Just for a moment, let's leave aside the details of J K Rowling's latest disgraceful attempt to smear the SNP with wild allegations based on zero evidence. Am I the only person to recall that, during the referendum, she said something along the following lines : "I will back No in the referendum, and then I will back any party that offers Devo Max at the general election"?
Anyone would think she was trying to ludicrously smear the SNP as racists to give her an excuse for breaking her solemn promise, because of course there was only one major party offering Devo Max at the election, and it sure as hell wasn't Labour. What more could the SNP have achieved in May with the backing that Rowling reneged upon? Perhaps we could have turned her own city 100% Devo Max Yellow. Such a wasted opportunity, J K.
I've been trying to avoid making the obvious point that the party Rowling actually supports issued an anti-immigration mug during the election campaign. But she certainly must have been purring with pride last night when Andy Burnham said "the party always comes first", and Liz Kendall sanctimoniously butted in with "er, the country always comes first". So narrow British nationalism trumps party tribalism in Continuity New Labour - that's reassuring. I was willing Jeremy Corbyn to sniffily add "I think you'll find humanity comes first, Liz".
Heaven only knows how I would vote if I was a Labour member/registered supporter. I would probably give my first preference to Corbyn (even though he achieves the impossible of being a Labour leadership candidate who is even more left-wing than I am), but it's the second preference that would really matter, and there I'm stumped. Maybe I would plump for Yvette Cooper on the basis that she has a marginally less irritating personality than Burnham, but it's murderously difficult to see much (any) difference between the two of them politically.
And what would be best for the SNP? In contrast to 2010, I don't think there's an ideal outcome this time. All of the three leading candidates are poor, but all of them - simply by virtue of who they are - bring something to the table that might be of assistance to Labour in these parts. The SNP will lose one of their USPs (in the Westminster arena, I mean) if Labour elect a female leader, but Burnham's northern accent may be of some appeal as well.
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There must have been something in the water since election day - I seem to have spent half my time arguing with fellow independence supporters on this blog. If it isn't tactical voting, it's irresponsible dog owners, and if it isn't irresponsible dog owners, it's the House of Lords. On the latter subject, and without any wish to start yet another argument, you might find this article from the Plaid Cymru website interesting - it's about how Lord Dafydd Wigley will take the case for Devo Max to the Grand Committee Room of the House of Lords this very afternoon. That doesn't sound to me like a man who has gone native - and of course it's the sort of thing the SNP can't do themselves for as long as they are completely unrepresented in the upper chamber.
(Thanks to Helen Ross for drawing my attention to the story.)
Can't agree that Rowling did anything out of line today. MacWhirter's writing was a bit wooly and there's no way that there aren't any anti-English types amongst the SNP membership. She responded directly to him querying his remarks without any aggression and presumably referencing personal experience.
ReplyDeleteI can understand people assuming an ulterior motive, but the vivid and immediate responses she received on twitter were excessive and unnecessary.
Rowling paid 1 million to the Better Together Campaign, making her complicit in the perpetuation of Westminster rule over the people of Scotland. She made a measurable contribution to the state the poorest people of Scotland find themselves in as a result of the No vote, as surely as Ian Taylor or anyone else. She went beyond offering well-intentioned words or soundbytes and actually put a significant sum of money into keeping Scotland in the United Kingdom - and therefore, ensuring that Scotland could be at the mercy of a Tory government.
DeleteAs for abuse, she's constantly ridiculing the "civic nationalism" (her quotation marks) of the SNP, rubbishing Scotland's resources, and comparing 50% of the Scottish electorate to naive at best and racists at worst. Abuse is unacceptable - and that includes Rowling's own remarks.
Sorry James, but No! :-)
ReplyDeleteIain, do you support smears instead of actually offering any fact based evidence then? I can only conclude from your answer that you support smears. Rowling and other unionists, both now and in the past, have been trying to portray the SNP as racist, anti-English. That is all they have, smears instead of anything remotely positive to say to the electorate here. It says more about them than the SNP imo. They clearly view support for independence as a confirmation of anti-Englishness.
ReplyDeleteNobody should be smearing anybody and I took exception to much of what Rowling said during the referendum campaign, but her comments today weren't of the same nature.
DeleteIn my opinion.
Rowling's comments today are the same as they were during the referendum campaign imo. It is basically the standard Brit Nat charge against the SNP; one that has been made frequently, and with ever greater tedium and desperation over the past few decades, if not longer. I agree with Mick in his post below. As I said even Adam Tomkins is not buying Rowling's schtick!
