Nicola Sturgeon didn't do anything wrong - but politicians need to think about who they help.

   Sturgeon intervenes in aid of benefit cheat; First Minister lobbies for illegal immigrant on drug charges; SNP leadership in cash-for-access row over sale of parliamentary lunches... You could be forgiven for thinking that the SNP administration had taken leave of its senses recently, or belatedly started playing catch up with Labour and the Tories over sleaze. 

  It's given the Scottish press a new angle on the SNP administration, which has been boringly competent for nigh on three years now.  Brings to mind one of those cod ‘apologies’ in Private Eye: “Readers of the Scottish press may have been under the impression that Super Salmond and his team of political visionaries were transforming Scotland through a virtuoso display of modern minority governance and sheer hard work. We now accept that there is not a jot or tittle of truth in this.  In reality, Fat Eck and his sleazy crew of misguided misfits have turned Scottish democracy into a disgrace from which it will never recover. We apologise for any misunderstanding.”

   So what exactly is going on?  Is it all got up by the press as the legion of cybernats believe? Has the SNP been infected with mad party disease?  Is it all over for nationalism?  Well, first of all this is about the curiously intense relations politicians choose to have with their constituents, especially those from an ethnic background. I’ve often been surprised by the lengths MPs and MSPs will go to help them.  As the SNP rightly pointed out last week, Gordon Brown himself has been known to give character references to people on drugs charges, just because they happen to live in his constituency.  Alex Salmond got into some presentational difficulties  lobbying the home office on behalf of a Chinese asylum seeker, also facing drugs charges.  Why do they bother?   Well, partly it’s about votes.  Supporting a member of an ethnic minority in a seat like Govan, where the Asian vote is crucial, can’t do any harm at election time. But I don’t think that was Nicola Sturgeon’s prime motivation.  

  

   These days MSPs are desperate to show that they can actually do things for people. They hope that helping constituents in a jam will generate goodwill as the tale gets circulated round Somerfield and Tescos.  No -  I can’t really explain why Nicola Sturgeon didn’t see why helping this particular individual, guilty of defrauding £80,000, would go down badly in these establishments.  There is nothing that angers people more than benefit cheats.  I can accept that she genuinely felt that Abdul Rauf had shown remorse and started to pay back the money and that incarceration might endanger his health.  But many Govan constituents will say he should have thought of that before he did the crime..  Alex Salmond insisted at First Minister’s Question Time last week that it was an MSP’s “bounden duty” to support a constituent “without fear or favour”.   But that doesn’t mean supporting them right or wrong. 

   Of course, Nicola Sturgeon herself did nothing wrong, as far as we know. There was no ministerial impropriety, no money involved and no cover up.  But these issues are all about perception, about judgement.   There was an echo of the al Megrahi affair, when the SNP justice Minister, Kenny MacAskill suffered collateral damage from his dogged decision to follow “due process” and release the Lockerbie bomber to die at home in Libya.  MacAskill similarly argued that he had done the right thing - while others said that giving special treatment to convicted mass murderers sent out the wrong message.  

 Actually, I think these latest scandalettes have more to do with independence than constituency politics or the law.   How so?   Well,  because this latter half of the first ever nationalist term of office was supposed to be about one thing and one thing only: securing that referendum on independence.   The bill should have been presented by now,  allowing Scottish voters the opportunity to demonstrate their enthusiasm for leaving the UK.  Nothing was supposed to get in the way, which is why there’s nothing really hot on the legislative agenda right now, nor any innovative policies emerging from Bute House.   

   Cynics might say that the SNP were anyway running out of ideas and running out of puff.  A lot of manifesto promises have had to be ditched -  local income tax, class sizes, the futures trust.   But  in Alex Salmond’s plan, 2010 was always marked out as the year for “raising Scotland’s game”.  Unfortunately, the Scots don’t seem to want to play at the moment.   I’m not saying that independence is a dead duck, but it’s not looking too healthy right now.  Support for independence in most tests of opinion remains well below 30%, while the SNP itself is losing ground  to Labour in voting intentions, both for Holyrood and for Westminster.  Partly this is an inevitable backwash from the economic crisis - people simply have other things on their minds right now, like their jobs, houses.   There’s some truth in the claim by Jim Murphy, the Labour Scottish Secretary, that the banking crisis made voters look to the security of the UK.   But whatever the cause, the urgency seems to have gone from the whole constitutional issue. This doesn’t mean it’s all over for nationalism, but what it does mean is that the SNP is stuck on the stage without any music to play - or anything the voters want to hear.  The government has begun to drift, and when governments drift, thing go wrong.  Ministers lose concentration and become accident prone.

  They should console themselves that Alex Salmond’s approval ratings are still high.  Labour’s performance in Holyrood has been dismal until the row over Nicola and the benefit cheat presented Iain Gray with an open goal last week.   After an inordinately long honeymoon  normal political service is is jut reasserting itself.   Never having been in government before, the SNP is unused to this experience and is in danger of overreacting to it.   Governments must get used to being disliked and stay calm when things go wrong. They could still come out strengthened.   This is a test of the moral fibre of the nationalist movement.  They must learn the most important quality in government is an ability to keep the heid. 

 

What's the difference between the SNP and the BNP?

