Where The Buck Stops

I have never called for Nicola Sturgeon to resign. Only the loony – there’s a song in that – think criticism of her policies or lack of them, is tantamount to demanding her resignation. Resignation is a matter for the SNP and her conscience, if that time should arrive, whether from force majeure, or happenstance. Then again, nothing might come about sufficient to cause her to rethink her role. On my Twitter site I warn contributors not to condemn her on her Holyrood Inquiry appearance. Please allow her Holyrood inquisitors time to report their judgement, and the James Hamilton QC Inquiry come to its conclusion. Give her the same courtesy we asked for Alex Salmond, faced by a cobbled together bunch of outrageous lies. In my ethics, at this time only Sturgeon’s track record stands open to fair analysis.

A totalitarian culture

One of the nastiest aspects I have witnessed is the creeping totalitarian culture of the SNP. This may seem paradoxical in a contemporary Scotland, so let me explain. If we aver, rightly, that power lies with the people, then ultimate power lies with those who can suppress or manipulate the people’s opinion. Lambasting honest discussion is a good way to create the bewildered herd – and I see that every day in people asking on Twitter, ” Can someone explain, I don’t understand what is being proposed.”

For the uninformed, totalitarianism a system of government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state.

The danger of telling the faithful to demand silence from the rest of us, ‘Wheest for Indy’, ‘zip it’, ‘you are killing independence’ is handing support to the aggressive, the raddled alcoholic and the sociopath. The Internet is a nest of those folks who know no limit to expressing wrath. It reminds me of a massed colony of breeding weaver birds in a tree invaded by a viper snake.

What have I said in criticism of Nicola Surgeon? After two glowing essays on her early development, and one following her historic visit to the Irish Republic’s parliament that our own press failed to follow, plus keeping a list of SNP achievements under Salmond and then Sturgeon, I have said our First Minister is “out of her depth” handling big political issues, securing independence the greatest of them all. No amount of hectoring, or making the excuse ‘It wisnae me” will do.

The accusation of totalitariansm arises from a number of sources. The SNP has become as other governments, trying to protect itself from its own citizens. The removal of Alex Salmond’s history from SNP records before his trial. We see that in the calculated way the SNP and Crown Office held back crucial documents that proved Alex Salmond’s innocence, and worse, retained them until the last minute from the Scottish Government’s own legal counsel in the High Court case. (They were livid and embarrassed, and advised the Scottish Government it would lose the case.)

Intolerant idolisers who think a favorite leader should never be questioned, never challenged, no matter how far off course they veer, require to do some thinking. Even when an oppositiion politician hits a node of truth, they are drowned out as wrong. Often they are right. To dismiss all criticism as nasty turns the democratic system on its head.

Asking us to be slavish, adoring fans is unacceptable. It makes life very unpleasant for those who are of a questioning or a curious nature. Not as unpleasant as life in the USSR under Stalin where whole dissident groups were sent to work in the freezing Gulag for years, not cutting complainers into pieces with a machette, left on the roadside in some South American country, but certainly moving toward the lockdown of non-right-thinking people when the party of liberty decides some dissidents need mocked, or purged from the party.

We elect representatives, not kings or queens. I am not building a pharaoh’s pyramid, doing as told fearing the lash of a team supervisor, I am building a new society to free the slaves.

A religous doctrine

Mass silence is prodded by ‘ humane’ means, by taking out two-page spreads in the unionist press to call annoying supporters of your ideals ‘cybernats’, a term coined by your mortal enemy, a Tory landowner. That way you teach the unwieldy the proper values of authoritarianism. You have a few adherents explain matters to dissidents, over and over again, until the lie gains traction, the warning heeded, we are threatening the future, our future and the nation’s.

This tactic is no smarter than the Better Together mob scaremongering with preposterous tales of a poverty-stricken Scotland if it chooses freedom from coercion. Nevertheless, constant harrassment of non-SNP members is ‘othering’, telling us there are good indy supporters and bad indy supporters.

Can anyone image Martin Luther King saying, “my speech at the Lincoln Memorial tomorrow, make sure to keep away those damn marchers and flag wavers that follow us, brothers and sisters. I don’t want to be seen associating with them. They are an embarrassment”.

Well, that is what the SNP has done on a few occasions to our mass support. It is bizarre, and Nicola Sturgeon has not condemned it, not once, nor when aimed at an individual, such as Joanna Cherry MP, or a group. In other words, she approves of and encourages the attitude. This is the toxic atmosphere people talk of.

This is marginalising the people who make the SNP feel uncomfortable. SNP MPs and MSPs are notorious for blocking their own supporters using Twitter as a mode of communication. I am sure Boris Johnson must be talking note of SNP methods of pointing to groups who are denounced for “destroying harmony”, accusing their own supporters of anarchy. They use propaganada on us as if a quasi-religous doctrine; dissenters are causing unrest by not holding to the Gospel line, whatever that is on the day. Those are totalitarian values.

