Stephen Daisley exemplifies the anti-democratic obscenity of British Nationalist extremism. But he serves a useful purpose in that he reveals the reality of a vile ideology that harks back to the supposed glories of belligerent Britannia’s bloody imperialist past.
Read Daisley’s spittle-flecked rants about Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP and you’d think he was referring to some murderous terrorist cult and its super-villain leader rather than the democratically elected First Minister of Scotland and the party chosen by the people to govern Scotland – insofar as the constraints of devolution permit.
Much of this is personal, of course. Daisley has hated the SNP with a vengeance ever since an SNP politician drew attention to something phenomenally stupid and unprofessional that he’d done leading to an embarrassing rebuke and a bit of a career blip. Seeking a vehicle for his bitter resentment, Daisley found a natural home on the far-flung fringes of Unionist loonydom.
His columns offer a stomach-turning glimpse into the manic minds of those who embrace a political philosophy based entirely on a mix of mindless hatred and elitist exceptionalism. Only such a mind could react with Daisley’s venomous malice towards a perfectly legitimate, lawful, peaceful, democratic political movement such as that which seeks to restore Scotland’s independence. Such minds are not uncommon among British Nationalists.
Daisley acknowledges that the “SNP is in its 13th uninterrupted year” of duly elected administration. He admits that support for independence is “close to 50 per cent”. He allows that “almost half of Scots want to walk away from the UK”. How does he respond? Does he respond with reasoned counter-argument and some approximation of the mythic ‘positive case for the Union’? Does he evince a determination to pursue his political aims through the democratic process in the way that Scotland’s civic nationalist movement does? No! Faced with a democratic threat to the constitutional arrangements he favours he immediately reaches into an arsenal of draconian measures reminiscent of the repressive impositions of totalitarian governments.
Much as one’s instinct might be to dismiss Daisley’s demented diatribes as the ravings of a political outlier, it would be a mistake to do so too readily. The frustration of hard-line Unionists who supposed the 2014 referendum would kill the independence movement and the SNP ‘stone dead’ is such that the bilious barbarism spewed by the likes of Daisley is entering the mainstream of British Nationalism.
Don’t think of Daisley’s fervid fulminations as a curiosity. Regard them rather as a symptom of the cancerous British Nationalist fanaticism that now poses a real and imminent threat to Scotland’s democracy.
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Peter A Bell 
Yeah just like in England where a litany of racist media utterings over a number of years facilitated and encouraged wider racism with the plebs resulting in Brexit. You just know where they’re going with all this. They can’t defend the indefensible, so they attack the attackable.
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England is turning ugly. It’s like the empire and colonial rule from the 18th century. Except it’s being carried out in their own country , in the 21st century , and with the consent of the English Serfs.
If it wasn’t so tragic it would be funny!
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What is Rees-Mogg up to in scheduling a Claim of Right debate in Westminster on Monday, 27 January? Out of the goodness of his heart, without being asked, as he would have it. He said this in his answer to Tommy Sheppard today.
Surely, Scots’ sovereignty is in perpetuity. Can our sovereignty be nullified by a vote by the Tories because of their 80 seat majority?
Or is this more about humiliating the SNP and Scots in general?
I can’t stand the Tories and that slimy, pompous, condescending ass.
Any light you can shed on this turn of events would be gratefully received.
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It was apparently proposed by an SNP MP. Perhaps we may hear something of interest, now that the EU Withdrawal Act 2020 has passed without the consent of the devolved legislatures. This is the formal Act that makes the agreed EU Withdrawal Agreement domestic law.
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scots sovreignty appears to have been nullified (certainly ruled out) by the Royal Assent to the Brexit Bill today. Maybe Westminster’s Monday debate is designed to erase it totally from the UK’s present and future
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It appears it is an Adjournment Debate by the SNP in the name of Patricia Gibson. I didn’t know that at the time of my previous post. Rees Mogg appeared to suggest it was him that scheduled it.
The SNP must be counteracting S38 of the Withdrawal Agreement Act about the UK Parliament being sovereign.
On thinking further, they can’t take our sovereignty by overriding it through strength of numbers.
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They can try, but it won’t fly.
What Clause 38 does in Law is transfer the Sovereignty of the Monarch of England to the Parliament of the United Kingdom. This is of more concern to the Welsh and Northern Irish, but IMHO it cannot affect Scots Sovereignty enshrined in the Declaration of Arbroath of 1320.
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hope you are right AC, but watch them try!
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Its incredible that we have people that think like Daisley in our midst. My stomach churns as I want to be sick.
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