“What's the difference between the SNP and the BNP? One letter and four hundred miles “ or so they used to say in the far Left. When I was young I used to annoy my late mother – a prominent nationalist in the1970s – by saying that the SNP was “racism with a human face”. I was completely wrong of course – it is nothing of the kind.


The modern SNP is a civic nationalist party, which enthusiastically accepts non-Scots as members and was the first Scottish party to have a Muslim MSP. Anyone who happens to live in Scotland can claim Scottish nationality under the SNP constitution, and it has an open door policy on immigration. Really, you can't get much less racist than that.


Nevertheless some people still try to taint the SNP by association. In the Nineties, the former Labour Scottish Secretary, George Robertson, invoked the “dark side of nationalism” and claimed that the SNP would turn the UK into a Balkanised state riven by ethnic cleansing. And now Tom Gallagher, Professor of Peace and Ethnic Conflict at Bradford University, has accused Alex Salmond of trying to revive the “blood and soil” nationalism of the 1930s.


In an interview for yesterday's Sunday Herald, Professor Gallagher declared that the SNP leader was bent on “junking civic nationalism for an emotion-laden ethnic variety”. He went on: “The SNP sometimes finds it difficult to resist the emotional forms of mass manipulation associated with Europe in uglier times”. In other words: watch out in case Alex Salmond morphs into Radovan Karadzic without the top knot.


What Gallagher finds objectionable is the SNP's celebration of victories against the English, like Bannockburn, and its celebration of Scottishness in the “Homecoming”. Presumably, Scots should erase their history and culture and discourage ethnic Scots from coming here lest they turn it into a tartan ghetto. This is rather like Bonnie Greer, the deputy chair of the British Museum, on Question Time last week, saying that there's no such thing as the British people because they all migrated here from Africa.


One of the unfortunate by-products of the media hysteria about the British National Party is that any discussion of nationhood is regarded now as crypto-fascist. The National Museum of Scotland, with its celebration of the Declaration of Arbroath - “So long as but a hundred of us are left alive...” - would presumably have to be closed if Ms Greer got her hands on it. And it goes without saying that Professor Gallagher would ban films like “Braveheart” and “Rob Roy”, and most of the Waverley Novels.


But nations are a reality and the people who choose to live in them – however mongrel their origins – are entitled to celebrate their national identity and their history. I personally find the Homecoming emphasis on golf and whisky rather depressing, because Scotland is so much more than that. But to condemn national symbols like the kilt and bagpipes, or say people shouldn't commemorate Bannockburn is as ludicrous as saying that the Tartan Army shouldn't support the Scottish football team. You might say they're indulging in collective masochism, but that's a matter of individual choice.


However, one question arises following the BNP scare: just why is the SNP is so different from Griffin's crowd, and from most nationalist parties in Europe? You may notice that the SNP doesn't have a great deal to do with a lot of the nationalist parties in Eastern and Central Europe these days. This is because a lot of them are rather right wing, and some of them, like Michal Kaminski of the Polish Law and Justice Party are extremely right wing. David Cameron may be comfortable sitting with Latvia's For Freedom and Fatherland party in the European Parliament, but you won't find the SNP inviting FFF's Roberts Zile to the next Bannockburn shindig


Now, the usual response to this question is to say that Scottish nationalism isn't concerned with race because there is no race 'problem' in Scotland. The non-white community in Scotland is only around 3% of the population. In England the percentage is more than twice that, and in multicultural London is nearer 25%. But this is a very unsatisfactory. Are we saying that, if there were a flood of Afro-caribbeans entered Scotland, that the SNP would turn into the BNP overnight? Of course it wouldn't More likely the BNP would start organising in Scotland. Actually they already are. The BNP won 2% of the Scottish vote in the European elections in June – 29,000 votes. There is no natural immunity from racialism in Scotland.


But we are fortunate in having nationalist party which is immune to racialism. There were some crypto-racists in the SNP's past – Hugh MacDiarmid, one of Scotland's greatest poets, was virulently anti-English. You used to see “English Go Home” signs daubed on motorway fly-overs next to the SNP symbol. There was even an explicitly “blood and soil” wing of the SNP called “Seed of the Gael” which was stamped out in the 1970s. No speaker could stand today at an SNP conference and deliver an anti-English speech.   I have never heard Alex Salmond or any of the SNP leadership express anti-English feeling in public or even in private - which, come to think of it, is pretty amazing for the leaders of a nationalist party.

  There used to be talk of the “Englishing” of Scotland. But this never turned into cottage burning or intimidation of English people taking Scots jobs. Indeed, Highlanders may have been rather too willing to accept living in caravans while incomers bought up the housing stock and the local businesses. If Barack Obama had been a community activist in the north of Scotland he'd probably have been organising squats and boycotts of holiday homes.


We must stop allowing the BNP to dictate the terms of the debate on national identity. Racism and ethnic chauvinism in all its forms is repellent and inexcusable, and MacDiarmid's memory is sullied by his flirtation with it. But this is not the same as love of country or celebration of community identity. The SNP is not racist, and never will be, because it does not have, at its root, any concept of national or ethnic superiority. As for Land of Hope and Glory at the last night of the Proms - well, that's a different kettle of fish.