Disunited Kingdom: How Westminster Won A Referendum But Lost Scotland by Macwhirter Iain

Author:Macwhirter, Iain [Macwhirter, Iain]
Language: hin
Format: epub
Publisher: Cargo Publishing (UK) Ltd
Published: 2014-12-08T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

The Nationalist Janus — The Two Faced Bastard

One of the most memorable events of the 2014 independence referendum was the BBC’s Big Big Debate, which took place in front of 7,500 16 and 17 year-olds at the SSE Hydro in Glasgow one week before the referendum. It probably changed history, if only because the intelligent contributions from the first time voters nailed forever the lie that they are too young to participate in elections. For inexplicable reasons, Better Together elected to put the case for the Union in the hands of the Scottish Tory leader, Ruth Davidson, and the Respect MP, George Galloway. Yes fielded the Deputy First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon and the Scottish Green co-convenor, Patrick Harvie.

It wasn’t one of Better Together’s finest outings. Galloway, resplendent in one of his famous hats, was booed by the young audience when he alluded to the great war against fascism as an argument against nationalism. In his “Just Say Naw” speaking tour of Scotland, Galloway had claimed that the SNP were fascist fellow travellers during the Second World War. As he put it: “the leaders of the SNP were openly willing a Nazi invasion.”37 This equation of Scottish nationalism and fascism was one of the unavoidable underlying themes in the referendum, especially on the left. “Blood and soil” — a reference to the Nazi slogan “Blut und Boden” — was the shorthand used widely on social media to demonise the Yes campaign, equating independence for Scotland with extreme nationalism.

The Labour blogger Ian Smart, a former president of the Scottish Law Society, said that the SNP was a neo-fascist organisation that “celebrated Nazi sympathisers at their annual conference” and compared Alex Salmond to Mussolini. Euan McColm of The Scotsman tweeted about “a little cup of blood and a little cup of soil”. Even the chair of Better Together, Alistair Darling, referred to “blood and soil nationalism” in an interview with the New Statesman in June 2014. Yes posters, particularly in West Central Scotland, were frequently defaced with swastikas. Yes campaigners claimed that some Unionists had taken to giving them Nazi salutes in the street. The worst example of this was caught on film at the Loyalist victory demonstration in Glasgow’s George Square on the 19th September 2014, when six people were arrested after violent exchanges involving pro-Unionists giving Yes campaigners the stiff arm.

The SNP is not an extremist or neo-fascist organisation and the last time anything like “blood and soil” nationalism showed its head in the party was in the form of the tartan splinter group “Seed of the Gael” in the 1970s. It was quickly expelled. The SNP under Alex Salmond and his predecessors has been a strictly non-violent, democratic parliamentary movement, similar to the civic nationalist movements that grew up, albeit under very different circumstances, in Eastern Europe in the 1990s. Despite Scotland’s proximity to Ireland, the SNP has resisted any connection with Irish nationalism, Sinn Fein, or the IRA. It has no ethnic or racial criterion for membership, had

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.