If the 2014 referendum had resulted in a ‘Yes’ vote, last Thursday (24th March) was to have been Independence Day. To mark the occasion, that day’s issue of “The National” published an eight-page supplement on what the news would have been on that imaginary day.
(As “Times” columnist Hugo Rifkind recently explained: “It took me a while, but I’ve finally got my head around ‘The National’. It’s the newspaper equivalent of William McGonagall, isn’t it?”)
Despite the stiff competition from every other article in the supplement (and every other article in every other issue of “The National”), an ‘article’ dated 24th March 2066 (50th anniversary of Independence Day) took pride of place.
It ‘reported’ the demise of the last Labour MSP in 2030, the creation of 12 successive SNP governments, a single 5p rate of income tax, and the creation of Prestwick Spaceport “to send our own brave astronauts, such as Jock and Jean Tamson, to Mars and back.”
Most outlandish of all, it ‘reported’ on Nicola Sturgeon’s election as first World President, the appointment of Alex Salmond as UN General Secretary, and the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Salmond for brokering peace in a war between America and Russia.
Of course, it was all written in good humour. But it also let slip the SNP’s vision of an independent Scotland: one-party rule, no labour movement parliamentarians, a low-tax regime, and a personality cult around SNP leaders of universal proportions.
The bulk of the far left lined up with the SNP during the referendum campaign and remains in thrall to the SNP eighteen months later. It therefore fell primarily to the more right-wing opponents of Scottish nationalism to lampoon the supplement published by “The National”.
A parody of the supplement portrayed the result of a ‘Yes’ vote in the referendum as Armageddon, used cartoons of body parts to abuse supporters of independence, and engaged in various other forms of personal attacks.
It did, however, manage some genuine humour, at least for close followers of Scottish politics and news.
“The newspaper that supports telling you how to bring up your kids” was a reference to the SNP’s Named Person legislation. “Nat the Nat’s libellous new single ‘I’m Sorry!’” referred to Natalie McGarry MP (SNP whip withdrawn), a serial tweeter of libel and subsequent apologies.
And “the former Paisley locksmith now detained at HMP Barlinnie” referred to a ‘Yes’ campaigner who worked as a locksmith for his local Housing Association and was recently convicted of burglary.
In many ways, the supplement and its parody sum up the state of Scottish politics.
Hard-core supporters of independence – and no-one apart from them would bother reading “The National” – continue to inhabit the “parallel universe” referred to on the cover of the supplement.
The SNP’s referendum promises about the financial health of an independent Scotland, the flourishing price of oil, and a post-independence currency union have now all been exposed as lies.
The SNP’s nine years of independence-obsessed government at Holyrood have been a shambles, with a demagogic intolerance of political criticism and a Scottish version of Tammany Hall never very far below the surface.
But rather than think through what such demonstrable real-world facts would have meant for Scotland if it had declared independence last week, “The National” and its followers take refuge in a fact-free parallel political universe of their own creation.
At the opposite ‘extreme’, serious political criticism of the SNP plays second-fiddle to a “Private Eye” version of politics. A focus on the latest real or imagined SNP scandal is substituted for a coherent political alternative that might win people over to meaningful political engagement.
With the Holyrood elections now only five weeks away, the result of this ongoing conflict between competing national identities is reflected in the opinion polls.
Voters rally to the camp which most loudly champions their national identity – the SNP or the Tories – while labour movement politics struggle to be heard above the cacophony of competing nationalisms.