The Famous Hypocrisy of the Grouse

So it's a curious thing - as you may have seen on Twitter, I've been receiving some totally unprovoked abusive DMs from Grouse Beater of all people. I did have problems with him many, many years ago, but someone interceded to end the rift, I had a long phone conversation with him and we made our peace with each other.  Since then, I've gone out of my way to tread gingerly with him, and when I've seen him have blazing arguments with other people (including in the comments section of this blog), I've just stood right back and let him get on with it, even when I thought he was in the wrong. But even those precautions weren't enough, it seems.

So what's his foul-mouthed harrumphing about this time?  To be blunt, it's just sheer hypocrisy on his part.  As you may remember, he was expelled from the SNP several years ago for alleged anti-semitism.  Countless numbers of us defended him at the time, because his words were actually extremely ambiguous and were open to plenty of alternative innocent explanations.  But no good deed goes unpunished, as the saying goes, and he seems to now have a visceral loathing of many of those who defended him most strongly, because some of them have since fallen foul of strikingly similar abuses of the Alba disciplinary process and have dared to speak up about it, just as he spoke up about the SNP's ill-treatment of himself. Suddenly he's become a born again Stalinist, saying that anyone who has been trampled on should just shut up and slink away where he doesn't have to think about them or remember their existence, because it's just so darn inconvenient to the party that large numbers of people should actually know that abuses of power have taken place.  As long as he isn't the one on the receiving end, and as long as the people being silenced are ones he dislikes and would prefer to shut up, it's all totally fine.

In fact, let's be honest: he would be an enthusiastic cheerleader for someone being expelled for exactly the same reason he was expelled from the SNP, just so long as you first stick a blue Alba rosette on the Conduct Committee.

Bizarrely, what seemed to trigger him tonight was that the people he calls "the Famous Five", which seems to be an alternative name for Shannon Donoghue's "wee gang of malcontents", have been paying generous tribute to Alex Salmond and saying very complimentary things about him. 

I asked Grouse Beater if he would prefer them to be making disrespectful comments about Mr Salmond at a time like this.  Unsurprisingly, he didn't have much of an answer.

Could I just say to @Grouse_Beater, who has been sending me totally unprovoked abusive DMs and blocking me before I could reply: you, sir, are a hypocrite. You, sir, are a coward. I'm not going to tolerate this behaviour from anyone, no matter what my previous respect for them.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) October 15, 2024

So where does the independence movement go from here?

Robin McAlpine's latest piece presents the independence movement as having been "orphaned" by Alex Salmond's death, with a sudden realisation that "we're going to have to do it on our own", and with no sign of a new generation of Salmond-like charismatic leaders to guide us to the promised land.  Others have expressed similar sentiments, but I must say I don't see it that way.  If the orphaning occurred, it was several years ago.  When Mr Salmond appeared on mainstream media in recent years, it was generally only to commentate on the fortunes of his former colleagues, in much the same way that Roy Hattersley used to pop up now and again to give his thoughts on New Labour.  Mr Salmond was no longer really seen as an active participant in the political process, even though on paper that's exactly what he was.

It's possible that he could yet have become an active participant once again on more than just paper, and that was what all of us in Alba hoped for, but my own view was that was becoming less and less likely due to Alba's direction of travel - in other words its drift towards authoritarianism (with accompanying mini-purges), which made it more and more of a narrow sect centred around a few closely-knit families and friends, rather than the open, welcoming space for everyone on the radical end of the independence movement that it really needed to be to have any hope of creeping up to the level of support that might win it Holyrood list seats.  Now is not the moment to be commenting in detail on the extent to which Mr Salmond's own decisions contributed to Alba going down that wrong path, although in fairness he may sometimes have been faced with impossible dilemmas given his heavy reliance on those who were keeping the party afloat financially.  

