John Swinney is a scoundrel!

Now that I have been banished from Facebook for no apparent reason, I hope to spend more time here. It’s one less distraction. I was spending far too much time trying to counter the lies and deceit that daily pours from Scotland’s political elite and their stooges on social media. It really was a futile effort. Akin to trying to stem the flow of the River Tay with bare hands. But even this odd spot of honesty I managed to toss into the torrent must have been too much for some. I am certain the ban was the result of malicious reports. Of course, I can’t prove anything, but the circumstances were strange enough to be highly suspicious.

The first I knew of the ban was when I received an email stating that I had requested a ‘review’ of it. I had not requested a review because I didn’t even know I’d fallen foul of Facebook’s catch-all ‘community standards’ regulations. For the sake of those not familiar with the process, I should explain that you are never told what it is you are accused of doing wrong. Only that you have contravened ‘community standards’. You are offered the chance to appeal, but you can’t really defend yourself when you don’t know what it is that you are charged with. You may have posted many times in the period prior to the ban, as I commonly did, but you are not be told which of these posts was the cause.

The whole thing is inherently unfair and wide open to abuse by any individual or group intent on silencing some troublesome voice. Although this unfairness is inherently offensive, being banned from Facebook is certainly not the worst fate that could befall a person. I am not the casualty in all this. Truth is the casualty. Lies and deceit win when there is one less voice attempting to counter the dishonesty.

As I say, there is a lot of that dishonesty in the discourse around Scotland’s constitutional question. I suppose there always is an element of dishonesty in any political debate. The more contentious the issue, the more polarised the debate, the more those with the weaker case will be tempted to bolster that case with lies and deceit. The public has become inured to this. Which means the dishonesty can be more blatant. Politicians and their mouthpieces on social media take full advantage of this ‘licence to lie’. Perhaps nobody more than First Minister John Swinney and his supporting band of social media posters. I’ll come back to this.

There are two main sources of this river of lies and deceit. One is the SNP and party loyalists. The other is the remaining nominally pro-independence parties, with Alba Party topping that list. One lot promotes the electioneering scams of the SNP leadership, and the other lot promotes the electioneering scams of Alba Party and/or some other nominally pro-independence party. I shall identify the latter as Alba Party as it would get tedious writing ‘and/or some other nominally pro-independence party’ every time.

Alba Party’s favourite electioneering scam is the SNP1ALBA2 voting strategy, sometimes called ‘supermajority’ or ‘max the Yes’. The claim is that if a large enough number of pro-independence voters give their constituency vote to the SNP candidate and the regional vote to Alba Party the effect would be to increase the number of (nominally) pro-independence MSPs, with the cherry on the cake being the ousting of an exaggerated number of Unionist MSPs.

This is not the lie. But it is deceit in that it implies an ease which is not present in the real world. The ploy is presented as simple and straightforward. In reality, it depends on a significant part of the pro-independence electorate participating. A sufficient number cannot possibly be guaranteed, and the historical habits of the electorate suggest that very few will even get to know about this ploy, far less participate in it. The lumpen mass of the electorate simply doesn’t take that much interest.

The real dishonesty of this electioneering scam is the claim that it will help Scotland’s cause. It won’t. It can’t. For some time now I have been responding to repeated posts promoting this scam explaining why it cannot help Scotland’s cause. I have been quite persistent in this. It would hardly be surprising if the promoters of the scam wanted me silenced. We shall never know.

The truth is that even in the unlikely event of the Alba Party electioneering scam succeeding in a way that the polls suggest it can’t, it wouldn’t take us one millimetre or one second closer to independence. This will be obvious to anyone who considers the abstracted arithmetic offered as ‘proof’ by proponents of the scam in the context of parliamentary procedures and real-world politics.

The polls are our best source of information about the status of the parties contesting the election in May. What the polls bid us expect is a (nominally) pro-independence majority with the SNP as the largest party and party of government. The polls also tell us to expect that Alba Party etc. will win no seats at all and that a Unionist majority is so unlikely as to not be worth considering, and certainly not the real-world threat that the scammers wave at us.

But even if a couple—or even a handful—of Alba Party candidates were returned, they could do nothing to further Scotland’s cause without the active cooperation of the SNP and or the Scottish Green Party (SGP). Another strand of dishonesty is the bundle of claims about ‘holding feet to the fire’ which portray the election of Alba Party candidates as essential to force the SNP to do something about restoring independence. This claim assumes the cooperation of the very parties which we are told are not willing to cooperate. It pretends to a persuasive or coercive power the Alba Party MSPs cannot possibly possess.

The truth is that the problem is not what Alba Party’s ploy purports to address. The problem in not a shortage of nominally pro-independence MSPs, but the fact that these MSPs are pro-independence MSPs in name only. There is nothing that can be done by 76 pro-independence MSPs which could not be done by 67 pro-independence MSPs, if those 67 MSPs had the will and the wits to do it.

The truth is that none of the nominally pro-independence parties has shown any sign of having the wits to devise an effective strategy for restoring independence even if they put on a convincing show of having the will.

Which brings me to the thing that prompted this little tirade against dishonesty. I refer to the piece in The National today under the headline John Swinney says independence ‘within reach’ after Holyrood poll.

…momentum is once again building behind the knowledge that independence offers the chance to escape a broken Westminster system and a chance to build our own country anew – that momentum means that an SNP majority and that fresh start with independence is now within reach.

Brazen dishonesty from John Swinney! This scoundrel is blatantly lying when he links his electoral success with independence. There is no connection. It's all lies and deceit. He is saying that what is good for the SNP—and not at all incidentally for himself—is good for Scotland’s cause. Nothing could be further from the truth. Success for Swinney spells disaster for Scotland’s cause.

Swinney attempts to draw a straight line from an outright majority for the SNP to independence. The truth is that there is no such line. Whatever line there is, it goes only to a request for a Section 30 order which will all but certainly be rebuffed. The request concedes to the British government the authority to refuse. The line stops at that refusal. There is no way for that line to reach independence. The request puts independence beyond reach behind a wall that the request creates.

The truth is that this Section 30 request is disastrous for Scotland’s cause because it creates a barrier which any real attempt to restore independence will have great difficulty penetrating. By acceding to the alien doctrine of parliamentary (Westminster) sovereignty, Swinney makes access to the exercise of our right of self-determination impossible absent the consent of the British state.

The truth is that Swinney cannot possibly have some Big Secret Plan to deploy when his Section 30 request is rebuffed because by asking for that boon he establishes a powerful precedent that can be wielded against any plan which doesn’t include that consent. We are being asked to believe that Swinney has a much better plan that he will only deploy when the flawed plan fails. People of normal intelligence are bound to wonder why he doesn’t go with this better plan in the first place. It’s as if he wants to go with his plan B and keep plan A in reserve. And his plan B scuppers his plan A. Except that this assumes the existence of a plan A, for which there is absolutely no evidence.

If all of that seems terribly convoluted then please don’t hold me to blame. This is what happens when you attempt to refute bare-faced lies and unravel audacious deceit.