DeleteWith each outburst J.K. Rowling makes, I get the distinct impression she has listened both far too much and too long to her SLAB friends Gordon Brown and Alastair Darling on the subject of Scottish politics. These blanket portrayals of the SNP as being anti-English/racist are becoming increasingly tedious. Even Adam Tomkins has defended the SNP on this!
ReplyDeleteYou get to the nub of it muttley.
DeletePeople have read far too much into Rowling's scripted Labour press releases as if they were a product of her own mind.
Fact is nobody could ever accuse Rowling of being a deep thinker on Devolution or the many facets of Independence. She's a children's writer who writes about boy wizards at a public school FFS. She is quite obviously motivated by her closeness to Gordon Brown and Darling who feed her this Labour/sub Daily Mail bullshit to trot out to the most gullible and unquestioning of the BritNats and their establishment media lapdogs.
I can think of few more ironic fates for an author who once relied on the welfare state than to become just another Daily Mail style mouthpiece unthinkingly smearing millions of scottish voters.
Particularly when the primary reason she has for doing so is that she is now close friends with a former PM in a Labour party which openly attacks the unemployed and welfare recipients while using BNP style language against immigrants.
We also have to consider that it is this exact behavior that drove up support for the SNP. For four years solid we had to sit and endure this keech. They've veered from anti-English racists. From Nazis to Marxists to sinister a personality cult. What did it achieve in the end? Scotland stays in the Union but the price tag is the collapse of unionist parties in Scotland.
ReplyDeleteThat they're still doing this, proves that they never had a plan for building on a no vote.
Only the smears were left. I watched the collapse of UK labour into a bizarre group of people who abstained on crucial votes in Westminster, and then shouted a lot about nothing in particular in Holyrood. Its the 1% doctrine and its it's clear that no party in recent memory has ever failed on their own terms on such a scale or quite so comprehensively as Labour did. It doesn't matter who issues this weeks smear, all it did and will continue to do is to strengthen SNP voters resolve.
In other words. UK labour and Scottish labour cannot win any of their lost votes by getting celebrities to talk pish on their behalf.
I can't argue with any of your comment, spot on.
ReplyDelete"Heaven only knows how I would vote if I was a Labour member/registered supporter."
ReplyDeleteAs a Labour member and I'm pretty stumped on the issue myself. It doesn't help that my two preferred candidates of Alan Johnson and Dan Jarvis decided not to run. At first I was a little dismissive of Corbyn, but now I'm really not so sure. I'm really going to have to think long and hard about this.
As far as I can see, it's a choice between three Blairites utterly oblivious to the lessons of last month's defeat, and someone who has a chance of at least starting the party on the road to reform. Right now Labour has a fight on for its soul, and Corbyn is the only person who can see that. The fact that the Tories are playing games like Tories 4 Corbyn tells a story all it's own.
DeleteThey're all so great, it's hard to choose.
Deletesurely liz kendall - uber-blairite - is the best for snp
ReplyDeleteShe is also factually incorrect as she uses Sean Clerkin as an example and he is not even a SNP supporter as he also has demonstrated against the SNP in the past. But why let the truth spoil a good SNP Bad story.
ReplyDeleteIt would be a bit more consistent if she also condemned the Unionist trolls and the thugs who have beaten up Yes supporters.
Silence on that though - as it does not fit with her MSM agenda to try to rubbish the SNP.
JK Rowling is a British nationalist (with a small n) - I doubt she gives the failure to deliver devo max any thought whatsoever. What matters is her country (the UK, not Scotland) remains intact. Its about the only argument in favour of the union that I have much respect for.
ReplyDeleteIf you play the internet game, you will be slandered, libelled, I heard words I never heard in the bible..
ReplyDeleteThat is what the internet does, it allows two steps across the county line, it allows an icon like J K Rowling to be asked questions.
And you know what? She is deliberately setting herself up as a target, not just for abuse, but for exit. It will be a minor point in the battle for self determination, but it is a negative one.
only a peerage away,from being neighbours with darling again
ReplyDeleteFor such a clever woman its utterly bizarre that she cannot understand that a country wants to be independent not because it hates the english (which it doesn't) but because it wants to run its affairs, its own way: caring for its people (whatever their race, colour or creed) and to determine its own future without weapons of mass destruction, with an intact NHS and with social justice as core to its values. The reason why Nicola Sturgeon is such a good spontaneous speaker is because her core values are solid and why we see Labour floundering like a fish out of water, flapping in aimless desperation.
ReplyDelete