So even without the tragic loss of Mr Salmond, it's highly likely that independence would have had to be won by a new generation of talent within the SNP's own ranks.  (Unless of course John Swinney actually *does something* in his remaining time as leader, but we all know he won't.)  Realistically, that probably means Kate Forbes and Stephen Flynn.  The current ruling faction clearly want Flynn to be the next leader with Forbes in a lesser role, whereas I firmly believe it should be the other way around - Forbes as leader, Flynn as second-in-command.  But either way they look like being the two key figures.  Charisma-wise, how do they compare with Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon at a similar stage in their careers?  I would actually say extremely well.

In my blogpost in the minutes after Mr Salmond's death was announced, I mentioned that he single-handedly converted me to the cause of independence with his persuasiveness in a 1992 episode of Election Call hosted by Nick Ross.  That's absolutely true, but I have other memories of his TV performances from around that time which are much more mixed. When he stood for SNP leader in 1990, I was very, very young, but I was just about old enough to be taking a tentative interest in politics, and I remember him taking part in an informal debate with his opponent Margaret Ewing on Left, Right and Centre - Kirsty Wark's show, although Brian Taylor was the moderator for the debate.  Taylor asked the two candidates how they differentiated themselves from each other, and Ms Ewing was extremely clear - she felt she had a stronger focus on social justice.  But Mr Salmond kept speaking on her behalf, saying that Taylor was going to fail to identify any divisions because Ms Ewing actually agreed with him about absolutely everything.  I found that tactic slightly irritating, and I bet I wasn't the only viewer who reacted like that.  

Mr Salmond himself used to recount an incident from the late 80s, when he got annoyed with Robin Day for shutting him down on an episode of Question Time.  Day asked him to watch the programme back and see if he felt the same way afterwards.  He took that advice and phoned Day later to apologise, because he realised that he had gone too far and had been in danger of losing the audience, and that if anything Day had done him a massive favour by stopping him.  So in a nutshell Mr Salmond was not the finished article in the late 80s and early 90s, and we tend to forget that.  He was a good debater but he still had plenty left to learn, and plenty of rough edges to smooth off.  Even by around 1995, when he was 40 years old and had started to rack up a few electoral breakthroughs, he wasn't yet being talked about as one of the finest politicians of his generation.  He grew in stature over the late 90s, and even during the four years in the early noughties when he was no longer leader.

The pattern was similar for Nicola Sturgeon.  Before Mr Salmond's dramatic comeback, she had been intending to stand in the 2004 leadership election, but no-one was in any doubt that she would have lost to Roseanna Cunningham.  That seems incredible in retrospect, but the 34-year-old Sturgeon simply wasn't seen as the political titan she later became.  I've said myself that I never rated the younger Ms Sturgeon - I thought she mimicked Mr Salmond's style of delivery but lacked his charisma.  I felt she came across as an automaton.

Which is as much as to say that politics isn't tennis - ie. it's not necessarily a young person's sport, and there's no reason to assume thirtysomethings like Forbes and Flynn have yet reached their peak.  They're already highly regarded and as they become older they could easily emerge as statesmen/stateswomen on a par with Salmond and Sturgeon.  My question is not whether they're charismatic enough, but whether they're sufficiently committed to do what it takes to bring about independence, or whether other priorities will get in the way.

I had a long conversation with Alex Salmond during the 2023 SNP leadership election.  Although that was eighteen months ago, I think that was the second-last time I spoke to him before he died - relations subsequently cooled after I started taking a stand against the Alba leadership's increasing authoritarianism.  I don't think I'm revealing any state secrets in saying that he regarded Humza Yousaf as having no interest at all in delivering independence, and that he broadly sympathised with the strategy Ash Regan had set out (although he was at pains to point out that Ms Regan was genuinely not 'his' candidate and she was not doing his bidding - it was just a natural convergence of views).  However, I knew Ms Regan had next to no chance of winning, so I asked Mr Salmond the only question that seemed to matter: "what about Kate Forbes?"

He paused for a moment, chuckled, and said "well, I think she does support independence".  OK, that's a start, I said.

