This must be why every state in early modernity tried to get rid of regional politics altogether. Up until around a year ago, Britain’s news media could find easy comparison between the Scottish National Party and the dour massed ranks of the Covenanters, a silly media trope which, I’m ashamed to say, I was taken in by. They were, to use that sickly phrase, ‘the adults in the room’. These clichés would all be packaged up as a kind of morality play: a complacent Westminster, personified by the rumpled patrician Boris Johnson, is undone by a wave of righteous Scottish fury. But behind it all seems instead to lie a perfectly respectable local racket – old, tired and seedy.
The national conversation about Scottish independence has shrunk to match. It does not turn on great questions of identity or nationhood – not even ‘Austerity’, which hung over the referendum of 2014. The debate has instead boiled down to a series of lurid and banal ‘dog bites man’ stories. A man is put in a woman’s prison. People cannot get off their islands because there are no boats. A swindle of £600,000.
That the project for an independent Scotland might break on the rocks of ferry timetables seems like a squalid anti-climax. I doubt that it will, and one clue in this regard is the SNP’s new leader, Humza Yousaf. His position is an embattled one. But he remains strangely chipper. Locked underground for a Channel 4 leadership debate, Humza cheerily answers some very grave questions about his party’s record. He is unfailingly polite to journalists; there is none of the testiness of Ash Regan.
Indeed, Humza seems to genuinely love the old racket. “We are a family,” he declares – he will do anything to hold together “the party I love so dearly”. This is a strange departure from some very longstanding ideas. The SNP, as we are often told, is first and always a marriage of convenience between disparate elements united by one aim, which elements all promise to scatter to the four winds when it is finally achieved. As a result, the party has never been about coming together to work through the humdrum of roads, taxation and hospitals. Each of these issues, like the latter-day stance against austerity, was adopted more-or-less opportunistically, as wedge issues to lever the union apart. “It’s Scotland’s oil” was the old slogan; now the promise is to keep it underground. Humza is a party man for a party whose only purpose is to achieve a solitary aim and then stop existing.
Equally strange is the eagerness to get on with the business of government. The idea of separation from the United Kingdom is only mentioned halfway through Humza’s first speech as party leader. He instead leads with policy, promising action on childcare, prices, wages, ‘life chances’ and climate change. “Your priorities are our priorities,” he finishes, in a Mayite flourish. Humza’s strategy for independence is for the SNP to govern well and earn the trust of the Scottish people. But what would this accomplish? The constituency of people who like the SNP’s ideas but do not want separation is a real one – according to a recent poll it is a little over ten% of their voters. Fixing the ferries and erecting windmills does nothing to advance the cause of independence; what it may advance is the SNP itself.
It is here that we discover why Humza Yousaf now seems so untroubled. For Salmond and Sturgeon, and still more for Yousaf, independence is a way to implement a particular agenda in Scotland, an agenda whose time they think has come. This is, broadly speaking, a new reactionary global order of stakeholder capitalism and degrowth, with a generous amount of old-school Fenianism stirred in. This might seem a strange and unlikely combination, but it’s one that enjoys the backing of the Biden administration, which criticises any move towards economic liberalism abroad, and can never resist extending a feline paw to the cause of irredentism in Ireland. It is an agenda that is pursued by the SNP with real vigour, even at the expense of independence itself. One of Humza Yousaf’s first acts as leader was to dispatch Shona Robinson to overturn, not the Supreme Court’s referendum verdict, but Rishi Sunak’s use of ‘Section 35’ to block the Gender Recognition Bill; a knight errant quest that shows where the party’s priorities really lie.
Of course, trying to recast society in your own image is no sin. In one lifetime, John Knox transformed Scotland from a sleepy kingdom on the edge of Europe to a country famous for its literacy, zeal and energy. But the SNP’s own arid and grassy vision has none of these charms. It is reactionary in the extreme. It looks to the countryside rather than to the city; to the ancient universities rather than the bankers of Edinburgh and the shipbuilders of the Clyde. It envisages Scotland at best as a tourist destination, at worst as a series of windfarms over empty fields. This society will not produce any David Humes. It will not produce anything at all. It will contain nothing of what has made Scotland a worthwhile place over the past five centuries. It will be only a dismal anti-England, perched above a great power as a tool to be used by its enemies.
What has changed with Humza Yousaf is that the pretence of real nationalism is no longer sustainable. Watch him blurt out that Scotland is too white; see his pledge not to pursue independence until a “sustained majority” of Scottish people support it – a miserable clause that, in practice, adjourns the contest forever. The pretence must be kept up all the same; this can perhaps explain the showy lashings of tartan, evermore frequent. Humza has his agenda all worked out, and only waits for the go-ahead. His order of march will eventually come, whether from Brussels, or Washington, or even from Whitehall. In the meantime, no wonder he seems happy to talk about ferries.
