Kevin McKenna is a former deputy editor of the Herald and executive editor of the Daily Mail in Scotland. It was my pleasure to sit down with him to discuss the recent UK General Election and the likely outcomes.
Will we see any change with Labour? Kevin tells us what he thinks about that. Why did Labour win, or was it more that the Tories and SNP lost the election?
Kevin travelled throughout Scotland during the campaign. He spent time with candidates from all parties as well as Independent candidates. Here he reveals what he saw and heard. He gives his unique view of the result and the likely outcomes from the election.His insight is probably the most complete you are likely to hear from anyone.
We are delighted that he agreed to share his views with Through A Scottish Prism. I am certain you will enjoy what Kevin has to say.
Main weakness in the 2014 referendum was not as Kevin says ‘the economic argument’, it was the fact that the politicians and the people had only a rudimentary understanding of colonial society. Independence is ‘a cultural emotion’.
The 56 SNP MP’s when elected were told by many people in the movement to exit Westminster and end the Union there and then. The articles of Union state that the UK parliament can only lawfully legislate for Scotland if there is Scottish representation at Westminster. Withdrawal of 56 MPs would have ended the Union by ending England’s MPs ability to legislate for Scotland.
Independence means decolonization, as the membership of the UN today demonstrates. Colonialism is not that difficult to understand, even for journalists:
https://salvo.scot/scotlands-colonial-status/
Absolutely agree, Alf. We behave exactly as a colony behaves, and none more so than our elected representatives. I know that there are many who still behave like this, but more and more independistas are beginning to understand what needs to be done to achieve independence, and removing our MPs from Westminster is the first step.
Agree – plus the franchise used was completely wrong. I agree with Roddy that Kevin actually displays the characteristics of one who has been colonised – everything is “good enough”. Yes we have our culture but it is being watered down and attacked by the slow take over of our towns and villages by economic migrants from south of the border. I believe our local SWI even had a chorus of Jerusalem at one of their meetings. Yeuch.
Cracking interview, Roddy. Kevin McKenna is, bar none, the finest political commentator in Scotland today, and I would say that even if did not believe in independence, and probably one of the very best in the UK. How I miss his political and social opinion pieces in ‘The National’.
Spot on about the result and the SNP. Still in denial. 2026 will see the end of the party if they do not listen to the people. They are narcissistic and self-absorbed, utterly hell-bent on retaking what they regard as their rightful seats, but at Holyrood. As Kevin says, if they do, byeeeeee… God knows, some of the intellectually-challenged there, could go now without great loss, but shipping equally bum-warming rainbow losers into those seats will end in disaster for the party.
I am also one who advocates spelling out the reality of independence and how it might impact on those less well-off; the working-class is crucial to the independence vote – absolutely crucial – and, if the middle-class toddlers don’t understand that, they will be wiped off the face of the political map. The female vote is also crucial, not just to the party and to independence, but to the party structures and campaigning. They have betrayed women so badly, I suspect that a large portion of their vote is now irretrievable.
I also agree that England, and Wales and NI (or a united Ireland) would be our allies in future if we all went our separate ways and dissolved the UK – in much the same way that all the Scandi countries form a solid phalanx across a broad spectrum of life and work. Just as Kevin did, I got my eyes opened to what is happening in England. Many English people are no happier with their lot than we are with ours, and if their representatives up here are not to vote for the Unionists in future, we need to bring them on board.
Zelenskyy is an American puppet, I’m afraid to say, but I think he has few choices now. The Ukrainians have fought like demons for their country, but what they needed was a real political operator who could keep both sides – the West and Russia – on-side. Joining NATO was never going to be an option for Ukraine, as things stand, and the Ukrainian leadership should have known that and avoided it, while opting for closer trade links with Europe, but also with Russia. Trade is the oil that lubricates the engine of diplomacy. They were under pressure from American and Europe, but they should and could have resisted. My own thought is that the ethnic Russian Eastern Ukraine might end up being the price of peace, along with a non-Nato stance.
Jim Sillars is an old and seasoned warrior and deserves our respect, not the disrespect he received recently when he criticized the SNP leadership. We all, in the independence movement, stand on the shoulders of giants, some long-dead. I remember many selfless individuals who gave their all for the cause when I was a girl. I still remember them and the respect I felt for them. The utter lack of respect shown for people, Mr Salmond being one, who gave their all for the movement, by the young guns and their doltish followers, is truly disgusting. They seem to have no knowledge of their party’s history or the struggle that took us to 2014 and the remarkable achievement that was. The complete lack of critical thinking and hard-won knowledge is almost entirely absent now in the ranks of the SNP. It does not bode well for the future of Scotland.
