organized crime? This is the immediate context in which Scottish gangsterism should be viewed: that of distracted ministers and a mismanaged police force.

Even so, Scottish mobsterism is about something deeper than bureaucracy. The country only hosts 5.5 million people, or about 8% of the UK population. And, despite its regional differences, it’s 95% white, something England hasn’t been since the Eighties. The occasionally overegged issue of religious sectarianism aside, that makes Scotland practically a monoculture, certainly compared to Birmingham or London. More to the point, these demographics also make the working class communities of Glasgow and Edinburgh less transient, more cohesive, and more able to resist the encroaching globalization of Somalis or Kurds.

Nor is this simply a Scottish phenomenon. Right across the Celtic fringe, the old ways survive, offering real life folk-horror, with houses burning instead of wicker men. I’m thinking, for instance, of Liverpool, forever an outpost of the Irish Republic. Liverpool boasts the UK’s primary seaport linking the UK to the coca fields of South America. As such, it’s coveted by criminals. Yet law enforcement legend has it that even the brutal Albanian mafia are wary of the city: local Scouse gangs are too well-organized and violent. As for Belfast? Northern Irish gangs overlap with psychotic paramilitaries. They’re armed with assault rifles, and deeply embedded in their communities, strutting like central-casting bad guys in an action movie. The long-suffering, politically hamstrung and underfunded PSNI can only operate a strategy of appeasement and semi-containment.

Contrast all this with London’s traditional crime families. These days, they’re good for little more than straight-to-streaming movies, ghost-written memoirs and the occasional nonagenarian funeral. Terry Adams, the former scourge of Clerkenwell, now spends more time with his art collection. “Dodgy” Dave Courtney shot himself. Other old-school “faces” keep their heads down.

And not only that. For apart from remaining mostly untouched by globalization’s international criminal diaspora, Scottish criminals also employ an MO The Krays and Charlie Richardson would recognize.

This old-school works on familiarity. On personalities. On an understanding of the other side’s way of doing business, be it drugs or protection rackets or smuggling. Not so much movie talk of “codes” or “honor” — but more of knowing what to expect from whom. The threats, acts of violence and feuding all follow a time-honored pattern. Furthermore, the criminals enjoy significant ties to the “respectable” non-criminal world. Compared to, say, London? It’s an anachronism. The south’s multicultural postcode gangs, middle-market cocaine dealers and county lines retailers operate in a relative state of freewheeling anarcho-capitalism.

Then there’s corruption. Organized crime of the sort blighting Glasgow and Edinburgh can’t exist without palms being greased. I’m not suggesting Scotland is uniquely prone to graft. It is, however, vulnerable for the reasons I’ve described: a close-knit monoculture, ruled by cliquish elites. This is why I’d suggest political institutions and law enforcement north of the border are disposed to a specific type of compromise. For instance, Glasgow’s Labour-dominated political machine, prior to the ascension of the SNP, was no stranger to scandal.

As for the police, it’s in a similar vein to the corruption that dogged the Met until the early 2000s, some of it involving working-class detectives and the criminals they grew up with. Some years ago, a Scottish detective told me about an investigation into drug money. It ended mysteriously, when the trail meandered too close to establishment figures. In more recent times, Police Scotland’s Organized Crime and Counter Terrorism Unit was recently compromised by corrupt detectives leaking intelligence. That flavor of corruption is less common in London nowadays, replaced by something equally damaging but perhaps more fragmented: corruption stemming from poorly-vetted, hastily-selected cops, led by inexperienced and out-of-touch managers.

Suggested reading

How the Mob went mainstream

By Andrea Valentino

What, then, is the answer? As the violence escalates across Scotland’s two largest cities, the SNP-led administration has promised urgent action. A 100-strong task force is on the case, backed up by The National Crime Agency (NCA). As for the gangs themselves, the old ways are both a strength and a weakness. Yes, they’re deep-rooted, tough to infiltrate, operating a code of omertà. On the other hand, their identities are largely a matter of record. When your organized crime group has its own Wikipedia page? Yes, you’re lighting up the police radar. The authorities, therefore, know precisely who their targets are. The rest is a question of time, resources, political will and luck. Police officers specializing in proactive operations know all four are as rare as gold dust. And make no mistake: the Scottish Parliament will throw the kitchen sink at the gangs who so blatantly challenge their authority, even if the SNP has to grit its teeth and get support from south of the border.

Nor is needing help from Westminster very surprising. The “pointy end” of fighting organized crime can sometimes feel more like counterinsurgency than beat policing. The mantra “Clear, Hold, Build” sounds like something you might attempt in Basra or Helmand. And it’s something our establishment prefers to deny, not least as it undermines their cozy image of British policing. In this case, anyway, Police Scotland can’t handle the gang crisis alone: 100 officers is a trifling number for an operation of this scale. The NCA, and possibly the Security Service, will need to provide technical know-how and assets (like MI5 did with the Adams Family). At the less glamorous end of the business, meanwhile, local police will have to work doubly hard to develop intelligence by winning trust on the streets. This, as Scottish politicians are about to discover, illustrates the consequences of neglecting neighborhood policing, which has suffered swingeing cuts from Taunton to Aberdeen.

A three-ring circus of law enforcement will therefore be pitching up in Scotland, with its attendant politics, agendas and egos. Can its thoroughly modern methods, reliant on theoretical models, proportionality, human rights and technology, defeat such a tried-and-tested enemy? In Glasgow and Edinburgh, the Wicker Man burns. Let’s hope the officers sent to extinguish it have more luck than Edward Woodward.

“Send Ireland back into poverty and depopulation like Wales and Scotland! Tell them they’ve got a Barnett formula and how lucky they are! That Limerick wouldn’t have that roundabout if it wasn’t for the Irish Barnett formula! Up the Union!” I concede, it’s a good point.

MacNeil is a crofter turned politician from an island 60 miles south of Benbecula called Barra — the last in the island chain variously known as the Outer Hebrides or the Western Isles, from where nothing but ocean lies to its West until you reach Labrador.

In this election he is standing as an independent — “an independent for independence on independence day”, as he put it — having been kicked out of the SNP last year after clashing with the chief whip, angry at the party’s failure to push hard enough for independence after Brexit. His main rival and the favourite to win the seat is a journalist friend of mine, Torcuil Crichton, one time Daily Record reporter turned Labour politician. Both are Gaelic speakers from the islands; only Crichton is a unionist who believes the British state can use its heft to improve people’s lives out here, particularly when it comes to the green energy revolution. “GB Energy” is, I realise, the first big-state, pro-Union policy to come out of Westminster in decades. Whether it will be enough to save the Union in the long term is less clear.

MacNeil’s point about Ireland is, to me, the central challenge for the British state today: does it even work? Look at any of the small countries that have either seceded or all-but seceded from their one-time masters. Are any of them doing worse than Scotland? How would “rejoin the United Kingdom” fare in an Irish referendum? We don’t talk much about the fact that Ireland left as the poorest part of these islands, only to become the richest today. For those like me who feel an emotional attachment to the Union, who feel British and would like Britain to remain, Ireland stands as a living, breathing challenge.

This is not a new challenge. In 1810, just nine years after the union between Britain and Ireland, the Irish unionist William Cuasck-Smith began worrying about the gaping divide between what he called the “theory and principle” of the union and the “vile system” of its administrative reality. “How have the promises made by Unionists to Ireland been kept,” he wrote to his friend J.W. Croker, the MP for Downpatrick. “Has a single step been taken to mitigate the evils which that arrangement was destined to reduce?… Has a step been taken to console the pride and soothe the exasperation of a country fallen from its high esteem? Can a Unionist avoid blushing when he contrasts the performance with the promise?”

Cuasck-Smith’s challenge remains to this day. Can the British state avoid blushing when it contrasts its performance with its promise? Back in Cusack-Smith’s day, the union was supposed to modernise Ireland, extending to its people all the apparent privileges of the English constitution, and in doing so, creating a new, unified people — a single nation stretching across both kingdoms. At the time of the union, the protestant Belfast News Letter urged people to get behind this new endeavour, aware that many of the Orange lodges across Ulster had only recently passed resolutions against the union. “However inimical some of the people of Ireland may have heretofore been to the adoption of that certainly awful, and most important, measure,” the paper’s editorial began, “it is now become an interest, as well as the duty of the whole… to consider the Empire, not as composed of distinct political bodies, each having views incompatible with the happiness and prosperity of the rest — but containing only one people, united in interest as in dominion.” It’s fair to say it didn’t work out like that.

What was so striking up in Scotland was that even though the threat of independence is fading in the short term — Brexit, ironically, having snookered the SNP — the reality is that the hope of “one people, united in interest”, no longer even seems to stretch across Great Britain, let alone Ireland as well. At a hustings on Benbecula on Monday night, I heard again and again complaints about Scotland’s resources being extracted by the English; Labour’s plan for GB Energy was dismissed as mere crumbs from a loaf that should be Scotland’s.

“It happened with the oil and it’s happening again with the renewables,” the SNP’s Susan Thomson told the audience. “Scotland is more than producing enough for its own energy needs… but the value from that doesn’t stay in Scotland, it leaves Scotland, it goes south of the border.” One woman in the audience chipped in: “We’re getting nothing back but drips.”

The facts tell a different story. On average, Scots receive around £2,200 more per head per year from the British state than the average Englishman. And that’s not because they pay more in tax either. In 2023, Scotland “extracted” £25.8 billion more from the UK state than it paid in — which works out at £4,735 per head, according to the Office for National Statistics. Scotland is the extractor, not England.

Yet, such arguments are about the worst you could make for the Union. I remember becoming frustrated listening to one esteemed MEP in the months after the Brexit referendum lamenting what she saw as the stupidity of the Welsh for voting to leave the EU when they were receiving so much money from Brussels in structural funds. I tried to make the counterpoint: not simply that the UK, as a whole, was a net contributor to the EU and so her argument was essentially circular, but that it was not unreasonable for people to vote against a system in which they were so poor they required large fiscal transfers just to make the status quo tolerable. People have every right to demand more than poverty alleviation from their political settlement.

More from this author

Keir Starmer's class neurosis

By Tom McTague

And here is the point. Every region outside London and the South East is a net recipient of public spending today. The whole country — from Dover to Benbecula and across to Northern Ireland — is dependent on the economic wealth produced in one place: the capital. The British economy, in effect, is now a giant fiscal transfer union, dependent on London, which in turn is dependent on one part of London: the Square Mile. We are, in effect, Manhattan surrounded by Portugal, only without the weather or pasteis de nata.

And yet, people are not receiving a cheque on their doormat each year signed “from London, spend wisely”. Instead, all they actually experience in their lives is a dependence which, at best, cushions their seemingly relentless decline. “Our hospital used to work, but now it’s atrocious” one member of the audience in Benbecula told the panel of aspiring MPs on Monday. The chair of the debate that evening then set out the scale of the challenge facing the community. “Currently, you can’t have a baby on the island,” she said. “You can’t have chemotherapy on the island. You can’t have minor surgery, you can’t have a vasectomy. You can’t have any of the small minor surgery interventions that you used to be able to have.”

This is not unique to Benbecula, or even Scotland, but is playing out across the UK where services are noticeably deteriorating. My own grandmother was on the receiving end the other day, woken up at 3am by a telephone call from the hospital who had looked at her blood tests and decided she had to come in immediately, only to then make her wait for 15 hours, alone, before failing to give her the treatment she needed because the doctors changing shifts had not handed over correctly. Everyone now has stories like this.

I used to think that the difference between Right and Left in politics was that, at heart, the Right believed Britain was fundamentally too poor and so needed to prioritise economic growth, while the Left believed it wasn’t a question of wealth but of distribution, and so needed to prioritise public spending. The radicals on either side believed in major structural reforms to fix these problems, while the moderates simply concluded small technocratic changes would be enough. Today, though, there seems to be a consensus emerging that Britain is both too poor and too unequal and that small technocratic tweaks will not be enough.

Suggested reading

Westminster is devolving itself out of existence

By Travis Aaroe

Today, we pay more tax for less in public services, with record levels of immigration for record low growth, all papered over by ever more dependence on London, which only produces ever more resentment of the capital and those who live in it. Angus MacNeil is right that defending this system because we have a Barnett formula is not enough. Limerick, after all, has plenty of roundabouts that the Irish pay for themselves.

In one sense, the Union is the safest it has been since the Brexit vote in 2016. With that issue fading from memory and the other great destabilising force, the Tories (also known as the Conservative and Unionist Party), also seemingly on their way out, the structural threats are receding. The real point, though, is that countries can thrive with independence, devolved self-rule or within larger well-governed countries. But unless they think of themselves at some level as a place containing “one people, united in interest as in dominion”, as the News Letter once put it, they will always be vulnerable. Barnet is not enough. Scottish nationalism was born in the era that oil was discovered. Suddenly, it was Scotland’s oil not Britain’s. In the end, of course, it would be Shell’s, which rather sums up the problem.

Visit Benbecula today for a similar fable of modern Britain, where even the English I met on the island are now for independence. Here is a place on the edge of Europe where the British state was once present, building things and employing people. The island’s biggest village is called Balivanich, formerly home to a few rows of cheaply built military accommodation to serve the nearby MOD missile testing site. What has now happened to that site? It has been sold off to a company called Qinetiq which now runs the place from Hampshire. Who today does not blush at this reality?

***

Listen to Tom’s podcast report here: Has the SNP blown it?

Given Sturgeon’s much vaunted twin loves — novels and being a “voice for inclusion” — the venue was a perfect match. Not far from Brighton, we were at Charleston Farmhouse; a place where, for much of the 20th century, core members of the Bloomsbury Group — Vanessa Bell, art critic husband Clive Bell, and fellow painter Duncan Grant — lived experimentally with various illustrious literary and philosophical figures orbiting around them. Immersed in endlessly complicated romantic liaisons, this was a queer pangendered polycule before the SNP had even heard of one. (More simply, though not inaccurately, relatives of mine by marriage who farmed the land nearby would refer to the Bloomsburies as “those funny people up the road”.)

In the present day, those now in charge of Charleston try to capitalise on the frisson of inherited sexual dissidence with lots of queer-themed events, including a recent fashion exhibition sponsored by Christian Dior. Indeed, an event poster displayed onstage directly before Sturgeon’s interview showed a naked female standing crotch-deep in a lake, elective mastectomy scars glinting where breasts used to be. But despite management pretensions to be running a modern-day Weimar salon, the reality of the audience at Sturgeon’s talk was somewhat more prosaic: scruffy middle-aged people dressed in violently clashing prints, their LRB tote bags stuffed with books by George Monbiot and Judi Dench. Only a few bright young things were scattered here and there, paying homage to their second favourite politician. Their first favourite, former Green Party leader Caroline Lucas, swept in just before the start and sat at the front.

To the sound of applause, festival director Nathanial Hepburn introduced the main attraction, effectively warning off audience members from airing “their own views on politics” during the question period — a sentiment which drew further appreciative applause from some. Dawson began the softball questioning, and we were soon immersed in a touching fairy tale: about a shy working-class girl from Irvine who had joined the SNP to “try and make a difference”, and then challenged male dominance and discrimination in Scottish politics by rising to the top. Over time she became the great feminist champion who led her people through their darkest hour during Covid. But in the end, weary of acting as a lightning rod for unjust toxicity — including from those angry with her for being a steadfast supporter of marginalised people — she had altruistically stepped away from power, for the good of her country.

There is a mental delusion called Capgras Syndrome, during which a person becomes convinced that someone in their life has been secretly replaced with an identical duplicate. During my hour in the Charleston tent, I started dimly to understand what this must be like. For in many ways the version of Sturgeon in front of me seemed to bear only the vaguest of relations to her historical doppelganger North of the Border.

Not least, the cause of Scottish Independence — to which I was sure I could remember her devoting almost her entire political life — was mentioned briefly only once, with a reassurance that she had an English granny and wanted the two countries to be the “best of friends”. The ongoing police investigation into SNP finances was similarly glossed over fast, albeit partly for legal reasons. When asked what she had been most proud of during her time in office, she said her government had done “a lot to try and shift the dial on child poverty”, referring to increased funded childcare and the Scottish Child Payment, but not to the fact that child poverty figures overall had remained obstinately static on her watch.

Mistily recounting the Covid years — during which her government closed schools for months, and imposed tougher lockdown regulations than in England yet with no real difference in death rates — she seemed to suggest openness and transparency had been key: it had been important “to stand up every day and explain exactly what we were asking people to do, why we were asking people to do it”. Could this be the same woman, I wondered, who was unable to produce any WhatsApp messages from this period at the Covid Inquiry, having deleted them all?

Suggested reading

Westminster is devolving itself out of existence

By Travis Aaero

And having arguably stuffed her party full of young activists hellbent on promotion within the system — including presiding over a jaw-dropping NEC rule change in 2020 that saw younger candidates with newly self-identified disabilities promoted to the top of regional MSP lists — this Anglicised version of Sturgeon advised young people never to see politics “as a route to a job or a career” because “if that is your motivation, then you are doing it for all the wrong reasons”. In her view, “politics, including in my party, now is probably too full of young people who have just gone through the political ranks”.

By the time she got to the bit about how toxic the public discourse about “trans rights” had become, and how trans people had become a public scapegoat, because citizens “struggling” with “a cost of living crisis” and “rising levels of poverty” — “particularly young people who suffered during Covid” — were looking “for somebody to blame”, I started to check what was in my drink. “I just have this belief that people should be allowed to be who they are, feel comfortable, respected, safe and able to live with dignity as who they want to be,” said the premier who had overseen the putting of violent male felons in terrifyingly close quarters with impoverished, vulnerable female prisoners, with no apparent thought to the safety or dignity of the latter.

Was it really she who had closed her ears to any possible problems with introducing self-ID at age 16 upwards, arguing that some opponents would “cloak themselves in women’s rights to make it acceptable, but just as they’re transphobic you’ll also find that they’re deeply misogynist, often homophobic, possibly some of them racist as well”? Who had personally insisted that puberty blockers would still be used for physically healthy children in Scotland’s youth gender identity service even after serious concerns emerged in 2021; and whose Party was defending clinical standards at the service as late as last month? Did she really not understand why all of this might get reasonable people riled? Apparently she did not.

The audience mostly seemed to lap it up; partly, I assume, because they knew practically nothing concrete about the speaker’s nine years in government. Nationalists often complain that the English media ignores Scottish concerns, but in this case it has clearly worked in their former leader’s favour. Still, it was also obvious that this deeply middle-class and well-heeled bunch mostly didn’t want to know about any potentially complicating factors that might temper their adulation, for that would spoil all the fun of the festival: paying £65 per day ticket to feel appalled about the state of the world and the Tories, but rather better about themselves. To this end, they needed a suitable moral heroine to side with, mentally speaking: preferably someone with a charmingly authentic regional accent, getting intermittent jabs in at their favourite hate figures while decrying toxic masculinity, and whose stated values otherwise were vague enough that you could read almost anything positive you liked into them. And it seems that they found one.

During the Q&A, as instructed, political questions were indeed mostly eschewed, in favour of fatuous queries about who Sturgeon might like to do a podcast with (Theresa May, apparently) and which books she might leave on the desk of an incoming Prime Minister (the crime novels of her good pal Val McDermid, in case you were wondering). Towards the end of the session, a sonorously voiced male admirer seemed to encapsulate the general mood of histrionic unreality by imploring the politician: “Will you promise us, whatever the result of the Police Scotland investigation, that you will find a continuing role to speak out?”

By then, I had heard more than enough. As I left, I reflected on the strangeness of what I’d just witnessed: the creation of an utterly fantastical world, bearing practically no relation to the actual one, being wrought in real time via the psychological co-dependency of two highly unlikely parties: on the one hand, a former Scottish National Party leader; and on the other, the sort of deeply unself-aware, affluent, self-satisfied and soft-minded Southerner who for decades has been a source of both mockery and fury to most Scottish Nationalists in practice. When that memoir eventually does come out, she’ll know exactly where to go to sell it.

Or at least a kind of Whig history. It — infamously — relied on grand narratives. Here is one. In the Middle Ages, England made a precocious finish to what we might call the story of early modernity. It had a single language; a single legal code; central government; national feeling; no great magnates; no municipal liberties; no regional distinctions that mattered. There was no rigmarole of provincial Diets, as was the style almost everywhere else. There was one organ, Westminster, where people could speak of a national interest that was felt as keenly in Scunthorpe as in London. These were legislators, not petitioners pleading the case of a town, or a guild.

The logical next step for this hot-housed national England was to round out the polity, incorporating the rest of the island to prevent it being used as a “backdoor” by its rivals. The unification of England meant, inescapably, the unification of Great Britain. Everything seemed to be pulling in this direction. The Scottish aristocracy was Norman. The Lowlanders, great bulk of the country’s population, were Anglo-Saxons. The Reformation had given the people of Great Britain a common religion (mostly), and, still more, a common set of enemies.

That decision, in 1707, to take the plunge for full parliamentary union simply made sense. Sure, much of it was down to self-interest. But it was a self-interest that presupposed a common one. The sectarian difference, dowdy and obscure by continental standards even during the time of Oliver Cromwell, was becoming even less important. Scottish merchants declared that the internal customs barriers with England were intolerable — barriers which were still the European norm well into the 19th century. Nationhood had arrived, and required only its formal consummation.

Suggested reading

Welcome to stagnation nation

By Tom McTague

If the unity of the island of Great Britain seemed in some way preordained, it still feels that way. Modern technology means that centralised rule is easier than ever. The confessional divide between England and Scotland has vanished. So too has the economic one: the choice is no longer, as it was in the dog days of Churchill’s chancellorship, between the shipbuilders of the Clyde and the City of London. Scotland and England both are now sustained by high finance; luxury goods; education; tourism. The departure from the European single market has made the British single market more important than ever.

