So it has been a while – June 2017, to be precise. Since then, life has been quite busy – not least with the Trump and Johnson administrations becoming increasingly comfortable – until the novel coronavirus derailed their plans somewhat. In 2018, I started blocking text together for another post called ‘On the Normalisation of Hate’ – following Rangers being dumped out of Europe by the 4th team in Luxembourg, and with a couple of weeks to go to marching season in Northern Ireland, I was seeing a lot of parallels with the Conservative base and the Trump base. Ultimately the post was unwieldy and I didn’t finish it – instead I began focusing increasingly on the Trump administration, mesmerised and distracted as it completed its transformation, through the filter of its reality TV-host, into a Mexican soap opera. Impeachment #1, the aftermath, the arrival of COVID, the build-up to the US election, the way that even after the election one did not feel confident that any transition of power would actually happen…never mind ‘Hate’, chaos had been normalised. Then the cascade of the march on the Capitol on January 6th, with the marchers sparking more than a few memories of the unionist thugs who invaded George Square in Glasgow after the referendum on September 18th 2014, giving equal currency to their neo-Nazi salutes and union flags, seeing no contradiction or conflict between the two at all.
If I’m honest, though, June 2018 was not the last time that I moved to publish something on this blog. Two years ago, I was fretting over writing a piece: ‘Is the SNP fit to lead the campaign for Scottish independence?’. There were no signs of strategy, or ways of dealing with a UK Prime Minister that just chose to repeatedly decline any requests for a Section 30 order to facilitate a second independence referendum. In June 2018, Ipsos-MORI had just published its first poll with majority support for Scottish independence. In January 2021, we now have an unbroken run of twenty such polls from a range of polling companies. Yet there is nothing to shake my unease, that there has been no strategy for how to take things forward – a very un-Salmond-like leadership of a campaign for Scottish independence.
Over a year ago, I was discussing politics with a US friend who had moved to Edinburgh and become a great supporter of Scottish independence. As a respite from discussions on Trump, he was asking for my thoughts and I noted that I was losing faith that Nicola Sturgeon had any plan for achieving independence, and how different this was to having Alex in charge. He reacted a little badly – perhaps – noting that he much preferred Nicola. Fair enough, Nicola had a very different style and I was a fan (see some of the now embarrassing hagiography on this site’s previous blogs about her), but I was struck by how much he was rejecting Salmond’s former stewardship, when there was no way that Scotland’s self-attitude and campaign would be anywhere without the work that he had done in the years prior to Nicola taking over.
Shortly after that discussion, there was the announcement of charges against Alex Salmond. He was acquitted from all of them, and the passage of time has slowly unearthed that not only was there a harassment policy drawn up specifically with the intention of targetting him, but internal Scottish Government policies were directly violated (e.g. forwarding complaints to the police when the complainants had requested they not be) in order to pursue this course of action…and the First Minister Nicola Sturgeon lied to the Scottish Parliament in the process of trying to cover this up.
This is profoundly depressing – a protection of political careers over principle that we last saw in Scotland when there was still a Labour Party here. The SNP circles the wagons…not only to protect one faction (that has remarkably attempted to expunge Alex Salmond entirely from the party’s history – and indeed imprison him as a matter of political expediency for themselves) against another, but also to suppress any attempts to develop Plans B or C to independence, if the UK government should ‘unthinkably’ continue to say ‘non’ to a requested Section 30 order. The SNP no longer seems interested in achieving independence – but is nonetheless very happy to use ‘independence’ as a call-to-arms in order to be politically retained in government. And the more polls that come in showing a majority of Scots voting for independence (without any campaign having started) the greater the likelihood that that will continue…without them having to materially do anything in support of achieving independence whatsoever.
So it seems that – as in 2014 – the broader Yes movement will once more have to take the initiative forward, until a political party is in position at Holyrood that is actually interested in attaining independence for Scotland, rather than just juicing it as a concept that they can milk for votes every election cycle. I would hope that that could one day be the SNP again – but, regrettably, it currently is not.
“There’s a very simple answer to [why Leslie Evans is still in a job]. She says it herself constantly to the inquiry – civil servants only represent ministers. They have no status other than as the servants of the government. Who is Leslie Evans’ boss? Leslie Evans’ boss is Nicola Sturgeon. Nicola Sturgeon was behind this from the outset. Leslie Evans was carrying out Nicola Sturgeon’s instructions. And that’s why she’s still in a job. Because if she wasn’t still in a job, neither would Nicola Sturgeon be.” (Gordon Dangerfield, 22/1/2021)
50 Days of Yes 