LOOKED at in a certain way, ‘extra-legally’ if you like, Peter Murrell is guilty of no more than seizing money provided for the separatist SNP cause and laundering it viamiscellaneous eccentric purchases to turn it into harmless merchandise: hair dryers, coffee machines, pens etc. Stuff which poses no threat to the stability of the Union.
This is classic spook tradecraft – the diversion of funding away from a demonstrably nefarious intended purpose towards something far more benign. In this case, an invisible motor home.
I’m not suggesting that Murrell was working on behalf of the State and in service of the Unionist cause, but he’s done it no harm. I have some sympathy for him as he begins his five-year prison sentence. It seems a bit harsh. Theft is theft, but some embezzlement adds to the gaiety of the nation.
Especially when it results in an absolutely fabulous shopping receipt which discloses no discernible pattern of purchases.
He’ll do fine in prison, to be fair. He’ll be like the Morgan Freeman character in The Shawshank Redemption, the popular fixer who can get his hands on pretty much anything his fellow lags are after. Or maybe more like Harry Grout in Porridge, whose cell was adorned with random kitsch.
I have less sympathy with Lara Bird, the talented, multi-accented, neo-Scot who tried and failed to be sworn in as an SNP MP for somewhere in Scotland.
I say tried and failedbecause Miss Bird flunked the Oath of Allegiance and is therefore not really an MP until she tries again, perhaps with a view to where she is and not how she looks.
Oaths are speech acts, and the way you say them makes a difference. If you make fun of an oath, while swearing that oath, then you thereby do not complete that oath.
The whole crossing the fingers thing is not trivial. We speak with our bodies as much as with our minds, and a gesture is the completion of a thought.
And if the response to this is that these oaths are symbolic, I reply with the words used by Flannery O’Connor when she said of the Eucharist that ‘if it’s just a symbol then to Hell with it’. Symbols matter.
If Speaker Hoyle wanted his Commons to be taken seriously, he’d do worse than begin with its own protocols of membership. But I digress.
If the SNP is recruiting fakers like Bird, it is no longer a serious political party. Much is made of the (supposedly) inefficient vetting procedures of Reform and Restore. But Bird stands for something far worse in our politics than a candidate with an abrasive social media history. Because you suspect that from the point of view of the SNP her candidacy was no error. This is a party which thinks that a man can choose to be a woman by putting on a dress. It is hardly a stretch to believe also that a posh English bird can become a Scottish class warrior by putting on an accent.
The decent left in Britain, the Orwell patriotic left, has been replaced by the modernists, relativists, and aggressive secularists for whom it is possible to be whatever you want to be, provided you want it hard enough and provided also that what you want is on the approved identitarian list.
When the malleable contours of Miss Bird’s psychology and personal history were disclosed, the SNP defended the nonsense by arguing that because she had spent time in both England and Scotland it is quite natural that she would have both accents.
If we’re to take that seriously as an explanation, rather than a decent gag, it reveals that the SNP is a ‘nationalist’ party with no concept of what ‘nations’ are. A person’s accent is shaped by geography, culture, class, and other factors. It is not transactional. If it changes, as it can, this is not by fiat.
But for the SNP none of this is relevant. Why? Because it is as disdainful of a supporter’s personal history as it is of the Scottish nation’s very specific national history. Its ‘nationalism’ is no more, now, than the delivery mechanism for the newer identitarian theology.
For the contemporary left, the suggestion that anything has an essence is absurd. If you want to be Scottish, a passable Braveheart vibeis quite sufficient while nothing is necessary.
This is why Lara Bird’s fakery is more significant than Peter Murrell’s dishonesty. Dishonesty is nothing new – we have ways of dealing with it and when it comes to politics, we’re only surprised that we’re surprised by it.
Lara Bird, on the other hand, represents the new politics of subjectivism. Where nothing matters and I can be whatever I want and demand that you take part in the fantasy.
