We’re going to be really, REALLY generous and not quibble about the “us”.
Because it’s not even nearly the funniest thing here.
Wings readers know all too well that paedo-bearded Ulster-born Herald columnist Neil Mackay only finds a tiny fraction of independence supporters acceptable, but he takes a moment anyway to remind us in his latest diatribe for today’s paper.
This is of course the modern usage of “moderate”, meaning “anyone who disagrees with me in the slightest way on even the tiniest item of policy is an intolerable far-right fascist thug who should be imprisoned for hate speech and/or hounded out of their job and ideally the entire country”.
Don’t DARE, for example, support indy and think of protecting women’s rights. That’s the sort of thing only filthy bigoted extremists would want.
All the same, let us belatedly congratulate Mackay on finally realising that the SNP are taking indy supporters for mugs. It’s only taken him four and a half years to catch up with what this site and others have been telling everyone, while he viciously abused us all as “freaks”, “weirdos” and cultists for doing it.
(While of course praising Nicola Sturgeon – who he now decries as a con merchant – to the skies and back, particularly for her instinctive, effortless feel for the public’s view on the trans debate, which was in fact so drastically wide of the mark that it eventually played a significant role in ending her reign as First Minister.)
But that’s still not the really funny bit. This is:
Because the people who knew years ago that the SNP were a sham tried to do exactly that. And all of us remember how Neil Mackay reacted.
When the grassroots indy movement still meaningfully existed – and so strongly that it could regularly put 100,000+ people on the streets rather than the pitiful 1,500 or so it can rally now – and tried to decouple itself from the SNP, Neil Mackay rang up every careerist SNP MP he could find (or the party’s “top brass”, as he called them) and got them to rubbish it as a bunch of dangerous nutcases and Russian stooges.
For years, Mackay poured vitriol on anyone in the Yes movement who tried to bypass the SNP. He couldn’t have made his contempt for the grassroots any more clear if he’d painted it on walls with his own excrement.
He proclaimed that it now solely consisted of “the abusive, the vulgar, the reactionary, the dumb” and “creepy”, “conspiracy-peddling” “crackpots” and “nutcases”.
By any reasonable assessment, of course, the most “upbeat, persuasive, intelligent and charismatic” figure in the independence movement since William Wallace has been Alex Salmond, and he didn’t escape Mackay’s attacks either.
On the eve of Salmond’s trial, the “moderate independence supporter” penned an infamous hatchet job so grotesquely egregious in its attempt to have the innocent Salmond locked away in prison for the rest of his life that the Herald had to pull it within hours for fear of a contempt charge and/or defamation suit.
(The piece was so foul that it “devastated” the mother of child murder victim James Bulger, to whom Mackay never apologised or even replied.)
Having spent so many years working so hard to destroy everyone influential in the Yes movement, Neil Mackay now demands the remaining scattered fragments somehow take over from the SNP in unspecified ways.
But to what end? According to the same article, the only possible route to achieve independence is “to govern”.
The only people who can govern are political parties. Mackay has already ruled out Alba (and with the best will in the world, they’re not forming a government any time soon) – indeed, he doesn’t want any “oafish nationalists” with their “painted rag”, as he calls the Saltire – so who does that leave? He wants the SNP “thrashed”, remember.
And he clearly doesn’t even intend the party with which he appears to be most closely politically aligned – the Scottish Greens – to step into the role, given that he’s working like a Trojan to tear them apart too.
So to recap: Neil Mackay did everything in his power to undermine and destroy the grassroots non-SNP independence movement, and now he’s busting a gut to destroy the SNP as well, while continuing to attack every other party with pro-indy M/SPs at either end of the spectrum, and offering no constructive suggestions whatsoever for a way forward.
(Wings, of course, is fully onboard with destroying the SNP and the Greens, but we’ve spent the last five years trying to STOP things from ever reaching this catastrophic point while Mackay urged them on.)
Sometimes, folks, you’ve just got to give an agent credit.
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