The One True Faith

There’s an idea of ‘growing old disgracefully’ that I’d like to adhere to when it comes. Not long, I know! The idea of not giving a shit anymore, of throwing off the shackles of conformity, and not caring what anyone thinks about you is a great philosophy we’d all be better adopting earlier.

But there’s another aspect to this where you just become detached from the world around you. This isn’t a function of ageing, as there’s both younger people detached from reality for different reasons and older people who don’t deteriorate into wildly reactionary politics (because that’s really what we’re talking about).

There’s now a definable politics emerging from a small group of influential people in Scotland who share a deeply reactionary streak of politics. They are highly-paid newspaper columnists and bloggers and former journalists. Some are MAGA supporters, some have ‘serious concerns’ about immigration, some are less coy about it. Most define themselves as being ‘Old School’, or ‘Old Left’. Many have their own pet hobby horses though they’re now increasingly converging. Here are some of their hot takes.

Some – like Craig Murray and Iain Macwhirter here – think that the CIA created gender policy division in order to split the independence movement. It’s a view echoed by Dave Llewellyn.

There’s a large dose of Christian fundamentalism thrown into the mix here, regularly dolled out by Kevin McKenna in the Herald, add-in a good mix of conspiracism and misogyny and you have the toxic soup ready to serve.

“It’s clear why this cabal sought the ruination of Alex Salmond. They wanted to replace the fight for independence with an agenda that would make women’s rights subject to the whims of men masquerading as women’ … my column in @heraldscotland” – writes McKenna (almost every week.)

The paranoia is high and alliances are made loosely across a spectrum of ‘thinkers’. Most portray themselves as dowdy defenders of the one true faith – be it Socialism, Christianity, or Nationalism – or a weird mixture of all three.

The conspiracies against the one true faith morph and vary – but include a heady mixture of Nicola Sturgeon and her nefarious clan, ‘environmentalists’ (see also Green Zealots), Greta Thunberg, ‘feminists’, secularists, deviants (loosely defined), Humza Yousaf and variations on the ‘Wokerati’ etc etc etc.

Some worship at the shrine of Alex Salmond, others are just consumed by the trans debate to the exclusion of any other thought. Some are openly full-on Scots MAGA (like Chris McEleny and Linda Holt), others like Iain Macwhirter are still circling the sewer waiting till it’s warm enough to jump in.

Here, Andy McIver, the go-to guy for the entire Scottish media writes (apparently seriously) about the idea that Fergus Ewing’s position with the SNP might be in the balance that: “This would be a mistake for the SNP and for nationalism. If the SNP was full of people like Fergus, Scotland may well be independent by now.”

Huge, if true.

Of course there’s a large dose of barely concealed homophobia, transphobia and sexism in all of this. Here’s Iain Macwhirter referring to the First Minister as the “headmistress” during lockdown.

And here’s the playbook of Nancy Boys and ‘soy lattes’ (this is classic alt-right language) from Jim Spence.

Lockdown does seem to have accelerated all of this, the paranoia, the conspiracies and the feeling that for some people things were slipping away. The prominence of this line of thinking is deliberate though. Shock Jocks are clickbait and people like Stuart Campbell have a lucrative line for the gullible. I’m not sure the lower-level journos churning out this crap are particularly popular anymore, but it does feed the mental diet of a certain demographic and their editors probably think they’re being Edgelords for publishing them.

Fundamentalist Christianity and the defence of ‘traditional family values’ and gender roles and sexuality are a recurring theme for this loose group, and they openly espouse the idea that prayer is banned in Scotland, as spouted recently by JD Vance.

A Tyranny of Unimaginable Darkness

A recurring idea in this group is the idea of the “one-party state”, an obsession previously confined to the extremes of the Unionist commentariat (Stephen Daisley once referred to “the first day of the new Woke Totalitarian regime of Scotland”. But in this world ‘left’ and right’ and ‘nationalist’ and ‘unionist’ have little meaning. Even the most ‘extreme’ Nationalists like Stuart Campbell are now far more comfortable in the company of people they previously despised.