@ Roddy … really interesting discussion, thank you for arranging.Food for thought!
@Alf … a feature I don’t see discussed often is ‘self-colonisation’. We attribute the blame to the coloniser without recognising our own self-induced faults as the colonised. There are some good insights and examples into its effects from African studies.
With colonialism, we are, efter aw, dealing primarily with a psychological condition; which again refutes the mainstream contention (among political commentators) that independence is mainly an economic argument.
‘Self-colonisation’ is probably covered in my paper here, Mike, but under different terminology used by postcolonial theorists, e,g, ‘cultural assimilation’, ‘dependency complex’, etc; liberation is necessary in order for the cultural etc. ‘self-recovery’ of a colonised people who are currently oppressed by another culture, ideology and its dubious values:
https://yoursforscotlandcom.wordpress.com/2024/03/03/the-colonial-mindset/
Hence ‘the peoples understanding remains rudimentary’ (Fanon), as they (and many political commentators) still do not know the meaning of independence, which is decolonization; much as the UN membership today illustrates:
https://salvo-cor.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/THEORETICAL+CASE+FOR+SCOTTISH+INDEPENDENCE.pdf
Thanks Alf … from reading much from Africa on the subject at the level of us as individuals, let me divert with perhaps two very diverse examples current in my own thinking:
– how many of our Scottish (independence???) politicians, beyond swearing a royal oath. then CHOOSE to accept membership of the Privy Council, a lifetime membership. Self-colonisation?
– dollarisation, the colonisation of the world’s economics, now under a de-colonisation challenge from Brics. Whither Scotland’s currency?
Very interesting interview. I think there’s a incrementally growing number of independence supporters who would agree with McKenna’s and your rightly disdainful opinion of the SNP hierarchy. There’s where the optimism lies? The SNP leadership must change its attitude very quickly or its party will be done for. To be replaced by a party or grouping which unequivocally puts independence before everything else.
It’s been said by others but the SNP is our IPP. We need a Sinn Fein. Independence can still be achieved within your lifetime, Roddy.
PS. I was so hoping you where going to ask McKenna what he thought of Vow-master Murray Foote. But then, in answering, the brotherhood of journalists would probably have kicked in…
A very good interview and conversation.
Kevin McKenna’s heart is the right place and he is spot on with everything he says about the SNP and its leadership cabal.
However, I would say that he is incorrect when he says that the weakness of the 2014 referendum was the economics and that Independence is essentially an economic argument.
The real weakness of 2014 was that we fought a defensive campaign. It was precisely because we tried to answer the questions on economics that we lost. We shouldn’t even have tried! Every time answers were provided more questions followed. We fought it on British terms. It was a miracle that we did as well as we did.
The restoration of Scotland’s full self-government and the return of it’s independent nation-state status is about righting the wrongs of this asymmetric and damned Union. It is about protecting our customs, culture, language and history. It is about making our own decisions based on our own values and priorities.
In short Independence is normal, it is the Union that is the anomaly.
The campaign going forward should be an offensive one where we demand the Brits justify the Union.
I see your video with McKenna has already over 1000 views on Youtube, Roddy.
I’ve never been convinced with the abstentionist argument, on the basis that MPs are elected to represent their voters at Westminster and not taking their seat is in a way short changing them.
I wasn’t entirely against the idea I just wasn’t convinced, although I’ve always been against our MPs taking the oath to the English crown,
But Kevins point about how that place and the whole establishment surrounding it seduces and corrupts those going down there is a compelling point and backed up by the fact Sein Feins MPs haven’t been corrupted into the sniveling cap doffers ours have has changed my mind
The Irish played this game for years but came to realize that it was doing absolutely nothing to help them. I think that many people in Scotland are now realizing that too, belatedly. Yes, I would agree that Westminster is constructed precisely to suck MPs into the vortex of privilege, cheap and subsidised meals and drink, and easy access to night clubs and other fun places in London, out of sight of their constituents and families. I sound like a female version of John Knox, who knew a thing or two about not resisting temptation, but some of the stories doing the rounds… Kevin is right, in my opinion, that too many of them end up as Unionists in all but name, certainly devolutionists, if they are not already that way inclined.
That’s not really what it is about, though: it is about the fact that no matter how many MPs we send down there, we can make not a jot of difference. That is the point. Not a jot of difference. I’m not sure either that a lot of them are not past saving and should probably not be considered for Holyrood if they lost their seats recently.
A very good discussion, but have to disagree with those that wish to ignore the economic argument. It is absolutely crucial to convincing those that doubt. McKenna is right that this is what should be worked up and provide convincing answers.
