How nationalists are destroying free speech
Rivals howled down. Dissenters vilified. Debate stifled and opponents smeared as enemies. The ugly, and deeply troubling, truth about the SNP’s powerful one-party state
IT has not been a great few months f or Jim Murphy. Having taken on the crown of thorns that is leadership of the Scottish Labour Party, he immediately found himself standing in the path of an electoral tsunami.
When the wave hit, it took everything and everyone with it, bar poor Ian Murray, the last remaining Labour MP in Scotland, who must often wish he’d been swept away with his former colleagues.
Throughout the election campaign, Mr Murphy was heckled, abused and jostled by the more aggressive wing of the Scottish National Party. No public meeting seemed to pass undisturbed.
I presume this enthusiastic hatred stemmed from his tour of Scotland’s towns and villages in the run-up to the independence referendum, where he would stand on a couple of Irn-Bru crates and robustly make the case for the Union. Again, these events rarely passed without incident.
On a purely human level, it cannot have been easy for him to lose his seat, his livelihood, arguably his reputation and, on top of all that, having to resign the leadership only six months after taking the gig. If there was one crumb of comfort in this humiliating experience, I suspect, to paraphrase Richard Nixon, it was this: ‘You won’t have Jim Murphy to kick around any more.’
Well, perhaps. Last week, as the newly resigned Mr Murphy was putting petrol in his car, a man crossed the road, walked up to him and said: ‘F*** you, you f****** red Tory!’
Now, whether or not you have any regard for the departing Labour leader, what sort of person walks up to a stranger while he’s chucking unleaded into the family Vauxhall and starts swearing at him? When, how and why, in once friendly, welcoming Scotland, did this public confrontation and malevolence become acceptable, and the well of debate become so poisoned? What do these people, and their political masters, want?
On any rational analysis, the separatist movement is allpowerful – as powerful as it can ever hope to be, really. It has 56 of our 59 MPs, an overall majority at Holyrood, a superstar of a leader and every likelihood of consolidating this extraordinary state of affairs at next year’s Scottish parliamentary election. The main opposition is in tatters and its Centre-Left standard captured.
SO if you are a Nationalist politician or supporter, what a time to be alive. The horizon is bright with possibility, the future yours to shape, a generation of dominance guaranteed. But think back to 1997, when Tony Blair entered Downing Street, and recall the feeling of forward-facing optimism that swept much of the country.
The Tories were so vanquished that they were the subject of humour rather than bile. The focus was on what wonders might now be achieved. So why is this not the case in Scotland in 2015? Why does the Nationalist gang remain so completely fixated on the ‘enemy’? Why the continued malice? Why waste your breath on Jim Murphy? And it’s not just Mr Murphy. Alistair Carmichael, the former Scottish Secretary and only remaining Liberal Democrat MP north of the Border, has undergone endless pressure and demands that he resign over the leaking of a memo suggesting that Nicola Sturgeon hoped David Cameron would win the election.
I ndeed, Mr Carmichael’s destruction seems to be the priority of the SNP group at Westminster. David Mundell, the Scottish Secretary and the only Scottish Tory MP, has been dragged in, with Alex Salmond insisting he must have known about the memo.
Mr Salmond shows the temperament of a modern-day Duke of Cumberland. He gives no quarter. The wounded must be bayoneted, the corpses smirked over, until they stop twitching. He is the political equivalent of the man at the petrol station, out to get Mr Murphy.
What does this say about the psychology of the movement that Mr Salmond and his people have created over the past few decades? In the circumstances it is not natural to be a bad winner, to be ungracious in victory, f or your blood l ust to be unsated, indeed, insatiable.
Yet the neddish aggression that characterised aspects of last year’s Yes campaign continued without pause into the General Election, and continues still. In all my years covering politics, I have never experienced anything like it.
As Nicola Sturgeon seeks to put her more considered stamp on the SNP, to begin the long process of reunifying our divided little scrap of land, she risks being drowned out by her predecessor and his angry army, who have descended on Westminster with the apparent intent of causing as much mayhem as possible.
At the point of Mr Murphy’s resignation, Miss Sturgeon tweeted that she wished him ‘all the very best for the future. Leadership is not easy and he deserves credit for standing up for what he believes in.’
In contrast, Mr Salmond wrote a newspaper article that began: ‘Fine qualities, often hitherto undiscovered, are focused upon, as people try not to appear ungenerous in response to a fallen figure. I am not at all sure that Jim Murphy will attract such a reaction.’ Mr Murphy, he said, was part of the ‘problem, not any sort of solution’.
This striking lack of class is replicated in the SNP’s behaviour in London. As well as its war on Mr Carmichael, the party has mounted a sustained attempt to force the Left-wing Commons stalwart and 83-yearold ex-miner Dennis Skinner from the spot he has occupied on the green benches since the early 1980s. Mr Skinner’s oneline quip before the Queen’s Speech has become an informal part of the event – this year, too preoccupied with keeping the Nats at bay, he was silent.
THE separatist MPs applauded three times during t he response by their Westminster leader Angus Robertson to the Queen’s Speech, like student union Citizen Smiths, despite being told that clapping is not welcome in the Commons chamber.
According to one of the new MPs, Natalie McGarry, ‘ It is archaic to shout “Hear Hear” which comes from “hear him”. It is boorish, entitlement, exclusionary nonsense.’
