THAT PENETRATING legal mind Ian Mitchell recently argued that both Putin’s Russia and Sturgeon’s Scotland are places where the defining trademark of the ruling parties is bombastic assertion. They rule through displaying open contempt for democratic norms and the rule of law but in everyday terms their style and mannerisms are often vulgar and ridiculous.
The week after the Holyrood election offered a particularly vivid example of this combination of the silly and the sinister. 23-year-old Emma Roddick MSP who had got into Holyrood on the SNP Highland list after her post-traumatic stress diagnosis enabled her to be placed on the SNP’s disabled short-list, indignantly harrumphed on twitter about suffering hardship because she would not receive her salary from day one as an MSP.
Not a few people pointed out that, in the real world, this was very much the norm. Nor did it escape notice that her cry of anguish occurred just as hundreds of biscuit makers in Glasgow were learning that they would likely be out of a job soon since the McVitie’s factory in Tollcross, Glasgow had been earmarked for closure.
This is one of the last remaining outposts of manufacturing in the inner city. But there was no serious deliberation about another example of investment fleeing Scotland. Instead, numerous MSPs (not all SNP, but mostly so) were busy taking the oath in Holyrood in a language other than English. The new member for Edinburgh Central, Angus Robertson, chose German. It was a clunky way of expressing solidarity with an EU which is fast ceasing to occupy the waking hours of most Scots and trying to raise higher a mental wall with the rest of the island of Britain.
But in terms of parading virtue and grandstanding, these gestures of ‘otherness’ were eclipsed by the scenes in the Pollokshields area of Glasgow on 13 May when a mob of people were summoned by politicians and far-left activist to prevent the deportation of two Indian nationals living in the area. In Britain the obstacles in the way of deportation are higher than in most other countries and all legal procedures had been exhausted before the border police arrived at the flat where the two men were living.
Large crowds gathered and surrounded the police vehicle which contained one of the men, preventing it from moving. The Labour MSP Paul Sweeney tweeted:
“Every Glaswegian who can please go to Kenmure Street… to demonstrate support for this picket. We must adopt a zero tolerance stance against Home Office detentions.” @PaulKSweeney He even posted a map of how to reach this street. This was duplicating the efforts of pro-SNP activists in the area. Flush with funds from the SNP council and government, they act as if they are a state-within-a state at times, both the media and the police being afraid to interfere with their activities.
For several years Sweeney had been a loyal Corbynite representing another part of Glasgow at Westminster. He had only made headlines near the end of his tenure in 2019 when he had falsely accused the Conservative MP for Aberdeen South, Ross Thomson, of sexual assault. A promising political career has been stalled with Thomson in a similar position to Alex Salmond after the latter was cleared by charges orchestrated by powerful allies of the First Minister Nicola Sturgeon.
Taking his cue very much from Sturgeon’s own demagogic playbook, Sweeney helped trigger mayhem in an area represented by her. Did she spring into action and use her authority to ensure that the law was upheld and enforced? No. She didn’t even appeal for calm or dissuade people from congregating. (She would have known of the spike in Covid cases in this area because, the very next day she announced that the indoor hospitality industry was to remain closed in Glasgow while opening elsewhere.) Instead her office issued a statement saying that it stood ready to assist those detained. There was not a word in support of officers trying to go about their lawful work. Tricia Marwick, a former Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament even stated that “it is the UK enforcement agency which is the threat to public safety.” @TriciaMarwick
The havoc didn’t arise spontaneously and it is likely more information will emerge about the leaking of information about the raid which could place the Scottish state in a very compromising light. Nor was it any surprise that the justice minister Humza Yousaf went further. He called the arrest of the two men on orders from the Home office which controls immigration policy across the UK as an act of provocation. The two Indian men were transformed into symbols of oppression. They were depersonalised, even turned into Muslims under the state cosh. Yousaf referred to the Muslim religious holiday Eid-ul-Fitr to justify the release of two migrants who were in fact Sikhs. A minister who has recently forced through a law criminalising conversations carried out in the privacy of Scottish homes indicated loud and clear that, with mass gatherings outlawed under the emergency powers Holyrood had granted to Sturgeon in 2020, some politically-well-connected elements enjoyed privileged immunity from the law.
