You might have missed the news that the SNP has expelled one of its MSPs, announced as it was following the death of Alex Salmond. John Mason has represented the SNP almost continuously for a quarter-century, first as a Glasgow councillor, then as the MP who wrested away Labour heartland seat Glasgow East in a seismic 2008 by-election, and for the past 13 years as an MSP for the equivalent Holyrood constituency, Glasgow Shettleston. Shettleston is a place with many social and economic problems and even Mason’s opponents acknowledge that he is a hard-working representative.
Mason’s expulsion has nothing to do with principles or rules and everything to do with politics and prejudice
Mason has rather a lot of opponents, most of them inside his own party. He is a Christian who holds orthodox Christian views about marriage, abortion and gender identity, views which weren’t all that uncommon inside the SNP in the not-too-distant past. Although a polite and quiet-spoken man, he has a tendency to say what he thinks before thinking about what he’s saying. Like the time he questioned whether Skye was ‘a real island’ when it was connected to the mainland by a bridge.
However, it is not his religious creed or foot-in-mouth tendency that has seen him banished from the SNP. He has been expelled because he said Israel was not committing genocide in Gaza. Mason initially had the whip withdrawn in August after he tweeted: ‘There is no genocide. If Israel wanted to commit genocide, they would have killed many many more.’ It’s not the most artfully worded rebuttal to the charge levelled by Israel’s enemies, but that’s not really why Mason was suspended. At the time Angus Robertson, a senior minister in the devolved Scottish government, had come under intense criticism for meeting with an Israeli diplomat, with some even demanding his resignation. (In today’s SNP, being cordial towards an Israeli is much more objectionable than being cordial towards an Englishman.)
Mason was plainly sacrificed to appease the rabid Israel-haters in the SNP’s ranks and expelling him only compounds cynicism upon cynicism. There are those who believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and there are others who do not. The International Criminal Court is considering a case on this matter but has not issued a final judgement. So belief in the existence or non-existence of a Gaza genocide is a matter of opinion. In expelling Mason, the SNP’s member conduct committee said it was ‘unacceptable and offensive’ that he acted as the ‘arbiter’ of the definition of genocide, but in the absence of a ruling either way Mason was simply expressing an opinion in the same way as those who say there is a genocide. What the SNP is saying is that expressing the view that Israel is not committing genocide is inconsistent with continued membership of the party. That is an extraordinary position. It is one thing to cancel someone’s membership for denying a well-documented, universally-recognised genocide, but another entirely to show them the door for disputing a claim of genocide in the context of a contemporary debate in the middle of a conflict. As I have pointed out before, this dramatically lowers the bar for booting out a member targeted by factional opponents.
If saying Israel is not committing genocide is grounds for expulsion, then John Swinney and each of his ministers should be asked if China is committing genocide against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang or whether the Ottoman Empire’s mass extermination of Armenians was a genocide. Given the Scottish government’s dealings with the People’s Republic and Turkey, this is important information to know, but it will also gauge whether the genocide-disputing rule applies to all conflicts or only the Israeli-Palestinian one. There are other practical considerations. Let’s imagine an SNP member who is also a professor of international humanitarian law or genocide studies. He is a pre-eminent scholar, highly regarded in his field, but his research concerns the Holodomor and whether Stalin’s starving of millions of Ukrainians constituted a genocide. There is a dispute over this question, and our academic determines that the man-made famine was an appalling crime against humanity but falls short of the criteria for genocide. Could that professor face expulsion?
We all know that he wouldn’t because Mason’s expulsion has nothing to do with principles or rules and everything to do with politics and prejudice. Visceral loathing for Israel is a growing sentiment inside the SNP, and Mason was ejected to sate the haters. It won’t work, of course, because obsessive, all-consuming hatred of the Jewish state – as opposed to even fierce and fiery criticism of its policies and actions – is often a function of a more basic and much older bigotry. The Labour party learned the hard way what happens when you try to pander to this bigotry rather than root it out. If the SNP wants to learn the same lesson, and just as painfully, it’s going about it the right way.
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