Thursday, March 10, 2022

Let us resolve that this crisis must be the last time humanity ever faces a nuclear war scare. That means total nuclear disarmament.

My piece yesterday about Nicola Sturgeon's jaw-droppingly irresponsible suggestion that NATO should "consider" entering into direct military conflict with Russia via a no-fly zone triggered a predictably angry reaction from SNP leadership loyalists - but what was really interesting was the angle they took. There were two approaches they could have taken in supporting Ms Sturgeon's words - a) they could have doubled down on her behalf and insisted that NATO military intervention might well prove to be desirable, or b) they could have pretended that she didn't say what we all heard her say.  For the most part (although by no means exclusively) they plumped for the latter option, which in a way is quite reassuring.  It's intellectually dishonest, but it at least suggests that a significant chunk of the SNP's support base continues to regard what Ms Sturgeon was suggesting as unthinkable, and that she'd be crossing a red line if she persevered with it.

The section of Ms Sturgeon's remarks that several people pretended to misunderstand was this: "But on the other hand, Putin is not acting in any way rationally or defensively, and you know, we have a situation right now where perhaps the only thing nuclear weapons are deterring is the ability to properly and directly help Ukraine."  The reimagined version of these words is that Ms Sturgeon was suggesting that Putin's nuclear deterrent was so effective that we must under no circumstances set up a no-fly zone. In reality, she was plainly saying the polar opposite of that - she meant that Mr Putin's actions were so immoral that we should disregard (or "consider" disregarding) the nuclear threat and set up a no-fly zone to "properly and directly help Ukraine".  If you look closely, it's almost as if she perversely thinks Putin's malevolence somehow blunts the deadliness of his nuclear weapons and means that the only effect they have is to erect a psychological barrier to providing assistance to a country under attack.

Nuclear deterrence, as a concept, does not work like that.  It pays no heed to the moral rectitude of the person or country that possesses the nuclear arsenal.  The proponents of Britain's nuclear deterrent do not for one moment argue that it is our (dubious) benevolence and virtue that makes the weapon so 'effective' - but rather our amoral determination to obliterate the entire civilian population of our enemies if we are facing defeat. Jo Swinson, leader of the Liberal Democrats as recently as 2019, famously had no hesitation in saying that she would press the nuclear button, thus instantly incinerating untold millions of innocent men, women and children, while leaving untold more millions of innocent men, women and children to die slowly in the weeks thereafter from radiation sickness, horrific burns and starvation.  From the expression on her face, she said this with a degree of levity and with a lightness in her heart.  There are many variants of "liberalism" and "democracy", but this appeared to be a particularly exotic one. President Putin would be entirely comfortable with it.

Just under a decade ago, I wrote a column for the International Business Times arguing that nuclear weapons were "humanity's greatest problem" and that our long-term survival depended on eliminating them completely.  I remember feeling slightly embarrassed when I submitted the column, as if any editor that read it would think I was stuck in a Cold War time-warp.  But that is exactly what is so dangerous - we've been caught in a trance for the last thirty years, imagining that it's perfectly fine to have thousands upon thousands of nuclear weapons sloshing around, enough to wipe out our species dozens of times over, simply because NATO no longer faces a communist bloc in eastern Europe.  (In many ways that's comparable to the current bizarre trance we've slipped into about "the pandemic being over" even though 5% of the entire population are currently walking around with an active infection.)  The reality is that it was always the weapons themselves that were the problem, not ideological competition between communism and capitalism.

If there's any silver lining to come out of the current crisis, it's the education of a new generation about the nuclear threat, and the wake-up call to older generations that the potential for nuclear annihilation outlasted the Cold War.  Hopefully the penny will now drop that if we retain these weapons, nuclear 'close calls' will continue happening periodically, just as they did between the 1950s and 1990s. In each 'close call', there might be only a 1% or 5% chance of escalation to full-scale war, but eventually the law of averages will inevitably catch up with us and human civilisation will perish - perhaps due to a catastrophic strategic miscalculation such as the one proposed by Ms Sturgeon yesterday.  The only way to avoid that fate is global nuclear disarmament.  And, yes, that will be a formidable task for as long as Putin is in power - but we have to understand that we cannot ever "win a nuclear war" against him, and that arming ourselves to the teeth with more and more nukes is the opposite of a solution.

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Please bear with me as I continue promoting Scot Goes Pop's fundraising drive.  Opinion polls are so expensive that since I started commissioning them, fundraising has almost become like painting the Forth Bridge.  If you'd like to help this blog continue for another year, or to help us commission another full-scale poll like the six we've commissioned over the last two years, here are the various options for donating...