And yet, there has been a concerted effort to throw the tide of history into reverse. Since the Scottish referendum in 2014, it has become common to say that Great Britain is an artifice with no real historical existence. But that rupture — devolution, Scottish and otherwise — is part of a particular idea of authority that has become hegemonic over the past 25 years.

The administration that came to power in 1997 was decentralist and localist in its assumptions. It did not like the idea of a powerful central metropolis in London. It did not like Parliament, with its debates, its majorities, and its ability to make and unmake any law — which threatened new unfalsifiable ideas of human rights. New Labour opposed majorities, executive power, and central government. No tradition of distributed power existed in Britain, so it would invent one. So was born the Supreme Court and the devolved assemblies, both practically free from Parliament’s writ, and which would make endless bartering between claims of right the legerdemain of politics, not popular appeals, or debates.

That idea soon became bipartisan. As a political programme, it preferred the local and familiar to the remote and metropolitan. It wanted politicians to “stop arguing” and come to an agreement. It distrusted Power, and sought to set things up in such a way that no one could exercise it over anyone else — except over the common people. It was, as George Orwell once wrote of Swift, “despising authority while disbelieving in liberty”.

Suggested reading

The gravediggers of British conservatism

By Aris Roussinos

Modern Scottish nationalism is not separable from this programme of decentralism. The two are symbiotic. Devolution created a strange and subsidised layer of local politicians and bureaucrats, who, having no real reason for their existence, could do little else but play to provincial rights and an exaggerated Scottishness as a gambit for funding and jobs. Westminster, won for the cause of sham provincial liberties long ago, always obliged. As national life was purposefully fractured, rule from London began — completely by default — to seem like a foreign imposition.

As the entirely self-created “crisis of Union” began to mount in 2014, Westminster could answer only with yet more decentralisation. Everything about London’s response to the separatist threat presupposed that a Scottish nation already existed, and that a British one did not.

The latest invocation of local rights was that Scotland had recently been getting governments and policies it had not voted for (so had, say, Cambridge). When a set of voters is unhappy, the usual course is to change things around to appease them — as Rishi Sunak is now attempting in the Red Wall. Instead, London’s response was a promise to shield them from the English electorate: “The Vow”. Reform of public services had been the main aim of David Cameron’s premiership, but now these public services were to be devolved entirely. In his heart of hearts, the prime minister did not believe that his mandate from the British people gave him any real right to govern Scotland.

The Vow, and the further devolution that followed, was an avowal that a British body politic did not and should not exist. London conceded every premise of the SNP. But these were its own premises. For its part, while the SNP was not the creature of London, at every turn it consented to play the role marked out for it. In the years that followed the referendum, Nicola Sturgeon became a permanent fixture of national life, and offered a general running commentary on British affairs. She was acting the part cast for her by London: a stern and forthright provincial critic of central excess. Unlike in Catalonia, or Quebec, there was never any serious talk of unilateral secession, even as parliamentary government in London virtually collapsed between 2017-19.

Suggested reading

Penny Mordaunt: the perfect head for the headless Tories

By Mary Harrington

The implicit relationship became clearer during Humza Yousaf’s year in power. One of his first announcements was that no second referendum would be pursued until a “sustained majority” emerged for one. This was, in practice, a way to adjourn the idea forever. In his resignation speech, Yousaf warned of the threat of populism. What? Scottish nationalism’s aim is to break up the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland: a permanent member of the UN security council, a stately member of the international system, and a nuclear power. It is, ostensibly, one of the most populistic causes on the planet. But that is no longer its way. To its leadership, at least, Scottish nationalism is not for Scotland, merely against majoritarian democracy in Britain.

But this dependence on patronage and concession made the SNP’s position too precarious. Having forsworn demagogy, it could now only petition Westminster to carry through its own project by degrees. Up till now, it had always found a receptive audience. But were even the feeblest of unionism ever to emerge in London, it would be out of road.

So it proved. After 2016, London took the bold and daring step of not allowing the SNP to hold another referendum at the time of its choosing and with its own gerrymandered franchise. This threw the party into a crisis from which it never fully recovered. The end, when it came last year, was suitably anticlimactic. Scottish nationalism, as practised, did not survive contact with a unitary British state that was prepared to take even the smallest of steps to preserve itself; and it perished over a trifle. The decision to veto the Gender Recognition (Scotland) Bill in January 2023 was a humdrum affair, entirely normal under any federal or pseudo-federal structure. But it has probably buried the SNP for a generation.

Buried, but dormant. In Westminster, devolution remains the solution to all political problems, and has indeed been given energy anew by recent events. Britain’s governing classes now believe that devolution is the best bar to the populist threat. They could not have been more clear about this: every anti-establishment vote from the British people is interpreted as, really, an inchoate cry against London, and for local autonomy. People in Teesside did not truly want lower immigration, it was said — only an Assembly of the North East, and a Mayor.

Rather than any change of course, Britain’s rulers have answered populism with devolution: to reroute and blunt public anger at the direction of national policy; and, still more, to break up the unified British body politic that had just delivered those results. It is proposed to dismember an ancient constitutional polity and hand over the fragments to a series of local fanatics and workaday crooks, in exchange for the assurance that these people will preserve the country from populism.

For their part, the British people have been vaguely bewildered by devolution. For all that is made of a clamour for regional identity and local belonging, the mandates for the new devolved assemblies and metro mayors have been derisory. The recent election for Mayor of the North East had a turnout of 31%; for the Mayor of York and North Yorkshire it was 29.89%. In May of 2022, the people of Bristol voted to abolish their Mayor and return to the old system of council oligarchy. The Liverpool mayoralty has collapsed in scandal. London politics only really exists insofar as there have been attempts to artificially wall it off from the rest of southern England: the battle over Ulez being the case in point.

Devolution, as a means to bar the way to populism, may yet reawaken Scottish nationalism. Gordon Brown’s plan for a new federal constitution, A New Britain, includes such howlers as giving the Scottish Government the ability to conclude its own international treaties. These proposals are already being watered down, and are unlikely to be adopted in full. But they show a clear direction of travel — even as Scottish separatism itself starts to sputter out. The end of the British union, if it comes, will have been entirely self-inflicted.

More than anything else, it will be a tragedy. Great Britain was created as a vehicle to unleash the energies of two almost uniquely talented peoples: people who had much in common anyway, but were being forever side-tracked by a tedious and endless cousins’ war. Union seemed to make everything young again. Union meant that the Scottish and the English could turn outwards. They pounced on the world with a boyish enthusiasm unequalled since the days of Alexander.

Devolution aims to bring this grand enterprise to an end. It offers — demands — a slower pace of life for the island and its people. The United Kingdom was created to do Something. One gets the sense that Decentralised Britain — introverted, particular, ruminating — is by design meant to do nothing.

But there is a further, non-criminal, charge against both characters: mendacity. In their defence, it went with the job. The project of Scottish nationalism has always demanded that its leaders lie, or at least obfuscate, or grossly exaggerate. Sturgeon, who resigned (on flimsy grounds) as First Minister of Scotland a year ago today, was even better at that than her mentor. While he has always projected something of a wide-boy public persona, she leant on a reputation for rectitude, control and dedication to a great cause.

Since Sturgeon’s resignation, and his victory in the subsequent leadership contest, Humza Yousaf has attracted the same accusation — only without the period of public popularity his two predecessors enjoyed. And this is inextricable from the movement all three represent: their personal and political calamities are the products of an integral deceit at the heart of the independence project.

This first became glaringly apparent with Salmond’s original tilt at secession in 2014. In his reshaping of the SNP, he used (or abused) his economist’s training to produce a 667-page document which claimed that Scotland, the region with the highest public spending in Britain, could single-handedly accelerate to Scandinavian levels of child and maternal care (without Scandinavian levels of tax). This shaky mound of assertions was then blown apart when, in the following year, the oil price crashed from $110 to $50 a barrel and the independence referendum was spurned by a majority of 55%. Without the economic ballast of the former and democratic will of the latter, Scottish nationalism seemed a dead scheme, buried beneath a pile of half-truths.

Suggested Reading

Scotland deserves better than this circus

By Graham Robb

Salmond resigned and Sturgeon slipped into his place. She was left with the job of sustaining confidence in the vision of independence when the oil price fall translated into a “black hole” in Scottish revenue and expenditure of £18.6 billion. Had independence won, as the then leader of the Conservative opposition Ruth Davidson pointed out, it would have meant vast cuts to every public service. Faced with a propaganda disaster, the new First Minister resorted to windy rhetoric: “I believe and always will believe that the best way forward is to be in charge of our own resources, so we don’t have to be subject to the kind of cuts coming at us from the UK government, but instead could be masters of our own destiny.”

This response, ignoring facts in favour of faith, was in part the fruit of Sturgeon’s apprenticeship to Salmond. And given her own steely structure of personal commitment — secular, yet infused with a Calvinist rectitude — it was to be Sturgeon’s sword and shield through years of leadership. Thus when, following a Brexit that had the support of only a third of Scottish voters, she thickly underscored what the loss of membership meant to Scotland. Brexit became a way to showcase, as in one March 2021 speech, Scotland’s national if not actual autonomy: “… a country and not a region of a unitary state. Scotland’s position is therefore unique — a country, in a voluntary union, which has been removed from the EU against the will of the majority who live here.”

Nothing there of the difficulty, maybe impossibility, of re-joining the Union while keeping sterling (as the large majority of Scots wish) or of refusing to join the euro — as all new entrants must. Nor was there any mention of the necessary erection of a trade border between Scotland and the rest of the UK. Sturgeon always waved away such realities, pointing instead to the independence of other “small” countries like Ireland, Finland and Denmark. The latter is a constant comfort blanket for SNP leaders: Sturgeon opened the Scottish government’s Nordic Office in Copenhagen in August 2022, one of a chain of such centres designed to give the impression that Scotland is already a nation with a foreign policy. To serve such a vanity, when denied a meeting with Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, the First Minister submitted herself to a brief early morning photo opportunity with a grim-looking Jeppe Kofod, then Foreign Minister. The cosmetic appearance of international status trumped realpolitik.

Sturgeon’s energetic self-righteousness and authoritarian governing style sustained her and her party — until, on 15 February 2023, she resigned, citing weariness and a realisation that the leader’s post “can only be done, by anyone, for so long”. It was a thin rationalisation of departure by one so dedicated to the goals and power of her office. But in her subsequent public appearances, she has seemed overtaken by fatigue. Appearing for five hours at the Covid Inquiry in January, her self-command was tested by a barrage of questions from Jamie Dawson KC, both on her reluctance to retain email and other messages among her colleagues, and on the possibility she used her daily media appearances to “politicise” the lockdown — something which this most political of politicians firmly denied.

More from this author

2024 is the year of the New Right

By John Lloyd

She was brought to tears at times: whether they were involuntary or staged was much discussed. The breakdowns likely had elements of both. She was, after all, always aware of the need to present herself as the unsleeping leader of her afflicted people, even as she admitted to an overly-delayed lockdown and Scotland showed the highest rate of Covid-related deaths in care homes.

It was a difficult return to political life, but her own successor and protégé has fared even worse. Humza Yousaf has copied Sturgeon in feeling “never really… comfortable” with the word “national” in the party’s name (she had found the word “hugely problematic”). But, little more than an epigone, he proves daily that he has none of her force.

Instead, he makes absurd mathematical leaps: where Sturgeon had the idea that instant negotiations on independence with the British government should begin when a majority of votes were cast for the SNP, Yousaf has proposed that a majority of seats in the UK parliament — where Scotland has 57 seats — would serve as a trigger for an attempted secession. Yet polling in October found only 13% of voters agreed that the SNP’s winning a majority of seats was a mandate, and only 15% supported the “most seats” proposal.

Yousaf has inherited a party that has proved itself unable to fulfil its only policy — secession — while neglecting its other responsibilities. Health, Yousaf’s responsibility before becoming leader, is in deeper crisis than in England. In education, once the pride of all Scottish classes, the decline represents a national catastrophe.

Still, unionists cannot rejoice. Support for the SNP has declined steadily — it is now level with a resurgent Labour Party — but support for secession remains high, in most polls only slightly below 50%. The aspiration of independence has a positive image, and it has young legs — Scots born after the mid-Eighties are more than twice as likely to favour secession than those born in the late Forties or earlier. Graduates, once less inclined towards independence, now support it in droves. Meanwhile, this constituency are repulsed by the party most associated with unionism: the Conservatives.

This social-ideological feat accomplished by Salmond and Sturgeon has meant that Scots’ politics have become very considerably dislodged from material issues — money, jobs, public services — to alight on the more fashionable bases of identity and cosmopolitanism. But again this is an illusion. The SNP, as populist in its policies and propaganda as any party in Europe, might claim a principled difference from conservative England for its liberal views on immigration, gender, the EU and public spending. But it has many fewer immigrants per head than England, and its unpopular attempt to allow men claiming to have changed gender to be housed in women’s prisons failed. The SNP is a liberal vanguard atop a conservative nation.

And this was further revealed in the leadership contest Yousaf fought a year ago. He won narrowly, securing 52.1% to Kate Forbes’s 47.9%. But her aggressive scrutiny of his ministerial record considerably exposed the SNP’s general mediocrity: “You were a transport minister and the trains were never on time, when you were justice secretary the police were stretched to breaking point, and now as health minister we’ve got record high waiting times.” Her religion — she is a member of the doctrinally strict Free Church of Scotland — was held up by Yousaf’s supporters as a threat to the party’s liberal positions on gender and other matters. (Yousaf, a Muslim with as many non-liberal commandments to obey, was not so challenged.) But the fact that she came so close to winning does indicate a strain of conservatism running through the party, as well as some internal doubts about its achievements in government.

Suggested reading

Scotland deserves better than this circus

By Darren 'Loki' McGarvey

A performative politics — developed by two great political performers, Salmond and Sturgeon — has for the moment triumphed in a Scotland whose older self-image as a country of rational, enlightened and prudent citizens has been allowed to lapse. This gives the unionist forces a large problem — but possibly also an opening, especially for the Labour Party. The more that Scotland’s liberal, credentialed classes become dominant in nationalism, the more the material interests of the majority, especially the working- and lower-middle classes, will be ignored. A party which could mobilise the latter, and offer a fresh and genuine image of national renaissance, could benefit greatly from SNP decline.

For now though, while Yousaf’s lacklustre leadership will damage the SNP, it has so far not damaged its cause. He has the capacity of his predecessors to protect himself with false and meaningless rhetoric, covering up the chasm where policy delivery should be. And that’s because he lives in the virtual world Salmond and Sturgeon created, where a country only needs to burst the bonds of UK oppression to become Denmark. They had the rhetorical energy to sustain the illusion: he is unlikely to develop it further. Yet as long as nationalism still endures, someone else — Kate Forbes perhaps, a very Christian soldier — could emerge to pick up the standard, and take it onward as another false promise to an already wounded nation.

This week, that thing was the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election. A two-horse race between the SNP and Labour, the result of which was supposed to offer important clues as to the direction of political travel both north and south of the border. Or at least, that’s what all the commentators and analysts were saying.

They know that the only way Labour can win a significant majority at the next UK general election is if a sizeable chunk of Scotland flips from yellow to red. And Rutherglen and Hamilton West had done exactly that on three occasions since 2010, which is why the SNP and Labour were on a war-footing there long before disgraced MP Margret Ferrier was recalled and then ousted for breaching Covid rules in 2020. Yesterday, there was a 20.4 percentage point swing back to Labour.

The two politicians fighting it out were the SNP’s Katy Loudon and Labour’s Michael Shanks. They are young and energetic. And even though relatively unseasoned, it is clear that each has already acquired the necessary affectations to bullshit their way through a live political debate. So rather than a battle of ideas, during their television debates we saw a battle of the brands fought with all the authenticity of a used-car salesman gesturing towards a smoking electric car, assuring you that “it’s a great little runner”.

We had Loudon, a South Lanarkshire councillor since 2017, pressing Shanks on his change of heart over Brexit and the two-child cap, which places not only him but Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar out of step with Keir Starmer. And she accused Labour of flip-flopping on its commitments, which might have landed more powerfully if only her party, in government now for longer than the Tories, were not also serial flip-floppers.

More from this author

Scotland's poor are left to die

By Darren 'Loki' McGarvey

And then we had Shanks, delivering political platitudes and then failing to press Loudon on her party’s indecision over arts funding, free school meals for all kids, abolition of the council tax, and its position on nuclear weapons. He then turned on her for supporting tax hikes in a cost-of-living crisis, knowing perfectly well that the hikes would be on high earners, living in the most valuable properties — the sort of progressive taxation you’d expect a Labour up-and-comer to support.

What was utterly lacking was anything specific about the actual constituency. The whole campaign has been an exhibition of nervous insincerity. The candidates know what’s at stake; they know they’ve been pulled in off the bench in the 80th minute in the wider war between the SNP and Labour. The sheer volume of heavy-hitters who have made cameo appearances to bolster both campaigns speaks to the height of the stakes here — and to the painful truth at the heart of this by-election: the most deprived locals are merely useful pawns in a tribal game.

Swathes of South Lanarkshire — the local authority in which a decent chunk of this constituency sits — are unglamorous, grey-washed urban purgatories rendered nondescript by post-industrial malaise. Maybe that’s a little harsh. We have some wonderful partially closed Sixties swimming pools.

Poor health and poverty are also embedded across this part of the country. Three years ago, South Lanarkshire Council published public health statistics that didn’t make comfortable reading: two in three people were deemed overweight. One in three was obese. Just 19% of babies were exclusively breastfed — significantly lower than the Scottish average of 27% — and around 20% of children lived in poverty. Out of a population of over 300,000, 41,000 were income-deprived. And the poorest residents of Rutherglen and Cambuslang — two areas which fall within this well-publicised contest – were, at that time, regarded as among the unhealthiest in Scotland.

Some will argue that’s because of their poor choices. But what choices do they have when their community consists of too much traffic on too few rush-hour expressways connecting rundown retail parks to gambling facilities, charity shops and junk food outlets?

The above statistics were published before Covid. Since then, every metric by which inequality is measured is flashing red. We have bouncers on the doors of Tesco Express. Security tags on baby food. And more food banks than we have McDonald’s, all while a billionaire class enters a new space race and no politician has yet suggested taxing them upon re-entry. On the plus side, energy prices are now so high the Tories can only afford to gaslight us for another four months.

Given the level of media interest in Rutherglen and Hamilton West, the scale of political campaigning, and the partisan chatter on social media, the casual onlooker would be forgiven for thinking the contest is of great material significance to local people. They’d be wrong.

This wasn’t about Rutherglen and Hamilton West. This by-election was both a progress report on First Minister Humza Yousaf’s wobbly early spell in Scotland’s top job, and a litmus test for how a resurgent Labour may fare at the next UK election. Pundits obsessed over possible turnout: would SNP voters stay home, unenthused by the lack of movement on indyref2? Or worse still, would more moderate pro-indy supporters sense a chance to oust the Tories and, perhaps worse than staying home, vote Labour. What would become of the Tory and Lib-Dem vote, which, if combined, is significant enough to swing the result if deployed tactically? And what do Jackie Ballie, Angus Robertson, Keir Starmer and Fiona Hyslop think of it all? Utterly riveting stuff.

More from this author

Scotland's drug shame

By Darren 'Loki' McGarvey

This was politics at its worst. There were no big ideas here. No grand visions. Even the insults rang hollow. The reason for this is simple: all that separates these two broadly progressive parties are their respective positions on constitutional issues which grow less salient by day — yet they must engage in the charade that there are profound differences.

According to the SNP, Labour are just the same as the Tories. Labour, meanwhile, wants us to believe the SNP are not the same as the Tories — they’re worse. This level of debate is worryingly disingenuous. Either these people actually believe the pish they talk — or they’re so cynical they willingly talk pish they do not believe. You would find more consistency of logic on the stands of a local football stadium. Yes, it’s politics. Yes, there are forces at play which constrain political discourse in ways that politicians cannot always control. But does it all have to be so tedious and predictable and insincere?

You can really see the draw of becoming a political diehard. Of nailing your colours to the mast and warring till the bitter end. It’s a far simpler existence. You train your eyes and ears for the errors of others, while remaining blind to your own. Behind the impressive professional facades both parties project, what we see are flawed, embittered, manipulative and often quite delusional people. There’s no craft, no skill, and no courage. Just both sides constantly trying to pin things on their opponent that they themselves have been guilty of in the past, or worse, are actively participating in as they speak.

Take the tit-for-tat over public services. The very day Scottish Labour talked up rumours of closures to local police stations, including three in Rutherglen and Hamilton West, blaming SNP cuts, the Labour-controlled council in neighbouring North Lanarkshire was forced into an embarrassing U-turn following a backlash to its planned closure of no less than 39 cultural and leisure facilities. Labour insisted the by-election was a mini-referendum on two failed governments at Holyrood and Westminster — but Labour is the party in control of both this constituency’s councils. Whether centrally controlling their parties, marginalising critical voices, or announcing policies they have no intention of actually implementing for fleeting traction in the press, the idea that one of these political shitshows has a moral high ground above the other is utterly laughable.

It suits both the SNP and Labour to portray themselves as diametrically opposed, but they’re two flaps of the same fanny. Most of us see clearly that these apparently rival factions are variants of the same essential strain of managerial centrism — both holding the belief that you can radically change society without doing or saying anything radical.

