The reliable solipsism of Scottish nationalism
Ukraine really isn't about the thing you were obsessed about before the tanks went in
“DELIGHTED for Ukraine. It just goes to show what political will can achieve. Remember this Scotland.”
So tweeted SNP MSP Michelle Thomson on Monday afternoon. An hour earlier, the official Twitter account of the Ukranian legislature had, from its base in Kyiv, posted a picture of President Volodymyr Zelesnkyy signing an application for membership of the European Union.
This was Mrs Thomson’s response. It’s one way to look at an existential crisis engulfing a country of 40 million people, our entire continent, and the future geopolitical direction of the planet just now, I suppose.
Probably not the take adopted by Mr Zelesnkyy himself who today continues to face the fear of assassination by Russian forces who are approaching the capital in Ukraine. Nor, I’m guessing, the position taken by Ukranian families huddling in basements as Russian cluster bombs target residential blocks and Russian missiles pummel government buildings in its second city, Kharkiv. I’m unpersuaded they currently find much to be delighted about. Nor, indeed, the take of most Scots either. I haven’t seen a poll of Scottish opinion on the Ukranian crisis yet but I’m willing to wager that most people here will “remember” the events of the last week in much the same way as everyone else has done across the world: for the needless barbarity of President Putin, not as a test case for EU membership.
As George Orwell once said, however, nationalism requires a certain level of obsessiveness. For Mrs Thomson, therefore, the job was to try to link a photograph from the Ukranian parliament on its application for EU membership to the distant cause of Scottish independence. I may have got this wrong – divining Mrs Thomson’s logic here isn’t that easy – but it appears to be something along the following lines: securing speedy EU membership isn’t as outlandish as some people might claim; for example, the mass invasion of a nuclear-armed neighbouring superpower changes the political dial pretty damn quickly; Scots therefore shouldn’t believe all that nonsense from Unionist scaremongerers about the difficulty of an independent Scotland becoming an EU state; like Ukraine, the “political will” would be there for Scotland too to enter the European Union pretty damn pronto; Scots – take note!
Mrs Thomson has now apologised for her “insensitive” comments. “Like everyone, my first thoughts are sympathy for the people there”, she clarified, adding a compulsory image of the Ukranian flag to show her solidarity. Yet while her party leader, Nicola Sturgeon, is far too astute to make any similar mistake, other nationalists have not been so discreet. It seems many simply can’t help themselves joining dots that, to the rest of us, simply don’t exist.
Accompanying Mrs Thomson in the box marked “How the Ukranian crisis serves to support my small pre-existing theory about Scotland’s place in the UK” was reliable eccentric Craig Murray, a former British Ambassador turned Nationalist conspiracy theorist. Mr Murray chose to highlight a photograph outside the Scottish Parliament, which decided to fly the Ukranian colours alongside our own Union flag. “Flying the Ukranian flag next to the flag of our own invader and occupier. Zero sense of irony,” he noted. Not to be outdone by this jarring juxtaposition, SNP President Mike Russell yesterday delivered his own: just as Ukraine should not has its right to sovereignty circumscribed by “rule from Moscow”, so Scotland should not have its denied by “an eight-year-old referendum”. Note the insidious equivalence drawn here between our own democratic nation and a murderous regime in Moscow.
What is going on here? At our own Scottish level, it is the consequence of a decade when the “national question” has become the dominant story of Scottish politics. These days in Scotland, no issue can go unremarked upon without reference to its implications for Scotland’s place in the UK. No issue, however unrelated to these shores, goes past without being picked over to find whatever tenuous meaning it may hold for secession. Often we let it pass: perhaps, over the last frenzied hyper-politicised decade, we’ve just grown used to it. Then along comes a crisis of the scale of the Ukraine war, and this extreme form of solipsism and a myopic obsessiveness exposed in all its weird glory. It’s the neediness that strikes you. That, and the parochialism.
But this monomania sits within a wider category that goes well beyond Scotland too. For example, earlier this week, one commentator poured through social media to examine the “lessons” that various people had taken from the Ukraine crisis. Among those causes which had been validated by the Russian decision to invade Ukraine were the case against Brexit, the case for Brexit, the need for better trans-rights, the importance of net-zero, critical race theory, and why we should all now adopt a low-carb diet. Obsessiveness is not a unique Scottish Nationalist trait.
It shows that far from just being the preserve of a few cranks and eccentrics, the antics of Mrs Thomson this week are more ingrained and more serious than we might like to think. So-called social media is partly to blame, of course. Where, previously, we would have had only a bathroom mirror to speak to about our latest grand theory of everything, now we can find hundreds of similarly voluble people online to validate our position. Taking a quick look at my Facebook feed this last week, and seeing the wave of conspiracy theories and barmy causal links that dominate the online conversation, I’m left to wonder why Mr Putin is wasting his time sowing disinformation, when we’re doing a perfectly good job of it ourselves.
It means that a counter-effort is necessary. Firstly, here in Scotland, pro-Union Scots should avoid chasing the likes of Mrs Thomson down her rabbit hole. If an asteroid struck the planet and the ensuing dust cloud blocked out the sun’s rays leaving the earth deprived of all sustenance, Nationalists would still want to debate the implications for Scottish independence and the Union. There is no requirement for the rest of us to follow them. In a world beset by the threat of catastrophic global warming, by war in Europe, and a cost of living crisis which will affect every family in the country, the entire discussion around independence is emerging as increasingly irrelevant. It is up to the SNP to change that: and good luck to them.
More broadly, for all of us, the challenge is to see past the end of our noses. Not everything, it turns out, revolves around us and our latest pet obsession. Not everything that happens in global affairs is a direct consequence of our actions, good or ill. Neither Brexit – nor the high-carb diet, nor woke warriors, nor the invasion of Iraq – is to blame for everything.
Instead, it just so happens that, last week, a murderous man in power threw the dice, set a country ablaze, and has now put us all in danger. He needs to be confronted and removed from power. In the end, that’s the only thing Scotland, or anywhere else, needs to remember.
ENDS
This article first appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail, 2nd March 2022