A Case Study In Delusion

Kevin McKenna has a piece in today’s Herald asking the question that is now the core issue for the Scottish independence movement.

The short version of the answer is usually attributed to Mark Twain: “It is far easier to fool someone than to convince them that they’ve been fooled”. But that does nothing to explain the fool’s mindset to us, or help devise a way to get them to accept it.

To some degree that’s because – as we saw so starkly in the “NO DEBATE!” tactics of the gender ideologly cult – part of the problem is that the built-in defence mechanism of the fooled is something George Orwell described in “1984”:

“CRIMESTOP means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.

CRIMESTOP, in short, means protective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one’s own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body.”

What that means in practice is that the fooled never reflect on their own behaviour, far less enter into a meaningful discussion of it. In Orwell’s dystopian Oceania, that was to save them from torture and death at the hands of the Thought Police. More often nowadays, it’s simply to avoid humiliation on social media.

Either way, it’s vanishingly rare to hear someone elaborate on why they’re choosing to remain fooled. Which is why we’re so lucky today.

A pro-Palestine blogger who also sometimes comments on Scottish independence posted a piece yesterday declaring John Swinney’s conference win on indy policy as a disaster ensuring the defeat of independence for at least the next five years.

“Until the SNP’s fateful decision at the weekend, the difference between winning a pro-indy majority and not doing so would have looked like the difference between victory and defeat for the SNP leadership and for independence itself. 

But now, it looks like the only difference would be between one type of defeat and another type of defeat – a self-imposed defeat, because the SNP itself has declared that a pro-indy majority is nowhere near enough for victory. 

Essentially all the suspense has just been drained from the election, because we now know with a very high level of confidence that defeat, in the absolutist all-or-nothing terms that the SNP have defined defeat, is firmly on the cards.”

They’d previously said that Swinney’s policy meant “putting the independence cause into a much weaker state than it’s been for decades” and was something that “we must avoid”, and they re-emphasised that view yesterday.

“Anyone listening to that speech would have been forgiven for thinking that the SNP have been pursuing de facto referendums for the last ten years, and it’s that which has proved a hopeless failure – when in fact they haven’t tried a de facto referendum even once. 

What they have tried, and tried, and tried again, and has hopelessly failed every single time, is precisely what the leadership have successfully argued must be tried yet again in a new “let’s make it even more difficult for ourselves” variant form.

If you want to argue that the de facto referendum plan has failed every time it’s been tried, get back to us when you’ve allowed it to be tried even once.  If you want us to believe the current plan of seeking a Section 30 order is the credible grown-up alternative, get back to us if you ever manage to break its seemingly endless run of being tried repeatedly without even the remotest hint of success.“

They point out that it flatly flies in the face of the SNP’s supposed mission to unify the wider independence movement and work together to achieve the common goal, when it fact it actively disregards and sets fire to any pro-indy vote that isn’t cast for the SNP.

“Contradictions and paradoxes abound in the new variant of the Section 30 strategy.  We’re told that the SNP will be campaigning on “Scotland’s right to choose”, when in fact the SNP have just decided for the very first time that Scotland does *not* have the right to choose, or at the very least that it does not have the right to make certain choices or in certain ways. 

For example, if Scottish voters look at a Green party manifesto that offers independence, and if they vote Green on that basis, the SNP are now saying that is not a decision they have a right to take – or at least that it’s not a decision the SNP will respect or recognise the legitimacy of. 

We’re also told that a key part of the strategy will involve reaching out to the rest of the movement and uniting it, but how are you even going to get a hearing from the non-SNP parts of the movement when you’ve just told them that they have no legitimacy whatsoever and that votes for them don’t even count?”

And, y’know, we agree with every word of that. Mainly because we’ve been saying it for years already, ever since we first put forward the “de-facto referendum” plan exactly half a decade ago today.

So logically you’d expect that the blogger would belatedly arrive at the same rational assessment that we did – that the SNP no longer has any genuine interest in achieving independence, and is now the biggest single roadblock to it, because all it’s actually interested in is shoring up its own power in the devolved government at Holyrood.