Suggested reading

Scottish nationalism is fuelled by resentment

By Kathleen Stock

Anas Sarwar, while steering Scottish Labour assuredly through some choppy political waters, claims Scotland needs fundamental change and says he can provide it. But I’ve looked up “fundamental” in the dictionary and that doesn’t match his actions. As far as I know, he has been out chapping doors for days in the plusher parts of the contested constituency, warning those comfortable homeowners cloistered around the best-performing schools that the SNP plans to punish them by raising their council tax to something approaching fair. This, from the same Labour Party that simultaneously lambasts the SNP for failing to reform local taxation after 16 years in government.

Their campaign has involved walking the classic centrist tightrope of promising action to the poorest on poverty, while keeping the middle-class happy with the sort of perks that only entrench the inequality. Scottish Labour needs to attract the kind of people who are not worrying about multi-morbidity, or two-week waits for GP appointments, or the stigma of food poverty, or the two-child benefit cap. Being on the right side of Scotland’s educational attainment gap, and a world away from the drug death crisis, voters of this ilk, while certainly feeling the cost-of-living pinch, are not exactly hard-up. And if they vote Labour, they’ll expect something in return. They’ll expect the various mechanisms by which opportunity is distributed blindly upward to be maintained and expanded.

Conversely, the SNP is paying the price for a decade spent playing the same game. Their problems run deeper than Yousaf being less popular than predecessor Nicola Sturgeon. The tragedy is that at precisely the moment where Yousaf could legitimately claim to have moved even further to the Left than ever before — going toe-to-toe with landlords over short-term lets, pioneering child poverty payment, nationalising Scotrail and abolishing peak fares — their own base is beginning to lose interest. People are so numb after years of political capital being blown on the pretence that another referendum was imminent that, even though the SNP seems finally to be using devolved power to make a difference — safe consumption rooms, progressive taxation, and at some point in the near future, a Scottish Welfare System — many simply shrug when these achievements are pointed out.

The biggest problem both parties have, even if they end up in power at the same time, is that they are now political hostages to their own bullshit. Namely, the volatile constitutional issues of Brexit and Independence in which they are now, in their own ways, enmeshed, yet forbidden by electoral imperative from speaking honestly about.

Suggested reading

Rural Scotland is dying of cold

By Cal Flyn

The SNP has known for a long time that IndyRef2 will not happen soon — even the movement’s most gung-ho campaigners are placing the next referendum a firm 10 years away — yet it has engaged in the charade that it was just around the corner. Meanwhile, the party insists that because Scotland voted to Remain, we’ve been torn out of a lucrative political and economic union against our will, failing to see the contradiction at the heart of their campaign to take Scotland out of the UK without evidence that a majority of Scots actually want this to happen. The SNP wants us to believe two contradictory ideas at the same time: that Brexit is harmful to Scotland and that Independence won’t be (I’m all for indy, but I’m also realistic about the challenges it will bring).

These intellectual gymnastics are mocked and mirrored by Labour. Starmer, Sarwar and the rest of them must pretend Brexit is settled and that the shambles of leaving the EU in the hardest possible fashion has had little bearing on the UK’s dire economic fortunes — even though they understand only too well that such a tumultuous exit from the Single Market has made the very people who voted for it poorer. But Scottish Labour must also talk tough on independence to fend off the threat of the Scottish Tories, while knowing full well that the Scottish Government will always be severely constrained in the progress it can make when key issues such as immigration, labour laws and most taxes remain the preserve of London politicians.

More from this author

My social mobility shame

By Darren 'Loki' McGarvey

Some might be relieved that constitutional issues were not as prominent in this by-election, but it is clear that, without the mobilising prospect of a rematch on either Brexit or a second independence referendum, Labour and the SNP will return to their comfort zones, taking their loyal bases for granted, pricing-in working class apathy, and targeting middle-class moderates whose political convictions could be written on the back of a fag packet — leaving space for all 228 lines of “Tam o’ Shanter”.

The only people actually buying what the politicians are selling are devout party activists, students yet to be disabused of their naivety, partisan hacks who study politics the way your Auntie Betty studies Emmerdale, and middle-class moderates who’ll swallow any old, reheated pish for stable house prices and a quiet two-driveway life. Nobody else gives a shit. If we can be bothered, we turn up on polling day, we hold our noses, and we vote for whichever party we believe is the least terrible option that year.

Coincidentally, the scepticism many Scots feel when London journos take a sudden interest in our affairs is precisely the scepticism many in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West constituency probably feel about the preening top-flight Scottish politicians chewing scenery in the run-up to the by-election. Working-class people here are mere beads on an abacus, their votes appropriated for some national narrative that doesn’t serve them. Today, the travelling political circus will pack up and leave without a backward glance.

During her address to journalists, the First Minister’s well-honed rhetorical abilities cast their usual spell — broken only during the Q&A, when she was asked about her legacy of a collapsing NHS, widening attainment gaps in literacy and numeracy in schools, and soaring numbers of drug deaths every year. Before that, though, we were firmly in Sturgeonland, where — a bit like being on a Highland distillery tour — reality tends to disappear in a euphoric haze and temporarily everything looks better than it actually is.

Despite plummeting personal approval ratings, she focused several times on consoling those who, she assumed, would be saddened by her departure, giving the impression of trying to avert outpourings of weeping in the streets. Putting an optimistic gloss on the general mediocrity of her party, she implied that for too long she had eclipsed the many talented SNP politicians with her own brilliance, promising that from now on we would be able to see them more clearly. And perhaps most startlingly — fresh from calling critics of her government’s gender law reforms “homophobic” and “racist” only a fortnight ago  —  she noted that, over the years, she had somehow become a lightning rod for “irrationality” in the “tone and tenor of discourse” on controversial areas, and expressed the fervent desire that things be less polarised from now on.

All of this must have been quite enraging for one of the few actually talented individuals left in the SNP, Joanna Cherry. Cherry is well-known for disagreeing with the party line on gender law reform in favour of self-identification, arguing that it will harm women’s and lesbians’ rights. In 2021, on the same day that an SNP supporter sent her violent sexualised threats for which he was later convicted, Cherry was sacked from her Westminster front-bench role, apparently for her opposition to self-ID. You don’t get much more “intensity” and “brutality” in politics than that.

Equally, Sturgeon’s new turn as a pacifist in the culture wars must have been hard for Joan McAlpine to hear. She was a highly successful MSP for a decade, but was viciously ostracised in 2019 for expressing reservations about the conflation of sex and gender identity in the Scottish Census. She was eventually pushed out of politics via a gerrymandered party rule change that some suspected was deliberately designed to oust her.

Sturgeon did nothing at the time to reduce toxicity in the party with respect to Cherry and McAlpine, even when SNP MPs were openly describing the pair as hateful for views about self-ID which — it now turns out — most of the Scottish population share. Quite the contrary: she frequently turned the heat up, via the regular delivery of public statements of support for transactivist causes that could easily be read as green lights for others to carry on smearing. Right up until the moment a fortnight ago when the First Minister was left havering on ITV about whether Isla Bryson is or is not a woman, she tended to present any dissent towards the “trans women are women” mantra as the product of confused or malicious thinking. When a headteacher publicly sides with the school bullies, she might as well have declared open season on their victims.

More from this author

The problem with 'trans women are women'

By Kathleen Stock

It was also Sturgeon’s government that funded one of the main engines of transactivist insanity in Scotland and the UK more generally, the Scottish Trans Alliance (now Scottish Trans). Effectively, they paid this organisation and its parent charity, Equality Network, to tell them what to think on trans issues, and then obediently did exactly what they were told — including pushing for self-ID, and dismissing all objections to it as hateful.

In 2016, then-director James Morton told the Women and Equalities Select Committee that rape crisis and domestic violence services for women should admit males self-identifying as women, and should work to “educate” any traumatised female service-users who complained — a point that was uncritically incorporated into committee’s final report. And in 2018, Morton wrote about how his government-funded organisation had deliberately influenced the Scottish Prison Service to introduce males into female prisons, reasoning that introducing self-ID in these “very challenging circumstances” would put pressure on other public services to adopt it too. And — factually at least, though not ethically — he was right.

So, for Sturgeon to pose at the press conference on Wednesday as some kind of throwback to the Scottish Enlightenment, urging that “debates should be rational” and that “Scotland should be capable of having them”, may well count as the most brass-necked reverse ferret of her long career. She is certainly no Thomas Reid or Dugald Stewart, two 18th-century philosophers closely associated with the Scottish school of common-sense realism, and who each emphasised the importance of trusting one’s senses and guarding against paradox. For the policy of self-ID is manifestly a failure on both counts.

Never mind that — despite an apparently shared interest in witch-burning, Sturgeon doesn’t even reach the fairly low bar for public rationality set by Presbyterian founder and general miserabilist John Knox. Knox may have been fond of ducking-stools, stocks, and pillories, but at least he thought that people should interpret biblical texts for themselves, without the interposition of priests in funny robes spouting incomprehensible jargon.

Suggested reading

Scottish nationalism will survive Sturgeon

By Tom McTague

Partly thanks to Knox and the high levels of literacy he encouraged in schoolchildren for Bible-reading purposes, Scottish culture has a long and justly famed tradition of valuing independent thinking. There is a rejection of closed hierarchies of power, and a habit of nose-thumbing authority figures. Outward appearances of prestige are supposed to mean little, and the lowliest and poorest member of society is thought equal to the most powerful and well-connected. “A man’s a man for a’ that,” Robert Burns famously told us. “Trans women are women,” piped the incongruent refrain from Sturgeon. To prove it, she put violent, unstable murderers and paedophiles into close living arrangements with impoverished, abused females. And then she left them to get on with it.

Politicians are generally good at rewriting history. In the general Great Forgetting which, I assume, will follow the eventual Great Resetting on gender policies towards something more sensible, the SNP may well feign collective amnesia about their former glorious leader’s role in helping discourse in Scotland on trans matters become as vicious and divided as it could possibly be. For all I know, Sturgeon might be about to announce her appointment as a Visiting Professor of Public Reason at Strathclyde Uni, or something. Stranger things have happened. So just in case — and as the woman herself might say — let me be very clear.

Over the course of her leadership, Sturgeon has presided over a closed system of mutual backscratching between her government and favoured courtier-transactivists, paying them to tell her and her government what to think. She has helped shut down free and lawful public discussion of their demands, enabled the unjust monstering of their critics, and sat silently watching as eminently capable women in her own party suffer unconscionable bullying and smearing from others within the party for dissenting.

More from this author

Scottish nationalism is fuelled by resentment

By Kathleen Stock

Even worse, while posing as both feminist and socialist, she monomaniacally has put the vested interests of a small group of privileged, university-educated activists over the interests of huge swathes of ordinary Scottish women, including many who are vulnerable and traumatised by violence and sexual abuse. And she has apparently done this for what she foolishly believed would be political gain.

Nicola Sturgeon may well be — in fact, obviously is — a human being. But she’s a hypocritical and callous one. She’s right to say that Scottish politics has become more intense and brutal, but she only has herself to blame.

Today, both secessionism and unionism feed off the other’s incoherence. Sturgeon’s press conference in Edinburgh compellingly proved this: she described her decision in ways that made it sound as if she were some kind of martyr. Under her leadership, she said, the cause of Scottish nationalism had suffered because it had become caught up in the irrational partisanship of her opponents, who had grown to dislike her so much that they could no longer judge Scottish independence on its own merits. She was, she intimated, sacrificing herself in the hope that a new leader would be able to bring more people into the tent of Scottish nationalism. Unionists should not be complacent about this prospect — she may actually be correct — but the structural problem for Scottish nationalism is not the prejudice of its opponents, but the failings of its own offer.

Brexit has made Scottish independence a far more complicated prospect than it was before. It is now possible that we will look back on the referendum in 2014 as the moment Scottish independence made the most sense. Fair or not, Brexit means that Scotland cannot dilute the dominating reality of England simply by leaving the union and joining the rump UK in a wider EU. If anything, Brexit has made England’s hulking presence next to Scotland even more pronounced, while demanding answers from the SNP that it does not seem ready or able to provide. What happens at the border with England? Will Scotland introduce the euro? Will Holyrood accept common European debts? Will it rejoin the Common Fisheries Policy? For the SNP, Brexit has turned out to be both the casus belli for its second push for independence and a strategic disaster. The best thing that could happen to Scottish nationalism would be for Britain to rejoin the European Union.

For unionists, however, Brexit might be an unexpected weapon in their constitutional arsenal, but it is one whose very existence is a reminder of the union’s inherent Englishness. Today, it is impossible to escape the reality that the UK has ceased to function in any meaningful sense as a unified British state; it now operates as an incoherent and imbalanced union of separate entities whose English character has not been softened by devolution, but incalculably sharpened. The fact is, the more Holyrood dominates Scotland’s national life, the more English the actual national parliament in Westminster becomes. This is a hole in the national barrel, draining the legitimacy of parliament and in time the union itself. The irony, then, is that just as Brexit acts as both an irritant and a salve to the threat of Scottish independence, devolution itself is a prime source of the union’s instability, the unbridgeable fault line in the body politic which no-one in Westminster is prepared to confront.

Watching Sturgeon’s resignation, I was reminded of the late Tom Nairn, the great academic pin-up of Scottish nationalism whose book The Break-up of Britain argued that the British state was destined to collapse like the Hapsburg, Tsarist or Prussian regimes of the 19th and early 20th centuries. “It is a basically indefensible and unadaptable relic, not a modern state,” wrote Nairn. “The only useful kind of speculation has assumed a geriatric odour: a motorised wheelchair and a decent funeral seem to have become the actual horizons of the Eighties.” Nairn’s book was published in 1977 and yet the geriatric old relic endures, still supported by half  of Scottish voters, despite Brexit and the political crises in Westminster that have followed.

Yet Nairn cannot be dismissed as a false prophet. As a political force, Scottish Nationalism has been transformed since 1977. The SNP is now the dominant force in Scottish politics, with independence supported by almost half the population and most of the young. As a result, Britain is easily the most fragile power in western Europe, or indeed the wider Western alliance. Almost no other country — apart from Canada or Spain — is as close to breaking apart.

Nairn was also right to argue in the 2002 edition of his book, when devolution was being hailed as a great reform which would permanently obstruct the demand for independence, that the British state remained structurally unstable. “A new tide seeking real independence is forming itself beneath the facade of Blairism,” he wrote. “It will rise into the spaces left by New Labour’s collapse, and by the increasing misfortunes of the old Union state.” Thirteen years later, the SNP expelled Labour from Scotland, winning every seat but three.

More from this author

Is Liz Truss really the next Barry Goldwater?

By Tom McTague

Nairn, in my view, was right to see long-term structural challenges to the British state, but wrong to believe that this made it uniquely outdated, or somehow destined to collapse. The fact that after eight years as First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon has resigned, still unable to answer how Scottish independence will be enacted, is testament to the inherent challenges of secession, not just continuity.

When I asked Nairn a few years ago about the challenge Brexit posed to Scottish nationalism, he was thoughtful and reflective, arguing that it changed the type of relationship an independent Scotland would have with the UK after the latter’s inevitable collapse. In his last interview before he died, Nairn argued that what would eventually replace Britain was still being worked out. “We’re trying to replace Great Britain… with something else, but what that is, there is no ready and living example of it to which we can turn. We have to make it up as we go along, because there is nothing else.”

In this he was right, but the truth is both sides are making it up as they go along. None of us have been here; everything is new. Unionism has yet to offer coherent answers to the problems posed by devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland but not England; Brexiteers have yet to offer coherent answers to the problem of Northern Ireland and its border with the Republic; and Scottish nationalists have yet to offer coherent answers to the problem of seceding from Britain after Britain has seceded from Europe. Nicola Sturgeon departs as First Minister of Scotland having failed to find them. But her opponents should not crow, for they have not succeeded in this task either.

In Sturgeon’s rhetoric, the former is the SNP itself, its policies for governing and its goal of national independence. All democratic politics partake, necessarily, of some of Mani’s drear religion, but Sturgeon has made it the brand of her party and her leadership, underpinned by the constant grievance that Scotland remains held — after centuries — in servile chains.

Every SNP minister and senior official must display their versions of this: the head Manichee, example to them all, is Sturgeon. And in the matter of the Gender Recognition Recognition Bill — which would allow children of 16 to change their gender, independently of their parents’ consent  — she deploys its mechanisms with practised skill.

In a speech just before the Bill came to Holyrood, she said she would “never apologise for trying to spread equality”, that the Bill would cut away the “intrusive, traumatic,  dehumanising” barriers to transition, and, with the Vox Humana in full flow, that she bore an important responsibility “to make life a little better for the stigmatised minorities”. This is luminous goodness — government as Good Samaritan.

And yet, the opposing forces, evil as they might be, have put down some markers which could cause the less enlightened to pause. London’s Tavistock Clinic, home to England’s Gender Identity Development Service (Gids), became increasingly beset with complaints and controversy. Last summer, it was closed. Scotland has its own Gids centre: the Sandyford Clinic, in Glasgow. It, too, began to receive a growing list of complaints. Last September, Sinéad Watson, who started to identify as a man aged 20, and who had been prescribed testosterone treatments and had a double mastectomy, told UnHerd that she bitterly regrets it, and called for Sandyford to be closed.

The procedures and overall approaches at the Tavistock and Sandyford are not of liberation and joy, but of young men and women inadequately advised by clinicians who were, as one report noted, more concerned with “putting them quickly onto a pathway to transition”. These considerations closed the Tavistock Gids and now threaten Sandyford: they also inform the decision of the UK Government to animate a Section 35 Order under the 1998 Scotland Act — the legal basis for the Scottish parliament — which has, for the present, stymied the Scots nationalists’ momentum.

In response, the SNP has mounted a grand operatic display of outrage. This was “an unprecedented attack on the Scottish parliament”, its Westminster spokesperson warned. For Sturgeon, it amounted to “a full-frontal attack on our democratically elected Scottish Parliament”. There is no denying the importance of this matter: it has elevated what was largely a political manoeuvre of little general concern into a moral issue that illuminates not just the proper age at which life-changing decisions may be taken, but the very nature of parental responsibility.

Those opposed to the legislation have also stressed the possible threat to women. Johann Lamont, a former Labour member of the Scottish parliament and briefly the leader of the party in Scotland, described in the Sunday Post how she found it “hard to believe anyone really thinks that it’s a good idea to have a convicted male sex offender in a women’s jail”. Reflecting on the consequences of the vote, she added: “the Labour Party manifesto is full of commitments around issues like single-sex spaces and understanding women’s health. But if you have dismantled what the difference between male and female is, how do you even begin to meet those commitments?”

Suggested reading

Is The Guardian sowing disinformation?

By Kathleen Stock

Last year, her national leader, Sir Keir Starmer, struggled to address this theme on a LBC phone-in: when asked if a woman could have a penis, he replied hesitantly that he didn’t think “discussing this issue in this way helps anyone”. But Starmer is on Lamont’s side now: he won’t — as most Labour MSPs did — support Scotland’s Bill: “I have concerns about the provision in Scotland, in particular the age reduction to 16 and in particular the rejection of our amendment in relation to the Equalities Act.” Pressed by Laura Kuenssberg on whether he thinks someone of 16 is old enough to decide to change their gender, he replied: “No, I don’t think you are.” In this, Starmer puts himself on the same footing as the UK Equalities Minister, Kemi Badenoch, who argued that it was “not possible” for the legislation to be “fully contained” within Scotland, since it could contradict parts of the 2010 Equalities Act.

The Labour split on this is deep. Where a few in Scotland took the Starmer-Lamont line, more appear to have been convinced that the progressive stance is to stand with the SNP. Labour put up a number of amendments to the Bill’s clauses, but all were rejected. Even so, rather than take the obvious course of abstaining or even opposing on the basis that the legislation is flawed, most voted yes. Kezia Dugdale, herself also a former Labour Party leader, celebrated the SNP Bill, saying, in a style similar to Sturgeon’s, that “this bill will become law this week not because women were silenced but because many female proponents of it refused to be”. Scotland’s current Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, yesterday agreed that the UK Government was “wrong”.

If the controversy continues and deepens, as seems likely, this may affect a future election: at the very least, it shows that many Labour MSPs and supporters are closer to nationalist than centrist Labour thinking — a political gift to Sturgeon.

Suggested reading

Why the Tavistock won't talk to me

By Hadley Freeman

But will it be enough? Perhaps the largest prick to the balloon of righteousness, curiously little referred to, is the SNP project’s unpopularity. Recent polls reported in The Times suggest 62% do not support age-reduction decisions from 18 to 16, while only 19% support them. The proposed cut in the waiting period before a new gender is recognised — from two years to three months — is opposed by 50% and approved by 25%. Ending the need for a medical diagnosis is supported by 26%, but opposed by 39%. (In these, the “don’t knows” range from 19-35%, suggesting widespread lack of knowledge of the issue.) Earlier polls by various pollsters show roughly similar results: in none is the SNP approach approved.

So far, the large force of the project, which has gathered every Scottish party save the Conservatives into the SNP camp, has been that of the progressive vanguard. But the UK government still has the legal advantage over the Scottish nationalist and cultural radicals. The population, now better informed, seems inclined to the former’s view. The larger questions, now being unpacked, have yet to divide our still united state.

By the time I cross the Forth and then the Tay, everything is changed: not just the passenger accents, or landscape, or weather, or light — but also the train itself. I would swear the carriage somehow shrinks. And time bends too. By the time I arrive at the tiny station and alight to the familiar sound of Arctic geese in the tidal basin right next to the platform, it feels like I’ve travelled, if not to an earlier time, then certainly to a different one.