Paul Sweeney and numerous SNP figures jubilantly proclaimed that the ‘Glasgow community’ had mobilised to foil the British state. Film footage of the demonstrators who marchers through the area showed them to be overwhelmingly young, student-looking types. Labour figures much absorbed with middle-class identity issues such as the pro-Union Duncan Hothersall, tweeted: “Great that people came together in protest and forced the release of a man being unfairly held by the Home Office.” @dhothersall He had an article in the Spectator in April urging a strong vote for Labour in Scotland. Another liberal-left figure this time for the Liberal Democrats, John Ferry is a regular Spectator contributor and he tweeted his support, depicting the state as oppressive and unresponsive towards “the poor refugees dying almost daily in the Med.” @JohnFerry18
After an election campaign in which Anas Sarwar, the new Scottish Labour leader sought at times to outbid the SNP with his own neo-nationalism, it would have been naive to assume that the Labour opposition would stand up for the rule of law and dismiss Sweeney as a maverick. And so it proved. Sarwar expressed his ‘disgust’ at the Home Office raid. It was the British state with its refusal to follow an immigration policy ‘based on human dignity’ which was heightening the risk of Covid in the area not the demonstrators or the politicians who had mobilised them. @AnasSarwar
Labour had done little to highlight the range of problems in Sturgeon’s run-down Glasgow constituency. Instead, its new leader seemed content to make it a magnet for disorder. When an Edinburgh colleague Daniel Johnson MSP tweeted “The scenes in Glasgow make me feel sick. Refugees taken from their homes on Eid of all days” he received this reply on twitter: “I tell you what makes me feel sick Daniel. Lawmakers deciding which laws need upholding and which don’t, based on their own particular personal beliefs. Does this mean I can now choose which laws I observe”? @tomhgill
Another Scot who had just voted for Sarwar tweeted: “I’m finished with labour and I gave @AnasSarwar both votes labour in the hope that in the next 5 years things would change. From what I’ve seen over the past few days I now confidently know that I will never vote labour again.”
The former Glasgow Labour MP Tom Harris was one of those who felt that a dangerous line had been crossed when Paul Sweeney MSP was able to make comments as outspoken as these: “The power of the people of Glasgow was humbling to witness today. We won’t stand for this ‘hostile environment’ policy of raiding and detaining people who escaped terrible conditions to seek sanctuary. We will organise on the streets, but our Police must not facilitate it either.”
George Galloway, the founder of Alliance4Unity party had suffered electorally because most people who admired his muscular defence of the Union thought that voting Labour or Conservatives instead might reinforce it more effectively. He believed that the flouting of the rule of law by senior figures in government and opposition had created a new situation fraught with menace. He tweeted: “SNP are seeking to create a situation of “Dual Power”. If the @UKGovScotland does not assert itself all will be lost.” This view was further elaborated by an editorial in Reaction Life which displayed concern about the ominous turn of events in Glasgow, one slow to register at Westminster.
For 24 hours after event, the 31 Scottish Conservative MSPs were largely silent. Silence would have undoubtedly been the wisest course for Angela Rayner MP, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party and a rival to succeed the embattled Keir Starmer as party leader, who recently demoted her from the position of Party Chair. She tweeted her “Solidarity with the people of Glasgow today” when perhaps she would have done the unity of the UK and her own party’s prospects a much bigger service by slamming the SNP for ramping up tensions on the streets to divert attention from its own problems, perhaps top of the list being its decision to give massive aid to the Indian financier Sanjeev Gupta, now under investigation for alleged fraudulent conduct.
It only went from bad to worse for the supposedly responsible wing of the British left when Howard Beckett, the deputy head of the Unite union, and the front-runner to be its next general-secretary tweeted that the person who oversaw the attempted detention in Glasgow, the Home Secretary should be deported in order to combat institutional racism.
The historian Michael Hallihane commented: “Priti Patel is demonised by the Left because she is a woman of Indian heritage who refuses to play their game of intersectionality and identity politics. Like Tony Sewell and Trevor Phillips and other people from minority backgrounds they are supposed to be victims.” @michael_hal
During the three decades of the Ulster conflict, Scottish Labour MPs like George Foulkes (who represented South Ayrshire from 1979 to 2005) strove to prevent the urban violence in Belfast and Derry spreading the forty miles across the North Channel to Scotland. Today, an active member of the House of Lords, I have previously interviewed him for my book Glasgow, the Uneasy Peace about the responsible role of most of the left in those dangerous times. I wonder how he now views the stance of Sarwar, Sweeney and Rayner who seem relaxed about urban Scotland becoming an arena of communal tensions in which it is anti-British agitators assisted by those in the seat of power, who are ramping up the unrest?
Regrettably those who wish to use direct action to accomplish constitutional change are in a stronger position in the 2020s than they were forty years ago. There is much sympathy in the BBC. Newsnight’s @lewis_goodall many of whose nearly 230,000 online followers display strong disaffection from the unitary post-EU British state, reported the Glasgow incident in terms unlikely to upset these followers. There is no lack of academic leaders and influencers ready to urge on direct action. Tanja Bueltmann, professor of international history at the University of Strathclyde quickly tweeted: “I am so proud to live in a country where our community can do this… No human is illegal. Migration is life.” @TanjaBueltmann She is from Germany, a state which deports far more immigrants and asylum seekers than Britain does (and a state which Sturgeon wishes to be in union with.)
Without any economic plans to take Scotland forward, it is hard not to conclude that Sturgeon wishes control of immigration policy currently resting in Westminster so as to design a new electorate that will give her the majority for separatism that she currently lacks. I see the 13 May confrontation in Glasgow between a local statelet and its superiors in London as a dry run in a struggle to see who can have ultimate power in Scotland. It is high time the British government realised that an insurrectionary spirit exists in Scotland. Remarkably it is far stronger (and better-organised) in the corridors of power than on the streets where a rogue Sturgeon statelet is sure to try and stir it up again.
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