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August 20, 2024 - 7:00am
The SNP has a unique capacity for generating internal rows over issues which have little to do with Scottish independence. The transgender reform bill comes to mind. Now, days out from its annual conference, the party’s leadership is in turmoil over genocide denial in Gaza.
On Saturday, the party suspended Glasgow Shettleston MSP John Mason for saying he didn’t believe that Israel was guilty of genocide in Gaza. His remarks outraged bien pensant nationalists who loathe Mason, an evangelical Christian, for having also opposed abortion and same-sex marriage. “You glorify killing and murder with your obtuse comment,” fulminated former SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford, urging the MSP to go. The whip was duly withdrawn for Mason “bringing the party into disrepute”.
By that point, the SNP External Affairs Secretary, Angus Robertson, had just had a meeting with the Israeli deputy ambassador, Daniela Grudsky. Was this not lending legitimacy to the genocidal regime of Benjamin Netanyahu, asked MPs such as Brendan O’Hara? Prominent nationalists have supported a motion ahead of this month’s conference calling for Robertson to be suspended pending an investigation.
However, it then emerged that the meeting had been authorised by the First Minister himself, John Swinney. According to SNP logic, this meant that the party leader was now guilty of bringing the party into disrepute. The FM insists the meeting was only held to urge an immediate ceasefire. Robertson has also delivered a grovelling apology, but discontent lingers.
It’s not as if the SNP doesn’t have enough to argue about at its first conference since the general election disaster, when it lost 39 of its 48 MPs. The campaign for a repeat referendum has collapsed, not least because of Swinney’s ill-advised decision to make the case for it dependent on the SNP winning a majority of seats. The rage had to go somewhere, and recently it has focused on personalities such as Mason and Robertson, who do not fully subscribe to the SNP’s progressive agenda.
Under Nicola Sturgeon, the nationalists sought to enlist to the cause any and every special interest with a grievance against Westminster or Tory governments. This explains the genuflection toward causes such as LGBTQ advocacy, green activism and the pro-Palestine movement. And unlike many nationalist parties in Europe, the SNP is also almost fanatically pro-immigration.
The objective throughout has been to bolster the moral justification for leaving the Union by portraying the UK as essentially racist, transphobic, prone to climate-change denial and, of course, soft on Israel. But now that independence is off the agenda for a generation, the SNP has been left with little to obsess over other than the various progressive causes which it has championed. Hence the row about a conflict in Gaza over which the Scottish Government has precisely zero influence or control.
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