A coastal town of 12,000 people, where many of my schoolmates found work offshore in the oil industry, I thought of Montrose last week as Sturgeon delivered her conference speech 40 miles up the road in Aberdeen. Among her key messages was the announcement of a new £50 million award to Aberdeen and surrounding areas from a government fund called Just Transition. This was not, as some might have worried given the SNP’s current preoccupations, a forward-thinking plan to make Aberdonians more non-binary, but rather a fund dedicated to helping the North East move away from oil and ultimately to make Aberdeen “the net zero capital of the world”.

As usual with the SNP, pesky details about the fast-changing status of Scottish oil in the face of Europe’s current energy crisis were unacknowledged in favour of a soothingly principled-sounding headline. Other progressive lures in Sturgeon’s speech included strong support for refugees, much lamenting about lost EU membership, and motherly requests that everyone get their Covid booster. There was also the requisite Tory-bashing, anticipated by Sturgeon the day before with her statement: “I detest the Tories and everything they stand for.”

How did this all go down in Montrose? My hometown is probably one of the most SNP-friendly in the country. Even when SNP MPs were few and far between, we had one in Angus for much of my childhood. Many — perhaps even most — people I know there are staunchly pro-independence. And yet, as you might expect in a place where farming, fishing and oil have shaped the economy, and where golf club membership is practically mandatory from birth, the Montrose civic character is quite far from the rainbow flag-waving ecowarrior to whom the SNP seems to want to appeal.

The main rival for the SNP in Angus is not Labour but the Tories, perpetually edged into second place (apart from one brief period in power between 2017-19). Generally, Montrosians are cautious, wry, and not easily impressed with flamboyant gestures — and this includes the few natural Labour voters I know there, who are more into nationalising the railways than taking the knee. It’s true that there are a few blue-haired teenagers around these days, but I assume it’s a bit like back in 1987, when I bought myself a BOY London baseball hat and matching sweatshirt on an intrepid foray to Kensington High Street. Back under the grey skies of Montrose, I looked ridiculous and everyone knew it.

More from this author

Real feminists don't need strongmen

By Kathleen Stock

Down in Holyrood, the SNP continues to pursue its own ludicrously incongruent fashion item — otherwise known as revising the Gender Recognition Act in favour of self-ID. Blithely ignoring the evidenced concerns of many women — famous and not-so-famous — Sturgeon continues to present this policy as a mere bureaucratic formality, sensibly ironing out a few wrinkles in the existing Act in a way that only morally bankrupt deplorables could possibly object to. Actually, though, her Bill proposes that any Scottish man can legally become a woman pretty much whenever he likes, with practically no meaningful strings attached. According to almost any local standard other than the one set by (mostly English) Edinburgh University students, that’s clearly the project of a total bampot.

It cannot be overemphasised how poorly this culturally radical, sense-defying policy fits with the temperament of the average Scot — and not just in Angus. Much of Scotland remains what it has been for decades: family-oriented, communitarian, and socially conservative compared to the average metrosexual liberal type. Scottish people may be economically more Left-wing than UK voters but they aren’t more culturally liberal.

At the moment, the SNP are making much of recent findings from the British Social Attitudes survey suggesting that 52% of the population now back independence; perhaps unsurprisingly, they say less about other social trends indicated in the last few years, suggesting that there are significant qualms about uncontrolled immigration or that support for the death penalty is higher in Scotland than the UK national average. Indeed, this is perhaps what you might expect in a place where local communities are still relatively strong. For there to be insiders, there has to be outsiders.

Suggested reading

The SNP won't silence women

By Sarah Pedersen

But to marvel at this mismatch between SNP luxury beliefs and the more parsimonious sensibilities of voters is to ignore the distorting influence of the biggest and baddest outsider of all: the one just over the border. For, although it has become relatively taboo to say so, whatever the official talk of civic rather than ethnic nationalism, a big motivator for SNP supporters in Scotland is still animosity towards the English. You can’t raise a population on endless stories about bloody historical injustices at the hands of their ethnic neighbours and then expect them to feel irenic. Certainly, I couldn’t fail to be aware of the enmity during my childhood, where my Southern parentage and wandering accent made me a constant target for cries of “English snob” at school.

Scratch the surface of grassroots SNP support and — not always but frequently — you’ll find slow-burning disdain, perhaps all the stronger for often being suppressed in favour of a more polite narrative. It’s usually confined to living rooms and pubs, but gets permissibly unleashed during football tournaments via support for that other national team, Anyone-But-England. And of course, as Sturgeon knows, an equally traditional means of expressing your feelings in this direction is to say how much you hate the Tories.

In the Scottish cultural imagination, the archetype of the sort of English man or woman that is most hated — Southern, posh-accented, privately-educated, and prone to seeing the country primarily in terms of its potential for invitations to hunting lodges — coincides significantly with the sort of Tory MP the membership still seems to prefer. Everybody knows that in saying you hate the latter, there’s at least the suggestion that you hate the former too. For some extreme nationalist groups, such as All Under One Banner and Siol nan Gaidheal, the equivalence is made without embarrassment.

More from this author

The problem with gaslighting

By Kathleen Stock

Once you understand that, unconsciously or otherwise, a contrarian anti-English sentiment implicitly powers many SNP decisions, a lot of other things become clearer too. You better understand how a party attached to sovereignty and self-determination can be so rhetorically keen on EU membership without perceived conflict; or why Scottish Covid policies were reliably more draconian than in England; or how an otherwise astute politician like Sturgeon could become so psychologically wedded to a baffling policy like self-ID. Though of course it isn’t the whole story, part of the answer is Any-Policy-But-England’s, and a passive-aggressive game of always being seen to stay on the right side of nice, with England inevitably cast as the nasty villain to Scotland’s noble but wounded hero.

In the case of self-ID, the knock-on costs are likely to be borne by ordinary Scottish women and girls, among them the further dismantling of single-sex services proudly built up by Scottish women for other women since the Seventies. Such is the naked contempt for women’s interests here, it’s tempting to see the whole project as a fig-leaf for deep-rooted misogyny. But if SNP supporters don’t already care about the present government’s many failures to govern well in practice, it isn’t clear why they would hold them accountable at the ballot box for self-ID either. Sticking it to the English will continue to be the more compelling goal for many voters over other practical considerations. And this highlights another way in which radical transactivism and Scottish nationalism can be a good fit, at least emotionally if not rationally. In practice, both can be a politics of resentment, pretending to be something finer.

In reality, the party’s 20-seat gain was very modest, under-shooting prediction models and tying with the Lib Dems, while falling behind the SNP, who were not expected to make any gains. Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar may believe that “Scottish Labour is back“, but his party recorded its second-worst local result in half a century.

Meanwhile, the Scottish Tories have lost a staggering 63 seats. No doubt they will be shouting from the rooftops that it’s all because of Partygate and Douglas Ross’s humiliating U-turn on his call for Boris Johnson to resign over it. But the Conservative result is not as bad as it looks: in terms of seat pluralities, the Tories have placed first in five local authorities, ahead of Labour in three. They’ve also made gains in a few strategic areas such as Moray, Aberdeenshire and Ayrshire.

Nonetheless, there is little room for complacency. The Scottish Tories’ popularity appears to have reached a peak in 2017 in the wake of the Ruth Davidson surge and a fierce unionist backlash against Sturgeon’s plans for a second independence referendum. It has declined in the five years since, and the party’s current vote share of 19.6% will only fall further in a national election for Westminster or Holyrood, where far larger numbers of younger, working class and urban voters will turn out. And of course, the leadership and macroeconomic problems that dogged the Tories across Britain (where their net loss of 487 seats far outstripped the worst expectations) are only set to get worse.

Despite its underwhelming victory, Scottish Labour’s reclamation of the second place mantle matters symbolically — the SNP’s preferred opponents are Tories, who give them the opportunity to define themselves against unpopular Westminster rule. Scottish Labour coming back from the dead would therefore complicate the SNP’s monopoly on the centre-left, even if there’s reason to believe Anas Sarwar has learnt little from the failures of the Jim Murphy era, if his current insistence that no local government Labour groups cooperate with the SNP is anything to go by.

Suggested reading

Scotland has lost its sense of humour

By Daniel Kalder

What does this mean for the fate of the independence movement? There has been talk of the issue being forced onto the back foot by the war in Ukraine and the cost-of-living crisis. Yet these developments only seem to have had a marginal impact on polling, which has hovered between 50-50 and 47 Yes – 53 No. In fact, if anything this election is further proof that the Scottish electorate increasingly favour independence. The vote-share of pro-independence parties was around 45%, while that of pro-union parties amounted to 55%. That’s quite a change from 2017, when 40% of votes were for pro-independence parties compared to 60% for unionist ones — especially when one takes into account that voters in local elections are more likely to be older, more middle-class and unionist compared to national elections.

Just after the election, a Panelbase survey for the Sunday Times found that more than 55% of Scots want an independence referendum to be held within this parliamentary term. Since the vote, senior Scottish Conservative grandees have said that opposition to Indyref2 is no longer working on the doorstep. The party’s former head of communications has openly acknowledged that the issue of the SNP dominance won’t be solved until a referendum is held. If this was meant to be an election for Scots to send Sturgeon a “no to Indyref2” message, it certainly doesn’t seem to have been interpreted by unionist parties in that way, to say nothing of voters themselves.

Suggested reading

Scotland's drug shame

By Darren 'Loki' McGarvey

Interestingly, however, this hasn’t necessarily translated into support for the SNP. In places such as Edinburgh and Glasgow, it certainly appears that progressive and younger SNP voters are decamping to the pro-independence Greens over a variety of issues such as climate and social policy. That isn’t to say we should downplay the SNP’s performance: another insufficiently discussed consequence of the local elections is that council composition will be quite different now — and in the favour of nationalists. Previously, the SNP were only part of administrations in 14 local authorities around the country, but now it is well-placed to form as many as 25.

In practice, this could make all the difference when it comes to Indyref2. Should the impasse between Bute House and Downing Street end up with an emboldened Scottish Government pursuing an independence referendum outside the Section 30 framework laid out by the 2012 Edinburgh Agreement, it will in large part rely upon the cooperation of local authorities in being able to organise polling stations, counters and observers. While previously the largely unionist composition of many administrations would have been a bulwark against this, the strategic gains of the SNP and Greens across the board will make it significantly easier for a unilateral referendum to be held.

Suggested reading

The SNP won't silence women

By Sarah Pedersen

Still, if there’s one thing that did emerge as a pattern from the local elections, it was that there isn’t a pattern. This is by far the most fragmented election Scotland has seen in a long time. The SNP’s gains were highly uneven and scattered, as were the gains of Scottish Labour and Scottish Conservative’s losses. This is a continuation of the dynamic at last year’s Holyrood elections, where a “national environment” couldn’t really be said to exist because every individual constituency became a hyperlocalised contest between the SNP and whichever unionist party was best placed to challenge it.

In this regard, the local elections are best understood as a microcosm of Scottish politics as a whole: it was a grinding war of attrition where significant developments take place on both sides, but where the momentum continues to be on the side of nationalism.

A spokesperson for the Prime Minister echoed her response, saying that he is looking into “toughening measures for social media and streaming platforms which don’t tackle harmful content on their platforms”. SNP Councillor Julie McKenzie has called for Carr to be “prosecuted” along with “his applauding audience”. Liam Evans, it seems, was simply ahead of his time.

The key difference is that Liam Evans does not exist. The article was a hoax, intended to draw attention to the ideological drift of the mainstream media. (For those who are interested, if you take the fourth letter of every sentence in the article the true author is revealed.)

But the success of the hoax raised a number of questions. How is it that a national media organisation would publish such absurd and authoritarian drivel by a complete unknown? Are their editorial standards really so low? And does their decision to publish the article suggest that they support the author’s calls for comedy to be regulated by the state? If so, Liam Evans was simply a useful tool, someone the Independent could promote who was prepared to say the quiet part out loud.

There has always been satirical potential in hoaxing. In the Sixties, for instance, a series of letters was dispatched to the press by Mrs Edna Welthorpe, who was enraged by the depravity of Joe Orton’s farces, which were dominating the West End. Of Entertaining Mr Sloane, Welthorpe wrote: “I myself was nauseated by this endless parade of mental and physical perversion. And to be told that such a disgusting piece of filth now passes for humour!”

When an audience member wrote a letter of complaint to the Criterion Theatre about Orton’s Loot, Welthorpe responded directly, claiming that she was an employee and that the letter had been passed to her for filing. “Please, please, as a fellow Christian, let me applaud your design in writing to the Lord Chamberlain,” she wrote. “This truly horrible play shouldn’t contaminate our streets.”

More from this author

The importance of obscenity

By Andrew Doyle

That Orton should assume a persona to fulminate against his own plays was simply his way of broadening the scope of his satirical work from the stage to the real world. He was obsessed with the sham gentility of a society that was, to his mind, essentially rotten. Orton loved to shock, perhaps because he was seemingly incapable of being shocked by anything. In his plays, he was able to take a hacksaw to those figures of authority he so despised, be they doctors, police officers, or any other breed of moralising hypocrite. But the hoax letters served a different purpose. They mocked their targets through the pretence of sympathy, effectively encouraging more of the kind of behaviour that his farces sought to lampoon.

This technique is the precursor to what we now call “trolling”. The term is often misused as a synonym for malicious and bullying online behaviour but, as traditionally understood, trolling is the art of coaxing people into a reaction. Motivations vary from troll to troll. For some, it is simply a matter of revelling in the gullibility of strangers. For others, the intention is to expose the vices and shortcomings of those in power.

Jonathan Swift was an early exponent of this kind of trolling in the creation of his alter-ego Isaac Bickerstaff, who wrote pamphlets which predicted, and then announced, the death of the astrologer John Partridge. Swift resented Partridge because of his attacks on the church, and must have been immensely gratified that Bickerstaff’s announcement had been taken on trust by so many. It is said that Partridge was thereafter continually having to fend off queries about his uncanny resemblance to a dead man.

Of course, many hoaxers are driven purely by self-interest. When, in 1806, Mary Bateman used concentrated vinegar to write “Christ is coming” onto her chicken’s eggs, and then charged members of the community to visit her “Prophet Hen of Leeds”, it is unlikely that she intended to make any kind of satirical point.

Yet one might argue that even in hoaxes of this kind there is some societal insight to be gleaned, however inadvertently. Mary Toft managed to destroy the reputations of a number of prominent surgeons who, in 1726, believed that she had given birth to rabbits. One of the king’s doctors, Nathaniel St. André, was so convinced that he published A Short Narrative of an Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbets. Soon after, William Hogarth produced his Cunicularii, which depicts Mary Toft in labour, surrounded by learned men of the medical profession, while multiple rabbits roam at their feet. If Toft was no satirist, she at least inspired some of the best of her age.

Perhaps the most celebrated instance of satirical hoaxing in our lifetime was Chris Morris’s television series Brass Eye (1997), which took aim at celebrity and media culture by inviting public figures to join campaigns against entirely fabricated social justice causes. In one episode, Bernard Manning, Rolf Harris and Noel Edmonds were enlisted to warn against the dangers of “cake”, a fictitious drug that, as Manning dutifully informed viewers, caused one girl to vomit out her own pelvis.

Suggested reading

Why comedians stopped being funny

By Dorian Lynskey

In another episode, Nick Owen expounded on the dangers of “heavy electricity” which, due to the effect of “sodomised electrons” was “regularly flattening cattle in Sri Lanka”.  Then there was the radio DJ Neil Fox, who was tricked into making this astonishing claim: “Genetically, paedophiles have more genes in common with crabs than they do with you and me. Now, that is scientific fact. There’s no real evidence for it, but it is scientific fact.”

Many of those duped by Morris were seemingly happy to read aloud any hogwash from an autocue in return for television exposure and the impression that they were on the right side of history. Such hoaxes could potentially be even more effective in today’s climate, with so many soft-witted celebrities eager to endorse fashionable but illiberal notions they barely understand. All major political, educational, artistic and corporate bodies are seemingly in submission to a new identity-obsessed religion of “social justice” that couches its regressive ideas in progressive terminology.

But, unlike the days of Brass Eye, the jesters are now in lockstep with these establishment lines, and so the most pertinent sources for satire are generally left untapped. They are, as Morris recently put it, more interested in “doing some kind of exotic display for the court” than exposing the follies of the powerful.

It is perhaps inevitable, then, that one of the most impressive hoaxes of recent years has come from outside the comedy industry. In October 2018, it was revealed that Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose had spent a year writing and submitting bogus academic papers to various journals in order to show how certain branches of the humanities were now routinely prioritising ideological goals over the pursuit of truth and knowledge. By the time the hoax was exposed, seven of their 20 articles had been accepted for publication, and a further seven were in the process of review.

As a work of satire, this project was an undoubted success. It provided evidence of what many had long suspected, that nonsensical ideas could thrive within the academy so long as they were camouflaged in vogueish jargon. One paper purported to be a study of the sexual activity of dogs in urban parks, and used this phoney data to draw conclusions about contemporary “rape culture”. Another argued that white male students ought to be chained to the floor during lessons as a form of reparation for slavery. Most audacious of all was the article based entirely on a chapter of Mein Kampf, rewritten in the language of intersectional feminist theory.

Suggested reading

Why satire gave up on politics

By Dorian Lynskey

That all of these articles were accepted for publication in peer-reviewed journals should have alerted academics to a troubling strain of corruption and fraudulence in their field. They should have resolved to rectify the problem, but instead chose to demonise and smear the hoaxers who had exposed it. When satirists hit on uncomfortable truths, they are rarely thanked for their efforts.

It has become a truism that we are living during a period in which satire and reality are not easily distinguishable. Ten years ago, headlines such as “Can my children be friends with white people?” and “Transgender man gives birth to non-binary partner’s baby with female sperm donor” would have been dismissed as the fevered concoctions of Viz or the National Enquirer (they are, in fact, from the New York Times and the Mirror).

For all that, there are opportunities to be seized in such a climate of institutionalised asininity. While trust in figures of authority is plummeting, and people are no longer sure who or what can be believed, the conditions are ripe for a new generation of Joe Ortons and Mary Tofts to cause some necessary mischief. In an age of unreason, the hoaxer can thrive.

One of my earliest political memories is of the minister in my grandparents’ church starting the service with a prayer for striking miners. A few years later, at the Glasgow Comic Art Convention, I remember Alan Grant, the Scottish co-writer of Judge Dredd and Batman, exhorting the audience not to pay the poll tax. This was also the era in which a fictional, unemployed, ranting Glaswegian with a bandage wrapped around his head became a beloved national symbol.

Indeed, in the 80s and 90s, a freewheeling attitude of utter contempt for the high and mighty seemed as Scottish as a Tunnock’s Tea Cake. Yet on my first visit home from Texas since pandemic chaos destabilised the world, I detected a very different mood in the air.

This was the first time I had been in Scotland since the government at Holyrood had passed a law making it illegal to utter wicked words in the home, the enforcement of which will necessarily involve family members denouncing the sinners among them to the authorities. I had missed Nicola Sturgeon’s daily briefings on TV, although I was aware that when the BBC had proposed to broadcast them less often, and perhaps not in full, there had been “widespread criticism”, while a petition to keep them on air had attracted over 50,000 signatures.

Meanwhile, I found myself receiving regular moral instruction from the government in the form of signs admonishing me against uttering wicked words on the train, letting my dog shit in the street, or conversely, letting my dog hunt hares; minimal unit pricing for alcohol had also been in place for three years. That finger wagging from the pulpit energy was back: it was as if the Scottish government feared that an irredeemably sinful people might at any moment erupt in spasms of hatred aimed at both humans and speedy animals with long ears.

What happened to the Scotland I remember? It was as if, by voting the nationalists into power, my fellow countrymen had accidentally resurrected Calvinism in woke form. The national poet wouldn’t have liked this much, I thought — and not simply because, were Robert Burns to return today, he would be cancelled in seconds both for his womanising, and his efforts to get a job as a bookkeeper on a slave plantation in Jamaica.

More from this author

The SNP have already won the culture war

By Daniel Kalder

A deep disdain for authoritarian piety runs through Burns’ poetry, informed not only by his rebellious temperament but also his direct experience of being denounced from the pulpit by the moral guardians of his day. Most famously, in Holy Willie’s Prayer he satirised a self-satisfied Calvinist believer who thanks God for making him one of the elect and justifies his lustful nature as a “fleshly thorn” intended by God to prevent him from becoming too perfect. Simultaneously he prays in a most unforgiving fashion for the destruction of his enemies for the same sins. Thanks to Burns, Holy Willie became archetypal, and I have often thought about his 21^st century equivalents while walking around Edinburgh. For Burns, however, it was personal: the man he mocked was no abstraction but a certain William Fisher, an elder in Burns’ own parish, and the poem was so libellous that he circulated it in private.

But it wasn’t just preachy, vindictive hypocrites that earned Burns’ mockery. In To a Louse he describes in loving detail the journey of a louse to the top of a lady’s bonnet in full view of everyone but her. Extracted from the poem, the famous lines “O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us/To see oursels as others see us!” sound like a prayer for wisdom and humility, but read in the context of the preceding verses it is hard to escape Burns’s glee at puncturing his neighbour’s self-satisfaction. Indeed, Burns sought to undermine just about everything that Calvinist worthies presented to him as sombre and sacred; in Tam O’Shanter, a drunkard’s horse outruns a horde of spirits, while in his Address To the Deil, Burns suggests that even “Auld Hornie” himself might have a shot at redemption if he would only change his ways.

Would the religious authorities of Burns’s day have accused him of “stirring up hatred” had such a vaguely worded law existed at the time? It seems likely. And would Burns, so aware of the lines he crossed in his own verse that he circulated some of it secretly, have felt at ease in a country where friends and family are encouraged to inform on each other for things said in their own homes? It seems unlikely.

