Can’t really disagree with Dundee-based commentator Jim Spence, whose Courier column a few weeks ago excoriated the SNP and their indy dream as follows:
Performances full of empty bluster and bombast instead of solid plans and pathways have become their stock in trade.
They’ve become one dimensional characters like those thespians who’ve played the same part for so long in TV soaps they couldn’t play another role.
I too once favoured independence but the poverty of thought and petty mindedness of much of the SNP has scunnered me.
On the other hand, the impetus for Jim’s article was remarks by another famous Dundee son – actor Brian Cox – and to that extent there’s a sniff of stuff like romanticism and double standards about what he says. Jim doesn’t use the phrase ‘old school tie’, but that seems to be the kind of thing he’s describing when comparing Cox’s former Dundee secondary school to Eton:
It may not have been a factory like Eton, churning out ham and egg second-rate politicians who reached dizzy heights through their family contacts and not their abilities, but it did produce the sort of folk who understood that hard graft and common sense were vital to prosper in their working lives.
Instead, Jim opines:
The ‘Mikeys’ [St Michael’s School in Dundee] wasn’t the sort of school which turned out pupils who didn’t know how the world turned.[…]
And, crucially, it was the sort of educational establishment which bestowed the ability to recognise life’s chancers and wide boys and girls, which now and for some time has marked out many of those in the SNP.
Trouble is, if a ‘chancer’ can be characterised in terms of opportunism and hypocrisy, then Brian Cox fits the bill perfectly, in my opinion at least. To describe this adequately would take too long, but one example relates to remarks Cox made in 2021 to the Economist magazine, subsequently critiqued in the Times by columnist Euan McColm:
He [Cox] said Scotland had “moved from tribalism to a form of egalitarianism”.
Scotland had huge potential but we have manacles around our ankles, [Cox] said. What’s more, Scots are “very different” to the English. “We are Celts,’ [Cox] said. “We have a different sensibility, we have different cultural routes. We are not the same as the south.”
McColm’s characterisation of Cox’s nationalism as sounding ‘awfully like’ the ‘distasteful blood-and-soil stuff’ surely represents one dimension to the latter’s opportunism – in particular, because of his effectively permanent residency in the USA, while indeed a year prior to his comments above Cox stated that when visiting Scotland he ‘couldn’t wait’ to get back across the Atlantic. (Ostensibly because of damp weather – obviously Scottish exceptionalism doesn’t extend to the climate.)
Another major aspect to Cox’s unprincipled approach is neatly encapsulated by his use of the term egalitarianism, contrasting this with ‘the south’, aka England. Which brings to mind the term ‘champagne socialist’, a term less in vogue these days, but which is surely a reasonable description for someone described by Hello! magazine thus:
As well as their main family home in Brooklyn, New York, Brian revealed he has another property in Upstate New York and a base in north London.
Aye, that would be the ‘penthouse’ in downtown Brooklyn. And, who’d have guessed it, a ‘base’ in north London, despite us Scots apparently being ‘not the same’ as the people there. (And, also ironically, the Hello! magazine piece was based on a ‘remote’ appearance by poor old Brian on Lorraine – another Dundee exile who sold ‘one of the finest houses in Broughty Ferry‘ to move down to The Smoke. I wonder if they discussed the damp weather and how morally inferior those Londoners are? And maybe what Lorraine Kelly thought of Cox’s visage, considering that she said Nigel Farage shows you get ‘the face that you deserve’?).
But, of course, egalitarianism seems to be quite an elastic term, and ironically echoes one of the SNP’s tediously repetitive and vacuous themes, and to that extent Cox simply reflects Jim Spence’s characterisation of the SNP, which to repeat included:
Performances full of empty bluster and bombast instead of solid plans and pathways have become their stock in trade.
And, ironically, in view of the fact that Cox is literally an actor, Spence also said of the SNP:
They’ve become one dimensional characters like those thespians who’ve played the same part for so long in TV soaps they couldn’t play another role.
And Jim’s column also contains the oft-seen trick of impliedly excusing a self-evident lack of egalitarianism with a reversion to humble roots. Therefore, as well as presenting the Dundee school as some sort of superior inversion of the old school tie, Jim says:
Cox is now showing that old traditional working class common sense in jalousing that the only party capable of achieving independence has given up the ghost.
All of which reminds me of a column at the same time by another Scottish exile who seems happy to milk the (capitalist) system for all it’s worth, namely ‘iconic’ drugs pornographer Irvine Welsh. So in a piece in which Welsh advises us not to vote in July’s election because all the politicians are ‘charlatans’, the icon’s hypocrisy maybe brings to mind why it took me around 40 years to work out what Mrs Thatcher meant by the ‘politics of envy’.
As an example, Welsh has in the past bragged about how much money he’s made from his property wheeling and dealing – enough to make even Angela Rayner blush, despite her ‘expert tax and legal advice’ on her own property deals. How very Mrs Thatcher, who of course enabled the sale of council houses that attracted a degree of attention to Rayner.
But I’m old enough and working class enough to remember when even getting a mortgage and buying your own house was regarded as all very middle class and Tory. So although Rayner’s ex-council house sale per se is regarded as pretty unremarkable these days, that sort of thing together with a six-figure salary doesn’t strike me as particularly working class.
But the likes of Irvine Welsh protege and anti-poverty campaigner Darren ‘Loki’ McGarvey simply says Welsh is ‘ridiculously successful’ and ‘very down to earth’ echoing his ‘working class’ defence of Rayner:
Which to me all smacks of elitism and privilege somehow excused because of where people have come from, not where they currently are. And, of course, the likes of Welsh can be regarded as a man of the people by virtue signalling over stuff like BLM and statues of slavers.
But as far as I’m concerned, class is about where you are, not where you came from. And there’s nothing wrong with being ambitious, and getting on, and societies and civilisations have always been characterized by hierarchy and inequality, and always will be. The problem is maybe not that Irvine Welsh is ‘ridiculously successful’, but rather the implied pretence that we can all be similarly blessed. But we can’t all be, because success is a relative concept, and depends on others failing.
So Jim Spence is bang on about the ‘chancers’ in the SNP. But to suggest that Brian Cox is quite unlike the SNP in that regard, particular with reference to his background and schooling, is a bit rich (pardon pun).
And echoes what wags used to say about the difference between communism and capitalism – all you get is a different set of people in the ZiL lanes.
And, more generally as regards Cox’s political acumen, what took him so long?