AWOKE ye starvelings from your slumbers – the occupation of the SNP by counterfeit liberals might just be coming to an end. The results of elections to the party’s ruling National Executive Committee on Monday were a triumph for those in the party who still believe there remains a place in it for authentic radicalism.
The NEC had lately fallen to a coup organised by an illiberal cult of identity. To them, the struggles to gain independence and to address the continuing obscenity of deprivation in our poorest neighbourhoods were secondary to an obsession with other issues, like gender reform.
When faced with reasonable criticism or concerns, they resorted to the tactics favoured by fascists the world over: they bullied, intimidated, harassed and threatened physical violence.
The bleating of some activists on social media yesterday showed that they indeed cared little for independence or tackling poverty. Instead, they were upset that their strategy of infiltrating the Scottish Government and planting the seeds of their ideology had been thwarted.
That much of the bullying behaviour came from men targeting women demonstrated the misogynistic currents running through those who fancy themselves woke. That it has been permitted to go unchallenged by Nicola Sturgeon is extraordinary.
That it proceeded unhindered by Police Scotland showed the extent to which our national police force has been reduced to a private army of the Scottish Government: always eager to harass working-class football fans, less so to collar the boutique warriors who issue threats against women on social media.
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Joanna Cherry and Joan McAlpine, both of them authentic liberals and feminists who have dedicated their entire working lives campaigning for sexual equality, took the brunt of the hatred. This had less to do with actual trans rights than a desire to permit men to occupy women’s private spaces through the insidious whim of self-identification.
For offering a reasonable critique a proposal to permit men to occupy women’s private spaces through self-identification, Cherry was offered 24-hour police protection following what they regarded as credible death threats. For several months McAlpine rose each day to pictures of her on Twitter with a large red target painted around her.
Cherry has appealed to the leadership of her party on several occasions to intervene and protect her from the violent threats but to no avail. The SNP leadership postures furiously over its support for women’s rights but can’t protect two of its most able and gifted politicians from abuse by known party members and office-bearers.
In desperation, Cherry took to Twitter on Sunday to appeal directly to the First Minister to intervene on her behalf. What she got was a wretched and half-hearted note of concern from Nicola Sturgeon in an interview with the BBC. If the SNP leader doesn’t quickly relocate her moral compass on this she risks disfiguring her legacy. Cherry’s latest appeal for protection followed the circulation of a letter last week that grossly defamed her. Among its 700 signatories were influential politicians, including several of Cherry’s party colleagues, and senior trade unionists. The SNP’s Westminster spokesperson for Home Affairs and Justice is a highly successful QC and it’s understood that she is initiating legal action against the authors and signatories.
It’s to be hoped that she’ll seek damages and an apology from those in her own party who thought this was acceptable. They are foolish, foolish people who ought to be disciplined by the SNP and eventually removed from their offices.
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UNTIL Monday night, there would have been no chance of this happening. The make-up of the newly elected NEC now makes it a beguiling possibility. Similarly, those trade unions who employ some of the other signatories really ought to be serving notice on them for wading in this poison. If they continue to look the other way they stand accused of giving tacit approval to bullying and intimidating behaviour targeting women.
It remains a curiosity as to just why so many senior SNP politicians have been seemingly hoodwinked by the aims of the woke cult. I suspect, though, that they saw in it a way to serve a more subtle purpose.
The party leadership and those who flatter them in exchange for advancement have lately come under pressure to think beyond merely asking Boris Johnson to grant a Section 30 order for a second independence referendum. Nicola Sturgeon’s speech on Monday offered nothing new in seeking to advance plans for a second referendum beyond the now biannual pledges of contrived intent.
In 13 years of SNP rule, very little has been produced to break the cycles of poverty and deprivation that persist in our most disadvantaged neighbourhoods.
The party hierarchy are transfixed by big business and corporate interests. They furtively advance a neoliberal framework for Scotland while portraying themselves as radicals compared to the hard right that now controls the Westminster Government.
The Taliban would fancy themselves radicals compared with the UK Tories. Baby boxes, free school meals and small NHS windfalls are all very nice but they don’t even begin to combat persistent deprivation in our neediest communities.
Promoting the fake radicalism of woke ideology is a convenient fig leaf for the absence of anything substantial and long-term in addressing Scotland’s real problems. All of these stem from the continuing inability of working-class people to access power and then use it to effect real change where it’s needed most.
The woke brigade thus serve as useful idiots for a manipulative political class who seek to deter scrutiny of their complacency and complicity. The groups who really are taking the fight to managerial neoliberalism such as Common Weal and All Under One Banner are thus regarded as meddlesome when they ought to be cherished.
These organisations are far closer to the needs of the majority of Scots who have suffered the iniquities of Thatcherism and a Labour Party which has abandoned its core principles in favour of supine acquiescence.
It’s why the SNP leadership sends out glove-puppets like Stewart McDonald and Alyn Smith from time to time to denigrate “those Common Weal types”. Promoting this agenda is much easier than improving the lives of the poor.
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