The SNP’s woke lessons in schools extend the one-party state
Another great, grey concrete slab is about to be added to the Berlin Wall of social control within which Nicola Sturgeon’s one-party state has immured the slowly suffocating liberties of Scots. Extreme leftist indoctrination is to be introduced compulsorily into Scottish schools, inspired by the Marxist movement Black Lives Matter.
The SNP manifesto for the Scottish election contains the pledge: “We will create a new programme of anti-racist education in schools, including support for teachers’ professional development, allowing every school to access high-quality anti-racist education. To track progress, we will improve the reporting and publication of data on racist incidents in schools.”
The one incongruous term in that commitment is “allowing”: the SNP is not a party commonly associated with allowing anything; prohibiting, banning and “outlawing” are its more usual instincts. In this case, the weasel word is employed to disguise or soften the underlying reality of compulsory social engineering, in the last place where political propaganda should be permitted to intrude: schools. Similarly, “support for teachers’ professional development” is Newspeak for conscripting teachers into a propagandist role.
So, what is wrong, SNP loyalists will ask, in teaching children that racism is a bad thing? Nothing, is the answer: except when it is a Trojan horse for a much more far-reaching agenda of political indoctrination. Are we seriously to imagine that Scottish schools have not, for years now, been condemning racism in the classroom? Of course they have; so, why is this new initiative needed? In fact, it is not needed, except by the SNP, to indoctrinate a new generation into separatist prejudices.
The general secretary of the Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS), which occupies vis-à-vis the Sturgeon regime a position analogous to the Soviet Writers’ Union, said last year: “We see the inclusion of black Scottish history within the curriculum as an important element… in supporting young people to understand the connections between Scotland’s wealth and the Atlantic slave trade, the legacy of this in contemporary Scotland, and the struggles for racial justice that are still ongoing today.”
Another indication of the inspiration behind this initiative and the direction it will take is contained in a document drawn up by the Edinburgh Slavery and Colonialism Legacy Review Group, created by Edinburgh City Council, which was leaked to the Telegraph. The group has conducted a “review” of street names, monuments and buildings in the Scottish capital and the leaked list of subjects for review included Adam Smith’s grave in the Canongate Kirkyard, on the grounds he had accepted slavery as “inevitable”.
That is a classic leftist inversion of the truth. Smith opposed slavery and was the first to contribute to the abolitionist thesis the argument that it was economically inefficient and damaged the interests of masters as well as slaves. A realist, he was pessimistic about abolition, which ran counter to so many vested interests; but his ethical view was given free expression in The Theory of Moral Sentiments: “Fortune never exerted more cruelly her empire over mankind, than when she subjected those nations of heroes to the refuse of the jails of Europe, to wretches who possess the virtues neither of the countries which they come from, nor of those which they go to, and whose levity, brutality, and baseness, so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished.”
Nonetheless, it is a safe bet that, within a year, some EIS-affiliated teachers will be cancelling Adam Smith in their classrooms and, with him, the institution of capitalism. Smith has long been a bugbear to the Scottish left in general and separatists in particular: it is an acute embarrassment to them that the principal prophet of free markets in Britain should have been a Scot. It did not help that Margaret Thatcher liked to laud him on her visits to Scotland.
So, the agenda of this latest SNP propaganda initiative will be to begin by condemning slavery, to general assent, then to condemn “colonialism”, leading on to a denunciation of capitalism and the entire culture of Britain over the past millennium. The British Empire will be presented, not as the curate’s egg it undoubtedly was, but as wholly evil. That will necessitate – and here the SNP government may be on dangerous ground – throwing countless Scottish icons under the bus.
The one period in history when Scots could legitimately claim to have been a conquered and oppressed nation was from 1707 to 1783: from the abolition of the Scottish parliament and the vicious repression of the Jacobite risings, to the return of Scottish political influence due to the partnership of Henry Dundas and the Younger Pitt. Thereafter, Scots played a hugely disproportionate part in the development and administration of the British Empire. For generations, their descendants have taken pride in their achievements.