J. Sorel is a pseudonym.
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Look at those eyes. Are they those of a man you could trust, or a taquia adherent?
An anti-Christian, anti-white racist Muslim leading Scotland – to thundering applause no doubt.
A Muslim ruining Londonistan.
A Hindu running the UK.
A gay Hindu ruining Ireland.
I don’t know. I think I see a pattern, but I am not the science and far too stupid to figure this out.
Indeed
Things are almost as bad in England, kept from being worse for the moment by the odd vaguely conservative minister and the need to placate the Tory right on the back benches and the grass roots. Once globalist Starmer is elected, England will follow Scotland headlong into utter misery.
You forgot an IRA man running the USA
You’ll find they are all came out the WEF cupboard too… of course, thats just a coincidence. And suure, elections couldnt possibly be rigged in a free democratic country !
It isn’t necessary to rig election when the set of election candidates ensures that people don’t really have a choice.
My preferred example for this is still the so-called German democracy. The German voting system is seriously complicated but at the core, it’s very simple: Partys compile list of parliamentary candidates ordered from most-preferred to least-preferred. Voters may select one of these lists. The number of voters who selected a particular list determines how many of the people on the list will end up in parliament.
The outcome is inevitably a parliament with 3 – 5 party factions which all have roughly the same size, ie, got between 10% and 25% of the votes. Because of this, government is always by coalition. If the manifesto of a party differs significantly from the ideology of the US democrats on anything (climate change, mass immigration of brown-skinned people, equality, wrongthink censorship, globalism, LGXYZity etc), it’s labelled far right and will remain frozen out of coalition governments until it mends its ways. This goes to the point that parliamentary votes can be anulled and rerun should it turn out that the outcome depended on the votes from MPs of an outlaw party.
It’s unneccessary to rig an election with such a system because they’re basically beauty pageants: Voters get to select who will implement policies but never the policies themselves.
Explains why Trudeau was so keen on blacking-up.
At a recent centre Right party conference I attended the Party leader posed the question “ How bad do things really have to get before people join, support and vote for us”?
None of the audience could give an answer to this very pertinent question. Can anyone explain the reluctance of those of a centre Right political outlook to actively engage in a fightback against the liberal Left’s agenda ?
This is far too small a country to have this many politicians.
The consequence is that a bunch of total numpties end up running Scotland, Wales, London, House of Lords…..
This is, quite simply, lunacy…….Blair’s Britain.
The solution: back to 1990, for starters.
World Government at the UN. European Government (which we still have not shaken off). National Government at Westminster. Scottish Government. Welsh Government. Irish Government. Local Government. ——-How many governments do we need? ——In the film Amadeus, Mozart’s friend asked the great composer if he would look over one of his compositions. Mozart listened to it and said, “Too many notes, chop a few”. ——-We need to do the same with government and “chop a few” ——-The less government the better and best government is the one that governs least.
You don’t really expect this guy to be able to declare himself a Scottish nationalist without bursting out into laughter immediately afterwards, do you?
That’s a citizen of nowhere whose only skill is Working the party who makes a (probably rather good) living from the status quo being and remaining what it is.
He’s an islamist – his only loyalty is to the cult – his sole purpose, the global caliphate.
Maybe. But I’d be careful with canned enemy stereotypes of this kind. IMHO, many of them simply exist because the wokitans keep talking about them as they want their opponents to pick them up and thereby, turn themselves into easy targets for boilerplate verbal attacks.
In Australia we’re about to have a referendum to change to Constitution to give those identifying as “Aboriginal” greater powers to influence all legislation that passes through Federal Parliament.
Anyone else will be classified as second class citizens, invaders, and those of Anglo-Saxon heritage are the bottom of the pile.
In Scotland, it appears inverted, with the country being “too white”.
If the same rules applied, the non-indigenous such as Yousaf would be seen as a lesser citizen
Perhaps the real crime is just being white!
I see the Billy-no-mates down-ticker has been on the ceaseless task of advancing the progressive cause again today. The House bastard offspring of Millie Tant and Ken Slabb.
