Kevin McKenna: Why are women often targets in online culture of faux outrage?

Then, to re-assure ourselves we’re not taking a long walk off a very short plank we’ll chivvy others to join us in flinging opprobrium. Preferably, someone else will have started the pile-on so that the risk of making a horse’s arse of ourselves is reduced. If you’re going to participate in throwing rotten fruit best to check that loads of others are already doing it and that the victim has been stunned into a stupor of anxiety, unable to move a muscle.

We all claim to admire progress and being brand new about stuff but, pleasingly, our propensity for bullying has remained undiminished since the first cave-painter got pelters for depicting bison with cherry blossoms coming out of their arses.

I can’t be certain if women were disproportionately pilloried or put in stocks in the Middle Ages. Accounts of witchcraft trials from that period, though, suggest that back then, as today, we seemed to place inordinate importance in making women behave according to societal norms.

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At least when you were having stuff chucked at you or being burned slowly to a crisp you could determine the identity of your torturers and executioners. Thus, when St Peter asked: “Who in the name of the wee man did this to you,” you could answer. “Big Andy the blacksmith’s son with the skelly eye and his pals from up the High Street across from the Rottweiler’s Arms.” And you had the satisfaction of knowing Big Andy would get his comeuppance when it was his turn to meet his maker. The ignorant big fud (Andy that is, not his maker).

Progress in the 21st century means that you can safely hammer someone on social media for stepping out of line without revealing your identity. At other times, of course, and once you’ve checked that there’s no risk, it can be beneficial to be seen to ridicule a miscreant. For this signals that you’re swimming in the mainstream; the wind and the tide safely at your back.

We saw this last week when Ruth Wishart (above) made a somewhat injudicious but throwaway remark about Scotland’s wild and beautiful islands being able to do without readers of the Daily Telegraph, which she described as “The Torygraph”. Private Eye magazine and numerous left-of-centre publications and satirists routinely use this appellation for the UK’s great, reactionary press thunderer. It’s usually said with a degree of affection for, if The Telegraph didn’t exist we’d probably have to invent it.

To judge by the responses to her tweet you’d be forgiven for thinking Wishart had not only wrecked the economy of the entire Western Isles but that she’d broken the Geneva Conventions on civilised warfare. Yet, on and on they came – powerful and influential men at the forefront – desperate to showcase their virtue, wiping their brows theatrically as they handed down their practised and polished apercus.

The previous week it had been Rhiannon Spear’s turn to face the fury of the mob and their contrived outrage. Spear is a young Glasgow City councillor who has previously attracted controversy for being on the SNP’s “woke” wing in the gender debate. Sometimes I agree with her, sometimes I don’t. It’s politics after all.

To define someone’s entire character and personal belief structure by a single point of view seems to me to reduce them as human beings and to invalidate all the other tributaries that have formed their political consciousness. Spear’s crime in the eyes of Twitter’s sanctimonious firing squad was to mock Britain’s rubbish Eurovision entry with a rather unkind admonition about the UK as a whole.

Having endured all three minutes or so of this wretched lay, I’d say no points was far too generous. Spear (below) tweeted: “It’s OK Europe, we hate the United Kingdom too. Love Scotland.”

ONCE more, as with Ruth Wishart, you’d have thought that Spear had threatened the security of the realm and that, if Scotland had such a thing, our ambassador would be getting summoned to Downing Street to explain our behaviour.

Certainly, like Wishart’s, her comment was mildly injudicious and not the wittiest pandect you’ll ever see about Scotland’s gnarly relationship with its great southern neighbour. Neither did it signify something rotten in the soul of Scottish nationalism. Nor was it “dark”, “uncivic” or “nasty”. The critics who piled in, eager to portray it as such, knew this, too. But this was an opportunity to disenfranchise, to silence and to beat to a virtual pulp in the name of a barely concealed agenda.

It poured from people who knew that it was trivial but who sought to attach significance to it for a nakedly political purpose. Yet, they still pursued a course of action which they knew would cause a grotesquely disproportionate measure of torment to their target. It was abject cowardice and betrayed an absence of humanity. But I won’t define them by their remarks.

I don’t know Rhiannon Spear but Ruth and I go back many years and have not always encountered each other on the friendliest of terms (insert winking emoji here and perhaps a wee sorrowful one too). She probably views the concept of me coming to her defence as one who looks up and sees John Milton in the Devil’s Advocate coming through the door.

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So, forgive me, Ruth, but some things just need to be said. I suspect that, like me, both of these intelligent and vivid women have more than a degree of affection for England and English people.

How can you not? There are more than 400,000 of them in Scotland and their presence makes our country better.

They and millions of other English people love Scotland and are crucial in maintaining our economy. The rich culture of those ancient English regions they all bring with them help make us who we are.

We have shed blood with them in common cause and we are forever tied to them by bonds of love, friendship and family. This will never change after independence and is much more important than any future changes to our constitutional relationship.

Knowing and loving the English as I do, I know that our mutual affection permits us to trade gentle insults from time to time. And to do it with a twinkle in our eyes. That’s all that happened with Rhiannon Spear and Ruth Wishart. So let’s get real and stop pretending we’re all outraged. It’s pathetic.