Today, however, under the inspiration of a neo-Marxist movement imported from America – the power that worked hardest to ensure the British Empire ended as quickly and ill-preparedly as possible – the left is representing the Empire as entirely evil and destructive. A Scottish “anti-racist” activist recently deplored “the lack of reparation”. In reality, Britain – and Scotland – have already paid reparations, in the shape of countless schools, hospitals, metalled roads, railways, legal systems, administrative structures, ports, cities and modernity of every kind, flourishing today in former colonies. These were the positive features of empire; those reparations amount to trillions of pounds in today’s money.
But, under the “imperialism exclusively evil” rubric, it will be inevitable that the reputations of innumerable Scots will be trashed. General Sir John Moore, of Corunna; General Lachlan Macquarie, from Ulva in the Hebrides, governor of New South Wales, who expanded opportunities for freed convicts and first used the official name “Australia”; Sir Alexander Mackenzie’s exploration of Canada; even David Livingstone – are all these men, and thousands of other Scots, to be reviled and disowned?
In any other circumstances, repudiating the achievements and denouncing the characters of hundreds of Scottish heroes would be condemned by the SNP as “talking Scotland down”. So, how can separatists avoid incurring that same sanction if, as is unavoidable by the BLM playbook, they launch a purge of Scottish icons in schools? Their obvious ploy will be to claim that these were not real Scots, but Unionist lickspittles who grew rich by aiding and abetting the English in their cruel subjugation of foreign peoples.
There may be a receptive audience for that: leftist Scots are especially unforgiving towards compatriots who leave home and achieve success overseas or, worse still, in the enemy capital. But the problem remains that, if all those who achieved success overseas in the past couple of centuries are “cancelled”, what heroes or role models will Scotland have, more recent than 1745? And is demonising the overwhelming majority of Scots of any eminence in previous generations a credible foundation on which to build the pride and confidence necessary to persuade the electorate to embrace independence?
There is a real possibility that the SNP, which has demonstrated great stupidity on previous occasions (e.g. Alex Salmond’s “penny for Scotland” ploy), may be sawing off the branch on which it is sitting. A kind of post-Brexit paralysis has left much of the Scottish electorate so inculcated with resentment that it seems willing to overlook the SNP’s appalling record of governance, in health, education, Covid vaccination (until rescued by the British Army) – a chronicle of failure that would doom any administration, in any other country on earth, to electoral defeat.
It is perhaps surprising that the SNP government can find room for a new anti-racism course on the curriculum, considering that, on the SNP’s watch, Scottish pupils’ proficiency, as recorded in the OECD’s PISA international league tables, has fallen in Science from 10th place to 27th, and in Maths from 11th to 30th. Scotland now ranks 15 places below Slovenia in Maths. Also surprising is the SNP government’s commitment to “track progress” and “improve the reporting and publication” of racist incidents in schools, which contrasts with its refusal to publish an OECD report on Scottish schools until after the election.
The new “woke” preoccupations of the Scottish government may aggravate a fault-line already opening up within the separatist movement. The schism between the SNP and Alex Salmond’s Alba party may largely reflect personal vendettas, but there is an ideological rift as well. People unfamiliar with Scottish history sometimes refer to the SNP as “Jacobites”. Nothing could be further from the truth. The whole dreary, puritanical control-freakery of the Scottish government is much more the heritage of the National Covenant. Sturgeon and Co. are modern-day Covenanters.
Arguably, without wishing to romanticise that least romantic of personalities, Alex Salmond, the Alba wing of separatism is closer to Jacobitism: more focused on independence, while the Sturgeonites are obsessed with social control. Sturgeon supporters know that when Braveheart Wallace shouted “Freedom!” as his last word on the scaffold, he did not mean licence: not the kind of abuse of freedom that would permit a Scot to voice politically incorrect opinions in his own home without being reported, arrested, and fined or imprisoned.
As Holyrood (twinned with Pyongyang) adopts a chapter from BLM’s Marxist playbook to indoctrinate the next generation of Scottish voters in the evils, not simply of racism but of the British state and the empire it created, the unionist Scots who contributed to that achievement and the free market system it exported globally, a further barbed-wire fence will be erected around young Scottish minds, increasingly brainwashed by the commissars of separatism to accept a propagandist narrative designed to perpetuate the blinkered thinking that takes a knee to the one-party state.