Suggested article

What the SNP really believes

By John Lloyd

Yet many Scots do appear to be comfortable in such an environment, and place great trust in the authorities to always do the right thing, to adjudicate with wisdom over what can and cannot be said in private as well as in public. The more I thought about it, the more my experience growing up in Scotland in the 80s and 90s seemed anomalous. Perhaps the virulently anti-authority strain in the national character was especially pronounced back then not because of some innate aspect of the Scottish soul but rather because the country was ruled by an indifferent Conservative government in London that had very little support north of the border.

Between Thatcher’s election in 1979 and her resignation in 1990, she managed to alienate large swathes of Scottish voters, and the number of Conservative MPs in Scotland dropped from 22 to 10. When Alan Grant took to the podium to inveigh against the Poll Tax in front of a bunch of youthful comic fans, it had already been in place for a year longer than in England. Mrs. Thatcher had decided to experiment with it first in the test lab of Scotland, where she wasn’t too bothered about alienating voters.

It’s not that all Scottish people were contemptuous of all authority; but many of them were contemptuous of that authority. After all, it’s easy to be anti-establishment when you have nothing to gain from the establishment. Once the SNP came to power, that changed. There was a different power in the land, and many people identified with it, agreed with it, and benefited from it. Meanwhile the Brexit vote and the omnishambles of Boris Johnson’s leadership has made it easy for the SNP to direct that caustic, skeptical, questioning attitude southwards.

Suggested article

The importance of being British

By Nigel Biggar

It was easy, too, for Burns to hate the establishment. When he wrote those poems mocking the powerful and attacking hypocrites, he — a poor farmer and notorious fornicator — was completely alienated from the powers that stood over him. But what if he had lived in today’s Scotland, where a poet of his stature would not need to think about moving to Jamaica to earn money, but might instead be offered a cushy professorship at a state-funded university, prestigious seats on cultural committees and access to funding from Creative Scotland?

I doubt that even then he’d bite his tongue. Following the success of his first collection, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, Burns moved to Edinburgh where he was feted by the literary elites of his day. In this environment his jabs at preachers and rural overlords were about as edgy as attacking Trump in the pages of The Guardian, and he began to focus on collecting and reworking traditional ballads instead of insulting  the church elders who annoyed him.

But he still enjoyed provoking the sacred cows of his new audience, too. His poem, A Dream, which Burns wrote in response to a particularly unctuous encomium to George III not only disparaged the king but included the suggestion that Bonnie Prince Charlie might have done a better job. To the enlightened Edinburgh readership of Burns’s day this was much more ‘problematic’ than whatever derision he aimed at rural ministers: support for the vanquished Stuarts was not only politically unacceptable but regarded as an uncultivated, lower class belief. Burns in fact had written it before moving to the big city, but he kept on publishing it in every edition of Poems, even when it would have been in his interests to leave it out.

As the literary scholar Carol McGuirk observes, Burns was a man “stimulated by prohibitions”. He would find plenty to stimulate him in Scotland today. The love poet, the man of the people, the composer of odes to haggis — I like that poet. But the Burns I find most inspiring is the annoying guy, the rebel who doesn’t trust overbearing Calvinist types, and who doesn’t pander to self-satisfied elites, even when it’s in his best interest to do so. It is those qualities that make him a poet not only of his time, or more generally of ‘all times’, but specifically for our times.

Yet reconstitution of a fighting force would take some doing, not least because its recruiting ground, northern Catholics, are more prosperous and less easy to mobilise than their parents and grandparents were in the late sixties. And mobilise for what? Polls continually show that a majority do not want, at least not soon, a United Ireland — the IRA and Sinn Fein’s reason for existence. In any case, Irish nationalists of every stripe now see themselves as in the ascendant, and thus believe that political pressure and elections will bring nationalist majorities in parliaments, both in Ireland and in the North. This is similar to the belief held by Scottish nationalists: both groups have faith that youthful cohorts will support radical change – unity for Ireland, secession for Scotland – and will, when the cagey elders remove themselves, bring victory .

Nationalists believe that Ireland’s geography is destiny, and that unionists should see that the island has room for only one nation state. The view isn’t a Sinn Fein preserve: Simon Coveney the Irish Foreign Minister in the Fianna Fail government described its formation this as a “terrible mistake (which) caused extraordinary division”.

Behind this view, overtly or by implication, stand the Catholic Church, the European Union, all the Irish political parties and — at times the heaviest guns — American politicians with Irish forebears. They, from the Kennedys through Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden, have felt empowered to intervene in the business of the British government to secure a greater all-Irish dimension to Northern Ireland’s politics, a tendency not confined to American leaders of Irish descent, and one always couched in terms of securing better relationships and lasting peace.

With these centres of influence now must be counted most of the Irish commentariat and intellectuals — men and women who command space in the Republic’s newspapers, talk shows and opinion websites and blogs. The leader among them is Fintan O’Toole, a writer with a large Anglophone audience for his commentaries in the Irish Times, The Guardian, the New York Review of Books and beyond. His book, Heroic Failure (2018), pictures Britain in masochistic but rebellious submission to a Brussels dominatrix, a posture he believes had been deliberately prepared for by the well-timed publication of Fifty Shades of Grey in 2011.

More from this author

What the SNP really believes

By John Lloyd

His visceral dislike of Brexit and by extension the present British state is amplified by other powerful voices, such as Bobby McDonagh, a former Irish ambassador to the UK and a reliable defender of all the European Union does and says. They view the unionists’ Euroscepticism, and their anger at the Protocol which retains large EU control over their border with Ireland, as evidence of reaction.

The columnist Emma de Souza sees Protocol denial as “chest-pounding bravado and posturing”. Pat Leahy, the Irish Times’ political editor, believes Sinn Fein is a government-in-waiting — an increasingly common trope among Irish columnists. O’Toole, a long-time and continuing critic of Sinn Fein’s “amnesia” about the IRA’s decades of massacre, torture and crime, still believes that it should be part of a “progressive” government coalition. A large exception: Ireland’s most remarkable novelist, Colm Toibin, who in a Guardian column asked of the anti-British, pro-United Ireland/Sinn Fein crowd: “do they want to import sectarian hatred and the politics of perpetual grievance from the north into the south”?

Sinn Fein, at 32% in the opinion polls, is 10 points ahead of both Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, governing together in a unique coalition. Leahy salutes the party’s “waves of energy, commitment and conviction”.

For unionists, Sinn Fein is remembered as having other qualities. In his essay, the deputy editor of the Belfast daily News Letter Ben Lowry laments that IRA leaders, including the late Martin McGuiness, a former head of the Londonderry IRA, were not brought to any kind of justice for the many killings they ordered. He quotes Alan McQuillan, a former assistant chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, as noting that investigators face pressure from both the British and Irish governments “not to pursue those whose arrest would destabilise the peace process”.

The force and power of Irish commentary has spurred the unionist intelligentsia to a collective response. In a collection of essays out this week — The Idea of the Union — they give tongue to defiance of nationalists’ growing assumption that the territory’s time as British possession is up, and that unionists must sooner or later recognise it.

Thus two sets of highly educated, strongly motivated, radically conflicting groups lay out their respective stalls. On the Northern side, this comes with a painful recognition of a subaltern status. “Nationalism,” writes Arthur Aughey, among the most lucid of Unionist intellectuals, “can mobilise its friends and unionism has few or no friends — and, in the text of the present post-Brexit protocol, has been betrayed once more by those it believed were its friends” — in this case, Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

Suggested reading

What if Ireland were united?

By Colm Toibin

Note the “once more”: it is an insistent theme in the essays, that unionists, the most demonstratively patriotic of all the national groups which make up the United Kingdom, should, over the long century of the province’s existence, have been so grievously disregarded by their own government. The political scientist Geoffrey Sloan highlights a Northern Ireland Office discussion paper of 1972 which insists that all policy on the province must reside within an “Irish Dimension” – instead, Sloan writes, “of defending the integrity of Northern Ireland’s territorial boundaries as part of the British state, a distancing process was set in motion”.

The historian Paul Bew, now a crossbench peer, notes that a “remarkable aspect” of the negotiations over the Northern Ireland Protocol was “the way in which the British government allowed the Irish government to control the narrative”. The former Northern Ireland first minister David (now Lord) Trimble writes that the Protocol , “rips the heart out” of the 1998 Good Friday or Belfast Agreement, which set up a  government sharing power between the two main parties, Sinn Fein and the United Unionists (later the Democratic Unionists): “it does so by removing the assurance that democratic consent is needed to make any change to the status of Northern Ireland.”

Leo Varadkar, Taioseach until June 2020 and now Tanaiste (deputy prime minister) to Micheal Martin, is much blamed for being used by the European Union to pile pressure on the British. Ray Bassett, a former head of the Irish Consular Service and now a stern critic of his country’s policies towards Northern Ireland, accuses Varadkar of “misusing the border issue to maintain Brussels control… to display its euro credentials”.

Micheal Martin as Taoiseach has been more emollient than Varadkar: but the issue of the Northern Ireland Protocol prevents any serious softening. The deal, agreed in December 2020, was necessary for a quick agreement on the terms of Brexit, and keeps the movement of goods free from check between north and south, while erecting a new trade border with the UK — retaining the authority of the European Court of Justice over the arrangement, a clear diminution of British sovereignty.

Yesterday, the European Union revealed it would offer “far-reaching” reductions on the checks presently required on goods moving between the British mainland and Northern Ireland: but, in the negotiations to come, will be reluctant to reduce the ECJ’s authority, and thus the wound to Britain’s sovereignty. There is little hope that the Irish government will take the British side on this, or even use its good offices to bring about compromise.

Some of the essayists in The Idea of the Union seek to cut Irish claims down to size — none more forensically than the economist Geoff Gudgin, now an advisor to the Brexit negotiator Lord Frost, who by careful statistical accountancy shows that the Irish claim of possessing one of highest GDPs in Europe, substantially higher than that of the UK, is based on it being one of the greatest of world tax havens. All of the more than 20 writers, inflamed or moderate in their tone, insist on what they see as the core truth: unionism is not to be argued, seduced, persuaded or charmed with any greater success than it was terrorised away.

Suggested reading

Why Remain lost

By Fintan O'Toole

It is a different culture: prepared to live in friendship (and often doing so, in Northern Irish communities) but not to have unity thrust upon them. If attitudes in the south have become more militant, those in the north have hardened round the old cry: “No Surrender”.

Irish intellectuals, as jealous of their independence as any other such national grouping, now line up with their government’s pro-EU, anti-Brexit, anti-Unionist themes. Katy Hayward, writing in the French journal Etudes Irlandaises, remarks that Irish intellectuals “play an increasingly “functionary” role in debates about “Europe”, in effect “supporting the official position of the Irish government without being given much scope for critiquing or elaborating upon it”.

They are not alone in this. The Scottish National Party enjoys the support of some intellectuals — such as Tom Nairn, the cornerstone of nationalist ideology through his diabolisation of England, the commentator Neil Ascherson and the academics Ben Jackson and Scott Hames. They are fleshed out by enthusiastic support from some English intellectuals: the novelist Will Self, the founder of Open Democracy Anthony Barnett and the writer Paul Mason. And it has nearly all the “creative” community behind it, including two novelists who won the Booker prize, James Kelman in 1989 and Douglas Stuart in 2020. This broad strand of opinion generally sees Irish unity as desirable, without violence if possible.

The well-worn observation of Orwell in England, Your England — that “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals 
are ashamed of their own nationality” — seems to remain substantially true, taking extra strength from the horror with which the intelligentsia, together with the bulk of the middle class, view Brexit. It is a horror which, much magnified, has given the Irish intelligentsia, and their governments, a new lease of anti-British life; and their Northern Irish unionist equivalents a tighter grip on their Britishness.

This week, the roll call of substance abuse fatalities during the SNP’s period of government is set to hit 10,000. That’s more than the number of people killed in Hurricane Katrina, or who perished as the Titanic went down. More than those killed at Pearl Harbor, in 9/11 or during the 7/7 London or Manchester arena attacks — more than British troops killed at the charge of the Light Brigade. It is more than the number of people killed in the Blantyre mining disaster or the Dunblane Massacre or the Lockerbie bombing. In fact, it is more than all ten of these events combined. And yet, while each of these losses of life have been faithfully recorded in our history books, there has been no equivalent recognition or examination of the current unfolding tragedy.

Why? Because of the people who are dying. According to the national figures, people in the most deprived parts of the country were 18 times more likely to have a drug-related death than those in the least deprived. The poor. The marginalised. The people who don’t vote.

But these people aren’t just statistics. Every death is a person with a story and loved ones mourning their loss. Bryan Hogg died in 2019 from street valium abuse. He was 29 years old and not long out of prison. His mum, Sandra Mackin, says the system failed him. “The politicians don’t care — it’s just another number to them. I think my boy was failed. After he died nothing was done — there was supposed to be an investigation. He had a wee boy and now he has to live without his dad.”

During May’s Scottish elections, Nicola Sturgeon was tackled on the issue and admitted her government had “taken its eye off the ball”. Public Health Scotland says that “every drugs-related death is preventable” and “quality treatment options” are “essential”. But as deaths have spiralled, funding has been cut and treatment options have narrowed. Over the first 12 years of the SNP’s time in office, funding to Scotland’s drug and alcohol services was cut by more than half. For those trying to pull themselves out of their addiction and get better, it’s had a devastating effect.

Suggested reading

Britain's criminal approach to drugs

By Ian Birrell

Scotland has some of the best residential rehabilitation facilities in Europe. So good, in fact, that Dutch authorities and insurers pay to place patients in facilities such as the Castle Craig hospital in the Scottish Borders. In 2002, Castle Craig admitted 257 patients funded by the NHS; in 2019, the number dropped to just five. There’s no shortage of demand for services, but they aren’t accessible to the Scots most in need. Currently a quarter of Castle Craig’s places are being filled by Dutch patients, with most of the remainder being funded privately or via health insurance.

Meanwhile Glasgow’s largest residential rehab centre, Phoenix Futures, was forced to abruptly cut its number of beds from 54 to just 14 in 2019, after a Government tender was revoked. The Mungo Foundation’s Cothrom Eile service — in Nicola Sturgeon’s own Glasgow constituency — was forced to close its doors completely in 2019 due to funding cuts.

Those who have benefitted from such services are concerned at their closure. When Bruce Munro started at Phoenix Futures he was “eight stone and taking food from bins and begging to fund a drug habit — I didn’t feel part of society”. He had been abusing substances for more than 20 years, becoming homeless and suffering mental health problems. After five months of rehab, he was ready to move into supported accommodation. “To have only 14 beds for a city the size of Glasgow is disgraceful. I think this model works for me because it’s not just about putting down the drugs. You are getting therapy, bereavement and trauma counselling rather than just putting the drugs down, because that’s the easy part.”

The outcry over these cuts — and the spiralling death toll which has accompanied them — forced the Scottish government into action in January. As well as reversing some of the funding cuts, Nicola Sturgeon established a Drugs Death Task Force and appointed a minister to directly oversee the issue. But huge question marks remain: there has been little change of direction in policy that has spectacularly failed over the last 14 years.

More from this author

Scotland's mid-life crisis

By Ruth Davidson

Dr Neil McKeganey, Director of the Centre for Substance Use Research in Glasgow, worries ministers are intent on just doing more of the same. “We have the same people advising the same government year after year, with no evident impact on the number of drugs deaths and no real accountability.” Dr McKeganey has repeatedly advised ministers and officials to better support residential rehabilitation —

“only to be told that their preference is for methadone and now benzodiazepine prescribing. That methadone is implicated in 53% of Scottish drugs deaths and benzodiazepines in 74%, should tell even the most ardent refusenik of the importance of abstinence-based treatments that prescribing addictive drugs is part of the problem — not part of the solution.”

CEO of the charity Faces and Voices of Recovery, Anne Marie Ward is more blunt: “The Drugs Death Task Force insists on pursuing the same failed options that got us into this mess.” She insists “we need the Scottish Government to start properly funding rehabilitation and recovery programmes”. The Scottish Government currently funds just 13% of the residential rehab places in Scotland (even Universal Credit funds twice as many) and their own figures show waiting times of up to year.

Of course, the barrage of criticism which has accompanied its sustained failure has prompted the SNP to hit out, trying to switch blame. The SNP has long campaigned to introduce consumption rooms — also known as shooting galleries — where addicts can access clean needles and inject in a safe environment. But the Scottish Parliament does not have the legislative power to introduce them — that is reserved for Westminster, and the UK Government does not support the policy.

Suggested reading

How drug dealers won lockdown

By David Matthews

When the record drug death figures were announced last week, SNP members were quick to point the finger south. Nicola Sturgeon tweeted that “we will continue to argue for reform of drugs law, which is not currently within our power” while Edinburgh East MP Tommy Sheppard stated that “major changes in UK law [are] required to really tackle the problem.”

Pretty shameless stuff, as well as being self-incriminating. On Tuesday, England and Wales released their drugs death figures, both now five times less than the Scottish rate. Pointing out that the laws are exactly the same on both sides of the border indicates that some other factor or combination of factors is to blame for the enormous discrepancy. As Anne Marie Ward has previously stated: “Bluntly, the obsession with drug consumption rooms (DCRs) is making it inevitable that more people in Scotland will die from addiction. DCRs are the same silver bullet trope I’ve heard for 30 years.”

A public health emergency that has built up over many years is not about to be fixed by a stroke of a legislator’s pen, and it is dishonest for those in charge to pretend otherwise. Still, even ideas with limited impact are something the UK government should be prepared to discuss with their SNP counterparts. The people being killed are UK citizens, too.

The truth is both complicated and mundane. We need better data and analysis of those who have died and the factors contributing to those deaths; we need earlier interventions, a number of different pathways, and joined-up support — so those dropping out of treatment or switching between areas or options are not lost in the system. We need to review the extent to which “stabilising” drugs such as methadone and benzodiazepines are prescribed and what the patient journey looks like once a more stable living situation is achieved.

Yes, replacing the funding that the Scottish Government has cut over the years is important — but only if it is directed well. Residential rehab will not be the best option for everyone, but it needs to be available and attainable for those who would benefit from it.

The hard work of policy development and service delivery is the only thing that will start to unpick the thousands of individual human tragedies that led us here. Unfortunately, this work is unglamorous. Until now, there hasn’t been much incentive for the SNP to do it. It has taken 14 years and nearly ten thousand deaths for the Scottish Government to be shamed into acting on drugs deaths. And now the party is wasting time and energy on glib finger-pointing. The country is watching, and waiting.

But if you complicate that a little by coming from the northern half of Britain, well, that’s a bit different. Yes, there are many world-famous Scots — Adam Smith, Arthur Conan Doyle, James Watt and Sean Connery, to name only four. But with the exception of the last one, none of them wrapped themselves in tartan, and so they are usually associated with the broader “British” identity.

Of course, if the SNP were to have their way, then the very concept of Britishness would be abolished, and Nicola Sturgeon is adamant that this option should be put to the vote sooner rather than later. Were that to happen, then I think these figures and others would be retconned as purely “Scottish”, in much the same way that the post-Soviet states projected their modern identities into the past. Thus was the prophet Zarathustra resurrected in the late 20^th century as a Tajik national hero, for instance. Whether or not such retcons gain credence with the wider world, however, is another matter: Nikolai Gogol remains resolutely part of the Russian literary canon, despite his Ukrainian origins.

As for Scotland, I think this retconning might prove to be quite challenging, also. For instance, in more than two decades spent living outside the UK, I have found that many people are quite foggy when it comes to my homeland’s precise constitutional status. They know that it’s not part of England, but the shared parliament and royal family and currency are confusing. Despite this, awareness of Scottish symbols is high, thanks in no small part to Walter Scott cobbling together all that malarkey about clans and tartans in the 19^th century. Our whisky is also held in high regard, and many a golfer aspires to play at the Old Course in Saint Andrews. In fact, I’d say that as far as small countries go, we don’t have it too bad — we’re certainly better off than the Belgians with their waffles, Tintin books and melancholy kickboxer.

But still, as Scots are few in number and comparatively rare beyond British shores, we remain quasi-mysterious to many. So whenever Scotland has appeared in the media, or come up in conversation in the different places where I have lived, I have always found it interesting to think about what that says about my homeland, how it is perceived, and whether, after almost a decade and half of nationalist rule, those perceptions are changing.

For instance, in Moscow in the late Nineties, I learned very quickly that by far the most famous Scotsman as far as Russians were concerned was a wee Australian in blue face paint named Mel Gibson.  “Ah, Scotland,” they’d say. “Braveheart!” “Yes,” I’d say, “Braveheart.” True, members of the older generation were familiar with Robert Burns in the Soviet era translations by Samuil Marshak, and quite a few people had seen Highlander (where the Scottish guy is played by a Frenchman rather than an Australian). But overall, to be a Scot abroad then — and since — was to live in the shadow of Braveheart.

Usually I would bluff my way through discussions of the film because I hadn’t seen it, and most people found that baffling, even disappointing (“How can you not have seen Braveheart?”). I suppose it would have been easier just to watch it, but I am very good at sustaining Larry David-style points of principle over things that are inexplicable to others. I’d been taught about William Wallace as a child, but even then, I thought there was something not quite right about the myth. I think it was all that stuff about losing, and then being eviscerated while still alive — it just didn’t seem like something I wanted to aspire towards.

I was more of a Robert the Bruce kind of guy, and not just because his bones were buried in my hometown of Dunfermline. I liked how he — you know — won. Besides, yearning for the days when hairy dudes roamed the heather and had periodic fights with the English just wasn’t my bag. I preferred the bewigged intellectuals of the Scottish Enlightenment: a handful of brilliant individuals coming up with world changing ideas on the fringes of Europe. That seemed like a healthier model for the nation, (though, I grant you, less appealing as fodder for a Hollywood blockbuster).

