There will undoubtedly come a time when everyone in Scotland accepts, as a political reality of our colonial domination by England, that independence is not possible by ‘legal’ and democratic means. It will be understood, even by those who support the union, that England’s intention is to hold on to Scotland — and by force if required. No one will argue the point that 2014 was a trick. It was never Britain’s intention to allow Scotland to be an independent country. In 2011, the year before the start of the independence referendum campaign, a YouGov poll conducted by The Scotsman newspaper found that only 28 percent of Scots voters would vote for Scotland to become an independent state.1
David Cameron, the then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, had every reason to assume Scotland would reject independence. He acquiesced to a referendum assuming it would be an easy win and that by allowing it to lose he could push the whole issue of Scottish independence back for another fifty years or so. At the time, given the information he and his government had, this was a safe bet. By agreeing to a referendum he imagined would be a walk in the park, he could both present the illusion of true democracy and strengthen the union by allowing the Scots to vote against their best interests. This has always been how democracy has functioned in the British state.
Britain does not and will not play fair. At every level of the state power is obfuscated, with everything engineered to hide the location of real power. The people, as the electorate, we are told, have the power. But this is not the case. British democracy is a controlled democracy hemmed in by a glass ceiling, floor, and walls. Neither is it the case that elected parliamentarians or even the British government have the power. They don’t. Members of Parliament come and go. Ministers come and go. Prime Ministers come and go. At best, these are the temporary custodians of power, serving only to further develop the illusion of democracy.
Real power in the British state is hidden and it is undemocratic. It is spread across the highest levels of the civil service and across the influential and often shady establishment. Real power in Britain remains, as it always has, with the crown — not necessarily always with the person of the monarch, but always within the royal establishment. This power hides behind an illusion of democracy and defends itself with three layers of protection; propaganda, outright cheating, and violence — moving up from each state as the situation requires. When the media fails — with which it shares a parasitic relationship, it brings out the loaded dice, and when cheating fails, it resorts to open and brutal violence.
Right now, with the unionist media now ineffective against the surge in support for independence, we are at the stage of Britain cheating in Scotland. Regardless of the charges against it, the Scottish National Party has still failed to offer a satisfactory explanation as how why in six years it has not continued to agitate for independence. But the answer is perfectly obvious to anyone familiar with the behaviour of the British state. As a serious threat to the union and to Britain’s access to our resources, the political ‘vehicle’ for independence in Scotland has been a tree of low hanging fruit for too long. The SNP has been a target of a British operation with a well-known record of infiltration and subversion:
In 2010, Lisa Jones was on holiday in Italy with her boyfriend of six years, Mark Stone. The couple were popular environmentalists from the UK: Mark had played a key role in the 2005 anti-G8 protests in Scotland, assisted political movements in over a dozen countries, and was involved in an activist logistics company, the Activist Tat Collective. The pair had traveled together, gone to festivals together, and mourned the death of Lisa’s father together. During that holiday, Lisa unsuspectingly pulled Mark’s passport out of the glovebox. The passport showed that Mark Stone was actually Mark Kennedy, father of two, and would help Lisa discover that Kennedy had been in the police force for two decades, deployed by the state to penetrate political threats to the status quo. Eight years later, we know that around 150 undercover police officers infiltrated over one thousand British political groups across four decades, forming long-term relationships with women, fathering children, and engaging in some of the most radical direct action.
Why would the Scottish National Party be such a hostile environment — as it has demonstrated so well in recent days — for people like Alex Salmond, Kenny MacAskill, Joanna Cherry, Christopher McEleny, Neale Hanvey, Corri Wilson, and others; all people outspoken and uncompromising in their support for independence? Why would an independence party conduct what looks like — to any reasonable observer — a purge of so many powerful voices for independence? Why would such a close relationship exist between the leadership of a pro-independence party and a newspaper like the Daily Record; the paper that published ‘the Vow’ in September 2014? Why would that party hire its author as its media spin-doctor? Why would it leak to that paper and not The National? Why would such a close relationship exist between the leadership of the SNP and the British civil service?
The simplest explanations are usually the true explanations. The SNP — certainly not everyone in the party — is not anti-independence. Not at all. But to suggest the SNP, as such a threat to the British state, is not infiltrated and effectively politically neutered, is simply laughable. Arguably, the SNP remains a pro-independence party in spirit, but it has been immobile and easy pickings for too long. Without some exterior pressure from the movement and from other pro-independence parties in the Scottish parliament, the SNP is going nowhere — and the compromised leadership of the party knows it.
The Scottish Pamphleteer
1. YouGov/Scotsman, 26-29 April 2011
2. Connor Woodman, ‘The Infiltrator and the Movement,’ Jacobin Magazine; 23 April 2018, accessed 28 March 2021.
The Scottish Pamphleteer 