And indeed, he briefly and vaguely flirts with the idea that Swinney’s policy is basically a deliberate attempt at throwing the game (which it is):

“One theory is that Mr Swinney doesn’t think Scotland is ready to pursue independence (his comments in the Salmond/Sturgeon BBC documentary were consistent with that), and therefore he’s consciously set up this strategy as a sort of “painful but necessary demonstration” to the independence movement”

“[If] the pro-indy parties do win a majority between them, and the SNP fall short of a single-party majority, which at this stage looks like the most probable election outcome, that will be – as Toni Giugliano pointed out in his speech – a victory that we have chosen to turn into a defeat.  I really don’t understand what the plan is in that eventuality or where John Swinney proposes to go from there.”

But like when Tommy Sheppard pretended to sympathise with the rebel amendments at the weekend before launching a nonsensical all-out attack on them, it’s all a con. Because this is the conclusion our hero then actually delivers:

“Anyone dismayed by what happened at the weekend should use that as really strong motivation to get as good a result for the SNP as possible at the Holyrood election.”

Of course! The SNP have put independence in the worst position it’s been in for decades and are deliberately and needlessly adopting a strategy which has failed hopelessly for the last 10 years and is doomed to certain failure for at least the next five years, therefore vote SNP for independence! It’s all so obvious!

(A minimum of) 15 wasted years is waved away as a “blip” best solved by rewarding the SNP with another half-decade in office.

“as I stated above, the best way to get over this blip as soon as possible is to win as good an election result for the SNP as possible”

This is exactly what Orwell meant by “a control over one’s own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body”. And the book’s next lines are telling:

“Oceanic society rests ultimately on the belief that Big Brother is omnipotent and that the Party is infallible. But since in reality Big Brother is not omnipotent and the party is not infallible, there is need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of facts.

The keyword here is BLACKWHITE. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this.”

The blogger’s article is BLACKWHITE in black and white. Having rejected the SNP once, joined and been active in a rival indy party, been kicked out of that and gone crawling back to the SNP, obviously admitting he’d made a terrible mistake by rejoining a supposed indy party that just set back the cause of independence by decades would be too big an embarrassment to bear.

So instead he twists the situation into another reason to vote SNP, casually dismissing five more about-to-be-wasted years as a mere trifle and assuming – entirely without evidence or reasoning – that the lessons that weren’t learned in the last decade would be learned this time. Or as he puts it:

“What they have tried, and tried, and tried again, and has hopelessly failed every single time, is precisely what the leadership have successfully argued must be tried yet again.”

Perhaps the biggest of the many flaws in that assumption is the one that the 2031 election will see the same circumstances prevail as next year’s, ie that the SNP will still be in theoretical touching distance of an overall majority and the electorate will give them a second (third, fourth, fifth) bite at the cherry.

“I think it’s pretty likely that delegates at future SNP conferences will learn the correct lesson and realise that the new strategy was a dreadful mistake that must never, ever be repeated. And that means a good election result will indirectly help us to win independence, albeit a few years later than should really have been necessary.”

Does it? All it means is that they’d revert to a pro-indy majority being the requirement to demand a second referendum rather than an SNP-only one, and we don’t know if you’ve noticed but we’ve had one of the former every single day since 2014, up to and including today, and it doesn’t seem to be winning us independence.

But good heavens above, readers.

The bigger issue with that analysis is that the only reason the SNP is set to win this election is the utter implosion of Keir Starmer’s government at Westminster, which has cost Scottish Labour more than half of their support in a year.

(Swinney’s “revival” of the SNP has seen them collect just two of the 17 points that Scottish Labour have shed since last September, most of the rest going to Reform.)

Whatever UK and Scottish politics looks like in 2031, it seems a safe bet to say it’ll be nothing like it is now.

