I think I am correct in saying that for the first time in the 90-year history of the SNP, its leader has proposed that his party policy should be to have Scottish soldiers involved in overseas military adventurism wearing Scottish regiment colours. This is not a small thing.
This is being met in the other direction by the usual SNP loyalist voices who claim that nothing bad is ever happening and everyone who thinks bad things are happening is a security services plant or whatever distracting hyperbole they can hammer out on their keyboards. But their exhortations are all just noise because facts remain facts.
And the fact is that John Swinney is turning the SNP into something broadly unrecognisable in terms of its underpinning philosophy. Please remember, he tried to do this the last time. I have three direct sources who were in the room when Swinney was last leader and tried to persuade the National Executive Committee of the party to support the Iraq War.
It’s just that back then the SNP still had democracy and its governing body wasn’t a clamjamfry of toadies, careerists and entryists who drown out anyone the membership actually elects to that body. Back then the leader had to ask. Back then the party would say no. Back then is a long way away.
Let’s just get the history straight; the SNP since it was formed has opposed every major military conflict involving Britain. All of them without exception, because all of them without exception were about something other than defending the sovereign territory of Scotland.
In the way that this anti-militarist sentiment was at the heart of Irish independence and has remained the underpinning international philosophy of the Republic of Ireland to this day, the SNP used to be divided on much but united on the idea that the British state had shown, relentlessly, that militarism was the mindset of the bully and that it’s practical application broke everything to which it was applied.
The SNP opposed militarism because militarism is such a fundamental philosophy of the United Kingdom, a philosophy the SNP used to abhor and reject. I want to be clear what that means though. The SNP wasn’t anti-defence and it certainly wasn’t anti-security, but militarism is something else.
Militarism is the idea that you can solve your problems through guns being fired somewhere else, or that it is your right to intervene in other people’s problems because you can, or that it is legitimate to shape the world through force and violence. Defence is being ready to use force and violence only to protect your own territorial integrity. Security is making sure your population is safe.
They need to believe of an always-on threat because militarism is a vicious circle – when you believe bombs are the solution, problems always look like someone in need of bombing
Morality is nothing to do with this. No-one disputed that Sadam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait was wrong, but the SNP did not believe that starting a war was the way to resolve it so opposed the first Gulf War. Likewise no-one disputes that the world would be better without the Taliban or that Saddam Hussein was a brutal and ruthless dictator Iraq’s people did not deserve.
And yet the SNP opposed both the Afghan and Iraq wars. Well, they did once the party overturned Swinney’s bloodlust. Before that was a picture not dissimilar to the one we see now. In the Balkans there was clearly a moral imperative to ‘do something’ and there was a clear aggressor. But then-SNP leader Alex Salmond described a military intervention as an “unpardonable folly”.
That was a highly unfashionable view in the world of British political insiders. When one of the fundamental tenets of your entire post-imperial nation is that violence solves problems, it becomes very easy to assemble the kind of universal group-think that says ‘well this is definitely a problem and it involves violence, so…’.
I don’t have the space here to explain how overwhelmingly right Salmond proved, even through the liberal consensus has largely patted themselves on the back, which has required people to overlook the unfortunate and problematic fact that almost all the genocide of Kosovans took place because the UN withdrew its peacekeeping force in preparation for Nato bombing.
This consensus is back again. They refuse to accept that it was Western militarism that led Putin on the path from Western-backed stabilising hand to anti-democratic menace-to-his-neighbours. They cannot see that peace with soldiers pointing guns at each other over a border isn’t peace at all but another Cold War. What Swinney is proposing isn’t a UN-backed peacekeeping force, it’s an offensive army in a foreign country.
The liberal establishment also refuse to accept the reality that the fiction they created of a Russia which is a credible threat to Western Europe, all to shore up their militarism, really is a fiction. I very, very strongly doubt Russia is in a fit state to invade any other nation in the near future and I equally doubt that the population (including the elites) will throw more of themselves at Polish guns. Ukraine and its history really is deeply linked to Russia; Poland is not.
They need to believe of an always-on threat because militarism is a vicious circle – when you believe bombs are the solution, problems always look like someone in need of bombing. It is garbage. It was a Republican US president who coined the phrase ‘military-industrial complex’ as a warning, not some lilly-livered leftie.
None of this matters to the current SNP. It has no real moral centre. Or rather its moral centre is that it must believe that it has a superior moral centre. It doesn’t have to have one, it just needs ‘values’ that make it look like it does. Watching the very-rich investment sector crowing about how they can now get even richer through exploiting young people during a housing crisis all because John Swinney scrapped rent protections for them was truly stomach-turning.
So when Swinney is gung-ho for ‘Scottish’ troops in Ukraine I can promise there is no sophistication of thought here. This is policy lifted from London liberal Twitter and imposed on his party. Had he said ‘as part of a UN force’ or ‘as part of a future European army’ there would be something approaching consistency with the traditions of the party. They’d clearly be fictions, but they’d be ethically consistent fictions.
We need a lasting, meaningful peace in Europe and guns will not create that
That isn’t what is happening. I am increasingly struggling to be persuade that Swinney isn’t just a Perthshire Tory who happens to support independence. I think this is just cowardice, the result of a weak man making policy that he thinks will be easy, exactly the opposite to the various courageous stances the party has taken over its history.
In 2012, when campaigning against the SNP’s Nato u-turn, I argued really strongly that if they turned their history upside down in this way then it was a matter of time before they were arguing for a Scottish Army to be involved in foreign wars. The loyalists sucked air through their teeth and gave a very strong impression that I smelled strange. Of course that wouldn’t happen.
But then the extent to which the loyalists have absorbed u-turns on everything, only breaking step to monster those of us who were right in the first place, means it is difficult to have much respect left for the party loyalists. Then again, they can’t have much self-respect left given how often they’ve had to argue against positions they previously held aggressively (oh how I suffered from pointing out that Sturgeon was never going to deliver a referendum…).
And so it is that when I now say that for the first time I’m questioning whether I can be confident that the leadership won’t overturn their anti-Trident position it’s because that seems quite likely. Once you ditch your core philosophy, you have no philosophy.
I can imagine how virulently the loyalists will argue that calling for Scottish boots on foreign soil isn’t a u-turn. They will I’m sure explain how joining the UK in believing that the future is one where we spend more and more on weapons so we can stand shoulder to shoulder with the Brits, all pointing guns together across the Russian border, isn’t precisely what it looks like.
Then again, those people told me the SNP’s governance reforms were going to be real, and big, and serious. And all of this is because the SNP really is now unrecognisable from the party I once knew. Swinney’s aides will say this is just the party ‘growing up’, because that’s what Starmer’s aides are saying and the two are basically in lockstep as they march ever rightwards.
We need a lasting, meaningful peace in Europe and guns will not create that. I’m all for a collective European defence system. But I remain opposed to the provenly-mistaken belief that pointing guns makes the world safer. It is a belief the SNP used to share. It is a belief that they have abandoned, along with so many more…