THERE HAVE for some time been signs that Scotland is moving in a very worrying direction under the SNP leadership. The Named Person project, originally proposed in the Children and Young People Act (Scotland) in 2014, was the first government initiative that alerted people to the potential danger of state intrusion into family life, although already by that time, in 2012, the groundwork had been laid by the decision to fuse Scotland’s eight regional police forces into a single Police Scotland.
This raised concerns about the ability of the SNP to exercise political control over the police and, therefore, the country. There followed a lengthy stramash about whether it should be liable for VAT, as a national police force would be (unlike the regional forces). SNP supporters accused the Treasury of discrimination, adding another faux grievance to their quiver.
The referendum campaign of 2012-14 presented us with worrying examples of SNP bullying. Alex Salmond ill-advisedly tried to pressure the then Principal of St Andrews University, Professor Louise Richardson, into withdrawing a statement she had made about Scotland’s departure from the UK being detrimental to research funding for Scottish universities.
A Freedom of Information response showed Salmond had phoned Professor Richardson demanding she ‘clarify’ remarks she had made about the consequences of leaving the UK. His office tried to pressure her into issuing a statement criticising the UK Government over higher education policy and praising the Scottish administration. She refused and issued only a very non-committal statement.
Salmond chose the wrong person to try to intimidate. Professor Richardson is Irish and had spent a significant part of her career in the United States. She had no Scottish family or baggage that could have rendered her susceptible to SNP bullying. In 2016 she departed to become Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford.
Much after the event, in the 2020 Hugh Cudlipp journalism lecture, Robert Peston, the TV journalist, revealed that in September 2014 he had compiled a piece for the BBC’s Ten O’Clock News on the economic implications of Scottish independence which was to air a couple of days before the referendum. A mere ten minutes before going to air, his piece was pulled, on the orders of the corporation’s most senior executives, who feared the ire of Alex Salmond, and let Peston know they were distancing themselves from his views.
Peston concluded the incident demonstrated the ‘sheer terror’ of a political backlash that grips ‘those who run the BBC’ which means it is afraid to ‘stick its neck out and give a view’. I think that we can be confident that Peston’s piece was not going to give Salmond comfort concerning his totally unrealistic economic promises and prognostications.
The BBC was right to fear Salmond’s ire – if lily-livered in not standing up to him. Many of us remember the disgraceful attempt in 2014 by a separatist mob to intimidate the BBC at Pacific Quay in Glasgow. They didn’t need to bother trying to bend STV to their will. STV had already capitulated to the SNP and become one of its wholly-owned subsidiaries. Who can forget the way their ‘moderator’ Rona Dougall failed (refused?) in TV debates to moderate between Nicola Sturgeon and whomever she was shouting down, whether Alister Carmichael or Johann Lamont? It was a foretaste of what we see at Holyrood, with successive Presiding Officers, Ken Macintosh and Alison Johnstone, sitting motionless while Ms Sturgeon not only fails to answer questions but, instead of providing answers, roundly abuses anyone from the oppositions benches who is so presumptuous as to ask her a question. Is this normal practice in a democracy? I don’t think so.
If the BBC had been in any doubt, the Sarah Smith incident of 2020, when Ms Smith’s use of the word ‘enjoy’ to describe Ms Sturgeon’s exercise of the new powers she was exerting in the pandemic emergency. It was the trigger for Ms Sturgeon to encourage a barrage of criticism and abuse from her followers, whose treatment of Sarah Smith was such that the hapless journalist felt the need to apologise four times. It remains to be seen whether her successor as BBC Scotland Editor, James Cook, will be any more robust in criticising the SNP without fear or favour.
We already know that we cannot depend on the BBC Scotland political editor, Glenn Campbell for that. One indication of the SNP’s control in Scotland is the fact BBC TV interviewers in London, such as Andrew Neil, Andrew Marr (latterly) and Sophie Raworth, as well as radio interviewers such as Justin Webb and Nick Robinson, are much more robust and searching – and apparently better informed – in their questions to SNP politicians than are interviewers based in Scotland. I exempt from this criticism Peter Adam Smith of ITV and Ciaran Jenkins of Channel 4, both of whom have put Ms Sturgeon uncomfortably on the spot more than once, in ways that are foreign to both BBC Scotland and STV.
