Since its launch in Scotland in 2014, the National newspaper has made a name for itself for several reasons, none of them particularly good. It is not merely partisan in the way many British newspapers are, strongly supportive of one party and editorialising thunderously from the front page through to the opinion pages. At the height of Nicola Sturgeon’s premiership, the National was closer to a hymnal such was the reverence with which the SNP leader, her government and its policies were recorded. Back then, it was hard to distinguish the paper’s news articles from SNP press releases, except that press releases were slightly less sycophantic. And less Photoshopped, since for the first few years of its existence the paper was known for its unique splashes.
One of these splashes have got the newspaper into trouble. Saturday’s front page depicted a Spanish footballer kicking a rotund, topless man with a St George’s Cross painted across his considerable belly. The headline ‘Time for revenge’ was accompanied by a standfirst that read:
Every summer, they fill up your beaches. They drink all your beer. They make a mess of your plazas. They eat fried breakfasts all day instead of your wonderful food. They retire in your towns, and sponge off your public services. They don’t even bother to learn the language.
The front page was criticised for resorting to lazy stereotypes about the English, with some suggesting it would have fallen foul of the SNP’s Hate Crime Act had other nations been caricatured in comparable terms. The National’s editor Laura Webster has apologised, admitting the paper had ‘crossed a line’. The apology indicates reflection on the part of Webster and her editorial team and reads as sincere. Such statements are rare from British newspaper editors – a function of the industry seeing itself as a craft rather than a profession – and to that extent it is to be welcomed.
That’s not enough for the National’s implacable unionist foes, who think Webster should be sacked. On the other end of the horseshoe are hardline nationalists who defend the front page and insist it is less offensive than some newspaper cartoons, include one earlier this year which depicted SNP leaders hanged by their party’s loop-like emblem. But while Twitter tribalists compete in the offence-taking Olympics, they miss the institutional failing that produced Saturday’s front page. The bitter, chippy Anyone But England sentiment that seethes from north of the Tweed any time England is involved in international football is not unique to the National or indeed nationalists. As I’ve written before, Scots of all political persuasions and none suffer from wee man syndrome. They resent English football for failing to be as mediocre as its Scottish counterpart and count this offence among the many imaginary oppressions the Scots must suffer under Sassenach dominion. For more than a generation now, the highlight of Scottish international football has been England losing.
No, the problem with that front page is that it reflects the flippancy and shallowness of the National. Now, I’m not being priggish here. Kelvin MacKenzie’s Sun was flippant and shallow – and downright evil sometimes – but it combined an irreverent, cynical tone with a solemnity towards the issues the paper and its readers cared about. The Sun had a worldview that it promoted with vigour and if that meant monstering even MacKenzie’s idol Mrs T. then so be it. Here, and not in election endorsements, is where the Sun’s real influence lay. By balancing scurrilousness with seriousness and party loyalty with ideological conviction, the Sun enjoyed more sway over politics and public policy in the 1980s than every other paper combined.
The National enjoys no such sway over either the SNP or the Scottish government. It is difficult to think of a single policy it has influenced or changed, or a time it has nudged devolved Scottish ministers in one direction or another. When you are in the business of stenography, you take dictation rather than give it. And the National presents no particular reason for the leadership of the SNP to take it seriously, fixated as it is on the mad and the marginal, the sort of content that delights or riles its frankly loopy readership, be it the latest foolproof plan to sneak Scotland out of the Union or another barrage of bile and paranoia directed at BBC Scotland. It is a newspaper that is now ten years old but still refuses to grow up.
This is illustrated by a letter published in Tuesday’s edition which denounces Stewart McDonald, the moderate SNP MP who lost his Glasgow South seat on 4 July. McDonald, who was previously the party’s defence spokesman, has questioned the SNP’s policy of removing Trident from the Clyde within two years of Scottish independence. By way of response, the correspondence, penned by a fellow SNP activist, falsely describes McDonald as ‘pro-Trident’, claims he has been ‘groomed by the UK defence establishment’, and accuses him of ‘mixed loyalties’. It’s the sort of letter that gets written by someone who buys a lot of tin foil, and none of it for cooking. Fortuitously enough, the missive validates a point McDonald has been making about a ‘culture of unseriousness’ in the SNP.
Whether people like McDonald can drag their party back from its drift into magical thinking over independence and other issues, it will be much harder to re-tether the National. It has never been tethered to anything resembling gravity, rigour or intelligence. It might not plaster breasts all over page three like MacKenzie’s Sun did, but it makes tits out of an entire political movement. Scottish nationalism needs a platform – a newspaper, magazine or website – that offers quality reportage, campaigning journalism, and a place where serious people can debate serious ideas. The National fails on the first two counts. On the third, it doesn’t even try.
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