'Satanic' Scottish MP: This petty society can go to the devil

For in 2023, a councillor called Altany Craik has been forced to abandon his ambitions of running as a Labour MP due to party “concerns” about novels he’s written. Apparently, his Father Steel books, involving occult goings-on, are just “too sexy and Satanic”.

Wow. Sexy and Satanic, you say? Let me spin up Amazon right now. I thank Scottish Labour’s prissy little Mary Whitehouses for the heads-up. I would never have heard of these depraved works without their ministrations. And isn’t Altany Craik a fabulous name for a horror writer? Talk about nominative determinism.

So in sympathy and solidarity with Mr Craik, I hold my hands up as a fellow author of what our moral watchdogs must evidently deem "harmful material". One of my novels explored the real-life crimes of the German serial murderer Peter Stumpf, who local villagers thought was a werewolf. Clearly, I must support psychopathic violence and lycanthropy.

Surely, I couldn’t have been exploring criminal psychology, or how societies react when terrorised?

Another of my novels is about two pre-teen killers during Ulster’s Troubles. Obviously, this was my veiled confession. Rather than doing bunny-hops on my BMX, I spent the 1980s embarked on a killing spree.

It’s obviously absurd to think that Northern Irish writers might try to make sense of the violence in their society or the impact that had on children. Such nonsense. I’m blatantly a carrier of unclean thoughts and need purged from this New Jerusalem in which we now live.

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Unquestionably, Mr Craik’s novels expose his own festering tendencies. He’s obviously a Satanist. Just as I’m a murderer in both the 1540s and 1980s.

Mr Craik couldn’t – could he? – have been writing to perhaps entertain readers? Or even, heaven forbid, maybe explore religion?

I tip my hat to Alasdair Clark, of The Courier, for breaking this story of political absurdity. Mr Clark wrote that Mr Craik is expected to issue a statement saying he’s withdrawing from the contest for "family reasons’.

Not for "literary reasons", or "crimes involving the imagination", not for "culture sins" or "artistic offences", but good old "family reasons". For pity’s sake, if you’re going to hound writers at least be creative in your bullying.

Mr Clark explained that Mr Craik was “directed to stand down because of party reservations about his novels”. Labour apparatchiks seemingly believed: “He’s not a suitable candidate because his books are too sexy and satanic”.

Aside from how balefully juvenile this all is, what strikes hard is how Labour seems intent on purging the party of anyone who dares possess a personality or hinterland. Obviously, charisma and vim are matters deemed unseemly in a party ruled by a geography teacher.

Apologies to geography teachers. Any I know are interesting, lively folk, but you’ve a bad rep when it comes to the craic, so you’ll have to do as a metaphor for the aching dullness of Sir Keir Starmer, a man whose voice is aural Tramadol.

Labour’s strategy for power is obviously to flatten the party into an entity so perfectly dull and void of spark that it becomes some milquetoast gruel, some tasteless pabulum. A vacuum made fit for government through hard-won nothingness.

But let’s shunt Labour aside – mercifully – and look at the wider issue here. We’ve now moved, it seems, from cancelling the books of dead writers to cancelling living writers for their books. What fearful pipsqueaks, what a pinch-faced society we’ve become.

Art and the artist aren’t the same thing, no matter how much Twitter’s screaming tribunes try to make it so. Agatha Christie didn’t assassinate victims on trains. Shakespeare wasn’t a Scottish king. In fact, the reverse is often true. Keeping to our Satanic theme, William Peter Blatty, who wrote The Exorcist, was a devout Catholic.

Novels are works of imagination. They are, in essence, the outpourings of the adult mind at play offered up as entertainment for other adult minds. If this scares anyone, then don’t read. Stagnate. A library must seem like Bluebeard’s Castle to these people.

Look, I get the odd tweak here and there. Yes, take the racism out of Roald Dahl so kids of all backgrounds can still enjoy his works. That’s fine. Better a slight and understandable bowdlerisation than banishment down the Memory Hole.

And as someone who’s taught English literature, I fully support expanding the curriculum to include more – many more – writers of colour, women writers and LGBT writers.

Though I would say that back when I was an undergraduate, 30 years ago, we were still reading plenty of writers of colour, women writers and LGBT writers. That fact seems forgotten amid the culture war.

Nor should we let stupid events like Mr Craik being stood down as an MP create false narratives around modern cancellation. Not so long ago, some newspapers – the usual suspects – were getting their lily-white knickers in a twist over Stirling University "cancelling" Jane Austen.

The only problem was Austen, who I really don’t rate, hadn’t been cancelled. She was still studied by undergraduates. She’d just been swapped from a "special authors module", which doesn’t feature any writer permanently, and temporarily replaced by Toni Morrison.

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It was a great, if false, opportunity, though, to hype up nonsense around the old "wokey-cokey". And you can see the subtext, right, given that Morrison is African-American?

What Mr Craik symbolises, however, is a culture of pettiness, of curtain-twitching and neighbour-snitching. A culture of fearful, deadening conformity. In truth, this is where our culture wars, from both the left and the right, have taken us. Toward a society that is scared of its own imagination. To invoke Father Steel, to me such a society can go to the Devil.