The Hate Crime Act is providing us with a taste of what we can expect if we are foolish enough to vote for a separate Scotland. A woman who had tweeted innocuously was recently visited by two police officers and interrogated about the ‘thinking’ behind her tweets. The officers told her that she had committed no offence, but she was subjected to an unsolicited visit and an interrogation nevertheless. The comedian Leo Kearse had already said that the Hate Crime Act ‘does nothing useful’ and ‘can be used maliciously’, as this example shows.
That was after Marion Millar had spent months waiting to be tried on charges which included publicising a photograph of ribbons in suffragettes’ colours which someone with hurty feelings about her campaign for women’s rights claimed was like a ‘noose’. Not as much like a noose as the SNP’s own emblem, one might say. Ms Millar was eventually informed not that the charges against her would be dropped but that they would not be proceeded with. These two instances are examples of state-sponsored intimidation of private individuals.
Ms Millar’s eventual release from the charges is an indication that the legal system still functions in Scotland. That is because the legal system remains free from control by the executive – unlike so much else in Scotland. Now, however, the SNP regime proposes to draw up new regulations for the legal profession on the basis of a report by Esther Robertson that proposed a commission, answerable to parliament, to take over not merely the handling of complaints but the whole way in which lawyers are recruited, trained and disciplined. This, according to the Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, Roddy Dunlop QC,
“would involve taking a profession that has for centuries been actually and visibly independent of the executive, responsible only to the independent judiciary, and making it instead answerable to a different body, which itself is unconnected to the judiciary.”
He added: “That would be such a retrograde step, with no countervailing benefit, that it cannot sensibly be supported.”
Mr Dunlop’s criticism was followed by that of Lord Carloway, the Lord President of the Court of Session, Scotland’s senior judge, who condemned the report as ‘an unwarranted and unacceptable interference by the government and parliament with the judiciary’. These are very strong words indeed for a judge to use about politicians. It remains to be seen how this issue will be resolved, but the implications of having political control over the legal profession are chilling.
Roddy Dunlop sees the Robertson report as more cock-up than conspiracy, but nevertheless warns that these days in Scotland there seems little distinction between executive and parliament. When he says, “one can never rule out the possibility of a rogue parliament in the future”, it would not be unreasonable to suggest that we already have one, with an SNP-Green majority. Mr Dunlop already has had searing experience of how Ms Sturgeon conducts herself and engages with the law through the Salmond case, where he was acting for the Scottish Government against Mr Salmond in the ultimately failed case that cost Scottish taxpayers at the very least £500,000.
As if to confirm the ‘rogue parliament’ idea, there is another SNP proposal, for the Scottish Government to introduce a ‘permanent suite of powers’ to tackle coronavirus or any other infectious disease or contamination in the future that threatens public health. This would allow the SNP permanent emergency powers to impose lockdowns, close schools and release prisoners in response to any health crisis. Who is to say that the control-freak regime that we currently have in Scotland would not be tempted to use such emergency powers at will, even when there were no health or other emergencies? Could a refusal by the Westminster sovereign government to afford Ms Sturgeon the Section 30 order that she needs to hold a legal referendum on leaving the UK be classed as an ‘emergency’ by her party and administration? Nothing would surprise me.
The recent spat over Scottish pensions in the event of Scexit gives us an unnerving clue as to the SNP’s unscrupulousness. To have the party leader and First Minister, and her party’s leader at Westminster, Ian Blackford, publicly telling lies that can be easily disproved about the remainder of the UK paying for Scots’ pensions after secession is astounding and shaming. For once, a number of journalists have got their act together, with even a Times leading article spelling out the detail and Scottish journalists like Alex Massie and Graham Grant writing coruscating articles about the SNP’s utter dishonesty.
The pensions issue, however, is an indication of the panic that is setting in within the SNP’s leadership. Sturgeon and Blackford have contradicted their own 2013 White Paper, as well as statements from UK government ministers, and have done so deliberately, because they know that pensions is a key issue for voters.
If they pretend that the UK would continue to pay pensions to Scots after separation, they can, they hope, calm any nerves or doubts that voters hold about the viability of pensions being paid in iScotland and therefore about the entire separatist project. It rather suggests, however, the eleven civil servants who are working on the SNP’s new prospectus have told the SNP leadership that paying pensions could be a problem – which is exactly what John Swinney told his colleagues, confidentially, in 2013.
My guess is that that is what has galvanised the SNP leadership into inventing their cock-and-bull claim about the UK paying pensions for a seceded Scotland. The SNP’s Scexit case is beginning to unravel.
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Pictured, the clenched fists of First Minister Nicolson Sturgeon during a TV interview.
