Britain has a cancer: the SNP
By Pete North - January 3, 2021
Twitter has been buzzing with Scottish independence chatter for the last couple of days for obvious reasons. I don’t suppose indy types will ever recognise their similarity with the Ultra brexiteers but it’s there if one cares to look. It’s a flimsy prospectus propped up by assumption, naivety and a failure to acknowledge or grapple with the the complexities of such an undertaking. Moreover, as a cause it can only be a broad coalition of contradicting grievances that will not withstand its own success.
There’s a certain Dorian Gray quality to contemporary Scottish politics. For all its outward appearance of youthful progressive internationalism, there’s a portrait in an attic somewhere depicting the decaying, snarling genuine article. It’s only a question of when the mask slips to reveal a small, spiteful collection of ideas based on the usual politics of envy.
This is ultimately why Scottish independence doesn’t really solve anything. Grievance politics will continue to be a mainstay of Scottish politics long after independence. SNP welfare serfdom is designed to maintain structural poverty (aided by EU) into which it pumps victimhood narratives, and will always find a way to scapegoat its English neighbours.
The SNP imagines Scotland as a business hub in the EU. We shouldn’t discount that as a possibility but it will do nothing for the employment prospects of Scotland’s “left behind” because there’s no place in business for illiterate serfs nurtured on a sense of victimhood and entitlement. I mean, why would you employ an SNP grunter barely capable of polysyllabic discourse when you can employ sexy young grammar educated Polish tech wizards with a work ethic for the same money?
What bothers me most, though, is how transactional it all is, exchanging an organic union peoples with a common history and shared concerns, with a remote legalistic enterprise in Brussels whose system of rules preclude much of what the SNP say they want to do. Ms Sturgeon’s EU advocacy is only skin deep. She believes it an economic guarantor of her separatist project.
This is astute politics. The first thing any referendum campaing has to do is to de-risk the proposition thus she pretends pivoting from one union to the other is just a matter of signing a few application forms and taking up her seat in the European Council.
The facadism is also astute. The vitriolic ethno-nationalism at the heart of the SNP is not welcomed in Brussels or anywhere else, but as long as the young and naïve believe it to be a progressive cause, separate to British politics, it pays to wave around your right-on credentials. Thus we see Sturgeon flirting with the transsexual lobby, which currently holds the attentions of young middle class graduates – of the type who still believe the EU is a glorified travel club and student exchange programme.
The true face of the SNP, and the independence movement, though, can bee seen around the edges – the corruption, the ruthless party discipline, and the rampant paranoia. It more resembles a mafia than a political movement – one that enlists the apparatus of the state for party ends up to and including the police which they are now using as a political intelligence gathering unit. Closer to the DDR than a progressive utopia.
In that respect, the SNP is the closest thing to fascism (as I understand it) that has ever been seen on these islands. If not the ideology then certainly the methods and the mastery of cynical propaganda. Brexiteers look like rank amateurs by their standards.
As it happens I’m still ambivalent on the whole issue of Scottish independence. We’ve talked about it for so long and so often it just feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy – and if it needs to happen for the virus to be expunged then it has to happen and we’ll pick up the pieces later down the line.
Should it happen, the Scots will learn the same lessons as the Brexit Ultras – that independence as is commonly understood is a mirage and sovereingty without power, is of limited value. It will either end up a subordinate of the Brussels apparatus, or in a no-man’s land between the two unions, pushed and pulled in bureaucratic game of tug-o-war, leaving everyone worse off and politics in a state of perpetual negotiation, chewing up unnecessary political bandwidth that would be better spent resolving more urgent problems.
This of course, could just as easily be said to leavers such as myself, but there is a clear distinction here. The Union of British nations is something tangible. It can be made to work and is worth saving. In my heart of hearts I don’t want to break up our country – even though the nihilist in me would enjoy watching Scottish independence turn to ash in their mouths.
It seems to be the function of the SNP to persuade the rest of the UK that the Scots are so vile and so unpleasant that we don’t even want them in our Union. There are days when it comes close to succeeding. I try not to give into such cynicism. It should be taken as a spur to fight for what is worth preserving. Nobody wins if the SNP prospers – least of all the Scottish. One wonders, with the SNP having more sway in Westminster than the Lib Dems, if they wouldn’t accomplish more for Scotland by constructively engaging. But this they will never do. Like their cousins in the Brexit Party, jeering and flinging faeces is all they’re capable of.
I don’t know if Scottish independence can be prevented, and Downing Street seems to have done all it can to exacerbate the problems on the assumption that the threat of a hard border imposed by Brussels would be sufficient a deterrent. This is complacency of the first order. If Brexiteers were willing to “go WTO” then Scots are unlikely to be persuaded by border fears. It may be that independence has to happen if only to kill the cancer that is the SNP. Whichever path is most likely to accomplish that may well be the greater good. Whatever it takes to expose them for what they are. Only then can we repair the divisions they have nurtured.