Political theorists (and even Cambridge Analytica) maintain that people vote not for what is in their best interest (Brexit being good example), but what their emotion (and values) tell them to vote for. In a colonial society it is ‘only the values of the colonizer that are sovereign’ (Memmi).
However,on the matter of the economic price of the UK Union for us Scots:
https://yoursforscotlandcom.wordpress.com/2024/03/19/the-real-economic-price-of-the-uk-union-for-scots/
Indeed, Alf. In recent years, especially, we have seen where raw emotion and its accompanying docility, and, indeed, stupidity, can take us. We are being fleeced and have been fleeced for many, many years, starting with the Equivalence. It really annoys me that we had a Scottish Enlightenment, a wonderful part of a larger European Enlightenment that started before the Union, and, today, it is as if it never happened.
Some of the finest minds in the world were to be found in Scotland, David Hume probably being the one that stands out most among a plethora of utterly brilliant men. He understood our human weakness in following our emotions solely, and not taking into consideration the reasoning faculty that always accompanies humanity. When the two are in harmony and balance, we make good decisions; when they are out of kilter, we make questionable ones. We are presently in an era when reason has been abandoned for uncritical thinking. Students at Edinburgh University wanted to pull down his statue.
Adam Smith was a sociological economist and understood better than most the ways in which humanity carries out its business via-a-vis ‘trade’ and ‘commerce’. If these are not carried out fairly, people start to lose out, and when they lose out, they become angry, and when they become angry, they revolt. We have not revolted yet, but we are close to it. We are, however, very, very angry. In the end, there is no good that can come of fleecing people – either for the people being fleeced or for the fleecers. Smith may seem like a man of his time and that his tenets no longer apply, but they do because he understood, as did Hume, and all the other Scottish Enlightenment philosophers, that human beings thrive under a system of fairness and grow into resentment under a system of unfairness; they understood the human condition, which is timeless. That most would be Unionists today is an assumption too far, I think, albeit Hume certainly courted the English elites.
Great conversation ,
K.McK is , as others have said , one of the best , ie honest and perceptive , journalists around – granted , he doesn’t have much competition on these qualities : ” Scottish Journalism ” has become an oxymoron . ( not that UK Journalism is any better )
Nonetheless . Kevin still stands-out and could be considered amongst the very best contemporary journalists currently working anywhere .
All the more surprising , then , to see him succumb to the ” Mad Vlad ” relentless , personalised hyperbolic propaganda that has characterised the West’s description/depiction of the Russian leader .
” I think he’s a psychopath ” – really ? Where’s the evidence for that ? The invasion of Ukraine ?
What choice was Russia given ? To simply acquiesce to every U.S provocation . Would the U.S tolerate such encroachment to it’s very borders had the situation been reversed ? Of course it wouldn’t .
Why should Russia be expected to ?
Far from being a ” psychopath ” , President Putin has shown remarkable restraint , for years ; he virtually pleaded with the * West * – ie the U.S – not to proceed with what it considers the existential threat of N.A.T.O weaponry right on it’s border . In it’s hubristic arrogance & need to be * top dog * , to dominate globally , this plea was contemptuously ignored by the U.S . And what if Russia had not invaded Ukraine ; would U.S provocation had stopped at that ? No chance ; provocation was the entire point of U.S policy vis-a-vis Ukraine .
Those 6 C.I.A bases in Ukraine are not there to promote harmonious relations between the two countries . Rather they are there to continually bait , undermine & sow unrest in the region .
Russia tolerated such bad faith until it could no longer do so , understanding , correctly , if it didn’t take a stance against this the U.S would simply keep on it’s insane strategy of regime change in Russia .
Just look at the carnage that has ensued as a result , absolutely the result of U.S paranoia/terror at/of losing it’s place as the global hegemonic power . This is happening anyway , again as a result of the U.S’s own hubris and the complete capture of it’s Political Class by Corporate interests .
And still the lunatics in the U.S/EU Power Elites refuse to concede Russia has legitimate security concerns , the right to defend itself against foreign aggressors and that it is not a nation of barbarous ” Orcs ” , but human beings with the same hopes & fears as any other group of people .
If there are any ” psychopaths ” around they can be found in the US/UK/EU Axis-of-Idiocy beating the cacophonous drums of war – over which any calls for Reason to prevail are drowned-out ; spending incalculable quantities of public money on the promotion and continuance of hellish conflicts while the quality of life of the people they are supposed to be serving declines to ever greater degrees . Taking us to the edge of potentially mass-extinction via Thermonuclear War .
Now , Iran is in the crosshairs of U.S psychopathy – as it has been for years . If that blows-up it will take us one step closer to oblivion .
We need to wake-up . And soon .