Hamish Gobson’s diary: the view from across the Uisge
31 May 2023
MANDY RHODES published a justifiably angry article about Mrs Peter Murrell in the magazine Holyrood last week. She called the learner-driver from Uddingston a “narcissist” and many other disobliging things. She suggested that the “toxic atmosphere” in politics today was in part the result of the way that Murrell never spoke about her gender recognition legislation, “never debated it, never exposed herself to being questioned on the details of it” and, on top of that, “vilified” any critics of what was, apparently, her own legislative initiative.
All that takes us back to the disagreeable period in our past in which Mrs Murrell featured under her stage name, Nicola Sturgeon. Being, however, without inner meaning as a public figure (unlike, say, Mrs Thatcher, or in some ways even the loathsome smoothiechops, Tony Blair), Murrell was more like a midge – parasitical but, once you have slapped your neck, irrelevant. It is gone. It is an ex-midge. It leaves behind nothing but a smudge of stolen blood.
Now, one reads that the ex-political leader has employed a driving school to teach her how to drive. But why not her husband?
At any rate, one is relieved to find one has completely forgotten about her. But are there lessons the wider political community in Scotland might learn from the embarrassing memory of having had a lady at the wheel for some years who was never instructed on how to run a country?
If Murrell had been more receptive to education while at university, or had concentrated less on petty political activism and more on breadth of learning, she might have heard of a country called Russia, and known it was ruled for many centuries by people called “tsars”. One of them tried to govern in a way which is irresistibly suggestive of her own way of controlling opinion.
Educated people will be aware much of Europe had, in feudal times, a system called “serfdom”, which was adopted in Russia in the seventeenth century (long after it had been abolished in England, though long before Westminster abolished it in Scotland). Ninety-five percent of the population of the Russian empire was denied both citizenship and civil liberties, beyond the right to stay alive after a landlord’s beating.
If they did die from such a beating, the serf master was, like SNP’s financial transgressors today, unlikely to be punished. Serfdom entitled middle-aged white men (and occasionally women) to rule despotically without having to account for their behaviour openly and transparently. Its possible abolition was an issue of fundamental importance to the political class in Russia. Like gender reform in Murrell’s Scotland, therefore, government thinking had to be kept secret.
This is all well known to normally literate people, but what was new to me were some reinforcing details which I read yesterday morning while sitting outside in the glorious May sunshine. In weather such as we are enjoying at the moment, my favourite place for doing nothing is the suntrap on the rocks above the shore. Surrounded by soft turf, it lies just below the hut where I conduct my Sturgeon-based seaweed research.
Two articles caught my attention. One was from the Slavic Review of 1960, and one from the journal California Slavic Studies, 1968. The first deals with Nicholas I, who tried half-heartedly to abolish serfdom, failing due to aristocratic resistance. It is called “The Origins of the Tsarist Epoch of Censorship Terror” (vol. 19, p. 497 for anyone who wants to read further).
Nicholas was a man driven by a personal sense of his duty to preserve autocracy in Russia and conservatism in eastern Europe. Many modern commentators have compared him with Mr Putin, but Putin is as corrupt as a Lanarkshire nationalist, whereas Nicholas was, in a weird sense, incorruptible. He really meant it! He was going to rule alone.
The Tsar was determined that not even the educated public should have the right to discuss government policy or behaviour. That was his prerogative alone. Between 1848, when revolutions swept across western Europe, and his death in 1855, Nicholas imposed on Russia a Murrellish idea of censorship that was so tight, and so vindictive against those who did not respect its shibboleths, that it became known as the Epoch of Censorship Terror. Ms Rhodes would have understood.
However – and this is the main point of similarity with clannish authoritarians like Mrs Murrell, Shona Blobison, Angela Constantinople, Uncle Tom Yousaf and all – Nicholas not only wanted to impose ever stricter censorship but also to ensure the ordinary Russian was unaware of that fact.