As far as Alba's own potential role is concerned, I and others have tried over the last year to democratise the party but hit a brick wall, which leaves power heavily concentrated in the leader.  That means absolutely everything depends on who is elected to replace Mr Salmond.  It shouldn't need to be as 'all or nothing' as that but unfortunately it is.  If an authoritarian machine politician becomes leader, the party will be essentially finished.  A reforming leader might just give it a fighting chance.

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SCOT GOES POP FUNDRAISER 2024: I took a prolonged break from promoting the fundraiser during the general election period, but I'll have to make some serious progress over the coming days and weeks if the blog is to remain viable.  Many thanks to everyone who has donated so far.  Card donations can be made via the fundraiser page HERE, or direct donations can be made via Paypal.  My Paypal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Alex Salmond's appearance on the Scot Goes Popcast, 6th April 2021

A couple of you have asked for the link to Alex Salmond's appearance on the Scot Goes Popcast at the time of Alba's founding.  You can watch the video version below.  I was one of umpteen alternative media people (and indeed mainstream media people) who were given a slot with him that day, so he'd already been going for hours by the time it was my turn - his mental stamina was incredible.

Although I was an enthusiast for the Alba project and I may already have joined the party by the time the interview took place, I didn't allow my journalistic pride (or my blogger's pride if you prefer) to desert me - I made sure I asked him a few awkward questions.  One in particular had longer term significance than I could possibly have realised at the time.

It's only 25 minutes long, so sit back and allow yourself to be transported back in time three and a half years to what already seems like a very different political era.

John Mason's ridiculous expulsion suggests the SNP have learned absolutely nothing from the Rutherglen debacle - you can't throw seats away like confetti and expect there to be no consequences

The SNP's decision to suspend the whip from John Mason a couple of months ago was interesting. They did it on the grounds that he had denied Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, which suggested to me that the party had moved an extraordinarily long way in a relatively short period of time.  It was only a few years ago, of course, that they were expelling Grouse Beater and suspending Neale Hanvey on very dubious allegations of anti-semitism, decisions that were followed by informal but pompous online seminars from the party's self-appointed enforcer of identity politics doctrines, Fiona Robertson.  She decreed that the SNP had to adhere to the IHRA definition of anti-semitism in full, because minority groups have the absolute right to determine for themselves what constitutes bigotry against them.  If the SNP had continued down that road, they would have ended up occupying exactly the same space as the Starmerites, and Mr Mason would not currently be getting expelled for denying the Gaza genocide, he would be receiving a medal.  I mean that absolutely seriously, because the claim of genocide is precisely the sort of criticism of Israel that the IHRA definition was intended to disallow and make unsayable.

So in a way Mr Mason's initial suspension had a kind of positive symbolism to it, if only because it was a demonstration that the SNP had decisively moved away from the Cult of Fiona, at least in one specific sphere.  But any upside of it only really applied if the suspension was going to be strictly time-limited, and initially the clear indication was that it would be.  To expel the guy from the party altogether is an absolutely shocking decision, and I think there's a warning here for everyone, no matter what your views or beliefs: if you celebrate a disciplinary process being abused against an individual because you disagree with his or her politics, it could easily be you or a friend of yours on the receiving end if the wheel turns and another faction ends up in power, or even if there's a more gradual evolution in the leadership's prevailing views, which is the case here.  Conversely, if you oppose disciplinary action because you can see that an individual is being targeted for their views, you really have to check yourself and make sure that you actually do oppose that abuse of procedure as a matter of principle, and not just because the victim is a fellow traveller of yours.  What we've seen in Alba over the last few months is almost unarguable proof that many people who blasted the authoritarianism of the Sturgeonite SNP are actually totes cool with authoritarianism as long as it's the supposedly "correct" views that are being heavy-handedly enforced, and the supposedly "wrong" views that are being cracked down upon and silenced.

