Spare us the SNP sanctimony about May and migration
The SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon told the Scottish parliament today that Marine Le Pen endorsed Theresa May’s speech to Conservative party conference. There is only one problem with this. It is not true. May’s speech was applauded by a 46 year-old pro-Le Pen activist from Toulouse in a tweet. “It is funny that British MPs cannot recognise an unofficial account. It’s clearly marked on my profile,” he responded last night.
The idea that May’s speech chimed with the ghastly FN and Le Pen was too good to check, and assorted critics (Campbell et al) of the Tory leader piled in clucking in disapproval. Some of the language at Tory conference about migration and foreigners was downright disturbing, and here was the leader of the French Right endorsing May. Case proven. Only Le Pen had not applauded May.
That did not stop the SNP leader from repeating the claim many hours after it had been debunked. Prepare for Sturgeon’s supporters to say that it was “kind of true” or “felt like it could be true”, the ultimate post-truth defence.
The incident highlights again that too many Scottish Nationalists – and the wider Scottish Left – have long been in the grip of a moral superiority complex. By this thinking Scotland is more caring and better than England, because, well, it just is. The roots of this delusion are deep, in Calvinism, in the Scottish Enlightenment, in the Scottish dominance of the British Empire (a third of colonial governors were Scots, it is said), in the Labour movement, and in the media and political folk memory of the Thatcher years. Incidentally, on the latter point – the hatred of Thatcher – it is becoming downright embarrassing for Scottish MSPs and others to fetishise her rule. She stopped being Prime Minister twenty six years ago. Imagine defining life in 1975 in opposition to what happened in 1949.
Now – in May, migration and Brexit – the old enmity gets a fresh boost and the sanctimony starts rising. The quite legitimate concern that the Tories are overdoing it to a dangerous extent, in order to respond to the anger of tens of millions of English voters who want control of immigration, produces rather than a measured statesmanlike response even more of the self-regarding smug rhetoric.
Forget for a moment that the only piece of directly discriminatory legislation – designed to discriminate on grounds of residency and in effect birth – in these islands is the SNP policy on student tuition fees. Scots and students from the EU do not pay, but English students from over the border must. Imagine if English universities reciprocated and levied a Scottish fee, but they wouldn’t and don’t, and being English quietly get on with welcoming all from these islands on an equal basis. What they do in terms of foreign students is obviously going to be a hot topic and May will come under pressure. But they don’t discriminate against Scottish students, like the Scottish government discriminates against English students.
Subscribe to REACTION
Iain Martin and the team make sense of the news, providing commentary and analysis on the stories that matter in politics, geopolitics, economics and culture.