The title of Stuart "Stew" Campbell's latest blogpost rant is "How to create racists", to which the obvious punchline would appear to be "och, just follow Wings Over Scotland social media accounts". Practically every day he pumps out apologism for Reform UK and other parts of the British far-right, or breathlessly talks up their electoral chances, and yet if you point out that it's blindingly obvious he's preparing the ground for an endorsement of Reform at next year's election, he'll innocently deny having any interest in supporting the party at all. Well, we shall find out soon enough, shan't we. I'm pretty confident that almost everything he says these days is gearing up for a pre-planned 'spontaneous' moment of "sod it, alert readers, you know what, I think we need to vote Reform", which he'll already have pencilled in for some time in March, April or early May. If I'm proved wrong about that, he can always gloat about it when the time comes, but I don't expect to be proved wrong, and anyone who reads his new post will understand why.
He starts by making the jaw-dropping claim that anyone who believes in democracy is required to actually celebrate the rise of any far-right party: "The only thing “the rise of Reform” can possibly mean here is “more and more people choosing to vote for, or express their support for, a particular lawful political party in a democracy”. Why are we supposed to think that’s a terrible thing, when it is in fact the entire POINT of democracy."
Wow. The entire point of democracy. Just how far does this logic stretch? Let's take a look, for example, at the results of German elections in the early 1930s, and the increasingly strong results for a particularly well known "lawful party in a democracy" -
1930:
Social Democrats: 143 seats
Nazis: 107 seats
Communists: 77 seats
Centre: 68 seats
July 1932:
Nazis: 230 seats
Social Democrats: 133 seats
Communists: 89 seats
Centre: 75 seats
November 1932:
Nazis: 196 seats
Social Democrats: 121 seats
Communists: 100 seats
Centre: 70 seats
1933:
Nazis: 288 seats
Social Democrats: 120 seats
Communists: 81 seats
Centre: 73 seats
Now, clearly there's a debate to be had over whether the Weimar authorities should have banned the Nazi party before it was too late, or whether the failure was purely that no party offered a compelling enough alternative to Hitler. But whichever of those two options you prefer, it's surely a bit of a stretch to say, as Stew apparently would, that the Nazis' wins have to be enthusiastically applauded simply because they were a "lawful party in a democracy", as if it's a game of cricket in which fours and sixes have to be appreciated and applauded regardless of who scores them. A gas chamber or two probably does make a difference.
Stew then launches into a passionate defence of Reform's policies, but please rest assured that he's not doing this because he's going to tell you to vote for them, perish the thought, etc, etc. Apparently abandoning net zero is fine because Scotland is too small to have any contribution to make to tackling the climate emergency. Just one snag - if every other parcel of five million people on the planet took the same attitude, that would amount to the entire planet deciding to do nothing, and the climate emergency going untackled. So a self-evidently bogus and fraudulent line of argument from Stew, one that he's been called out for many times before.
He tells us that Reform's plans to stop illegal immigration are fine, because "we're all against illegal stuff, aren't we?" Well, no actually, we're not, Stew, or at least not in all cases. Most of us think it was perfectly fine to break apartheid laws in South Africa, or for Sophie Scholl to illegally distribute anti-government leaflets in Nazi Germany. Only a true authoritarian, such as Stew, is blind to the distinction between immorality and illegality.
He tells us that Reform are in tune with the gender critical views of the public. But what the public are plainly not in tune with is Stew's all-consuming obsession with the issue, which leads him to bombard his social media followers with really rather nasty trans-bashing propaganda for hours on end on a daily basis, and to the exclusion of pretty much all other topics, all the way up to genocide. He has so completely lost all sense of perspective on this issue that he's simply in no position to make judgement calls about its salience for the public, which is probably a lot lower than he'd be comfortable believing.
And just when you think he can't make his cheerleading for Reform any more blatant, he tells us at length that Sarah Pochin's self-evidently racist comment was somehow not racist. I'd have hoped it was a statement of the obvious that it's perfectly possible to make a legitimate case against the principle of positive discrimination in the media without using inflammatory language about it "driving you mad" when you see people from ethnic minorities on the TV. Incidentally, the statistical pedant in me feels obliged to point out that Stew and others are making a fraudulent comparison between more than 50% of ads featuring black people when black people make up only 4% of the population. That comparison would only make sense if every ad had only one person in it, but in reality some ads with a black person in it will also have another four or five people from other ethnicities. To prove over-representation, the statistics would have to relate to percentages of people in ads, not to the percentage of ads featuring at least one black person.
But seriously, Stew, repression is bad for mental health, and your overwhelming passion for Farage is becoming the love that dare not speak its name. Best just to make your public endorsement once and for all and put an end to this excruciatingly slow pretend courtship.
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