"Yeah, you know that John Major guy? The Council of Europe FORCED him to give Scotland devolution. He only did it because they MADE him. FACT" - How Sara Salyers wrecked Salvo's credibility yesterday by trotting out a nutty, long-debunked claim

As I said in a recent video, I've tried hard to remain open-minded about Salvo's approach to independence campaigning - not because I think there's the remotest chance of them achieving their stated objective of "decolonising Scotland via the UN", but because I can see how their unusual strategy might yield side-benefits that are distinct from that stated objective.  Those side-benefits mainly boil down to publicity - ie. Salvo and Liberation Scotland might help to increase international awareness of the Scottish independence campaign and of the UK's ongoing denial of Scotland's right to democratic self-determination.

However, there comes a point where you're presented with irrefutable proof that a campaign group is fantasist in nature, and you just can't in good conscience take that group seriously anymore.  I reached that point yesterday when I read Sara Salyers' piece in the Sunday National, which was intended as a rebuttal of recent attacks on Salvo, but instead unwittingly demonstrated that those attacks had considerable validity.  My jaw absolutely dropped to the floor when I reached the start of her fifth paragraph - 

"A two million-strong petition for home rule in 1950 was ignored by the UK Government for 50 years. Only international pressure (the Council of Europe) finally forced the governments of John Major and Tony Blair to accept Scottish devolution"

This guff about the Council of Europe is right up there with "Ronald Reagan only became a communist because the aliens from the spaceship told him to".  It is, not to put too fine a point on it, a batsh*t crazy claim from the wilder fringes of our movement, which I have encountered numerous times over the years, not least in the comments section of this blog.  If I had a pound for every time I've had to patiently try to explain to its wide-eyed proponents why it is completely baseless and utterly without foundation, I'd be...well, not wealthy exactly, but I'd have £30 at least.  To see something that is so monumentally and stupidly wrong being trotted out as fact by the leader of a self-styled "national liberation movement" is nothing short of mind-boggling.  I would go so far as to suggest that this means Ms Salyers should never again be regarded as a reliable witness, and while most of us have no direct knowledge of whether her implausible claims about progress being made at the UN are accurate or not, they certainly shouldn't be taken on trust without corroboration from a far more credible source.

What has always put the Council of Europe claim into a completely different category from other fake histories or conspiracy theories is that you don't actually have to be an expert on the subject to know that it is false.  Literally anyone who lived in Scotland during the relevant period and who regularly watched the news knows that it logically cannot possibly be true for two main reasons:

1) There is no way John Major can have been forced to accept devolution by the Council of Europe, very simply because he did not accept devolution.  Not at any time.  Ever.  He remained viscerally opposed to it quite literally right up to the very second he was removed from office at lunchtime on the 2nd of May 1997.  He was such a roadblock that his election defeat was an absolutely essential prerequisite to devolution being brought about.

2) The Labour Party under Tony Blair did subsequently deliver devolution, but it is impossible for them to have been forced into it by the Council of Europe because the dates don't tally up.  The mythology about the Council of Europe seems to date from a single article written by James Wilkie in 2012, published on Newsnet Scotland and Electric Scotland, about his own lobbying attempts at a Vienna Summit in 1993 - by which point the Labour party had already been long since converted to devolution.  Labour policy initially changed under Harold Wilson in the mid-70s due to severe electoral pressure from the SNP, and accordingly support for an Assembly from Scottish Labour MPs was rather tepid to begin with.  However, a much more confirmational shift occurred during the 1980s due to Thatcherism, with the penny dropping for Labour MPs that if an Assembly had been set up as envisaged by the Scotland Act 1978, Scotland would have been largely governed by Labour throughout the 80s, rather than by Thatcherite Secretaries of State.  By 1990, Labour had already been fully transformed into a thoroughgoing pro-devolution party with only one or two holdout MPs (like Tam Dalyell) remaining opposed.  They were committed to legislating for a Scottish Parliament within the first parliamentary year of the next Labour government, and that is exactly what happened.

Anyone who actually believes the silly myth that the Council of Europe threatened in the 1990s to rescind the UK's membership unless Scotland was given a parliament, and that Labour's devolution policy was a sham until that point but suddenly and quietly became real as a result of Strasbourg's non-existent threat, is - to use the technical term - two sandwiches short of a picnic.

The only limited truth in Ms Salyers' claim is that the Scottish Covenant Association's petition tactics in the early 50s proved to be a failure, and that an alternative strategy ultimately proved far more effective.  But that successful alternative strategy was not international pressure, but instead pressure at the ballot box from the SNP.  Before Winnie Ewing's triumph in Hamilton in 1967, devolution was completely off the political agenda, but after she won, it was immediately bang on the agenda and never went away.  The Kilbrandon Commission was set up as a direct result (Gwynfor Evans' win for Plaid in Carmarthen in 1966 was also a crucial contributory factor) and for a time even the Tories under Edward Heath were converted to the principle of devolution.

The lesson for the present day is that we will win independence by causing the London parties pain domestically.  It can't be done in New York, Geneva or Strasbourg, and that really should be a statement of the obvious.   

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This is Post 4 of "Seven Days of Retro Scot Goes Pop" - a shameless gimmick in which I attempt to solve this blog's funding problems in the space of a week with a conventional text-blogging marathon to help promote my Ko-Fi donations page, during which period pre-moderation in the comments section will be switched off.  My target for the week is to either get up to 60 regular monthly supporters on Ko-Fi (as of now I have 21), or to reach £1500 in one-off donations to the page, or some sort of combination of a bit of both.  In an equally shameless attempt to coax KC's stinking rich Tory landowner chums in Surrey into helping to fund Scot Goes Pop, I have pledged to try to leave pre-moderation switched off even after the seven days are over, but only if at least one of the targets is met in full.  Yes, it's time to play hardball with our resident "Nessie" enthusiast.  

If you might be interested in making either a small recurring monthly donation or a one-off donation, please check out my Ko-Fi page HERE.