Wings Over Scotland | The quality of mercy

Let’s just deal with this quickly.

Because the truth is that we should all be quietly sending BBC Scotland bouquets in appreciation for doing the independence movement a favour for once.

Belief in an independent Scotland IS as strong as ever, which is to say it’s pretty much where it’s been since 2014 – two or three points either side of 50%. But while it’s true, that fact certainly WASN’T demonstrated by last Saturday’s pathetic march and cursory “rally”, which at the very, very highest estimate was attended by just a twentieth as many people as used to regularly show up at such events.

“We are the 45”, a performer sang at one point to a crowd which numbered only slightly more than that.

“With strength in numbers, Scotland shall prevail”, he continued, leading any rational observer to conclude that Scotland’s chances of prevailing must be roughly on a par with those of our capturing the World Cup in America this summer.

The march was the latest in a series of similar embarrassments, which would have attracted nothing but mockery and pity if broadcast on the evening news. What it demonstrated was that the roughly 50% of people who support independence are as actively committed to making it happen as the roughly 50% of people who want to bring back hanging and the roughly 50% who want to get rid of Trident, two things which are just as far away from the current political agenda.

This is an extraordinary misunderstanding of news values from someone who used to be the editor of a national newspaper. The march was announced seven months ago, has been relentlessly promoted since then, was officially supported by the SNP (which the 100,000+ AUOB marches never were), took place in the runup to an election and featured the First Minister as its headline speaker AND STILL ALMOST NOBODY BOTHERED TURNING UP.

That’s the only thing even remotely and tentatively approaching being a news story here: Widely Promoted Event About Supposedly Incredibly Vital And Urgent Subject Supported By Half The Population And Government Party Who Will Win Imminent General Election Attracts Comically Low Attendance.

We should be weeping with gratitude that the BBC didn’t run that story. Even the march organiser didn’t show up, and nor did most of the SNP, who were focused on keeping their members on the gravy bus come May.

Breaking: 3,000 people mooching down the High Street for an hour and half of them climbing Calton Hill to listen to a desultory handful of awful speeches for another 45 minutes is NOT, in fact, “more than enough” to end the British state’s 300-year control of Scotland. (If it was, obviously, we’d have been independent by Monday.)

Once again: if it had really had the potential to do that, why didn’t more people turn up? At least 1.6 million Scots support independence. Yet fewer than two out of every thousand of them could be arsed with getting a bus or train to the nation’s capital on a bright sunny day to register their interest and have a nice social day out.

Not even SNP supporters think independence is on the political agenda.

And nor do they much care. Independence is not even in SNP voters’ top three priorities, because even people so dumb they’re still voting SNP know that the SNP have neither a strategy nor any motivation for achieving independence. The SNP’s interests lie entirely in maintaining the status quo, as the party’s last former CEO accidentally pointed out in The Courier this week.

And even if the SNP did want independence, we know how it goes by now.

[SNP wins election]

SNP: “We demand another referendum!”

UK GOVERNMENT: “No.”

SNP: “Okay then! See you in another five years!”

More to the point, Richard Walker knows that too. In the article, he just comes right out and says “We should deploy this strategy even though we know it won’t work and when it doesn’t work everything will be over”.

For the sake of brevity we’ll draw a veil over some of the more farcically ludicrous passages in the article. But the line below merits a brief mention, because it’s either a breathtakingly audacious lie or self-delusion on level that in less enlightened times would have seen someone put in a jacket whose arms fastened round the back:

Because on the evidence of last Saturday, the biggest favour UK media can possibly do the independence movement right now is to not draw attention to what a pitiful, withered, irrelevant and impotent state it’s in.