The SNP method I describe is holding onto power by slander and vituperation. You can see it every day in the Nicola is Joan of Arc propaganda crews on Twitter, and the Green Ink Brigade in the letters pages of the press, libelling Alex Salmond, an exonerated man not by one but by two courts, yet still subjected to snide remarks by the slugs of unionism and dupes of the SNP. They take their cue from Nicola Sturgeon, who has made clear he won his cases by a technicality, not a jury of his peers or a female High Court judge, and not complainants who lied through their teeth.

Power for power’s sake

To Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP, people are not the best judges of their own interests. Some will put this down to self-importance, but it also hints at a colonial view. The SNP I knew in 2013 was nothing like that, I hasten to add. It was tolerant, progressive and full of idealism. It has transmogrified into a power first, people second, pursuer of anti-women’s rights. If you do not believe in the rightness of Sturgeon’s policies you are an anti-Scot. Sturgeon has weaponised sexual politics, and weaponised her own citizens, one side against the other. No statesman with any political gumption, let alone self-respect for survival, would get themselves into that corner.

My first blast of icy cold wind came when Sturgeon appeared against a bright yellow bus that did not say, ‘Vote Independence’ but flashed up ‘Stop Brexit’. I was shocked at the diversion that effectively interfered in a solely English vote, but began to realise she has not managed to shake off a colonial mindset. Yes, hard to accept someone who has devoted the best years of their life to their country’s liberty might be something of a colonial, but that is the nature of her Anglo views inculcated over decades. The Brits needed rescued before the Scots needed protected. It is expressed in the opinion, the British State is not in the least brutal, one has only to ask nicely and it will provide with a cheery smile.

When England creating its own downfall by casting off international society, you exploit the moment to supreme effect, not try to remove the one mandate (of many) that wipes out your justification for a referendum. If not a colonial mindset, then surely inept? How else can you explain handing Scotland’s authority over to a far-right-wing party in London by requesting a Section 30 referendum that she knows will be shredded before it reaches Boris Johnson’s desk?

Later we discover she wound down all the independence committees, squandered over half-a-million pounds of donations on chasing Brexit, failed to keep a consistent campaign to inform the electorate of what the Tories are doing to Scotland, had no master plan or back up strategy to outwit a Tory take over by stealth, now that London has us by the throat. When you look carefully at what she has made her priorities, nothing is in line with independence. It is low down on Sturgeon’s list.

SNP pile on

This interventionst state mentality sees the grandees of the SNP do their own version of a pile on, The Angus Robertsons, the John Nicolson’s, the Stewart MacDonalds, the Pete Wisharts, a man who resembles the bumbly assistant forty years selling socks and slippers in Jenners emporium. Asked to accept Sturgeon’s appearance before the Holyrood Inquiry demonstrates she is the greatest living Scot, these men fall in line to usurp the judgment of their own Holyrood Inquiry and the Hamilton Inquiry by indulging in a pre-judgement whitewash.

The SNP does not even have the confidence in its own inquiry even where it holds the majory verdict by SNP member numbers alone. Moreover, they speak the language of unionists who tell us the SNP is just the same farty old party as any other. Well, they have a point.

The totalitarianism that I talk of permeates to the SNP HQ where I am told the only way I will ever get consideration for the blight the party has put on my reputation and my family, is if I ‘reapply for membership’. The rules, the bureacracy is so inflexible, you must kneel before your defamours and ask for clemency. There is no room for compassion or dignity.

And so far, each and ever MSP and MP who knows of my case will not, I repeat not, dare to defy the pen pushers. I learn Fiona Robertson who ‘weaponised’ anti-Semitism to boost her career, thrown off the National Exective Committee, was invited back without a vote and endorsed by an hour-long appearance by none other than Nicola Sturgeon. This is authoritarian rule in all its unpalatable ugliness.

You can hear SNP HQ yelp after reading this: ‘this sad sack blogger (I always get demoted!) is not getting as much as a reply to his letters’. Well, no surprise; no reply to three emails to Stewart Stevenson so far, the new national secretary.

In Summary

Let’s put two resignations to rest: I am on record stating Peter Murrell, Sturgeon’s husband, holds a dishonest position in the party which is untenable and unethical, and I believe he proved it in his evidence to the Holyrood Inqury. I share that view with the public I meet. And I see enough evidence to ask that Leslie Evans should resign, or if she refuses, flung out of a medievil catapult, Sturgeon’s amoral, unscrupulous, unreliable permanent secretary. The evidence of tampering with documents overwhelms opinion. Nicola Sturgeon raised Evans pay by £40,000 annually and renewed her contract. No evidence of scruple there.

Nicola Sturgeon has enough years in office to mature. Other than a hair style, expensive two piece suits, I see little difference from Year One compared to now.

What she has given us is a disastrously underqualified manager as independence leader. She has succeeded in politics through confidence gained, being well briefed, and an argumentative character bordering on arrogance. She is better at delivering empty speeches to admirers than listening to reason or executing a plan of action that will save Scotland from the onslaught underway by a right-wing ideology that aims to tie Scotland down permanently like Gulliver by Lilliputians. 

The SNP’s existence does not mean anything, their slogans or party political broadcasts empty, if it does not mean independence by any means possible, not one only – by every means possible!

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