IAIN MACWHIRTER

Voters have fallen slightly in love with Nicola Sturgeon. She makes Scots feel good about themselves

THE former Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy’s parting shot on his resignation was to suggest that the SNP are like a “pseudo religious” cult. The SNP must have captured the voters minds. This is a meme that has been around for some time on the internet under the hashtag “#SNPCult” which features observations such as: “The #SNPcult has truly taken hold amongst the deranged of Scotland”... ”The cult believe anything the SNP tell them. They’re beyond reason”.... ”I’ve just seen that #SNPcult Mhairi Black burd on TV. Jesus Christ. A total Chav”..... “Cult members are like this (picture of a chimpanzee)”… ”Don’t you have caves to go to #SNPcult”

Well, there’s always nastiness on the internet if you look for it and I’m not saying these are necessarily views of Labour members. But the cult theme went mainstream on election night when the defeated Labour MP for Linlithgow, Michael Connarty said that voters had been “taken in” by a Stalinist “cult of personality” .

This is less offensive than comparing the SNP to “fascist scum”, but is in the same territory. Cults are irrational, dangerous, self destructive, impervious to reason and of course built around a charismatic leader.

Step forward, Nicola Sturgeon. Clearly, she is L Ron Hubbard, Osama Bin Laden, David Koresh on high heels. She has cast a spell over the people of Scotland with her quasireligious mumbo-jumbo about progressive alliances, abolishing Trident and ending austerity. Using occult powers of persuasion, combined with ruthless ideological centralism, she has forced the press to recycle nationalist propaganda that excludes all criticism and paints a picture of a Dear Leader who is never mistaken.

Only, er, something has gone slightly wrong here. I don’t think the Unionist press could seriously be accused of being followers of the Nicola cult. Unless all those headlines about her being “the most dangerous woman in Britain... wrecker... Scotweiler” contained subliminal messages saying: ‘Vote SNP’.

Hardly a week goes by without some courageous columnist standing up to the might of The Cult. “How do you defeat a faith-based party whose voters are animated by quasi-religious zealotry?” asked Alex Massie in the Spectator during the election campaign.

Voters have fallen slightly in love with Nicola Sturgeon. She is how Scots like to think of themselves: smart, modern, radical

Here’s the well-balanced CapX columnist Gerald Warner:

“’Millions now living will never die’, the slogan coined by Jehovah’s Witnesses a century ago might more appropriately be adopted by the SNP. It admirably sums up the millenarian, hallucinatory vision that the Scottish Nationalists are fervently promoting as their programme.”

The idea that the SNP is “faith-based” relates to Nationalists’ belief that Scotland should be independent – a proposition which most Unionists believe is simply irrational. But I think the real targets here are the voters themselves who have voted en masse for the SNP.

Like the little green men in Toy Story, they must be weak minded innocents wanting a leader to take them “to a better place”.

Nationalism is often portrayed as an emotional passion rather than a rational ideology. I suppose any party which bases its appeal on ethnic or racial exclusivity is always liable to degenerate into if not a cult, then extremism.

But the SNP is a social democratic party and the most obvious thing about Ms Sturgeon is her almost complete avoidance of ethnic nationalism, or indeed any kind of nationalism. Alex Salmond used to go on about Wallace and Bruce, but I’ve never heard the FM talk about Bannockburn.

This is a funny fuhrer who doesn’t even sound particularly patriotic. At least not in the gushing manner of Gordon Brown who begins his book, My Scotland; Our Britain, thus: “I love my country. Simple as that. I am passionately and proudly Scottish...Some people have a love-hate relationship with their country. Mine is a love-love relationship”.

However, as this column has remarked before, voters have fallen slightly in love with Ms Sturgeon. She makes Scots feel good about themselves. She is how Scots like to think of themselves: smart, modern, radical.

Adoration of politicians may be unhealthy, but popularity isn’t a crime. And it is not the same as blind faith.

At any rate, I’m not sure calling all this “pseudo religious” is the best way for Labour to recover lost electoral ground. As Mr Murphy also says: the voters are always right. Well, except in Germany in the early 1930s.

Comparing your political opponents to a “cult” is like comparing them to “Nazis”: you lose the argument even before you actually make it.