Commentary

With a grand fanfare, the SNP released their manifesto. Never have I seen such desperation and cynical attempt to pass off a promise that "we will try to fix what we broke" as something new and revolutionary, done in such a fundamentally self-contradictory manner.

No doubt you will have heard the headline that the SNP will now give you a free bike. Well, one kid somewhere may end up getting their photo taken with a bike. A closer look at this fabulous generosity reveals a manifesto that combines the policies of Jeremy Corbyn with the outlandishness of Willie Wonka and the financial sense of Wesley Snipes. 

Famed polling guru, John Curtice, tells us Scotland is "split down the middle" on the constitutional question. When the undecideds are excluded, the polling for either side is within the margin of error of each other (about 3% in a poll of 1000 people). This is essentially where we were right before the vote in 2014, when the vast majority of undecided voters voted to remain part of the United Kingdom.

Solidarity, collective resources, having more in common than differences, and working together in a shared identity and future. This is the basis of my political beliefs and my commitment to Unionism and the British family of nations and people. 

They are powerful arguments that we, a country welded together through shared pain and happiness, are "better together". That we are even bigger, even stronger and even smarter than we could ever be apart. These arguments for the UK, are made real in furlough payments, the vaccine rollout, the British Armed Forces, the NHS, and people coming together during the pandemic. They are also arguments that Labour has used since its birth. 

Yesterday, following the widely covered announcement of Alex Salmond's new Alba party, those who listened very closely would have heard two distinct sounds: a pained groan and a jubilant celebration. For the SNP, it was a knife thrust deep into their back, and for Unionists, it was the joy of watching an enemy devour itself. Alba's hype — that it will somehow game the system and end up with an unchallengeable majority — is the ravings of a vindictive and ego-driven man high on his own supply. 

As a young man, I was given the kind of advice you never forget, but hope you will never have to prove right. I was driving with a colleague, through a volatile part of the world, on a research trip, where landmines are very common. As we got into the truck, he turned to me and said, "Keep your feet as far apart as possible." I asked why and he replied, "That way, if we drive over a mine, you have a better chance of keeping at least one foot." I have all the flexibility of a pane of glass, but I spent the rest of the drive doing the splits. To this day, I am glad to say I still have two feet, unlike the SNP, who are shooting themselves in the foot, repeatedly.

Controlling the narrative is vital to any information, or disinformation, campaign in politics and in policy. To achieve this, a political party will use several different tactics, such as catchy slogans, announcements, cover-ups and more. All these tactics fundamentally rely on someone to convey them from the party to the public: journalists and influencers that dominate the media and the online world. 

The SNP have been able to control the narrative well, hiding their overtly divisive nationalism and objectively terrible record in government, which has allowed them to convince, or at least dissuade, criticism from most casual readers. The SNP has relied on many things to achieve this, but above all, they have relied on a sympathetic Scottish media establishment that they have, in turn, given either preferential access or outright bullied.

Time is a unique concept; it is a variable constant that has come to dominate everyone's lives on this planet. Be it by the sun's movement and the need to care for cattle or the morning commute to your 9-5 job, time impacts us all, but we experience it in different ways.

One concept is that of time dilation, where the passage of time is different in two bodies depending on the velocity at which they travel; think of the masterful movie Interstellar, where the protagonist in space experiences time much slower than his daughter on earth so that when they meet again, he seems not to have aged at all while his daughter is on her death bed from old age. As abstract as this may seem, time dilation is very relevant to politics, especially in a time where our days seem to drag on.

In politics, the end always justifies the means. People are nothing but tools to advance causes and ideologies. Due to this inevitable fact, political history is littered with "useful idiots", people who champion and support a cause without knowing the full story behind it.

Scottish politics is no exception, and has more useful idiots than many other places. The EU used the SNP during the Brexit negotiations to leverage the British government. When they were no longer needed, the SNP found themselves abandoned by an organisation that now says Scotland cannot join the Erasmus scheme because it is "not a country". The SNP were the EU’s useful idiots.