I’m a bit tired today, because I was up to 3am last night as a result of the director of a Labour think tank (or technically the Labour director of a ‘non-partisan’ think tank, which is probably a distinction without a difference) having a five-hour long temper tantrum at me. This is the sort of wacky incident that makes my life so thrilling, you guys really don’t know what you’re missing out on. Sunder Katwala’s claimed justification for the intensity of his anger (he literally said that one of my replies was “the most offensive” thing he had ever been sent) was that he believes it is “racist” to suggest that Scotland is subjected to London imperialism, because that somehow trivialises the experience of “real” colonies of the past.
However, given his anger was self-evidently disproportionate to the mild-mannered nature of my tweets, it seemed pretty clear that the convoluted claims of racism were a distraction technique and that he was actually deeply uncomfortable with the points I was confronting him with. Like many Labour people in England (and indeed in Scotland), Sunder imagines himself to be an anti-imperialist and a supporter of liberation movements all over the world, and yet will not apply the same principle to Scotland. And we all know why – it’s got nothing to do with conviction or with logic, and everything to do with Labour self-interest and the imposition of internal discipline within the party in furtherance of that self-interest. So people have to tie themselves up in knots trying to explain why Scotland is, for example, fundamentally different from Ireland – even though Ireland was (and part of it still is) an integral part of the United Kingdom, and thus technically exempt from some people’s definition of the word “colony” in exactly the same way Scotland is. Push them far enough and they’ll get to the risible point of arguing that the difference is that Scotland shares the same island with England, and Ireland does not. Yeah, as if there is no other example anywhere in the world of one country sharing a landmass with another.
Essentially Sunder was trying to “pull rank” on me by praying in aid his mixed race background, and saying that he therefore gets to set the parameters within which Scottish pro-independence discourse may exist. If we step outside those parameters, ie. by suggesting that Scotland’s current relationship with London is colonial or quasi-colonial in nature, we are being “racist”. I must say it’s rather convenient for an English Labour supporter who actively propagandised for a No vote in 2014 to believe he should be universally recognised as the legitimate setter of ground rules for Scotland’s national debate. When I challenged him to identify what was remotely racist about any of the dozens of replies I had sent to him last night, the best he could come up with was the word “visceral” and the phrase “close to the bone” (ie. I had said that his reaction to being confronted with his cognitive dissonance about Scotland was “visceral” because the points being made were “close to the bone”). I then challenged him to explain exactly *what* was racist about those words, and he was curiously evasive for half an hour – before finally blurting out that in his view they were synonymous with the word “coconut”. That’s just about the most fantastical, desperate line of argument I’ve ever encountered. His final tactic was to argue that it didn’t matter if I was using the words according to their plain dictionary definitions – what mattered is that he had “received them” in a completely different way and I should therefore apologise to him for what his own mind had generated!
Unfortunately for Sunder, the visceral reaction I noted in him has nothing to do with his ethnic background, and everything to do with his party affiliation and the British Nationalist dogma that is part and parcel of that affiliation. I’ve encountered exactly such a reaction in the past from many white Brit Nats, most notably when I used to post on the Political Betting website (aka Stormfront Lite) and pointed out that the United Kingdom is essentially “Greater England”. The heat of the fury generated was quite something to behold. They felt their country was being compared to Nazi Germany, because Hitler’s conquests were known as “Greater Germany”. But was the characterisation accurate? After all, Wales was conquered by the Kingdom of England and then annexed. Ireland was conquered by the Kingdom of England, which then imposed a puppet regime which eventually voted through a de facto annexation against the wishes of the population. Scotland is the odd one out because our own homegrown independent parliament did vote through the Treaty of Union, but it wasn’t exactly the freest of choices given that there were military threats and heavy personal bribery involved. As in Ireland, the general population was opposed – dare I say ‘viscerally’ opposed – to the London takeover, and certainly by the time you get to the consequences of the Jacobite defeat at Culloden, with the suppression of the Gaelic language and culture, and the genocidal characteristics of the Highland Clearances, it’s murderously difficult to argue that the treatment of Scotland did not resemble in at least some respects that of other colonial possessions of London.
And now in the modern day, we have the UK Supreme Court and the UK Government declaring that Scotland has no right to determine its own future. On that point, Sunder was last night totally behind the London line – he would only support independence once Scotland had voted for it, but Scotland would not be allowed to vote for it and therefore he would never have to support it. The justification for denying a democratic vote was his own personal opinion that Scotland does not want a vote. When I pointed out that the last two Westminster general elections and the last two Holyrood elections had all produced pro-referendum majorities, he started muttering stuff about opinion polls, which apparently he believes have a higher status under the British constitution than actual election results produced by real sentient human voters resident in Scotland. When I then pointed out that a Redfield & Wilton poll only this month showed a majority of the Scottish public want an independence referendum within the next year, he fell silent, although it does appear that opinion polls with the ‘wrong’ results also have considerably lower status under the British constitution than opinion polls with the ‘right’ results. Bloody flexible constitution we’ve got, I must say.
Don’t want to be accused of imperialism and/or colonialism? It’s really simple, guys: find for us the democratic mechanism by which Scotland can choose to leave the UK without external permission, and then by all means we can have a chat about your fragile feelings.
PS. The funniest part of the whole exchange was when Sunder mused that a “member of my own tribe” would probably be having a quiet word with me to ‘explain’ why the director of a Labour think tank does actually get to decide the parameters of our discourse and that if we stray beyond those parameters we are being “racist”. I don’t think he was aware that my “tribe” is now Alba, and that half the members of Alba joined specifically to get away from the insufferable SNP thought police represented by the Fiona Robertsons of this world.