Via the Scot Goes Pop polling fundraiser for 2021-22, which I set up in the autumn and is part-funded.

If you prefer to donate directly, that can be done via Paypal or bank transfer:  

My Paypal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Or email me for my bank details.  (My contact email address is different from my Paypal address, and can be found in the sidebar of the desktop version of the site, or on my Twitter profile.) 

Posted by James Kelly at 1:21 PM 12 comments

Wednesday, March 9, 2022

No, Nicola Sturgeon, direct conflict between NATO forces and Russia must not be "considered"

In spite of the well known preoccupations of the SNP's wholly unsuitable defence/foreign affairs team at Westminster, I wouldn't have faulted the Scottish Government's response to the Ukraine crisis until today. However, I see that Nicola Sturgeon has given an interview in which she says that, although she understands the case against a no-fly zone, "all of these things must be considered". That, astoundingly, means she's more hawkish on NATO military intervention than Boris Johnson and the Tory government.

Let's be clear about what a no-fly zone would actually mean. It would mean direct war between NATO and Russia. If Russia attempted to fly over Ukraine, NATO would attempt to shoot the Russian planes down. I know some will argue that's not genuine war, but was the Battle of Britain not genuine war simply because it was confined to the air? Russia has the world's largest nuclear arsenal, and NATO is a nuclear weapons alliance - something the SNP have long objected to, because they understood the appalling risks of nuclear states coming into direct conflict with each other. Now, it appears, the SNP leadership are not merely willing to countenance those risks, but are actively prodding the UK government and others to throw caution to the wind. What is happening to the party we thought we knew?

This, to put it mildly, is not a game. The future of human civilisation is at stake. We could literally all be dead within weeks if a strategic miscalculation is made. You don't provide humanitarian relief to the people of Ukraine by turning their country into a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Nicola Sturgeon may not hold any direct power to make these decisions, but she does possess a measure of 'soft power', and people with that kind of power contribute to a climate of ideas that can prepare the ground for a change in policy. I would urge any SNP members reading this to contact their parliamentary representatives and try to re-instill some common sense into the Scottish Government's pronouncements before it's too late.

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FitzyFan asked yesterday if I could provide more analysis of last week's Savanta ComRes poll on independence.  I'm afraid I can't, because there's still no sign of the data tables.  I don't even know what the fieldwork dates were, and that's the most crucial point of all - were they before or after the invasion started?

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Please bear with me as I continue promoting Scot Goes Pop's fundraising drive.  Opinion polls are so expensive that since I started commissioning them, fundraising has almost become like painting the Forth Bridge.  If you'd like to help this blog continue for another year, or to help us commission another full-scale poll like the six we've commissioned over the last two years, here are the various options for donating...

Via the Scot Goes Pop polling fundraiser for 2021-22, which I set up in the autumn and is part-funded.

If you prefer to donate directly, that can be done via Paypal or bank transfer:  

My Paypal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Or email me for my bank details.  (My contact email address is different from my Paypal address, and can be found in the sidebar of the desktop version of the site, or on my Twitter profile.) 

Posted by James Kelly at 2:15 PM 12 comments

Tuesday, March 8, 2022

Every year in the last fifty has contained a world event that the current SNP leadership could have used as an excuse for postponing an indyref yet again

The above tweets attracted a hysterical response from certain quarters, to which all I'd say is that the SNP leadership loyalists doth protest too much.  They evidently know that this is the point at which they have to double down and claim that the war in Ukraine is yet another totally unforeseeable event that must, sadly and inevitably, delay the supposedly "scheduled" 2023 independence referendum yet again.  If they don't maintain that pretence with the utmost seriousness and self-righteousness, a large chunk of the SNP's own support base might start to think that the leadership have cried wolf once too often.  Actually, they're likely to start thinking that anyway.

Yes, in the literal sense the current war was largely unforeseeable, but what we do know and what we have always known is that major world events will crop up fairly frequently and regularly.  If you squint hard enough, every year in the last fifty has contained an event that could have been used as an excuse by the current SNP leadership for kicking independence into the long grass.  This is not even the first time in the last decade that Russia has invaded Ukraine, and yet other countries' politics have gone on.  It's the third time this century that Russia has invaded a fellow ex-Soviet republic, and yet other countries' politics have gone on.  The Soviet Union was at war in Afghanistan every year between 1979 and 1989, and yet other countries' politics went on.  The US and its allies were at war in Afghanistan every year between 2001 and 2021, and yet other countries' politics went on.  Israel has been in conflict with its Arab neighbours almost constantly since it came into existence in the 1940s, and yet other countries' politics have gone on.

