Dismal proof the SNP’s talent pool is as shallow as a puddle
EVERY party or political movement needs a heavyweight to give it some gravitas and intellectual heft.
When it comes to big thinkers, the SNP is fishing in the shallowest of pools — and the shallowest of all is occupied by one James Dornan.
Last week, the Glasgow Cathcart MSP gamely strode onto the minefield of sectarian politics in a Holyrood speech.
His thesis was that an Edinburgh bus firm had scrapped timetabled trips on St Patrick’s Day because of anti-Catholic prejudice.
He said he could only assume that Lothian Buses had suspended some services because its bosses believed ‘Irish Catholics were to blame’ for a rise in anti-social behaviour.
Mr Dornan asked, triumphantly: ‘Why else cancel buses only for the night of a ubiquitous Irish Catholic holiday when pubs were not open and… a stay at home order [was] in place?’
Why indeed, and yet it hardly takes Hercules Poirot to work it out — some services were diverted back in April because of loutish conduct towards bus drivers — some of whom were physically assaulted.
Mr Dornan has serious form on these issues: back in May he said it seemed ‘clear’ to him that Rangers players were singing sectarian songs in a video doing the rounds on social media, shortly before police ruled that they weren’t.
‘I’ve heard and seen two videos of that same scene and it seems clear to me what they are singing,’ Mr Dornan tweeted on May 17.
‘If someone proves it to be otherwise I will of course… apologise on here. But I’m not going to pretend I didn’t hear what I’m sure I heard.’
He stuck to his guns, and on May 23 criticised those who were ‘pretending [that] the police said the video was fake’, adding that ‘the minute they confirm it was doctored I will be on to apologise’.
Quite a few officers who do this kind of thing for a living had pored over the video footage in question and detected no sectarianism — but that wasn’t good enough for Mr Dornan.
Yet it’s worth remembering he was once convener of the Scottish parliament’s education committee, entrusted with scrutiny of flagship school reforms, though admittedly there haven’t been many of them — or not many, if any, that actually worked.
He’s paid nearly £65,000 a year for throwing around these baseless smears — and the leadership lets him get on with it, as he’s a blindly faithful acolyte who’ll never cause trouble for them.
But let’s not kid ourselves that the SNP benches aren’t free from other parochial placemen of the same calibre.
John Mason is the best possible evidence that voters opt for the party rather than the individual, after representing Glasgow Shettleston for a decade.
He once said some critics of the Named Person scheme, a doomed Orwellian enterprise branded largely unlawful by the highest court in the land, might be child abusers.
Among his other pearls of wisdom was the belief that IRA terrorists could be seen as ‘freedom fighters’.
Earlier this year, at the height of the post-Christmas lockdown, he said people missing contact with elderly relatives could take them out of care — and look after them at home.
And he claimed that the shortage of teachers in Scottish schools might benefit pupils because of the ‘variety’ of temporary staff.
Mr Mason was also accused of ‘trivialising rape culture’ after he compared the campaign for Scottish independence to attempting to woo a woman.
What does it say about the SNP that it allows these people continue to represent it, apparently without any visible shame?
It’s not as if they’re new on the scene — they’ve been around long enough to be known quantities.
Nor is the House of Commons much better in this regard — consider SNP Coatbridge MP Steven Bonnar, who tweeted in December that Nationalists would ‘fight to the death’ for their country, before deleting his post and insisting that it was a joke.
Or there’s the party’s Commons group leader Ian Blackford, who launched an online attack on an English photographer last year.
He mistakenly implied that Ollie Taylor had broken lockdown when he took snaps of the north of Scotland — when in fact Mr Taylor lives here.
Angus Robertson said last September that ‘predominantly Yes-supporting’ 16-year-olds joining the electorate had produced a ‘likely net gain’ of more than 100,000 for the independence movement, when you factored in the demise of No voters.
That kind of number-crunching is callous enough at the best of times, but infinitely more offensive during a pandemic that has claimed the lives of so many elderly people — many of them in care homes that were inadequately shielded from the ravages of Covid.
Mr Robertson, a close ally of the First Minister, now has a seat at the top table, tasked with engineering dust-ups with the UK Government as Cabinet Secretary for the Constitution.
Isn’t there a pattern developing here? A degree of licence and latitude is given to some of the most bullish characters in the party, if they’re slavishly loyal to the SNP hierarchs.
If they push the lines that might be seen to appeal to the hardcore SNP vote, or sections of it, saving their masters the job of getting their hands dirty, then even better.
You might wonder how this tallies with Nicola Sturgeon’s belief that you can’t bully people into supporting independence (though to most objective observers that continues to be the party’s modus operandi).
Rather you have to win them over using what SNP MP Pete Wishart — another intellectual giant of the SNP — once described as ‘gentle persuasion’.
But there’s nothing gentle or indeed persuasive about this unedifying crew.
Look at what they could be doing — representing their constituents, for example, or grappling with Covid recovery, or improving public services.
Compare some of these time-servers with fresher faces like Tory MSP Russell Findlay, who spoke powerfully last week about his acid attack ordeal and the insidious evil of organised crime — while railing against the failures of the justice system and the SNP’s secret state.
One of his hecklers during a compelling maiden speech was none other than Mr Dornan — who needs little encouragement to offer up his take, even if it is entirely unsolicited.
They will keep shouting from the side-lines and picking up their wage cheques, but isn’t it about time these dullards who give democracy a bad name piped down — and left the field clear for the grown-ups?
*This column appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail on June 15, 2021.