However, despite the predominance of Braveheart, it wasn’t all Mel Gibson all the time. I remember discussing Dolly the Sheep. I liked to explain that Dolly had aged much faster than a sheep produced by the traditional method and was now preserved forever in the National Museum of Scotland, where she received visitors every day — our Lenin. I also tried to steer people towards Trainspotting because I felt that it captured Scottish nihilism quite well, and I had a story about Irvine Welsh renting Jean-Claude Van Damme movies from the video shop in Dunfermline which made him sound very uncool. But Trainspotting did not endure; people did not want janky Edinburgh junkies. They wanted Braveheart.

More from this author

Don't fall for Putin's enemies

By Daniel Kalder

And so it continued, for years. It was while I was living in Russia that Scotland held its referendum on devolution, but I don’t remember that catching people’s attention. It wasn’t supposed to; Labour thought that Scotland was their fiefdom and that that they would run it forever, like Moscow ran its satellite states during the Cold War.

When I moved to the US in 2006, I discovered that Braveheart also cast a long shadow over the land of the free, although Sean Connery was very popular, as was the late night chat show host Craig Ferguson, extracted to LA via Cumbernauld. One year later the SNP took power, but things were still quiet for at first, although I do remember one unusual story making it across the waves a few years later. In an early act of cultural auto-colonisation, the likes of which are now commonplace across British institutions, an MSP lodged a motion supporting the gay wedding of the little-known Canadian superhero Northstar to his partner Kyle in the Astonishing X-Men #51, published by Marvel Comics, the New York-based subsidiary of the Disney corporation. Admittedly, I read about it on a crap comics website; even so, it felt like a new development.

But the hitherto super-boring world of Scottish politics was about to change drastically. Mel Gibson’s dominance as a conversation topic for people mildly curious about where I came from was seriously challenged in 2014 when Scotland voted on whether or not to remain inside the UK. Suddenly the possible dissolution of a 300-year political union was in the headlines and, for the first time ever, the continued existence of a collective British identity seemed in doubt. Most people in the US had simply never thought about any of this before. Starting about three days before the referendum I found myself fielding all kinds of questions about independence (not that I had a say in any of it, mind, because the SNP had disenfranchised all Scots living overseas).

More from this author

What America can learn from Russia

By Daniel Kalder

A cheat sheet, rather than a detailed discussion of, say, claims about the viability of North Sea oil was all that was desired, so I didn’t discuss the issues at length. But that was fine — it was startling, and refreshing, after all this time to find that the Scotland my family lived in, and to which I regularly returned, was finally more compelling to the people I knew than Mel Gibson’s bekilted action movie.

Still more striking, however, was the mood the day after the referendum. I vividly recall going into work and feeling a strange sense of anticlimax among those who had talked to me about it. Presented with the opportunity to turn everything upside down and strike out on its own, Scotland had voted to… maintain the status quo. What lay behind this sense of disappointment, I wondered, among people who had zero skin in the game? At first I thought it was the influence of the revolutionary war — for Americans, declaring independence from the meddlesome parliament in London is ground zero for their national identity. And perhaps that was part of it; but now I wonder if it wasn’t also the shadow of Braveheart. Everyone appeared to have seen that film, they had all heard Mel’s stirring words about freedom, and here, given the chance to at long last fulfil Wallace’s dream and seize independence, a majority of Scots had turned around and politely declined to do so.

Suggested reading

Scotland's mid-life crisis

By Ruth Davidson

The referendum was a watershed moment in the global imagination, the moment at which Scotland ceased to be a nostalgic fantasy and became a modern country, a place where things sometimes happened, things that required further explanation. Now, with Nicola Sturgeon insisting on another referendum, I suspect it is only a matter of time before I find myself answering questions about Scotland’s constitutional status again. The conflict with Boris is scoring headlines even amid the raging garbage fire of America’s self-obsessed media. I’ve already discussed the hypothetical of a hard border between Scotland and England with one curious Texan.

An awareness overseas of Scotland as a place that, culturally at least, is not fully British is definitely on the rise. I’d say that’s half the battle for the SNP, but it isn’t — independence is a zero-sum game, after all. It is a change, however, and a significant one. Something else has changed, too: these days I’m more likely to be asked about Outlander than Braveheart. And I haven’t seen that, either.

Putin aside, Scottish voters are now having to contend with the return of two Scottish political heavyweights of yesteryear: Galloway and Alex Salmond, two RT hosts who now find themselves leading two new political parties.

Each is attempting to outflank their former tribes on the constitutional question, playing to their respective unionist and nationalist bases as strongmen who will hold the current crop of MSP’s feet to the fire. But in doing so, both risk doing more damage to the cause they claim to support. North of the border, there’s more than a lingering suspicion that both are using their creations as a vehicle for their respective egos, rather than as a genuine attempt to shake up the body politic.

The comparisons don’t end there. For while Galloway and Salmond are not quite the opposite of each other, they represent, in a phrase favoured by the former, “two cheeks of the same arse”. They are both, in effect, attempting to game the Scottish electoral system.

Unlike the House of Commons, where an MP simply has to record one more vote than their nearest challenger to win a constituency, the Scottish Parliament — as well as the Welsh Senedd — is elected using the Additional Member System. In Holyrood, there are 129 seats, of which 73 are elected using the traditional first-past-the-post system. Scotland is then divided into wider electoral regions, where 56 further MSPs are elected on a proportional basis. This “list” is designed to ensure that parties are not penalised for recording their support evenly across the country, rather than seeing it pooled geographically in a number of individual seats. Or so goes the theory.

But when the architects of devolution were deciding on this modified “d’Hont system”, there was a general assumption that the same parties competing on the list would also choose to stand candidates in the constituencies; this matters, because the number of constituencies a party wins is ratio’d out of their list returns to make the result more proportional.

Both Galloway’s party, All for Unity (also, confusingly, called Alliance4Unity), and Alex Salmond’s vehicle, Alba, are standing solely on the list. And at least in tactical terms, that may make electoral sense.

In Galloway’s plan, the SNP will likely take the overwhelming number of first-past-the-post seats, but with less than half of the vote. So if pro-UK voters simply cast their wider politics aside and vote for the leading unionist candidate in the constituency vote and the Alliance4UK candidate in the regional list vote, the SNP would be crushed. Nicola Sturgeon would be out on her ear and there would be no more talk of independence referendums.

Salmond’s offer to independence supporters is the inverse of Galloway’s claim. Because the SNP records so many first-past-the-post wins — and will likely do so again in May — they return very few MSPs from the regional list. In effect, goes the Alba narrative, thousands of true believers in independence have their list votes cast aside. But, says Salmond, if they decided to split their vote — SNP in the constituency and Alba on the list — Scottish nationalists could record what he calls a “supermajority” for independence. With so many pro-independence MSPs in Holyrood, Boris Johnson would be forced to capitulate and offer another independence referendum immediately.

More from this author

The fall of the Wall powered up my politics

By Ruth Davidson

On paper, there appears to be a logic to both arguments. But in reality, they are to varying degrees a combination of sleight of hand, misdirection and utter cobblers.

Both Salmond and Galloway fail to appreciate that Scottish voters are unlikely to put all other considerations to one side when they cast their ballot. Yes, there is tactical voting between Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem voters — Conservatives sweep up thousands of Lib Dem votes in the borders, many Tory voters in West Dunbartonshire are happy to vote for their local Labour MSP to keep the nationalists out and a fair whack of both Labour and Conservatives will cheerily vote for the avuncular Scottish Lib Dem leader in his NE Fife constituency.

But there is no wholesale transfer, nor would you expect there to be from such diverse political traditions. Indeed, because Scottish councils are decided on multi-member wards and with a single transferrable vote, where voters rank their choices, it is easy to track their second and third preferences. In the glut of council by-elections we have seen following the lifting of Covid restrictions, it is clear that as many  — and sometimes more — Labour voters would rather give their second vote to the SNP than to the Conservatives, even if the Tories are best placed to keep a nationalist out of office.

Moreover, as the vast majority of pro-union MSPs are elected on the list system, rather than winning constituencies outright, adding another unionist party such as Galloway’s and splitting the vote four ways, rather than three, is likely to reduce each party’s share and allow more nationalists in through the middle.

I suspect that George Galloway — whose itinerant political career has taken in the Labour Party, The Respect party, the Workers Party of Britain and now All For Unity — probably knows this. This is not, after all, the first time he has stood for Holyrood; in 2011, he managed to record 3.3% on the Glasgow list.

Fast forward to today, and the most recent three Scottish polls have All For Unity failing to cut through. But while it looks unlikely that Galloway will return any MSPs, he could still gather enough votes to keep some pro-UK members out. For a man who refused to join the Better Together campaign at the 2014 independence referendum because “I hate the Union Jack”, who has previously called for a United Ireland and last week saw a clip resurface of him calling on the UK government to deliver a second independence referendum, it is almost as if his new party is just another grift to keep himself in the public eye.

Suggested reading

The SNP are falling apart faster than the Union

By Henry Hill

For Alex Salmond, however, even his most devout opponents accept that he believes fervently in Scottish independence. It is a cause to which he has committed almost his entire adult life. Whether, though, he is fully invested in seeing his protégé, Nicola Sturgeon, be the one to deliver it is another matter.

The fallout between the two former allies has been seismic. It centres on a complex and unedifying series of events, involving Salmond winning a civil battle over Sturgeon’s government over the way it investigated allegations of sexual assault against him, and culminating in Salmond being acquitted of multiple allegations of the same nature. Along the way, Ms Sturgeon traduced the character of her former boss, mentor and friend of 30 years — and she has carried the attacks into this campaign, highlighting his gambling habits and suggesting his new party was about putting “self-interest first”.

For his part, Salmond appears to have buried the enmity he showed throughout the investigation into the Scottish Government’s handling of the harassment complaints, during which he accused a group of Sturgeon’s allies (including her husband) of colluding to have him removed from public life and jailed. He now claims he simply wants Alba representatives to help get the SNP over the line with a majority that the UK government can’t ignore.

But is this likely? While a new nationalist party throws a spanner into some of the statistical modelling of polls and results, the general rule of thumb is that you need 5% of the regional vote to start taking seats. Get more than 5% of the vote and Alba begins doing damage to the pro-UK cause by displacing some pro-UK MSPs; receive less than 5% and the damage is mostly inflicted on the nationalist side by taking SNP and nationalist-supporting Green votes without anything to show for it.

Suggested reading

Scotland's failed #MeToo moment

By Sarah Ditum

The most recent three polls, in which Alba has recorded between 2-3% of the vote, suggest the latter scenario is increasingly likely. Indeed, it’s hard not see Alex Salmond’s power play as anything other than a revenge mission. When he stepped down in 2014, he handed his deputy a parliamentary majority. Nicola Sturgeon promptly squandered it in the 2016 Scottish election — a setback which allowed the UK government to deny all claims that an independence referendum should be rerun.

But even if Alba does somehow manage to return the sort of “supermajority” Alex Salmond claims to be hoping for, there’s nothing to say that it will pay off. The UK Government would be well within its rights to point out that gaming the system isn’t the same as gaining support. After all, in recent polls a majority of Scots have not been in support of separation. It would also, I suspect, be easier to counter a fractured nationalist Scottish movement composed of squabbling splinter groups than an SNP majority.

Come election day, though, far more important will be the fact that voters simply don’t like the sense that they are being played; that so-called big beasts think the political stage is theirs for an encore even if there’s no applause.

With lockdown sceptism having proven itself not very popular with populist voters, another cause presents itself in the form of “devoscepticism”.

Next year marks the 25th anniversary of the referendums that began devolution in Scotland and Wales. The first, and most radical, of the big New Labour reforms has long outlasted New Labour itself, and a quarter of a century on, what have we got to show for it? The devosceptic answer is this: SNP rule in Scotland; and not much of anything in Wales. Devolution has been a disappointment, and a failure.

Just as unionists warned, home rule has empowered nationalists and marginalised unionist parties, leading to one-party state in Edinburgh with all the corruption and incompetence that goes with it.

In those areas where power is devolved, such as education and health, the SNP has performed poorly. Evidence of a Scottish or Welsh culture renaissance is thin on the ground, and the main growth industry associated with the devolved administrations is the growth of government itself. Just as the Eurosceptics of old longed to be rid of the Eurocrats, the devosceptic bugbear is the “devocrat”.

Is it any wonder, then, that a small, but growing, band of devosceptics scent an opportunity here? Yes, they may be few in number — but 20 years ago the same could be said about the early Brexiteers. So could the anti-devolution movement become a serious force?

Politicians aren’t popular, especially those deemed surplus to requirements. Reversing devolution in Scotland and Wales would mean getting rid of 189 MSPs and AMs — plus all the hangers-on, of which there are many.  And public hostility to paying for the apparatus of politics is a potent force. It proved decisive in the 2004 referendum on the creation of a North East regional assembly and the 2011 referendum on electoral reform. Those two paved the way for the biggie: the Brexit referendum.

Already, the devosceptics have a voice in the media: try Googling “devocrat” — a word which no one uses with admiration, but which is already gaining traction just as so much of the language of Euroscepticism helped sow the seed of Brexit.

In May’s elections the anti-devolutionists are also set to establish a political bridgehead. Polls show that the Abolish the Welsh Assembly Party (whose purpose you can probably guess) will win its first seats in the Senedd. “Abolish” is full of former-UKIPers and they’ll be hoping that 2021 is the start of bigger things just as 1999 was for Nigel Farage.

And yet, I fear — or, rather, hope — that the devosceptics are doomed to disappointment. Devoscepticism is not the new Euroscepticism. Look beyond the superficial parallels and it soon becomes apparent that the two causes — and their underlying dynamics — are completely unalike. It also becomes clear that there is no going back on devolution; instead something else needs to be tried to correct the mistakes made by the Blair government.

More from this author

Has the EU lost its mind?

By Peter Franklin

Let’s start with a point that ought to be obvious, which is that Scottish (and Welsh) separatism is first and foremost a British failure — specifically that of the British political establishment. With great power comes great responsibility — so when millions of people yearn for something as disruptive and painful as leaving the United Kingdom, the responsibility has to lie primarily with those who had — and still have — most of the power.

The devosceptic agenda, however, puts all the focus on the failings of Edinburgh and Cardiff, therefore avoiding the underlying problem. Devolution in its current form has not — as promised — halted the march of Scottish nationalism, but that doesn’t change the fact that the stresses and strains of the Union precede devolution by decades. Unless the devosceptics have anything to say about that, then they don’t have anything to say at all.

Let’s not forget that prior to 1997, there was an explicitly anti-devolution party — called the Conservative Party. You may recall how that worked out for them. From holding half of all Scottish seats in 1955, they went down to zero by 1997 — and zero in Wales too. Even they got the message after that.

In any case, Eurosceptics, of all people, should understand that voters don’t like being ruled from distant places. Westminster was to pre-devolution Scotland and Wales what Brussels was to pre-Brexit Britain. In many ways, it was worse. At least the UK was never under direct rule by a team of ministers headquartered in the Berlaymont. And only some of our laws were decided in the European Parliament.

Also I don’t remember any occasion when the EU trialled its least popular directives in the UK first — unlike Margaret Thatcher’s government, which introduced the hated Poll Tax to Scotland a year before England and Wales. Whatever you think of Scottish separatism, it is a monster of Westminster’s making.

Of course, the parallels are far from exact but, being Eurosceptics, devosceptics ought to have a sense of what it feels like to have your future decided by institutions in which you’re outnumbered by outsiders. What part of “taking back control” don’t they understand?

This is also about the principle of power sharing. We’ve already had eleven years of Conservative government. Given the state of the opposition parties in England it’s likely that we’ll have many years more. Indeed, it’s not impossible that we could see a situation like in Japan where one party governs for decades on end. This might work in a consensus-driven society with a highly unified national culture, but Britain is not either of those things. We are a nation of nations — of different sizes and political predispositions. Such a situation would be torment to most Scots.

Devolution therefore provides a vital safety valve, a mechanism by which the Westminster system can persist but without giving the dominant English party exclusive power over the whole of the UK.

That’s why the boo-word “devocrat” is so ill-judged. Devocrats are in fact democrats. As individuals and as governing parties they are voted in directly by the Scottish and Welsh electorates — and they can be voted out again. They couldn’t be less like the Eurocrats we’ve just freed ourselves from. Whether you like Nicola Sturgeon or not — and I’m about as big a fan as Alex Salmond is — she has democratic legitimacy.

But, of course, for devosceptics that’s the problem. If the SNP secures a majority in May, then the pressure on Westminster to concede another referendum on Scottish independence becomes overwhelming.

Well, so be it. It is completely consistent with the principles of British Euroscepticism to give the people — in this case, the Scottish people — the deciding vote on that most fundamental of democratic questions: who governs? Brexit supporters in the Government, and the London media, can hardly complain if Scottish voters demand that its government carries out their wishes.

If such a vote is what Scotland truly wants, it’s not our place to suppress it. After all, isn’t that what the pro-EU establishment did to a number of countries which voted against them, and what EU supporters in Britain tried to do after the 2016 vote?

More from this author

How the EU humiliated itself

By Peter Franklin

There are of course matters to settle about the timing of the referendum, the wording of the question and who can vote. The UK Government should be adamant that the Covid recovery comes first; that the question presents a clear and explicit choice between leaving and staying in the United Kingdom; and that Scots who live outside Scotland should not be disenfranchised. However, the principle of Scottish people deciding Scotland’s future should never be in doubt.

In any case, what’s the alternative? A constitutional ban on independence referendums forever? Lock up the SNP leadership? Force Nicola Sturgeon into exile? This is Britain, not Spain.

We’d do better to follow the Canadian example instead, the only country to democratically neuter a secessionist movement. Back in 1980 the French-speaking province of Quebec held an independence referendum that was defeated. Then a landslide election victory for the Parti Québécois (the equivalent of the SNP) led to second referendum in 1995, but that too was defeated — though more narrowly. At the time, independence for Quebec looked inevitable, the result of unstoppable trends; today, the PQ is in long-term decline, independence is off the political agenda and the province is governed by the centre-right Coalition Avenir Québec.

Perhaps the single worst argument for reversing devolution to Scotland and Wales is that devolution is imperfect and full of contradictions. Well, of course, it is! There’s no such thing as a perfect democracy. The rule of the people, in all their wondrous complexity, will always and everywhere produce messy compromises and inconsistencies.

Suggested reading

Scotland's failed #MeToo moment

By Sarah Ditum

Those who think we should give up on devolution because we’ve never really solved the West Lothian question remind me of the anti-Brexiteers who relentlessly focus on all the problems caused by leaving the EU. In both cases, they overlook the much greater problem of their preferred alternative. In the case of the continuity Remainers, it would have meant submitting to a sovereignty-destroying superstate. In the case of the devosceptics, it would mean going back to an outdated, over-centralised model of Britain that the people of Scotland and Wales have clearly rejected.

We don’t have to stick with Tony Blair’s botch job, and there are other ways of decentralising a country. We could learn a thing or too from the Swiss, for instance — who have been at this lark for a lot longer than we have. Without a common language to unite them, they’ve nevertheless held their confederation together for centuries — and they’ve done it through fiercely-defended localism and direct democracy.

A system of cantons with local responsibility for their finances could suit the nations of the UK very well. Each area could come together with other areas as they saw fit — so that our governing institutions could emerge from the bottom-up instead of being determined by Westminster.

But that’s just one option. The key point is that if you believe that our model of devolution doesn’t work, then you need a positive vision to put in its place, not some unloved and long-discarded ancien regime that can never be brought back. Devolution can and should be re-done, but it can never be undone.

They have been blessed (or so it seemed until recently) to have had two extremely capable and charismatic leaders in succession. Alex Salmond took them first to a supposedly-impossible overall majority in Holyrood, and then to the cusp of breaking up the United Kingdom in 2014. Nicola Sturgeon, his anointed successor, helped to transform the referendum’s Yes Movement into a standing Nationalist army that swept all before it at the 2015 general election.

They have benefited, of course, from outside assistance. David Cameron’s extraordinary complacency ahead of the independence referendum handed them a long campaign and a favourable question. His needless invocation of English Votes for English Laws the morning after the vote poisoned the well of Better Together’s victory. Boris Johnson is deeply unpopular north of the border. And let’s not forget the generations of devolutionaries who have systematically handed the separatists vast constitutional arsenals, treasuries, and pulpits, while rendering the Union practically non-functional across vast areas of policy, including key bread-and-butter areas such as education and health.

But beneath all of this, the SNP’s real secret sauce has been its extraordinary discipline. After years as an enthusiastic but rabblesome force, Salmond forged the Nationalists into a veritable phalanx. Largely freed from the need to bargain with the base, the SNP leadership won extraordinary freedom of political manoeuvre and has used it to build a hegemonic position as ‘the party of Scotland’.

Suggested reading

The secrets of Scotland's ancient capital

By Daniel Kalder

After 13 years in office – long enough to have seen off New Labour and reduced the Conservatives, in their Thatcherian pomp, to a morbid state – the Nationalists look set to remain comfortably the largest party at next year’s Scottish Parliament elections. With the support of their separatist foederati, the Greens, they also seem (almost) certain to retain control of the Scottish Government. But not even the luckiest and most capable politicians can outrun time forever, and beneath the SNP’s perfumed poll ratings it isn’t difficult to detect the stench of decay. Sturgeon’s embattled administration is besieged within and without.