Scotland is NOT a region… The wilful and deliberate ignorance of this author grinds my gears. The curious fantasy of Britain and britishness has been Englands elitists wet dream for hundreds of years, but the irony of that statement from this pseudonym also reduces England (a once proud and free country) to nothing more than a backwater region that happens to be next to Scotland. Offer the public in England a referendum on whether they should be classified as a region and you’ll get a 95% no vote. (in case you didn’t notice, countries all round the western world are slowly having their heritage and identity erased, intentionally or otherwise so its hardly a surprise scotland is feeling the same). It seems Mr ignorant Sorel assumes Scotland to be a Region and England not.. .I’d like to hear a reply to that question?
England wasn’t bankrupt in 1752, nor was it balied out by scotchland.
scotland was never bankrupt either.. a couple of dozen landowners and noblemen might have been, enough for them to take bungs and backhanders and who were prepared to sell their country to the enslavement of the treaty of union. I agree with almost everything in this article about humza (the same it more or less true of the westminster government in relation to globalisation) .. but the initial angle of attack was clear and the desperation to uphold the fabricated fantasy of britishness transparent (as if somehow being british is better than being english)
I’ll be honest – I want rid of scotchland, the rebuilding of hadrian’s wall (with machine gun turrets), and the repatriation of enemy agents like Tony Blair, and the one-eyed Scotch feck-wit Mad Jock McBroon.
None of that means that scotchland wasn’t bailed out by the act of union
The independent countries and states of Scotland and England ceased to exist in 1707 under the terms of the twin Acts of Union and were subsumed into the new unified country known as Great Britain. To underline that this was not some sort of temporary arrangement the term used was ‘hereto and forever’.
In that sense they both most certainly are simply regions of the country now known as the United Kingdom.
The third term that crops up in these sorts of discussions, that of ‘nation’, has two distinct but equally problematic meanings.
The first comprises these fundamentally hollow sectarian generalisations and attempted homogenisations so beloved of fascistic ideologies such as ‘a community of people linked by culture, tradition, history, religion, language’ etc.
The other is the more factually based but similarly regressive and divisive one which points to geographical areas that used to comprise independent countries but are now incorporated into larger units.
In reality this meaning is also only ever used by those who buy into sectarianism and separatism (when was the last time you heard of Texas being called a nation?), the most prominent and relevant example being the Scottish National Party itself;
Which constantly and deliberately mixes up and misuses all the terminology outlined above to falsely imply that there is some sort of EU style partnership of equals between Scotland and England (or rather there should be, the concomitant claim is made that the non-existent state of England is acting as some sort of colonial master) which can be dissolved at any time Brexit style.
Again, there is only one country involved, the UK, Scotland and England are indeed regions of it, and the relatively useless and harmful word ‘nation’ simply muddies these waters on behalf of divisive ideologies and movements.
The EU, which the SNP aspires for Scotland to join, considers Scotland to be a region. It’s why it has a Puppet Parliament (along with Wales) whilst England hasn’t. England was considered too big (and strong) to be a region, so the intention was to balkanise it into the mini-Kingdoms which pre-dated English unification.
A very good explanation for that and why this is now happening everywhere else.
From raison d’état to raison du monde.
https://brownstone.org/articles/machiavelli-globalists-why-elites-despise-independent-thought/
That’s a poor article written with all the historical ignorance so-called US antistatits usually display. European history didn’t start with medieval Christian kingdoms and Machiavelli was certainly not writing about a welfare state. He wrote to further his own political careers in Florence and he addressed the audience of the ruling class of an Italian city state of that era: There are a number of noble house of roughly equal power, all employing their private armies and retainers, which compete for government of the city itself. Some member of one of them is the local principe at any given time. And if that principe wants to retain both his position and a head on his shoulders, he needs enough loyal subjects, ie, retainers, that he can hold those of the other noble houses at bay. These are armed non-noble citizens with less property than members of noble house and if push comes to shove, they’re expected to fight for their patron. They’re not perennial victims in need of state handouts.
He’s Ed McMilliband with a beard. Only worse
So Humza, ethnic Pakistani, thinks Scotland is “too white.” Does he also think that Pakistan is “too brown?”
Or does he think diversity and multiculturalism is only for (wealthy) western nations which he thinks people from poor, homogenous, and mono-cultural/religious countries have a right to colonise?
The SNP want to use the revenue from oil and gas as the powerhouse of their “Independent” economy while at the same time building thousands of turbines because oil and gas is “bad” —–eh pardon??? Well, you won’t be able to use the revenue from oil and gas if you pour concrete in the oil and gas wells to save the planet will you? Which is what was proposed by the SNP——-So which is it? Is oil and gas a valuable resource that can create prosperity or is it an evil planet destroying fuel that can be replaced by part time wind and sun that cannot and never will provide base load ? The sill SNP cannot make up their mind just like in the gender nonsense debate where they don’t know which jail to send men in skirts to.