There has to be a UK general election no later than 2029, and right now Reform are looking set to win it in a canter. If that happens, it’s distinctly possible that they’ll have continued to strengthen in Scotland at the expense of the other Unionist parties, and that the total fragmentation of the anti-independence vote that’s currently serving the SNP so well will be a thing of the past.

Meanwhile, it seems as certain as can be that the SNP’s stupefying incompetence in domestic governance – or at an absolute minimum, the public’s perception of it as such – will only have worsened. Hundreds of years of political experience is leaving the party next May (albeit mostly proven useless), and is set to be replaced entirely from its awful wing of woke careerist drone children without a single day’s knowledge of the real world between them.

(Perhaps most terrifyingly in the form of Gravy Bus Barbie, who wants to “bring a bit of fun” to politics to combat the rise of Nigel Farage. Her selection proves either that the SNP holds its voters in such complete contempt that it thinks she’ll do, or that they really don’t have anyone better. We’re not sure which is worse.)

The SNP’s popularity over the last few years has tanked (its combined Holyrood vote has plunged from 48% to 29% since September 2021 and 60% of its members have quit), and the party’s only been travelling in one direction for some time, as these shots of this year’s conference and one from recent happier days demonstrate. (We’ll let you guess which is which.)

Very few governments start to improve in their 20th year in power.

But perhaps starker is this graph. Sadly, not much of that purple line is Alba.

So the astonishing arrogance of the assertion that the indy movement can afford to just toss away five years and assume the electorate will be willing to grant it a majority in 2031 is a quite incredible level of deliberate blindness to reality.

(Doubly so if the Greens do end up losing a significant chunk of support to Jeremy Corbyn’s fledgling new party.)

The real reason our blogger pal is so reluctant to face reality, though, only shows up in the very last sentence.

“Don’t listen to the siren voices of the Stews of this world who are trying to convince you that somehow the way to win independence is by first destroying it with a vote for the far-right British nationalist party Reform UK.”

[weary sigh]

This site has never advocated voting for Reform, although it’d still be slightly more likely to result in independence than voting for the SNP, in all sorts of ways.

But what’s certainly true is that the SNP needs to be destroyed and replaced with a pro-independence party that isn’t hopelessly corrupted in every possible meaning of that word.

Unfortunately such a party does not currently exist – Alba has reduced itself with infighting to a shambolic irrelevance which there’s no credible hope of retrieving, as much as we respect its leader, and with the best will in the world the other indy micro-parties were never anything but.

What, then, have we learned from our case study? Well, perhaps not much that we didn’t know already. We’ve watched with our own eyes as our blogging friend has first echoed Einstein’s famous line about the definition of insanity being doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, but then enacted it himself by urging people to… do the thing that hasn’t worked for the last 11 years, namely voting for the current travesty of an SNP, and hoping that it somehow works out differently this time.

But it won’t, folks, and that graph with the purple and yellow lines shows that we don’t have the luxury of just dismissing the next five years and starting again in 2031. For once we’re in total agreement with the Ingsoc blogger about at least one thing: that whatever happens next May we’re getting nowhere on independence for the next five years, so it doesn’t much matter who forms the government – red haddies, yellow haddies, blue haddies, they’re all going to do pretty much the same.

(If someone told you that five years of Unionist rule would focus minds and deliver the shock to the system that it needed to actually make independence happen, would you pay that price, if the alternative was keeping the hapless SNP in power but not getting a single step closer to independence and having to wait another five years to even get started? That’s not a rhetorical question, please actually tell us.)

We know that “Get rid of this thing and then replace it with, um, SOMETHING” isn’t the easiest sell in the world, but it’s where we are. We didn’t choose this situation and we warned people until we were blue in the face, but it happened and nature will not fill a vacuum until that vacuum exists, so our first job is to create it, and then spend the next five years doing whatever we can to build something to put in it.

It’s better to start down a long road now than in 2031, so there’s only one way forward from here. Whoever you do vote for, or whether you just spoil your ballot or even stay at home this time: No Votes SNP.