Let's be honest: the only genuine reason the SNP leadership have ever had for postponing an indyref (a reason as opposed to an excuse) was Covid.  It would have been pretty much impossible to hold a referendum during full lockdown, and for campaigning reasons it might have been undesirable to hold it during a partial lockdown.  But with all of the governments of the UK prematurely declaring a return to normality (even though the virus is still absolutely everywhere), that reason no longer applies.  If the Scottish Government are now immediately latching onto yet another totally unconnected "delay is unavoidable" narrative, it's hard to escape the conclusion that they're not looking for opportunities to bring independence about - they're frantically searching for excuses to run away from it.

We as an independence movement don't have to continue going pointlessly round in circles like this.  There's a political party out there that doesn't just believe in independence as a nice idea in the abstract, but actually wants to achieve it in the real world, and with an appropriate sense of urgency.  Please consider giving Alba your first preference vote in the local council elections in May, and let's see if we can get the campaign for independence firmly back on track.

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Please bear with me as I continue promoting Scot Goes Pop's fundraising drive.  Opinion polls are so expensive that since I started commissioning them, fundraising has almost become like painting the Forth Bridge.  If you'd like to help this blog continue for another year, or to help us commission another full-scale poll like the six we've commissioned over the last two years, here are the various options for donating...

Via the Scot Goes Pop polling fundraiser for 2021-22, which I set up in the autumn and is part-funded.

If you prefer to donate directly, that can be done via Paypal or bank transfer:  

My Paypal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Or email me for my bank details.  (My contact email address is different from my Paypal address, and can be found in the sidebar of the desktop version of the site, or on my Twitter profile.)  

Posted by James Kelly at 1:04 AM 6 comments

Sunday, March 6, 2022

Beware the siren voices of tribalism that could help to elect unionist councillors in May

My number one mega-fan in the Wee Ginger Dug comments section, "Hamish100" (who famously couldn't run away fast enough when I offered him a chance to debate me openly on the podcast) has complained about my brief explanation yesterday that I wasn't blogging about Alba NEC meetings due to confidentiality rules.  I must say that I don't quite follow the point he's making - as I understand it, NEC meetings in the SNP are governed by similar confidentiality rules, and even if someone says or does something totally outrageous in an SNP NEC meeting, we only ever find out about it if it's leaked to Iain Lawson.

But whatever Hamish's problem is (he doesn't seem too sure himself), you won't be surprised to hear he thinks it's yet another reason for SNP supporters to help get unionists elected in the council elections in May - 

"Vote SNP, or Scottish Greens . Don’t put a number against anyone else seems a reasonable approach so I have been told"

So you've been told? By who? By someone high up in the SNP, perhaps? Make no mistake, this destructive anti-Alba tribalism carries the very real risk of needlessly getting Labour or Tory councillors elected.  Alba will be standing in a large number of wards, often with credible candidates who have a high profile locally.  They have every chance of being elected - if they get transfers from the surplus votes of SNP candidates who are sure to be returned to office.

In May, I will have no hesitation in asking Alba supporters to help the independence cause by giving their second, third and fourth preference votes to SNP and Green candidates.  If some people in the SNP can't bring themselves to return the favour, my question to them is simple: at what point did independence cease to be your priority, and why?

Elsewhere on the same thread, the Torrid Threesome of Hamish, Alec "LOL" Lomax and Grizebard criticise "divorced from reality" blogs for discussing gender self-ID rather than Ukraine.  They think this is evidence that the writers of those blogs are "parasites on the movement with other motives in mind". So let me get this straight, chaps.  The Scottish Government, through their own free choice, introduce gender self-ID legislation in the middle of the worst European war since 1945, and that is apparently NOT evidence that the Scottish Government are "divorced from reality", and "parasites on the Yes movement" who have "other motives in mind". But if anyone dares to COMMENT on what the Scottish Government have done in the middle of the war, that's somehow a different story?

Er, how does that work?

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Please bear with me as I continue promoting Scot Goes Pop's fundraising drive.  Opinion polls are so expensive that since I started commissioning them, fundraising has almost become like painting the Forth Bridge.  If you'd like to help this blog continue for another year, or to help us commission another full-scale poll like the six we've commissioned over the last two years, here are the various options for donating...

Via the Scot Goes Pop polling fundraiser for 2021-22, which I set up in the autumn and is part-funded.

If you prefer to donate directly, that can be done via Paypal or bank transfer:  

My Paypal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Or email me for my bank details.  (My contact email address is different from my Paypal address, and can be found in the sidebar of the desktop version of the site, or on my Twitter profile.) 

Posted by James Kelly at 1:37 PM 14 comments
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