The Closet Conservatives

UNPRECEDENTED TIMES

It was only a matter of time before the frustrated nationalism of the Scottish independence movement turned sour and started looking for targets to scapegoat. This is what has happened.

Scotland is a small country that has always deserved better than its exploitative and abusive union with England. It deserves so much better than Westminster rule and England’s narrow, poisonous, and vindictive right-wing Conservative Party. Scots deserve better than the pathetic eunuch ‘socialism’ of the British Labour Party. But more than this, and this is a painful realisation, Scotland and the Scottish people deserve better than the Scottish National Party and the Alba Party. There was a brief moment from late 2014 when something better was possible, but the failure of the independence campaign of that year and the subsequent failure and decomposition of the independence movement have put the question of independence on ice for decades.

Scottish independence, for the foreseeable future, is dead in the water. It is no longer an achievable political goal (at least in our lifetimes), and only the most fanatical and irrational would argue otherwise. Regardless of our individual hopes for an independent future, as a political movement and as a small colonised and defeated nation, we no longer have the cohesion and cross-partisan solidarity to mount and win another campaign capable of winning out against the British political and propaganda machine. The use of the SNP as a personal fiefdom of a few self-serving career politicians and the adoption of radical right ideas and personalities by Alba have completely buggered any hope of a ‘political vehicle’ for independence for the time being.

From its very inception, the modern campaign for independence has comprehensively misjudged its opponent — Britain. The mass demonstrations, popular marches, and rousing rallies of 2014 appealed to the hearts of the Scottish people. They made people feel good about being Scottish. But struggle, genuine struggle, is not about good feelings and pretty banners and flags. This was the Mollie horse: Will there be sugar after the rebellion? The Scottish National Party thought it could dress like the British and talk like the British in some idiotic plan to win the respect of the British. The SNP thought asking nicely would work. Alba’s strategy was to appeal to the reactionary sentiments of nationalism hoping to perhaps make a socially conservative common cause with the right-leaning base of Scottish unionism. But these people already had the unionist parties, the tabloid media, and GB News.

What the Scottish independence movement failed to grasp was that Britain thinks of the union — England’s dominance of Scotland, the Six Counties, and Wales — as the end justified by any means. This is a state which, not fifty years ago, sent elite units of the British Army into Ireland to massacre Irish civilians, to go from house to house murdering young mothers and priests, and to brutalise Ireland’s independence movement into submission. In this same time, the British government arrested, interned, and tortured Irish Republican volunteers (in Ireland) and allowed them to starve to death in their cells. One of these volunteers was even an elected Westminster MP. This same British government supplied arms and military intelligence to Loyalist murder squads that they might wage a war of terror against nationalist civilians.

David Cameron, the British Prime Minister at the time of the 2014 independence referendum, had previously called for Nelson Mandela to be hanged when he was imprisoned on Robben Island, Pollsmoor, and at Victor Verster prisons in Apartheid South Africa. While we were campaigning for independence in Glasgow and Dundee, the British Army was assisting the United States in a systematic and criminal terror campaign in the Middle East. Criminality is not part of Britain’s ancient history in India. Criminality and violence are essential to the British state. Good feelings north of the Tweed, efforts to look more British than the Brits, and appeals to the viscous nature of unionism stand fuck all chance of destroying Britain. Scotland has never realised this.

Rather, what Scotland has been left with is a slightly redder version of British Labour’s ‘pink socialism’ that will — and it will — shuffle back into the unionist Labour fold, a small middle-class centrist and castrated political ‘elite,’ and a not insignificant number of deeply frustrated nationalists. The emergence of an angry nationalism was always going to be the outcome of the defeat of the independence movement. Such was unavoidable, and Scotland lacked — mainly due to the SNP’s megalomaniacal desire to dominate the independence movement — a strong enough political faction to rein in this impulse. What it got instead was Alba; a party that felt it had to accommodate the hard right of the independence movement to secure any votes from the SNP. What this has produced, of course, is an emboldened hard right in Scotland — on the pro-independence side.

Alba members and voters — with whom I have a great deal of sympathy — are typically working-class and are of course the first to declare their hatred of the British Conservative Party. Almost a decade of activism has made them loud, and they are well-represented on social media. Yet, in spite of their avowed distaste for the Conservatives, they have far more in common with them than they would like to admit. Like the English Tories, they have adopted an ethno-nationalist language; using terms like ‘native born’ and ‘indigenous’ to describe who they perceive to be real Scots. Yes, they frame this — and no doubt many believe it — as a distinction between ethnic Scots and English ‘colonisers,’ but it is easy to see how ‘indigenous’ lends itself to racial conceptions of Scottishness — lex orandi, lex credendi; the language people use informs what they come to believe.

We see this similarity with the right-wing British Conservatives more especially in the fact that Alba has become the hub of anti-transgender opinion and activism. Despite their claim to hate the Conservatives, the litany of shared social positions between them is lengthy and growing. People are met with outrage and anger for pointing this out; for pointing to their transphobic opinions and stating that these are the same opinions of the far-right, the right-wing state stenographer media, the British establishment, and the current British Prime Minister. Rather, than giving this any deeper thought, they project — calling ‘trans rights activists’ the ‘far-right’ and ‘fascists.’

It is altogether quite clear that this has become the home of the closet Conservatives, the reactionary element of the Scottish independence movement. This is not British Conservatism, but it is conservatism. It is proto-fascist Scottish ethno-nationalist conservatism. This is not the position of everyone in Alba, by no means. The party was established as a protest against the SNP. Many of its supporters and members are Alba because of their frustration with the SNP. But this does not change the fact that it has very much become a refuge for ethno-nationalists and an extreme right-wing anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ ideology. Alba has ensured that it will never win an election.