IF YOU LIE DOWN WITH THE ONLINE DOGS, YOU GET FLEAS
WAS that the staccato sound of ‘delete’ buttons being hammered at Holyrood yesterday? Perhaps so as Nicola Sturgeon’s reshuffle, a year in the making, fell apart in a day.
Gillian Martin, Scotland’s higher education minister for 24 hours, was unpromoted by the First Minister after a string of offensive remarks was discovered on an old, since-deleted blog.
We have witnessed, at dizzying speed, the making and unmaking of Scotland’s first cybernat minister.
When some of Martin’s comments were read aloud, including references to Jews, black Americans and the disabled, there was a series of gasps across the chamber.
The SNP benches, particularly the younger crop, were always going to be vulnerable to this sort of thing. They had a come-to-Jesus moment in 2014 and started agitating for independence like a Baptist dunking heathens. Too often, the fire and brimstone got the better of them and out came the lightning bolts at Yes rallies and in fractious social media debates.
Others in the same position would be well advised to come clean, admit their mistakes and resolve to do better. The alternative is having embarrassments dug up and doing greater damage to their prospects.
Honesty would also spare them the indignity of clutching at straws. Martin sought mitigation in a curious corner, arguing that a blog she wrote and published ‘does not represent my views then or now’.
This blog was the work of a mature woman, not a callow teenager, over the course of around five years. Is it credible that so much effort was lavished on a work of pure fiction?
CONFRONTED by her MSP’s words, Miss Sturgeon cringed and said she hadn’t been aware of the most obnoxious of them until yesterday morning. In a day where behind-the-scenes anarchy spilled into public view, the Scottish Government admitted that the newly uncovered blogs had been the decider, not gratuitous insults to transgender people in another post. Those Sturgeon had known about – and still chose to press ahead with the appointment.
Opposition MSPs averred that the Martin affair called the SNP leader’s judgment into question but that was long ago up for appraisal and found wanting. For Nicola Sturgeon has presided over a culture in which nationalism has become tolerant of – indeed, synonymous with – aggression and invective.
Gillian Martin’s decade-old sophomoric put-downs are hardly out of place in today’s SNP. Her Westminster colleague Pete Wishart’s social media boorishness has been indulged by his party and leader.
In April 2017, Wishart tweeted a graphic describing opponents as ‘w***’, ‘w******’, and ‘absolute total w***’. The following month, Nicola Sturgeon swept into his constituency, a heaving pack of photographers in tow, and campaigned for his re-election. That’ll show him.
Then again, she has shown little appetite for tackling her party’s problem with political abuse, especially those digital enforcers of Nationalist orthodoxy, the cybernats. The rise of this online heavy squad is one of the most important, yet largely overlooked, developments in politics in many years.
After decades of struggling for editorial favour from a heavily proLabour Press, some in the SNP saw the internet as salvation – a shortcut to engage the public directly. Yet the kind of digital supporter it attracted was more likely to have voters reaching for the block button than the ballot paper.
Bile, paranoia and unbridled hatred, these are the hallmarks of cybernationalism – and as the party eventually made it into government, this behaviour wasn’t only overlooked; it seeped into the DNA of offline Nationalism.
SNP politicians can be found tweeting long into the night demagoguing about the hated ‘mainstream media’, calculated performances for their foam-flecked fans.
Others are just downright despicable. Backbencher Sandra White was forced to apologise after retweeting an anti-Semitic cartoon depicting piglets, including one sporting an Israeli flag, suckling on a sow named ‘Rothschild’. John Mason tweeted that IRA terrorists could be seen as ‘freedom fighters’.
The effect is symbiotic: politicians mimic the loutish rhetoric of their grassroots and the grassroots takes this as legitimation. Even Sturgeon is not above such things. She appropriated the whiny cry of ‘SNP bad’ and deployed it at First Minister’s Questions, as she did another slur from the cybernat handbook – the accusation that opponents are ‘talking down Scotland’.
Of course, this is the First Minister who has not been shy about pouncing on other parties’ social media woes. Did she flash back to any of this when she learned her latest ministerial appointment had a digital paper trail of derogatory and outrageous viewpoints? Did she pause to reflect on her own leadership and whether she ought to have spent less time making political capital out of a problem she was failing to tackle on her own side?
PROBABLY not. Consider one of her other appointments, Christina McKelvie, who has been named the new Minister for Older People and Equalities. When Labour MP Ian Murray dissented from the campaign to block extradition of Catalan referendum organiser Clara Ponsatí, McKelvie retweeted an image of US civil rights icon Rosa Parks. The picture, however, had been doctored to show Murray behind Parks accusing her of being a law-breaker.
The SNP has been in power so long it has forgotten that the public trust of high office comes with responsibilities. It demands ministers who comport themselves with dignity. It requires a First Minister who enforces good behaviour rather than rewarding bad behaviour with a bump up the career ladder.
The country will receive Gillian Martin’s online antics with horror and despondency at a Government that refuses to grow up and get on with the job. But most of all, they will look to Nicola Sturgeon and note that, in this as in so many other matters, her leadership is lacking.