On the outside, MSPs investigating the Scottish Government’s botched investigation into sexual misconduct allegations against Salmond are on the warpath. The former First Minister’s successful legal challenge against the handling of his case ended up costing more than £500,000 of taxpayers’ money, and the central question now is what Sturgeon knew and when. Her predecessor alleges the original investigation was stacked against him; her own sequence of events has been called into question; crucial meetings with senior civil servants weren’t minuted; and Scottish ministers have twice defied votes by the Scottish Parliament for them to release the legal advice they received during the Salmond case. Opposition MSPs scent blood.

But it isn’t only opposition MSPs. Linda Fabiani, a Nationalist and convenor of the Holyrood inquiry into the Salmond affair, has been as vocal a critic as anyone of the Scottish Government’s response – and this is just one of the fast-growing spiderweb of cracks in the SNPs seemingly perfect façade.

Suggested reading

The Scottish town that rejected nationalism

By John Lloyd

At the centre of this web is Salmond himself. The one-time darling of the separatist movement may be a diminished figure, dogged by the sexual misconduct allegations and hosting a talk show on Kremlin propaganda network RT, but he remains a capable operator and commands a loyal following among the Nationalist grassroots. Feeling that his hand-picked successor at best tried to hang him out to dry — and at worst actively designed the Scottish Government’s anti-harassment policies with him in mind — Salmond is on the warpath.

Unhelpful interventions in the battle between Sturgeon and the inquiry MSPs are the least of it. The split between the SNP’s two titans, personal as it is, reflects growing divisions in the wider party, and Salmond has not been shy about exploiting this. His pose as the Nationalists’ radical conscience well-positions him to exploit activists’ unease about the potential softening of the party’s totemic commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament, independence strategy, and much else.

Meanwhile, Joanna Cherry, a high-profile MP and close ally of Salmond’s, has risen to prominence as a vocal critic of Sturgeon’s approach to gender issues, adding social policy to the growing list of axes  the SNP phalanx is turning on itself. She has made headlines with a plea to Sturgeon to condemn the vicious social media attacks she endures from parts of the nationalist movement for her positions on transgender issues.

She has also spoken out against the party’s “cult of the leader”, a rallying cry to those growing increasingly frustrated with the command-and-control culture which has helped the SNP ride so high for so long. And it is slipping: at their recent conference, one in four delegates backed Craig Murray, a former ambassador sacked by Tony Blair who has previously been barred from standing for election as an SNP candidate, to be party president.

For their part, the Nationalist leadership clearly think Cherry sufficiently threatening that they shamelessly changed the party’s selection rules to prevent her contesting a Scottish Parliament seat at next year’s elections.

A charismatic leader out for revenge; a devoted base of energetic partisans; a strong clutch of emotive ‘wedge issues’ in divisions over separatist strategy and gender; and a tired, over-centralised opposition fighting fires on multiple fronts – the Salmondites have all the raw materials for a sustained political insurgency.

Even those who don’t agree with them might wish them well. It is past time that Scotland was rid of the SNP’s hyper-disciplined politics, the upshot of which is that parties elected by a diverse range of voters end up reflecting only a narrow band of officially-sanctioned views. It was good that the Scottish Conservatives’ attempt to operate as a Westminster ‘bloc’ failed, and the fracturing of the Nationalists into a more chaotic, democratic, indeed normal party would be welcome. The fact it would almost certainly hasten the end of their extraordinary winning streak is, for unionists, simply a bonus.

Yet there is one thing that still binds the Nationalists’ increasingly unhappy alliance together: the imminence of next year’s Holyrood elections, and beyond them the chance of a swift re-run of the 2014 vote.

The Tories should understand this. It wasn’t all that long ago that Brexit was working a similar magic on their own fortunes, holding Theresa May’s Government’s poll ratings above 40% even as it shed Cabinet ministers almost monthly – and while the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, by removing the threat of an election, reduced Conservative internal discipline to rubble. As she learned, these peculiar conditions do not endure forever.

Suggested reading

Nicola Sturgeon's canny doom-mongering

By Douglas Murray

Sturgeon is key to the SNP’s current moment: new research from These Islands reveals the extraordinary hold she has on swing voters. But the First Minister is no political immortal and the magic is starting to slip. Even her much-vaunted handling of the pandemic has been called into question by new data, and an attempt to whip up anger at Westminster over a bung for NHS employees has been slated both by the Fraser of Allender Institute (‘Scotland’s leading economic think-tank’) and now by doctors themselves.

This is why Boris Johnson needs to defy the defeatists in his Government and stand by his refusal to grant the SNP another independence referendum in this Parliament.

There are plenty of good arguments for doing so, but on a purely tactical level it would almost certainly place a future vote beyond the end of Sturgeon’s leadership, and there isn’t another politician of her calibre waiting in the wings. It would also give the Nationalists the space to have the civil war they’re spoiling for.

The Prime Minister should let them fight it out, and then give battle to the survivors.

That feeble fifth-place ranking captured the depressing atmosphere of weary run-down rubbishness in which we who lived in the “Auld Grey Toun” were marinaded. Our local bookshop and cinema had closed down by that point, so there was not a lot in the way of culture or entertainment, although — to be fair — we did get the panto every year and I once saw Fife’s premier Frank Zappa tribute act, Frank McZappa, play in a pub. Speaking of pubs, we had no shortage of those, and we were also lucky enough to have a swimming pool, bingo hall and some ruins. You might say it was a bit like Waiting for Godot, only we’d all long since given up waiting.

More from this series

Why they burn witches in Scotland

By Diane Purkiss

Not that long ago, I would have ridiculed the very notion that Dunfermline contained any mysteries worth bothering about. My teachers did at least try to instill some civic pride: as a child I was taught that my hometown was Scotland’s “ancient capital”; that in the 11th century an important king named Malcolm Canmore built a tower there; that his wife Margaret became a famous saint; and that Robert the Bruce, the last Scottish king to defeat the English in battle, was buried in the Abbey. After that, nothing much seemed to happen for 500 years, until Andrew Carnegie was born. But he had to leave Dunfermline to become successful: a fact that was not lost upon any of us.

That’s a decent amount of history for a small town that nobody visits. And later, I learned more: Charles I, later to attain some notoriety, was born in Dunfermline’s royal palace; and Robert Henryson, a major medieval poet, had been headmaster at the high school.

And yet even to a child it was obvious that Dunfermline was centuries past its prime. Malcolm’s Tower (the “dun” in Dunfermline) was a circle of old bricks in on top of a hill frequented by nobody. The Abbey nave had fallen into disuse after a new bit was added in the 19th century, while all that remained of the royal palace was a wall — which was a great backdrop for staging mock-World War II battles, until Historic Scotland put a gate on it and started, rather too optimistically, charging for entry.

Saddest of all was Saint Margaret’s Cave, a once-sacred grotto, which was accessed through a shed in the car park behind The City Hotel, and which was closed for much of the year (the shed’s design drew heavily upon the “public toilet” school of architecture.) I was told by a guide that the city council had almost filled in the cave completely when they were putting in the car park, but a grassroots campaign had prevented that outrage. Thus even our history seemed a bit rubbish; the town was a place where people did things that were forgotten, or left to achieve greater fame elsewhere. I turned my back on Dunfermline in favour of Moscow, and then Texas, and for a long time I thought that seeing family was the only possible reason for visiting the place.

More from this author

Nineties Russia prepared me for coronageddon

By Daniel Kalder

But my attitude began to change the first time I brought my children to visit. Little Texans, they were growing up under a bright, limitless blue sky; I took them at Christmas, with the benefit that they would see the town as I remembered it, with horizontal rain and mid-afternoon darkness. One day I took them to visit Robert the Bruce’s tomb in the Abbey. The guide was telling the same story I had first heard 35 years earlier, when suddenly he mentioned, as an aside, that there were six other kings buried in the Abbey grounds, but nobody knew which one was which: “We know where they are, we just don’t know who they are.” Having travelled fairly widely in post-communist Europe and Asia, I had seen many identities assembled on less evidence than that. Yet here was Scotland: a country with a nationalist government sitting just across the bridge from this pile of kingly bones — and neither they nor anybody else seemed to care.

I was impressed by this grand an act of forgetting — this sustained, centuries-long indifference. We’d even managed to lose Robert the Bruce — that most legendary of warriors — for hundreds of years: his tomb was accidentally rediscovered in the early 19th century. And our kings, I later learned, were not the only things that we had mislaid.

When next I returned, I spent a couple of mornings in the local library, reading old books on the history of Dunfermline. It turned out that the Auld Grey Toun had been a major site of pilgrimage for centuries, a place of holiness and miracles. Visitors had come from far and wide to venerate the relics of Saint Margaret. One of those relics was her head, which remained on Earth long after her soul had departed for its eternal reward. It was a fixture at the Abbey right up until the Reformation, at which point concerned Catholics spirited it away — first to Edinburgh, and then to the continent — so that it could escape the orgy of iconoclasm taking place in Scotland. The plan worked, and Saint Margaret’s head survived for a further two centuries, before disappearing in a different orgy of iconoclasm: the French Revolution.

It was also around this time that I picked up a copy of the Arden edition of Macbeth, and, reading the notes, realised that the “Malcolm” who kills Macbeth in Shakespeare’s drama was the same Malcolm who married Saint Margaret and built the very tower that put the “dun” in Dunfermline. You’d think my English teacher might have mentioned this, but she didn’t because — I am sure — she did not know. It was as if Dunfermline, secretly interesting after all, was clouding the minds of those who inhabited it, sustaining a miasma of boredom to prevent anyone from looking too closely. How could a place that had once been so rich in mystery, and a sense of the numinous, now be so bereft of it? Our capacity for forgetting awed me. It still does.

More from this series

Don't call Abingdon ordinary

By Eleanor Parker

This time last year I was home again, and decided to follow the Tower Burn into town, a route that many have trod and re-trod over the centuries. Its banks were overgrown with nettles and the section closest to Saint Margaret’s shed (which was closed) was strewn with litter and serving as the last resting place of an errant shopping trolley. From there, I walked through the car park and on to the Glen, where I paid a visit to Malcolm’s Tower. A bit of the ancient tower had fallen off and lay on the ground amid crisp packets and beer cans. Not too far away, Abbot House — a medieval building containing a contemporary mural by the celebrated writer-artist Alasdair Gray — was also boarded up.

I was heading for the Abbey when, all of a sudden, I spotted a numpty with a hurdy-gurdy standing at the entrance. Intrigued, I lingered a few minutes, and the next moment I saw Gordon Brown leaving the building in the company of some people who I assumed were local dignitaries; I think the Earl of Elgin may have been among them. They were celebrating the opening of ‘The Fife Pilgrim Way’, a new walking route that, it was hoped, would lure tourists over the bridge from Edinburgh into Fife so we could extract some money from them while they drank deep of our sacred history. That’ll be the history surrounded by nettles and beer cans, then? My cynicism was so profound that I could feel a “Disgusted of Texas” email to the Dunfermline Press coming on.

But when I got back to the States, the business of life swept me away and it was weeks before I remembered that I was going to write that letter. And now, a year later, I wonder: what if this level of disregard for the past is, well, typical? What if Dunfermline is just a particularly pronounced exemplar of our natural state? I remember visiting Konye-Urgench in Central Asia, where a kid was grazing a goat outside the ruins of an ancient fortress that clearly meant nothing to him; and also VDNKh, the giant Stalinist exhibition centre in Moscow, where shoppers browsed for washing machines and fridges, indifferent to the monumental totalitarian architecture that housed them. I think about the epic of Gilgamesh, which disappeared beneath the sands of Iraq for so long. The heritage industry exists to serve visitors who are disconnected from the history they stare at. Locals, well — they forget.

Even so, all those forgotten things lie heavy upon Dunfermline and everyone in it. The glory of the town is not so much its past but its status as a mysterious monument to aging — to decay, loss and death. It reminds us that glory days once gone do not come back; that you don’t need to be so dramatic as to decline and fall: sometimes to decline is enough. That which is interesting is not visible, and that which is visible is not that interesting. But if you stare long and hard at the town, it will begin to reveal its secrets. It only took 40 years or so for them to start opening up to me, and as the years pass, I find that the heavy gravity of the Auld Grey Toun exerts an ever-stronger pull upon me. Each time I return it is as if I am edging my way ever closer to some central enigma of existence.

Who knows where it comes from, this trait? Most likely some hangover of Presbyterianism, an ultra form of that puritanism which H.L. Mencken summarised as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy”. Scottish joy at the opportunity to impart bad news is some extension of this: the knowledge that someone, somewhere, may have been happy and that the universe has finally made them pay for it.

The thought recurred to me as I watched Nicola Sturgeon addressing the Scottish people on Wednesday night about a fresh outbreak of coronavirus in her native land. The tableau was almost perfect in its grimness. The Scottish First Minister stood at the podium with a black background. Slightly off to one side behind her was a woman who was signing, not deemed necessary on all political occasions and adding to the solemnity of the event. Nor did it help that the signer was wearing dark clothes, so that her alabaster-white arms and face were the only things flashing out from the pitch-black. If this tableau had been given a paint name it would have been “Banquo’s ghost”.

Mrs Sturgeon’s words, too, were of the darkest hue. ‘This virus hasn’t gone away,” she began: “If you doubted that then today we have evidence of how true that is. It is still out there. And it is still highly infectious. And it is still highly dangerous. The outbreak in Aberdeen is a sharp reminder of that. It shows what can happen if we let our guard drop. And it should serve as a warning to all of us.”

Using the language of fires, firewalls and firefighters, Sturgeon warned: “Our job as citizens, as human beings, is to try to make sure that the fires don’t start in the first place.”

Always good to hear a politician to remind us that we are human beings.

Of course, to hear this talk you would think that the Scottish people are dropping dead at an even faster rate than usual. As it happens a certain level of panic should exist in the voices of Scotland’s politicians at all times: life expectancy in Glasgow, for instance, is the lowest (for men and women) in the whole of the UK. During the years of SNP rule life expectancy in parts of the country, such as Dundee, has actually fallen, a phenomenon rarely seen in modern times outside of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.

More from this author

Cambridge University's very modern bigotry

By Douglas Murray

But for the SNP to address such problems on their watch would be to take some responsibility, and Scottish Nationalists like Nicola Sturgeon never take responsibility. Not when there is “Westminster” to blame, and the opportunity to grandstand by issuing the direst imaginable warnings.

Yet what was striking about Sturgeon’s words were not just how grim, but how misleading they were. True, the general public in Scotland might have got used to being mislead by Ms Sturgeon, but even by her own standards, Wednesday’s doom-mongering was extreme. Her words about the lockdown in Aberdeen suggested that the city and wider country was facing a death toll on a gargantuan scale. The figures say something very different.

The fact is that there have been exactly zero confirmed Covid-related deaths in Scotland over the last three weeks, an astounding figure. Meanwhile what non-public sector employment exists in Scotland has been decimated, as everywhere, by this shutdown, a shutdown that we are told is crucial in order to save lives.

It is a shutdown that has become contestable as more and more evidence emerges, but what is not contestable is that what remains of the private sector will be unable to survive repeated shutdowns of the kind now being imposed. To imagine that they could is to engage in the economics of fantasyland in a country already used to consuming several economic fantasies each day before breakfast.

The lockdown announced in Aberdeen is a consequence of exactly 18 new corona cases, including 13 linked to a single pub. This tiny number of cases is the justification for Nicola Sturgeon to quarantine an entire city, a quarter of a million inhabitants who are now once again forbidden to enter each other’s houses, forbidden to go to restaurants or pubs, and forbidden to travel for any purposes other than work.

More from this author

Who controls the Covid-19 narrative?

By Douglas Murray

Of course all of this could be seen as a terrific and necessary precaution. Or it could — and perhaps should — be seen as a wild and politically-driven over-reaction. Here is displayed a strange dynamic, which is not peculiar to Scotland, but is certainly epitomised in the place — ultra-caution on the part of the politicians for reasons that do not directly have any bearing on the case at hand.

It now seems clear that the total shutdown of the UK that started in March was primarily put in place in order to stop the embarrassment of the National Health Service being overwhelmed by corona cases; specifically to avoid similar scenes to those emerging out of northern Italian hospitals. Underneath this ultra-caution another dynamic existed, which was the decision that the NHS could not be put under such strain during the time of a Tory government.

For years the Conservative Party has been pushing back at Labour efforts to portray them as in some ways callous or uncaring towards the NHS (or even seeking to privatise it). While never sincere and never less than cynical, still the Conservatives deeply feared this line of attack, and worried that Italian hospital-like scenes would offer their domestic political opponents a weapon for many years to come.

A similar dynamic is seen in Scotland. The SNP exists for a single purpose — to remain in government, to be seen as ultra-competent in the tasks of government and from there to be able next time (whenever that might be) to persuade the Scottish electorate that a one-party state ruled forever by the Scots Nationalists will be a land of milk and honey. Or oil and whisky. Whatever your poison is. That is now, as it always has been, the sole ambition of the SNP. Anything that deviates from that goal is of no interest to them.

Suggested reading

Why we aren't wearing masks in Sweden

By Freddie Sayers

So how to explain Wednesday’s speech? Simply that Nicola Sturgeon would rather do anything — including shutting down the Scottish private sector, such as it is — than have another coronavirus death on her watch. This isn’t because of the extreme and unusual “compassion” of the Scottish people that the SNP claims exists (in fact we Scots are at least as bloody and vengeful a people as any) but rather because Sturgeon knows that if her own mortality figures come out any worse than England’s then she and her fellow Nationalists may be held responsible for the fact.

Just as if the death tolls in England turn out higher than those in Scotland, then Sturgeon and co will highlight this as yet one more example of “foreign” malfeasance and incompetence which only highlights the case for independence. Of course, happily for them the SNP can further wreck and immiserate the Scottish economy, safe in the knowledge that they will be able to continue relying on the support and largesse of taxpayers in the South-East of England.

So it is that after weeks of zero deaths Sturgeon stands in front of the Scottish people and warns them of fires, and gloom and doom and the importance of taking action “as human beings” to avert a catastrophe that was in fact averted weeks if not months ago. Shutting down Aberdeen for a dozen cases of corona portrays Sturgeon as a strong but determined leader.

When the financial consequences of her decision hit then she can portray them as further evidence of how much better off the Scots would be without the English yoke. The grim warnings Sturgeon issued on Wednesday will have given her the greatest possible satisfaction. Not just because she is a Scot, but because she is a Scots Nationalist who knows that everything — including the worst possible catastrophe — can all be made to work very happily in her own favour.

Yet it cannot be right that the Scottish National Party should subject the good people of these Isles to yet another nationalist, divisive, separatist “little Scotlander” referendum, kicking off a new round of an entirely unsolvable political bun-fight that will tear our country apart even further. We’ve had the “once in a generation” referendum and the nationalists lost. Should the SNP succeed next May, Westminster — Parliament for all the United Kingdom — should simply refuse to authorise it.

The SNP is by any measurement Left-wing, a social democratic party that prides itself on being as unlike the Tory and Brexit-voting hordes of the south as is possible. They are Left-of-centre on economic and social issues, fiercely pro-EU and in the European Parliament would align with progressive and green groups from across the continent. Yet this is not the whole story, as anyone who has upset their supporters can testify to.

Despite being a Remain-voting liberal, my views on a second referendum have attracted the sort of racism — from Scottish nationalists — that you would usually expect to receive from the far-right. In many exchanges with SNP supporters, I have learned that that Left-wing racism against people of colour is apparently acceptable, if we veer off an approved script.

But, then, as surprising as English liberals may find it, Scotland is not the progressive paradise they like to believe — and  my anecdotal experience is borne out by wider concerns. Last year more than 80 public and professional figures signed an open letter warning that the struggle against racism in Scotland is “rolling backwards”, creating a climate of “resentment towards frank discussion of race and racism” that is threatening to undo progress on race equality.

It is significant that the signatories also highlighted a trend to “silence the voices of people in Scotland who face colour-based racism”. This letter came less than two months after Scotland’s national poet laureate Jackie Kay warned openly  that Scotland had to “grow up” as it was “decades behind” in its treatment of black and ethnic minority people.

Too often, when minority voices such as mine — children of the colonies, born in Britain — oppose the break-up of what we now consider our country, Scottish nationalists too readily seek to silence our voices by accusing us, instead, of being English “colonists”.

More from this author

Is China preparing for war?

By Maajid Nawaz

Such rhetoric is not only overly antagonistic, it also displays a fundamental ignorance about why most ethnic minorities in Britain have expressed a preference for calling ourselves British over English, Scottish, Welsh or Irish. And while I embrace being both a non-Anglo-Saxon Englishman and a Brit, it is not easy for many of us to forget the nationalist-inspired violent racism levied against us growing up, and still present today.

For ‘progressive’ Scottish Nationalists to draw an equivalence between ethnic minorities who oppose their separatism and British colonialism, smacks of the very colonial privilege they seek to denounce. The fact of the matter is that Scottish colonists profited greatly from the creation of the British Empire. Scotland’s debt to Empire is her dirty little secret, seldom acknowledged but ever-present. The “tobacco lords” of Glasgow were enriched by slavery in the Americas and Africa, while a quick visit to the former North British Rubber Company in Edinburgh serves to disabuse most naysayers suffering under such a false sense of righteousness.

The pernicious narrative peddled by Scottish nationalists that England colonised Scotland, and then the rest of the world — and so England must even now be resisted in Scotland — sounds suspiciously like an act of whitewashing Scottish culpability, at least to the ears of this descendant of a former colony.

More from this author

Labour is institutionally anti-Semitic

By Maajid Nawaz

This is not something SNP supporters like to hear, but SNP supporters have gained a reputation for intimidating critics. Recently, BBC News Scotland Editor Sarah Smith learned the hard way why Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has earned the nickname “Nippie Sweetie” for adopting the  “aggressive and adversarial approach of male politicians” early on in her career.

