Labour’s doomed attempt to paint the SNP as a threat to national security
Speymouth
The oil is running out, all the banks will leave, you won’t have a pension, you can’t use the pound, the EU won’t let you back in, and now we have – the SNP are a threat to national security. This wasn’t an off the cuff remark from a harried Labour minister being put under pressure during a TV interview on BBC Scotland – there must be some parallel universe somewhere in the multiverse where Labour ministers are put under pressure by BBC Scotland, because it sure as hell isn’t this one – the line that the SNP led Scottish Government is a threat to national security was used by no less than three cabinet ministers, Defence Secretary John Healey, Scotland Secretary Douglas Alexander and Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy, the last of whom bizarrely justified his deployment of the smear by claiming that a DNA test informed him that he’s 5% Scottish.
When three cabinet ministers use the same attack line against their opponents within the space of a few days, it’s part of an orchestrated campaign devised by the party strategists. Condemning a political opponent as a”threat to national security” is an alarming development coming from a party like Keir Starmer’s Labour party, which has already displayed its authoritarian instincts, ruthlessly clamping down on even mild internal dissent within Labour, purging and demonising Starmer’s rivals on the Labour left, announcing plans for ID cards which would be effectively compulsory, and above all, proscribing a direct action protest group as a terrorist organisation, resulting in hundreds of people who clearly pose no threat being arrested for the “terrorist offence” of holding up a placard.
Labour has denounced the SNP and the Scottish Government as a threat to national security because of their opposition to nuclear weapons, a position which was until recently also espoused by members of the Labour party and which is very much mainstream in Scottish politics. The SNP and the Scottish Government oppose the siting of nuclear weapons on Scottish soil by Westminster for many reasons, the moral abomination of weapons of mass destruction, the knowledge that these weapons make Scotland a prime target in the event of war breaking out which could lead to the annihilation of the great majority of the Scottish population and rendering most of the country uninhabitable for centuries. It’s no hyperbole to say that this could potentially cause the extinction of Scotland.
But even without the worst happening, the UK’s nuclear arsenal does not keep us safe, it’s merely a ruinously expensive nuclear Viagra to allow British nationalists to pretend that their flaccid former empire is still a global player and not just a mid-sized European power. Despite the UK’s claims it’s not even an independent nuclear capability, being entirely an adjunct of the Americans’s nuclear arsenal, one which can never be used without the permission and co-operation of the Pentagon. The UK spaffs away billions of pounds annually on a weapons system whose main purpose is to massage the egos of British politicians. That’s money which could be more productively spent on improving public services or on conventional defence.
In pursuit of this nuclear wet dream, the Westminster government not only wastes hundreds of billions of pounds, it also risks the lives and health of the people of Scotland, having chosen to site its nuclear bases less than an hour away from Scotland’s largest conurbation, where more than 40% of the entire Scottish population live. These bases are polluting, pumping out radioactive waste into the waters of the Firth of Clyde and contaminating the Scottish environment. This contamination has been taking place foe decades, on military bases which have a cavalier attitude to environmental protection, safe in the knowledge that they enjoy Crown Immunity from prosecution.
Labour denounces as a threat to national security those in Scotland who oppose the contamination of Scotland’s environment with potentially dangerous radioactive waste in pursuit of an ego boost for politicians who have never quite got over the loss of empire, politicians who live safely very far away and who on leaving politics can look forward to lucrative directorships with defence contractors.
Of course when Labour says a threat to national security, we know that they really mean a threat to the interests of the British establishment and the Labour party.
The whole sorry saga is strikingly reminiscent of the play En Folkefiende (An Enemy of the People) by the 19th century Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen, which also had the pollution of local waters as its central theme. Written in 1882, the play tells the tale of Dr. Thomas Stockmann, a conscientious public health doctor who discovers that his town’s new public baths, a major source of income, are contaminated with pollution from a tannery. When Stockmann tries warn about the dangers posed by the tannery, he faces fierce opposition from town officials and the mayor, who fear the loss of their status and wealth. As a result of a campaign orchestrated by the mayor, Stockmann is ostracised, loses his job, and is ultimately declared an “enemy of the people” by the townspeople, who succumb to the mayor’s campaign of scaremongering, coming to fear more for their prosperity than for their health and well being.
The message of the play is that the real enemy of the people are the mayor and the town councillors who organise the campaign against Stockmann in order to defend their own selfish interests.
The Labour party is trying to whip up a campaign against the SNP ahead of next year’s Holyrood elections in the hope that the people of Scotland will follow the townspeople in Ibsen’s play and ostracise and cast out those who speak up for their real interests. The critical difference is that the mayor and the corrupt town officials in Ibsen’s play were regarded with respect by the townspeople, who trusted them and deferred to them. However the Labour party in Scotland has blown what credibility it used to have, all of Scotland knows that the Labour party is only interested in what benefits the Labour party and its promises are made to be broken. You can only make political capital by painting your opponent as a threat to national security if you yourself are trusted, respected and believed. For Labour that ship has sailed, hit the iceberg of Starmer’s many lies and sunk.
Another major difference is that many of us in Scotland have no problem at all with being called a threat to the security of the British establishment. We know that the British establishment is the real Folkefiende and its political representatives are the ones we intend to ostracise and expel in May next year.
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