No, Ross, Holyrood should not honour a Marxist gunman

IN a week when our thoughts are drawn once more to two murdered American brothers, one might quietly challenge the myths around President John F Kennedy – that he was a bleeding-heart, softLeft liberal, a made-for-television vacuity who prospered only because there were so many clever men behind him.

Kennedy was notoriously flawed and by no means perfect. Yet he was a consequential figure of mean intellect, read several books a week and was immensely proud of his pure-blooded Irish heritage, three generations off the boat.

He was a cold-headed, robust Cold Warrior who in June 1963 stood up in bright West Berlin sunshine to make the speech of his life – a full-on demolition of Communist delusion and Marxist tyranny.

‘Freedom has many difficulties, and democracy is not perfect,’ boomed the US President, ‘but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in…’

Kennedy loved company and, especially, feisty young people. He’d doubtless have been intrigued by Ross Greer, who is the Green MSP for West Scotland and (born in 1994) the youngest member of the Scottish parliament yet elected.

But Greer never topped the polls in anything like an earthly constituency. It just happened that, in May 2016, he was top of the Scottish Green regional list when the Marxist-Lentillists squeezed 5.3 per cent of the overall party vote from the patient folk of Arran and Inverclyde and North Ayrshire; Renfrewshire and Dumbarton, Clydebank and Milngavie.

Greer is by all accounts an amiable lad and, as one might expect of someone too young to remember when John Major was Prime Minister, has a social media presence of industrial scale. A full-time politician since he was 15, he did not trouble to complete his Strathclyde University degree and has never held anything resembling a real job.

It is also remarkably hard, considering his affiliation, to find anything he has ever actually said about the environment. Rain forests tumble, chimneys belch and porpoises perish without the least ululation from Ross Greer MSP. His chief fascinations are Scottish independence and LGBT rights. Unusually, for our time, he is a pillar of the Kirk and, in a magazine interview, confessed to a weakness for bouncy castles.

HE was perhaps still reeling from one when, on Tuesday, he tabled a Scottish parliament motion that can only be described as quietly insane – a paean of praise to James Connolly, an Edinburghreared school teacher who became an ardent socialist, a Dublin radical and, in the spring of 1916, an armed insurrectionist.

Greer beseeches parliament to declare that it acknowledges ‘June 5, 2018 is the 150th anniversary of the birth of the Irish republican, socialist and revolutionary James Connolly, in the Cowgate area of Edinburgh; celebrates Connolly’s active involvement in the socialist and labour movements in Scotland, Ireland and the USA…’

He wants Holyrood to acknowledge ‘Connolly’s role as de facto commander in chief of the 1916 Easter Rising against British rule in Ireland… and his subsequent execution by a British firing squad, while tied to a chair on May 12, 1916’ and to declare ‘Connolly to be one of the leading Marxist theorists of his era, whose works it believes continue to inspire socialists and trade unionists across the world…’

That Greer thought it appropriate to lay down this anthem to a swivel-eyed gunman on the 50th anniversary of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination is perhaps the least grotesque aspect of this posturing.

The Easter Rising was a bloody debacle that broke a fundamental tenet of just war – that there is a realistic prospect of success.

A huge delivery of German arms for the plotted insurrection had been stymied by British forces and so scant a secret was the revolt that the leader of the Irish Volunteers tried to call the whole thing off by an advert in the newspapers.

Connolly and other hotheads, such as Patrick Pearse and the dotty Joseph Plunkett, nevertheless embarked on a suicide mission, with such incompetence they failed to seize either Dublin Castle or the city’s telephone exchange (both undefended) or cut the lines to British Army barracks.

Those keen to glorify Easter 1916 should be reminded that nearly 300 civilians were killed, including dozens of children; that the revolt was so unpopular that Dublin crowds mobbed and spat at the rebels as the authorities finally hauled them in. What transformed it into a heroic event – and its dead into sepia-print martyrs – was, of course, the grotesque British overreaction. Martial law was imposed by a distant and boozy Prime Minister and the Army then began to court martial and execute the surviving commanders.

THE authorities failed to grasp the likely effect of these shootings on Irish people who ‘read of them’, warned an onlooker, ‘with something of the feeling of helpless rage with which one would watch a stream of blood dripping from under a closed door’.

The rest is history and, in a green little land where tragedy tends to repeat itself as tragedy, Ireland’s politics to this day are polarised along party lines from its subsequent fight for independence, a brief and utterly pointless civil war and an abiding ‘physical force’ tradition that does not acknowledge the legitimacy of the Irish border or even the Irish state.

Many Irish are highly uncomfortable about the Easter Rising. A former Taoiseach, John Bruton, insists bluntly it was a mistake, with ‘no room for compromise… a recipe for endless conflict’. It is on no account an event whose leading guerrillas should be glorified by a devolved parliament in another country. But still more demented is Ross Greer’s happy celebration of Marxism.

He is, of course, too young to remember Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968. But any educated person should know the Soviet Union launched the Second World War as Hitler’s ally, even as Stalin continued the industrial murder of so many Russian citizens; or that North Korean prison camps are full of people incarcerated – since birth – for the ‘political crimes’ of their grandparents.

Marxism has been an abysmal economic and social failure wherever it has been implemented and Marxist regimes survive only by all the murderous machinery of totalitarian oppression. None of this is remotely relevant to the needs and preoccupations of Greer’s constituents. And how shameful to see his distasteful motion supported by other MSPs who should know better, from Nationalist John Mason to Labour’s Elaine Smith.

By countenancing such folly, Holyrood only demeans itself. By such irresponsibility, Ross Greer attests only that he is unfit for public office.

You can email John MacLeod at john.macleod@dailymail.co.uk