Ms Smith had made the admitted error of accidentally describing Sturgeon as  “enjoying the opportunity” to shine during lockdown, instead of saying that she was “embracing” the challenge. Ms Sturgeon’s supporters were not happy to say the least, and an online pile-on inevitably ensued. Ms Smith, though, was quick to push into reverse gear, her resultant climbdown being perhaps the swiftest and most complete of any journalist in recent years, to my mind. Scotland’s BBC chief was so remorseful, in fact, that she felt the need to issue no fewer than four swift back-to-back apologies online to Ms Sturgeon, with one of them remaining pinned to her profile page for days. Ms Sturgeon regally confirmed that she accepted her apology.

So wouldn’t it be lovely if Nicola Sturgeon also apologised for, and investigated, the racism present among all too many of her online supporting trolls?

While it is true that Ms Sturgeon is not personally responsible for the behaviour of her supporters, such racism appears not to be a mere bug for the SNP, but may well be a feature. Indeed, just because a nationalist party identifies as being on the Left, it does not mean that an undercurrent of racism cannot be found beneath all the cuddly talk.

Historically, many nationalist parties and nationalists have started on the Left, from the French Revolution onwards; indeed one of the most famous of 20th century nationalists, Benito Mussolini, was on the National Directorate for the Italian Socialist Party, before he turned rightward to fan the flames of nationalism.

Suggested reading

Covid-19 is hardening our borders

By Tim Marshall

Violent hostility to outsiders and critics is in the DNA of nationalists, whether on the Left and Right, as anyone who has debated with SNP can testify to. When that outsider has different colour skin the rage seems to be heighted.

As party leader, it is Nicola Sturgeon’s duty — not mine — to make minorities feel safe from the racism of too many of her supporters. And until she can do so, do not be fooled by the progressive overtures of this SNP. For too long commentators of all persuasions have harboured a policy and ethical blindspot for Scotland’s nationalists, viewing them as polar opposites to English nationalists, rather than their counterparts.

We should beware the kid gloves with which metropolitan opinion formers treat the SNP. Their party machine is curiously similar to Momentum, and much of what we would never tolerate from Corbyn now rules in Edinburgh. As such, they are riddled with all the trappings of power, while harbouring a nasty, illiberal and authoritarian streak. Alarm bells should be ringing now, lest after lockdown we enter blindly into yet another experience like the three years before the virus struck.

And if you thought Brexit Britain got bad, just wait until Scexit.

To seek to understand this polarisation is to intrude on a kind of painful family feud. So I tread carefully. But the story goes, I think, something like this.

There was a time when politics in Scotland was a fairly staid and predictable affair: Labour was dominant; most Scots hated the Conservatives; the Lib Dems (or old Liberal party) controlled a few seats in the Highlands and Islands; and the SNP, known as the ‘Tartan Tories’, was seen as something of a crank outfit and its raison d’être — independence — a fringe position.

But that was then. Now the SNP reigns supreme and Labour is in sharp decline. (It’s pretty much as you were for the Tories and Lib Dems.) This seismic shift in the popularity of both Labour and SNP is a tale of hubris, complacency, the politics of grievance, and a rediscovered national self-confidence and sense of identity.

Devolution was seen by the new Labour government as not only desirable in itself, but also a tactic designed to end the debate over independence for good. But, the law of unintended consequences being what it is, millions of Scots went and got the taste for running things themselves. And their ultimate unwillingness to settle for what they came to view as an ersatz version of the real thing ensured that the independence campaign, and thereby the SNP, was suddenly emboldened.

Suggested reading

Does Scotland resent the Royals?

By Ewan McColm

Meanwhile, Labour, having taken Scotland for granted for too long, began to haemorrhage support. Its pursuit of austerity-lite policies in the years after the global financial crash, and then its alliance with the other ‘English’ parties, particularly the Tories, in the Better Together campaign for the 2014 independence referendum, accelerated its demise. Again, the SNP, which had long since reinvented itself as a progressive alternative to Labour, reaped the dividends. As far as Scottish politics was concerned, all had changed, changed utterly.

Glasgow was the last Labour bastion to fall, the party’s long hegemony over the city eventually collapsing in the Westminster, Scottish parliament and city council elections in 2015, 2016 and 2017 respectively.

But, despite all that, vestiges of support for the party in this most working-class of cities do remain. In fact, as I travelled around the constituency of Glasgow East, I found it hard to believe that it was anything but Labour. But it is. Only just, mind. The seat is a hyper-marginal, with the SNP holding it by a mere 75 votes.

The East End of this city was once a major industrial centre, home to sprawling manufacturing, engineering and textile works, including the vast steelworks of Parkhead Forge. The sounds and smells of heavy industry would permeate through the nearby slums, of which row upon row of poverty-infested tenement blocks were the main feature. The history of this part of the city is one of working-class solidarity and culture, of cranes and mills, of deprivation and squalor, of the Irish diaspora and Celtic football club, of the notoriety of the Gorbals district and 1920s razor gangs.

Suggested reading

Scotland's drug shame

By Darren McGarvey

Today, the old industries may be a fading memory (Parkhead Forge is now a shopping centre) and the remaining tenements sandblasted to look clean and new, but the hardship is still all too prevalent. The East End contains some of the most deprived areas in the UK. Unemployment and levels of poor health are comparatively very high; the number of benefit claimants well above the UK average.

Every one of the seven Glasgow constituencies represented at Westminster voted Remain in the EU referendum; but, of them all, Glasgow East saw the largest share voting Leave.

After the war, huge new municipal housing estates – known as the ‘schemes’ – were constructed across the city to rehouse families displaced by slum clearances. I headed out to one of these – Easterhouse – an infamous place that over the years has gained a national reputation for gang culture, violence and drugs. If Glasgow East is deprived, then Easterhouse feels like its most impoverished corner.

The place has attracted much media attention and the occasional famous visitor – Princess Diana and Jacque Chirac among them – over the years. They are brought here, no doubt, to discover what life is like for those living on the breadline in one of the most disadvantaged pockets of the nation, almost as junior doctors having a somewhat unusual and stubborn medical condition demonstrated to them.

It was after a visit here while leader of the Conservative party that Iain Duncan Smith was inspired to launch his crusade for ‘compassionate Conservatism’. The moment was, it is said, his ‘Easterhouse epiphany’.

Suggested reading

The town that should shame our politicians

By Paul Embery

If you come here expecting some kind of benighted, lawless ghetto, you will be disappointed (or pleased – depending on how you look at it). True, mattresses and other discarded furniture are piled up on some streets, drab and unsightly low-rise blocks of flats abound, shop fronts are shabby and uninviting, and you’re likely to stumble upon some untended grassy wasteland every few blocks.

But Easterhouse is fighting hard to reinvent itself, and vast amounts of money have been pumped into the place to help it along the way. Much of the original estate has been pulled down, to be replaced by modest but modern housing, and there is the odd shiny new building, including the Kelvin college campus (which wouldn’t look out of place in a Home Counties town) and an art and culture facility called ‘The Bridge’.

You can’t help but feel, though, that much of this is little more than cosmetic surgery – a superficial makeover on a timeworn body which, beneath the veneer, still suffers from the wear and tear of the daily grind. It’s clear, when you look at the poverty statistics, that the regeneration scheme, which dates back to 2002, has been little but a sticking plaster.

Suggested reading

Will Brexit tear Belfast apart?

By Paul Embery

What can the mainstream parties possibly say to convince those whose existence here has been marked by constant need and privation that their lives really will change for the better after the general election?

At St Benedict’s Roman Catholic church on Westerhouse Road, 67-year-old Mary Maguire, until now a lifelong Labour voter, is helping to prepare a special Mass. “Labour are a joke these days. Not just Corbyn; the whole party. They are a joke,” she tells me. This time she will vote SNP because it is the only party standing up for Scotland. She supports independence. “Scotland is a rich country. We’ve lots of resources, but we don’t get a say. Everyone says that England pays to keep us, but that’s rubbish.”

She voted Leave in the EU referendum. “I thought it was the right thing to do,” she says. “I voted Yes to the Common Market first time round, mind.”

“Is unemployment a big problem around here?” I ask. She bristles. “Yes, but lots of people work too. People want to work. Easterhouse isn’t just full of people claiming benefits.” It’s a common theme here. Locals are acutely aware of the reputation of the place, but are desperate to convince you that it isn’t as bad as all that.

I thank Mary for her time and offer five quid for the donation box. She gently rebuffs me. “Don’t be daft. We don’t take money off people who come to see us.”

Suggested reading

Don't call it poverty porn

By Jenny McCartney

For all the problems caused by a lack of decent jobs, low wages, inadequate housing and social exclusion, there’s a kindness and warmth in Easterhouse. Folk are friendly and eager to chat.

Friends Donna and Fiona are walking along Aberdalgie Road. Donna, 41, tells me she is “on the fence” but veering towards Labour. “I’m a single parent and would probably be better off financially under Labour. Plus, Labour would look after the NHS. And I don’t trust the SNP.” I ask about the challenges facing Easterhouse. “Drugs. They are a big problem here. And some of the teenagers have no respect and no manners. They trash the place. Mind you, there’s nothing for them to do. And over there,” she points, “is a homeless centre filled with young men. I don’t always feel safe walking around.”

“What do you think of Boris Johnson?” Donna widens her eyes and puffs out her cheeks at my question, as if to say, “Don’t get me started!” I do get her started. “Let me just say,” she snaps back, “that I bought a Donald Trump toy for my dog. He ripped it to pieces. So now I’m looking for a Boris Johnson one.”

I ask Fiona how she will vote. “I won’t,” she retorts sharply. “It’s a waste of time. Nothing ever gets done. They are all a load of shite.” She reflects. “Although at least the gang fights have stopped now.”

Crawford Irving, 24, has lived in Easterhouse for two years. He moved here because “the rent is cheap” and earns his living as a door-to-door fundraiser for a charity. “Yeah, we’ve got our problems,” he says. “Drug issues. Poverty. You go to the shops at 10 in the morning, and people are lining up to get their cans of beer. Or outside the chemist the junkies are queuing to get their methadone. But all places have their problems, don’t they?”

He likes living in Easterhouse and is in no hurry to move on. “Underneath it all, there is a real sense of community on the schemes. It’s like we’re all struggling, but we’re struggling together.”

Suggested reading

Why I'm going to spoil my ballot

By James Bloodworth

He will vote Labour on 12 December. “I trust Corbyn. He’s genuine. Rides a bike and stuff. I like that.” And though a supporter of independence, he is no fan of the SNP or its leader. “Nicola Sturgeon is dishonest. She hasn’t made Scotland better. She said she would restore the NHS to its former glory, but it’s in decline.”

History tells us that the evils of unemployment and low wages are primary factors in so many other social problems that can plague communities such as Easterhouse – not just the usual mix of crime, drugs and vandalism, but the absence of self-worth, of dignity and a sense of vocation.

Give people meaningful, rewarding work and the rest will follow. It’s a truism as relevant now as when man was fashioning tools from flint. Yet it is rare these days to hear any party – not even Labour, with its radical economic programme – make the case for full employment as a prime goal of economic policy.

On the train back to the city centre, I read on my iPhone a breaking story exposing an old column written by Boris Johnson, in which he stereotyped British working-class men as “drunk, criminal, aimless, feckless and hopeless”. I guess if you were fortunate enough to brought up on the playing fields of Eton rather than the streets of Easterhouse, you can deceive yourself into believing that such simplistic garbage provides any explanation at all for the trials and tribulations faced by our most blighted communities and the mindset of those who populate them.

Alighting at Queen’s Street station, I walk the few yards to George Square, home to a statue of Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns.

“Ye see yon birkie, ca’d a lord / Wha struts, an’ stares, an’ a’ that / Tho’ hundreds worship at his word / He’s but a coof for a’ that,” wrote Burns in “A man’s a man for a’ that”, his paean to the poor.

For some reason, I am still thinking of the Prime Minister and that old column.

For all our chippiness and our tendency towards Scottish exceptionalism (I dare you to buy a 73-year-old Scotsman a pint and ask him to list the achievements of our scientists and inventors) we’re not, I daresay, so very different from our neighbours south of the border. Just as is the case in England, Scottish society is built on a bedrock of small-c conservatism. The majority of us are not the radicals of contemporary myth but traditionalists, suspicious of sudden change.

And so it is not entirely surprising that a majority of Scots remain, for now, in favour of the Monarchy.

The Queen, if not every member of her family, retains the respect of most Scots. Crowds may be depended upon to appear whenever she is north of the border. When she is in residence at Balmoral, the route to Crathie Kirk in nearby Ballater will be lined with locals who see her as one of their own. A publicised visit to Holyrood Palace at the foot of Edinburgh’s Royal Mile provokes similar interest, with tourists and locals alike gathering in the hope that they might catch a glimpse of the monarch.

It helps that the Queen has never been backward about describing her love of Scotland. Visiting the Scottish Parliament to mark its 20th anniversary in June of this year, she described her “great affection” for Scotland and spoke of “the many happy and personal connections I enjoy with this wonderful country.”

It is safe to say that among those listening to Her Majesty from the cheap seats that day were MSPs — particularly those from the SNP, the Labour Party, and the Greens — who do not reciprocate these feelings. There is a strong vein of republicanism running through Scottish political life. It is only the caution of mainstream political leaders which prevents much discussion about the matter. The findings of UnHerd’s survey, showing that Scots are not as enthusiastic about the continuation of the monarchy as our neighbours south of the border, will come as encouraging news to many elected members.

Suggested reading

Meghan and Harry are playing a dangerous game

By Douglas Murray

Back in 2004, when Alex Salmond returned to the leadership of the SNP for a second stint, he and his team created a new story of Scottish nationalism. Out went the Braveheart rhetoric and in came a more widely palatable narrative. Basically, everything would change with independence but it would also, somehow, stay the same. The radical break up of the United Kingdom would not seem like the nationalists overturning centuries of tradition.

Crucial to this story was Salmond’s effusive support for the monarchy. He spoke enthusiastically about the Queen’s role in an independent Scotland; she would, he said, be proud to be its monarch.

Scotland is changing, and quickly. Politicians have long since abandoned the pretence that theirs is a battle between Right and Left. Rather, the fight now is between two visions (or fantasies, depending on your taste for populism) of how the country might be. For the (slender) majority of Scots, the country’s future is more secure as part of the Union. For nationalists, nipping at the heels of Unionists, a radical shake-up is required.

Suggested reading

Introducing Charles III

By Tanya Gold

Cautious senior figures in the SNP will continue to publicly support the monarchy. The future of the monarchy, one tells me, is not a discussion worth risking right now. But the results of the survey — which show approval and disapproval of the monarchy equally split in some areas of the country — might reveal the existence of a ticking time bomb.

Not so very long ago, you could say with certainty that the vast majority of Scots would continue to vote Labour until the day they died. Now, the party languishes behind the SNP and the Conservatives in the polls. Nothing is set in stone.

Scotland may not yet be ready to discuss the abolition of the monarchy but with radical voices urging the SNP to be bolder in its approach to breaking up the union, it would be unsurprising to hear more republican voices emerge in our national debate. Should Scotland become independent, a debate on the future of the monarchy would be unavoidable.

One veteran SNP politician tells me that the outcome of that discussion may hinge on who is at the head of “the firm” at such a time:

“Nobody at the top of the party is going to agitate to get rid of the Queen. But if someone else is in charge, there may be a debate to be had in an independent Scotland.”

There might not yet be an insatiable appetite among Scots to ditch the monarchy but, as the findings of the UnHerd survey show, the Royals are endured rather than admired by a great many of us.

Apparently, I – as an MEP – get a say on whether to endorse them, but it’s not exactly a free and fair election. There is no actual choice, for a start, just a chance to reject or query a pre-ordained list. With Britain not putting anyone forward (as we’re – allegedly – preparing to leave on October 31) and Germany denied choosing one as they already have Mrs von der Leyen, there are 26 new commissioners, each nominated by member states, and given their jobs based on “a series of formal interviews” by the president-elect. The powers that be will present them to Parliament as a dream team ticket, and we are expected to rubber stamp them before 1 November.

So, who are these people who will hold sway over the lives of so many Europeans for the next five years? It’s a rather mixed bag. Much has been made of the fact that the line-up features 13 women, making it the “most gender-balanced Commission in EU history”. I am not a supporter of identity politics, but when Ms Von der Leyen boasts that the new Commission cabinet is “as diverse as Europe is”, one is tempted to point out that they are all white. Unless you count the Belgian nominee Didier Reynders, who in 2015 was accused of racism after he dressed up in blackface for a charity event in Brussels.

The newly-appointed Justice Commissioner (whose role involves ensuring compliance with the rule of law) insisted it was a harmless tradition. Fair enough, but after listening to endless speeches at the European Parliament achingly flaunting their anti-racists credentials, and calling for legal sanctions against hate speech, this hypocrisy is hard to take.

Perhaps he is a quality politician and is worth the grief? Perhaps, except that he recently failed to become President of the Council of Europe and was passed over for the Commission in 2014, making it third time lucky for a seat on the gravy train. But then he does have solid credentials, having previously worked in the Belgium government under its then Prime Minister, the anti-Brexit, friend-of-the-Lib-Dems  Guy Verhofstadt.

Suggested reading

Why can't we talk about Brexit?

By Giles Fraser

These new members of Ms Von der Leyen’s cabinet have been given new titles, supposedly to focus on their goals, but with a tinge of Orwellian doublespeak. So, we have a Commissioner for “A Stronger Europe in the World” and a Commissioner for “An Economy that Works for People”. One particularly creepy rebrand involves Greece‘s Margaritis Schinas – a former MEP, LSE alumnus and spokesman for previous President Jean-Claude Juncker – who has been given the migration portfolio and now revels in the title of Vice President for “Protecting our European Way of life”.

Jeez! Even in the supine world of EU bureaucracy this sobriquet has already led to some queasiness. A Dutch liberal MEP, Sophie in ‘t Veld, told The Independent that implying “Europeans need to be protected from external cultures is grotesque and this narrative should be rejected”. Other Europhiles denounced the title as “grotesque” and reminiscent of “fascist” rhetoric, but for me it shows up the two-faced nature of the claims that the EU is an internationalist enterprise. The truth is, it is a protectionist bloc, only committed to freedom of movement within its borders, at the expense of pesky foreigners from without.

What is most galling is that so many Remain champions here in the UK have the nerve to label those who want democratic control of national borders as xenophobic, when the more racist dynamic resides in Fortress Europe; it is a circling-the-wagons mentality that savagely polices its own borders to protect it from non-European immigrants, who are posited as a threat to “our European Way of Life”.

Another appointee is Spain’s Josep Borrell, who now heads up European diplomacy. This is the same Josep Borrell who entered Spain’s foreign ministry with one main aim: to defeat the Catalan independence movement. In 2018, he withdrew the diplomatic credentials of the Flemish government’s delegate in Spain in response to criticisms by the Flemish parliament speaker, Jan Peumans, about the jailing of Catalan leaders.

As this “diplomat” regularly defends the imprisoning and exile of elected Catalan politicians, maybe the SNP MEPs – who make much of their support for Catalan independence – will oppose his appointment? But… maybe not, as Borrell has been diplomatic enough to pander to Scottish nationalism, indicating that an independent Scotland should be allowed to join the EU, even while endorsing locking up those with similar views closer to home.

Suggested reading

Labour's Brexit shambles

By Paul Embery

On the economy, there’s France’s appointee Sylvie Goulard, who is in charge of Domestic Markets. Ms Goulard is a close ally of French President Emmanuel Macron, and quit as an MEP to join his government as Armed Forces Minister in 2017. However, she lasted less than a month and was forced to resign when an investigation was opened into how her party had misused EU funds; she had to reimburse the European Parliament Є45,000 euros (£40,200) in a case involving fake Parliamentary assistant jobs.

But please don’t worry about her. The following January, Ms Goulard was back with Mr Macron as deputy governor of the Bank of France! Barely a year later, she has now landed a plum job at the Commission. Nominated with no discussion. Nice work if you can get it.

That said, I’m sure that most of the Commissioners are upstanding. Although, only last Friday, the European Anti-fraud Office (OLAF) revealed that they had begun an investigation into the Polish candidate, Janusz Wojciechowski. OLAF said that the investigation into the 64-year-old former MEP, and former president of the Polish Court of Auditors, concerns financial “irregularities”. Even if MEPs challenge his appointment (as much because of his politics, being a member of the Right-wing Law and Justice Party) von de Leyen will simply pull another name from a hat of non-discussed allies for us to “choose”. This smacks of an Xi Jinping version of democratic accountability.

Suggested reading

Look what happens when you ignore Parliament

By Diana Purkiss

I could go on. And on. There are so many examples of the essentially undemocratic and unaccountable nature of the Commission, but perhaps nothing better illustrates this than the new president herself. A gigantic poster of Ursula von der Leyen has just been erected in Brussels that reads: “In fair free elections, the power of the people determines the people in power”. Fine words, but simply not true. Juncker’s successor did not get her elevated position as a result of people power, but was appointed to the top job after secret negotiations in July that followed a row when the candidates put forward by the European Parliament were turned down by EU heads of government.

An unpopular politician at home (as defence minister she was dubbed by one wag as the German equivalent of Chris Grayling), I was there when she was confirmed as president after a fierce fight and lots of opposition in the European Parliament, only scraping home by nine votes (she won by 383 votes to 327, needing the support of 374 MEPs for an absolute majority). She played down the narrowness of her win, insisting that a “majority is a majority”. On that, I agree with her, and so do 17.4 million others: they are the real embodiment of “power of the people”. She and her new Commissioners should show a genuine commitment to people power, and stop keeping us tied to their dictats against our will.

Claire Fox is Brexit Party MEP for North West England