Professor Balmuth tells us that Nicholas’s censorship action committee sent a special message about this to the executive censors – (yes, there were censorship supervisors to ensure the working censors did what they were supposed to do). The message included a “reprimand” reminding line officers of “the new censorship regulations forbidding references to the stringency of censors.”
That was bad enough, you might think, but Nicholas’s son, Alexander II (“the benevolent Tsar”), tightened the screws still further, in connection with what most non-serf-owning Russians regarded almost as a holy crusade – the abolition of serfdom. The context was a statement by Sergei Uvarov, a previous Minister of Education who had been closely involved for decades with Nicholas’s censorship operation. In 1833, Uvarov had spoken in the same arrogantly “omnipotent” tone that Murrell used to adopt with the more gullible media: “The rights of the Russian citizenry do not include the right to communicate in print with the people. This is a privilege that the government can give and take away.”
Notice the very SNP-like class distinction. The citizenry – about 5 per cent of the population – was treated completely different from the 95 per cent which comprised “the people”. The latter were expected to do what the former group told them, yet without any explanation of the reason. Like the SNP, the tsarist government relied on the power of its enforcers to keep the population compliant, silent, inactive.
When Mrs Murrell tried to force us all to speak of Islay Bryson as if he were a woman, I could feel the clammy hand of Count Benckendorf, head of Nicholas I’s notorious Third Section, on my throat and keyboard.
In the second article, called “Censorship and the Peasant Question 1855-1859” (CSR vol. 5, p. 137), Charles Ruud tells us that “even the most enlightened censor could not open discussion of the sensitive peasant question… That topic was specifically banned from public discussion.”
Like Murrell, Alexander “never debated” his pet project, and “never exposed himself to being questioned on the details of it”. Yet this was the most important issue which had confronted Russian society for centuries. Alexander offered the first opportunity for Russia to right a historic injustice of monumental proportions. But discussion had to be confined to insiders, as in the European Commission or the Scottish Government.
However, before Alexander was able to clamp down on public debate, a few rebel writers did comment. Non-serf-owners tended to be positive about the Tsar’s initiative, but those who did own land, and therefore serfs, were largely (though not uniformly) negative. Professor Ruud gives an example of comment which our very-own L-Driver of Uddingston “might like to reflect on” (her own phrase). A journal called The Landowner’s Gazette, argued “the peasant lacked sufficient native ability to handle his own affairs”.
It perhaps illustrates the advanced state of Russian public consciousness in the mid-nineteenth century that the Gazette’s editors did not take the contemptuous SNP approach to opponents by, for example, suggesting the provision of baby boxes might appease public opinion, or even the recycling of fizzy drink cans by horse-faced eco-freaks with personality disorders. Instead they took a pessimistic line, arguing the average serf “would always remain poor because his sagging, shapeless wife offered no inspiration for his labours.”
When I read that, the seaweed fell from my eyes. Suddenly, I understood why Mrs Murrell has not been able to persuade her sagging, shapeless husband to give her driving lessons himself. She thinks she might get more inspiration from top-shelf instructors with abs like rippled concrete and pecs like old Morris Oxford bonnets. Maybe it is only “real” men who are capable of inspiring former First Ministers of Scotland to get down and dirty with the United Kingdom’s Highway Code?
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Hamish Gobson lives on the Hebridean isle of Great Todday (Todaidh Mór) and features in Nicola Sturgeon: the Years of Ascent (1970-2007) – A Citizen’s Biography of a Driven Woman in a Drifting Parliament (Ian Mitchell, 2022) – available on Amazon and also reviewed here by Tom Gallagher.
Also written by Ian Mitchell is The Justice Factory (second edition): Can the Rule of Law Survive in Twenty-First Century Scotland? which considers the future of liberal democracy, taking Scotland as an example.
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Photo of portrait of Alexander II by Konstantin Makovsky – http://www.belygorod.ru/img2/RusskieKartinki/Used/427ovskiyK_PtAleksandra2GTG.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5394369
