Ruth Davidson: Playing The Sectarian Card

Jeremy Corbyn seems to be suffering an incredible amount of coordinated attacks regarding his stance on terrorism. Depending on the sources Jeremy Corbyn ranges from being soft on terrorism to a terrorist mouthpiece, all the way through to an appeaser of terrorists. It’s been revealed that he was the subject of MI5 interest  over his stance on Ireland and the IRA, and it’s this which has ramifications on the Scottish political scene.

I’m not a great fan of Mr Corbyn. He supports a united Ireland but not an independent Scotland. So no matter how attractive some of his policies are, for me they are trumped by Scottish independence. Jeremy Corbyn offers a sticking plaster on a constitutional question which requires major surgery, a temporary solution to a more permanent problem. Take fox hunting as an example. Banned by Labour, it looks set to be legalised by the Tories; legislation is not permanent and can be undone by future governments. The Scottish Parliament can similarly be removed by a future UK government, if that government is strong enough to ride roughshod over Scotland. That future is looking increasingly more likely, with a Tory majority in England highly likely and a vocal element rallying to the Scottish Tories as a purely unionist party. Combine that with a compliant press and media and you have a recipe for Scotland apparently “demanding” that Holyrood be closed down and Westminster complying with our “wishes”.

The Tories in Scotland have cast their net out into the sectarian pool for votes and have dragged in a large haul, and this has led to their fielding quite a few dubious characters, and I can only expect this to grow. Not only will this grow but as those numbers grow you can expect to see policy change, simply because they are targeting a group of people who have a specific set of views and will bring those with them to the party. It will be become more unionist orientated rather than Conservative and Unionist.

In the lead up to the 2014 referendum the Yes movement didn’t cast it’s nets into a narrow pool of opinion, but into a far wider one, and in the 2014 post referendum flood of new SNP members there were no doubt many supporters who had dubious backgrounds too. That’s to be expected. Some of these people supported a united Ireland, and to be honest I can see no reason why if the people of Ireland wanted such a thing that it should be denied to them. But that’s something to be achieved through the ballot box, not by guns and bombs. Yet there are people within the Yes movement who see no problem in praising and celebrating terrorists and terrorism in an Irish context, but who decry it elsewhere. That’s not an acceptable stance. It’s also one which is being seized upon by some extremist Tory supporters to try to brand the whole Yes movement as somehow an “Irish republican YeSNP” movement. Pictures of one Glasgow councillor in an Irish republican flute band are passed around as though they represent all of Yes or the SNP. Old photographs of Alex Salmond or Nicola Sturgeon posing with Martin McGuinness are often shared as if if to say “See! Here’s the proof!” while conveniently ignoring pictures of the Queen and Mr McGuiness together. Or ignoring the fact that the Tories actually have a former IRA member serving as a councillor in London.

Terrorists are the lowest of the low. Celebrating their attacks on civilians is as low as it gets I suppose, and people who hold these kind of views should be exposed for their views wherever possible. If a candidate for a party I supported had such a background I certainly would not vote for them. The problem for the Tories is they are specifically targeting and recruiting from what would appear to any independent observer to be sectarian and extremist groups, albeit British Nationalist ones. So while the charge made by those extremists that the SNP or Yes are pro-IRA/ Irish Republican in nature fails to hold up, the reverse is certainly true of the growing Tory/British Nationalist movement.

In England they don’t have the same trouble with sectarianism as we do in Scotland. They do have a problem with xenophobia though. In the attempts to portray Jeremy Corbyn as a friend to terrorists in the English media, this will have an inevitable ripple effect here. For Ruth Davidson, using the union flag as a dog whistle to attract support is one thing; going full on bigot is another.