Don't get me wrong, and I hope my Twitter history leaves no room for doubt on my views about the situation in Gaza.  I think Mr Mason's views were abhorrent, and seem to mainly reflect the weird obsession that evangelical Christians have with the Israeli state.  But the correct response to those views would have been to condemn them and face them down, not to try to expel them out of existence by expelling the man who expressed them.  Apart from anything else, this decision suggests the SNP have learned nothing from the debacle of the totally unnecessary Rutherglen by-election, which heavily contributed to Labour's momentum in Scotland in the run-up to the general election.  The obvious lesson should have been that you can't throw parliamentary seats away like confetti for virtue-signalling purposes, or at least not without suffering heavy consequences sooner or later.

As with Neale Hanvey in 2019, I wonder if the stated reason for Mr Mason's expulsion is not entirely honest and is a proxy for the real underlying reason.  In Mr Hanvey's case, it was disapproval of his gender critical views, and in Mr Mason's case it may be his views on abortion that have rendered him 'undesirable'.  He can't really be openly disciplined for his abortion stance because it would look like an attack on freedom of conscience for religious groups.

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SCOT GOES POP FUNDRAISER 2024: I took a prolonged break from promoting the fundraiser during the general election period, but I'll have to make some serious progress over the coming days and weeks if the blog is to remain viable.  Many thanks to everyone who has donated so far.  Card donations can be made via the fundraiser page HERE, or direct donations can be made via Paypal.  My Paypal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Simply astounding: just three months after their "loveless landslide", Labour have *lost their poll lead* and have a vote share similar to John Major in the mid-90s

I said a few days ago that crossover seemed to be approaching, and although we still haven't quite hit that point yet, a major landmark has today been reached with the first GB-wide poll from any firm since March 2022 that does not show Labour in the outright lead.  To put that in perspective, Boris Johnson was still Prime Minister in March 2022.

GB-wide voting intentions (More in Common):

Conservatives 27%

Labour 27%

Reform UK 21%

Liberal Democrats 13%

Greens 7%

SNP 2%

During the period between the Trussmageddon and the general election, I used to occasonally squint at polls showing a dip in the huge Labour lead and wonder if we were seeing the earliest hints of a turnaround.  That was never the case, and in retrospect it looks like a Labour landslide (at least in terms of seats) was inevitable from the day of Kwarteng's mini-budget.  But it turns out that all that needed to happen for Labour to lose their lead was for them to actually get into power and for voters to experience the disappointment first-hand.  It's surely likely to get even worse for them, because incredibly the right-wing vote is still almost evenly-split between the Tories and Reform UK, and as soon as that starts to consolidate, a Labour vote share of circa 27% will leave Starmer in an incredibly deep hole.  It's the sort of vote share John Major had in the depths of his unpopularity in the mid-90s.

The fieldwork for this poll seems to have been mostly conducted before James Cleverly's shock elimination from the Tory leadership election, which Labour regarded as Christmas coming early.  We'll see, but I'm not convinced that it's going to make such a difference, or at least not in the way they're banking on.  A hard right Tory leader might even speed up the process of consolidating the combined Tory/Reform UK vote.

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Just a quick note about the blogpost I put up yesterday before the dreadful news about Alex Salmond came in. I announced that I was taking a break from blogging to prepare properly for the Alba disciplinary hearing, which was scheduled for Thursday night, and in particular to compile my written submission, the deadline for which was tomorrow afternoon.  I'm abandoning that plan, because I'm assuming the hearing is now almost certain to be postponed.  That may yet prove to be a dangerous assumption, but I think it's one I have to make in the circumstances.

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SCOT GOES POP FUNDRAISER 2024: I took a prolonged break from promoting the fundraiser during the general election period, but I'll have to make some serious progress over the coming days and weeks if the blog is to remain viable.  Many thanks to everyone who has donated so far.  Card donations can be made via the fundraiser page HERE, or direct donations can be made via Paypal.  My Paypal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk