THE Scottish and UK Governments have both had cause to give thanks to The Queen for her longevity. Her Majesty’s platinum jubilee celebrations arrived at just the right time for Boris Johnson as he seeks to divert attention from the lies and corruption that have characterised his time in office. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine helped him through the first Tory Partygate rebellion relatively unscathed.

And then, just as Sue Gray’s report and pictures threatened to nail the Prime Minister, England regressed to a medieval version of itself to celebrate the platinum jubilee. Soon it will be summer and the momentum to unseat the Prime Minister will have dwindled … for the time being.

The SNP have their own reasons for helping The Queen and her family celebrate 70 years on the public teat. The absurdly monarchical drivel that’s passed for the BBC’s public service journalism and the £1bn the UK paid to host a birthday party for one of the richest property magnates on the planet has also provided camouflage for the Scottish Government. Otherwise its adherents might have lingered and fretted over The Spending Review announced by Kate Forbes last week.

In signalling that low-paid public sector workers would take the brunt of “necessary” cutbacks, the Scottish Finance Secretary paid homage to the Tory austerity budgets of the Cameron and Osborne years. Little wonder that The Spectator hailed it as a gold standard that should be followed by the UK Government.

Ms Forbes’ boss Nicola Sturgeon was dutiful in giving thanks for God saving The Queen as she confirmed that Elizabeth will be invited to continue her reign following independence and that an independent Scotland will be proud to take its place in the Commonwealth. The British Commonwealth is a loose alliance of countries that were looted, brutally repressed and enslaved in the name of Elizabeth’s predecessors.

This is a curious sort of Scottish independence indeed, and I’m not entirely sure that many of its supporters, if asked, would be keen to maintain links with a relic of 18th century British colonialism that exists today primarily for the purpose of providing all-inclusive, luxury holidays for the fecund Windsors and their broods.

A new concept is emerging under the Sturgeon regime that’s challenging our seemingly antiquated ideas of what it means to be independent. Perhaps, as well as giving birth to a new concept of ‘independence’, the SNP have happened on a new form of modern politics. Future historians may even refer to it as post-democratic. In this, a form of pluralism will remain, but it will resemble the way that private schools organise their pupils into ‘Houses’.

In reality, one single, all-powerful party ruthlessly subsumes the identifying characteristics of all the other parties into a single, amorphous whole. The Scottish Greens have already been drained of their blood and now have a twilight existence attached to an SNP drip.

The Labour Party has been denuded of its power and influence in Scotland by the SNP’s ruthless exploitation of its supporters’ worst fears: that the UK was entering an endless night of extreme, right-wing Toryism and that only Scottish independence offered a route away from this. It’s why the SNP was at the forefront of anti-austerity marches and local campaigns to save community resources in disadvantaged neighbourhoods.

And now, after 15 years during which the SNP have effectively neutered all left-liberal opposition by absorbing their essence and vital functions, they’re coming for the Tories. One-by-one, all the dogma-based characteristics of the Tories are being hoovered up by the SNP.

There are several iniquities in Kate Forbes’ spending review that go beyond its betrayal of those workers and trade unions the SNP once courted and seduced. In 15 years of unchallenged unbroken power, when faced with the first serious, economic crisis she had nothing imaginative or radical in her armoury. Instead, she simply chose the path of least resistance: to be the Tartan Tories that thousands of Labour households once suspected them to be at heart.

The Finance Minister fell back on bleak, neo-liberal growth jargon to mask the absence of any industrial strategy in her Rreview. Consider these phrases: “scope for innovation”, “embracing entrepreneurship”, “value for money”, “opportunities for commercialisation”. They represent a surrender to the market and place Scotland’s growth potential in the hands of global corporate raiders who are beginning to realise Scotland has become an out-sourcing hub, run by a core of middle-management careerists whose primary purpose is to remain in power.

This is the chief identifying characteristic in which it resembles a medieval, Game of Thrones reality focused on the gathering of power and territory. In this, they’re happy to deal with anyone and to retreat from previous positions to maintain it. Each year they spend millions on accountancy and management consultant firms whose solutions are geared towards privatising essential services and inviting offers from a host of operators whose senior executives – how can I put this – are already ‘known’ to them.

Scotland – as BP and Shell have discovered to their delight – is where you can pick up vast assets on the cheap. It’s where large global corporations can use their financial muscle to price out local competition in the procurement process and then siphon off the profits to overseas shareholders with no obligation beyond a few universal and bland equality commitments. Nor do they have to worry about contending with trade union resistance because the Scottish Government is using its vast spin operation and its pet lobbying firms to disparage them and label them fascists.

And as the SNP offers Scotland as a Klondyke for global corporates it’s also preparing to hand over ownership of our foreign and defence policy to the NATO military alliance. The SNP’s signature, anti-nuclear stance has been a guiding, spiritual light throughout the decades and at every stage of its evolution. This though, is being dismantled before our eyes in a matter of a few months.

Meanwhile, as last week’s ‘grassroots’ independence convention in Aberdeen showed, all internal dissenters have been removed and been replaced by panels of performative, leadership shills eager for a slice of the action. Why should the Unionist parties now concern themselves with killing off independence? The SNP are doing a perfectly good job of it themselves.

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