This plays to a number of tropes which merge and don’t need to make any sense to happily co-exist: the lockdown conspiracies, the threat of a Scottish State, the terrors of Nicola Sturgeon, cycle lanes (yes!), or rainbow flags happily jostle along together in the hatefest.

“Scotland is effectively a one party state” according to Iain Macwhirter (this is from May 2022)

… while poor old Jim Spence goes further imagining a future Scotland as a hellish Albania. [Alba-nia geddit?]

Jim’s wild dystopia is regularly matched in the pages of your tabloids, beautifully rendered by the permanently incandescent Andrew Neil.

This idea of authoritarian rule is a recurring one, and kind of fun. This mountain of rage all coalesced around the Hate Crime legislation.

But it won’t come as a huge surprise that Neil’s apoplexy is misdirected.

As Andrew Tickell pointed out: “The parochialism of the discussion on hate crime is a thing to behold. France – where Andrew Neil lives – already has the following offences on its statute book, including inciting hatred based on race, religion, sexuality, gender identity or disability.” Read the details here.

Is Neil turning his formidable rage against Macron?

Non.

This is in fact a grand coalition of the reactionary, the deluded and the deliberately confused. They are united in a fantasy about the draconian and authoritarian nature of contemporary Scotland, while many, possibly most, purposively avoid the very real attacks on civil liberties in the UK. For example the ‘Police Crime Sentencing and Courts Bill’ pushed through in 2021 by then Home Secretary Priti Patel is an astonishing piece of legislation. As George Monbiot wrote:

“The last-minute amendments crowbarred by the government into the police, crime, sentencing and courts bill are a blatant attempt to stifle protest, of the kind you might expect in Russia or Egypt. Priti Patel, the home secretary, shoved 18 extra pages into the bill after it had passed through the Commons, and after the second reading in the House of Lords. It looks like a deliberate ploy to avoid effective parliamentary scrutiny. Yet in most of the media there’s a resounding silence.”

He continues: “Perhaps most outrageously, the amendments contain new powers to ban named people from protesting. The grounds are extraordinary, in a nation that claims to be democratic. We can be banned if we have previously committed “protest-related offences”. Thanks to the draconian measures in the rest of the bill – many of which pre-date these amendments – it will now be difficult to attend a protest without committing an offence. Or we can be banned if we have attended or “contributed to” a protest that was “likely to result in serious disruption”. Serious disruption, as the bill stands, could mean almost anything, including being noisy.”

Speaking of being noisy – you won’t have heard a peep out of any of these protestors about the very real attacks on civil liberties imposed under Tory rule. Why not? Stop and search overwhelmingly affects people of colour, and anyway much of this legislation is aimed at environmental protestors, and you can bet that the cross-section of Angry Columnists don’t care about them (will add detail ad nauseam if really required…).

The fact that you are living in a British state that created some of the most oppressive legislation you have ever known – effectively criminalising peaceful protest – while howling at the moon about this bill – tells you everything you need to know about this coalition and their hysteria. The protest brings together Grifter-bloggers, the far-right, the openly racist, the terminally dim, a Unionist hardcore and many who have just been radicalised and confused by the tsunami of disinformation that has surrounded the legislation.

But, as I said, none of this needs to make any sense.

The Left has some responsibility for letting this agenda flourish. The descent and sublimation of class and economics to lifestyle – the abandonment of what materially matters to people – has allowed this craziness to take root and flourish. The Left, such as it exists, has been wrong about a lot of stuff. Yes the pandemic raised legitimate issues about civil liberties and yes the conduct of the upper echelons of the SNP has been at times dreadful. But this doesn’t allow for this demented paranoia and this outbreak of perpetual bigotry. The normalisation and mainstreaming of fascist ideas through MAGA has infected Scottish public life and is perpetuated by legacy media and the outliers of the once-called ‘alternative’.

But the values of openness, tolerance, equality and acceptance have also been normalised, and these have to be defended in the face of such hysteria. The idea that our understanding of the complexity of human behaviour might be changing and developing, the idea that our economic systems might be broken … these are not ideas to be terrified of.