I believe she was serious. This is the same ‘feminist’ who, duri ng the election campaign, excused the frightening street pursuit of the then Labour MP Margaret Curran by Nationalist hoodlums, saying she was a ‘fair target for community justice’.
And it’s not just the elected members. The infamous cybernats continue to stalk the internet, hunting down any opinion that does not fit the party – and the state-approved viewpoint.
Last week, someone called Derek Bateman, who appears to
sit in his bedroom in his underpants writing furious, mis-spelt, ungrammatical blogs, turned his pea-shooter on me.
In a series of rants about my writing, he described me as ‘intolerant, unreasonable, incorrigible, one-eyed, zealous, doctrinaire… and Scotophobic’.
Scotophobia i s actually a morbid fear of the dark – Mr Bateman should invest in a dictionary. But he ploughed on regardless, declaring I was ‘an unrepentant Unionist bigot. And every sane company with Scotland at heart should reject him.’ Now, rambling obsessives such as Mr Bateman are ten a penny on the i nternet and easily dismissed, but what happened next was a bit more sinister. Mike Russell, the MSP and former education minister who was sacked by Nicola Sturgeon when she took over as First Minister, tweeted that he agreed I was ‘an unrepentant Unionist bigot’ who should be rejected by ‘every sane com- pany with Scotland at heart’. Mr Russell i s no rambling obsessive. He is a powerful man who has been at the top of the SNP for decades. He has just been appointed professor of culture and governance at Glasgow University. It should concern us all that we live in a society where such a figure judges it acceptable to say publicly that a journalist with whom he disagrees is a bigot who should be boycotted by employers.
I suppose Mr Russell, a longterm Salmond henchman, views me as one of the wounded who must be bayoneted and finished off. I have been uncomplimentary about his record as education secretary – not hard, as he was a disaster – and I am a consistent critic of his party’s weaknesses. But it is surely one thing to challenge my opinions and quite another to suggest I should be unemployable.
This can only be viewed as a disturbing attack on freedom of speech and thought, which are the bedrocks of our liberty. It plays to every dark stereotype associated with Nationalism – opposing views must not just be debated, but shut down.
You can see it again in the pressure placed upon business leaders and academics not to speak out against the SNP and Scottish independence. It was announced yesterday that Louise Richardson, principal of St Andrews University, has been appointed as vice-principal of Oxford, the first woman to hold the post in that venerable institution’s 800-year history.
It emerged last year that this superb academic had been telephoned by Mr Salmond and treated to a ‘loud and heated’ conversation demanding she clarify remarks she had made about the consequences of leaving the UK. It is little surprise that Miss Richardson chose to use the opportunity of the Oxford announcement to criticise the Scottish Government’s poli c y on hi gher education.
LAST year, Gavin Hewitt, a former British ambassador who was chief executive of the Scotch Whisky Association from 2003 to 2013, attempted to organise a group of business people to speak in opposition to independence.
‘We found around 150 people prepared to sign up,’ he said. ‘But almost as many refused – not because of any disagreement with our opposition to Scotland leaving the UK but because they feared they would be punished in terms of receiving grants, winning contracts or getting access to ministers.’
Mr Hewitt says business people were told by ministers that if they caused problems, existing contracts would not be renewed: ‘The SNP is, frankly, a party that is vindictive. It doesn’t forget people who disagree.’
The SNP’s overall majority at Holyrood has allowed it to dominate the parliament’s committee system, which is supposed to act as a check on government in the absence of a second chamber. Instead, those committees have become mere echo chambers in support of government policy, regardless of its merits.
Meanwhile, Nationalist MPs have been forced to sign up to a new rule prohibiting them from criticising, in public or in parliament, a colleague, a party decision, or a policy. If even the party’s MPs are barred from thinking for themselves, where does this leave those of us who don’t vote SNP, have no intention of ever doing so and believe they should be held to account l i ke any other party and government?
WHAT kind of society are Sturgeon, Salmond, Russell and the like attempting to create? One in which only those who agree with the official position should be allowed to speak freely? One in which journalists can have their right to employment called into question by elected politicians? One where opposition leaders can be abused as they put petrol in their car and where academics and business leaders are intimidated if they dare go against the grain?
It seems as if anything, no matter how important, can be sacrificed to the ‘greater good’ of securing the destruction of the UK. In an astonishing confession this week, former justice minister Kenny MacAskill revealed that the Scottish Government’s refusal to grant prisoners voting rights was ‘ the wrong thing done, albeit for the right reasons’.
And what were those right reasons? ‘It was to avoid any needless distractions in the run-up to the referendum, to deny the Right-wing Press lurid headlines that could tarnish the bigger picture.’ One might almost call this ‘one-eyed, zealous and doctrinaire’. What a way to run a country.
I hear a lot about the peace and positivity of the Nationalist movement. But for those of us at the sharp end, things are less than peaceful and less than positive.
The state, with all its might and influence, is quite deliberately creating an ‘us and them’ Scotland, in which, if you are not with them, you are not just against them, but must be taken out. So what do they want?
Should the 50 per cent of voters in Scotland who didn’t support pro-independence parties at the General Election leave altogether? Would they prefer a one-party state with no dissenting views, where nobody dares put their head above the parapet?
Do they properly understand the principles and conventions of a civilised, liberal, pluralistic democracy? Do they understand the dangers that undermining such a society brings? It would appear not – and that should worry every sensible person in Scotland.