On Labour's "cybernat" problem...

Living in England as I do, and consorting with opinionated souls with decent conceits of themselves, being an “out” Scottish nationalist isn’t always terrifically easy. On hearing of my political convictions via a crony during dinner, one left-leaning Oxford don who shall remain nameless cried “Oh God no! Really?” before scoffingly explaining to me that Scottish independence was “a ludicrous little notion” I would do well to abandon. Decades of political argument and development summed up in that witty and encompassing saw, he toddled off to enjoy his second dessert, quite satisfied with his summary. Although drink had been taken, this fellow is not a general boor, and is I’m sure generally committed to promoting a questioning, thoughtful analysis of the world we live in.

Fascinating, then, that he felt able to make such a glib Nationalist exception. I note this in no spirit of rancour or slight. I’m far more interested about what it might tell us about the reflexive (unthinking but not untheoretical) images and (mis)understandings of Scottish nationalism and nationalists in parts of these islands. It’d be a mistake – an under-interpretation – to understand his dismissive posture as subjective condescension on the don’s part.

Socially, historically, it’s always interesting to see whose views can be offhandedly dismissed, whose political convictions can safely and concisely be written-off as crankish, loopy, atavistic or unserious. (In Scotland, by the by, I suspect the folk most familiar with this sort of flippancy will be your average Tory). For a version of it, all one need do is fire up Democracy Live during a contentious Scottish Questions day in Westminster. You encounter it in England. Despite the SNP being in government, and heedless to the party’s re-election by a large margin, you can still experience it in parts of (particularly bourgeois) Scotland. Whether understood as a moonshine radicals or atavistic clowns clinging to the withered, taloned hand of nationalist folly, the pathologised image of the Nat continues to enjoying a lively if crudely conceived conceptual life.

Unbidden, this little Oxfordian vignette came to mind last week, as I sat reading Lord George Robertson in the Scottish Review. The Labour peer and former MP takes as his subject the frumious “cybernats”. Having relayed his sufferings at the hands of perfidious Nats during the 1990s, he relates how an article he had written was received by the hoaching mass of commenters who adorn the Scotsman website. These “cybernats”, Robertson temperately defines as:

“... demented, screwed-up untypical bigots sitting in the middle of the night abusing their opponents but they do show a sordid underbelly to the debate that good people in all parties and none should condemn and revile”.

Yesterday, of this article Jim Murphy tweeted:

"A stunning insight into the world of SNP supporters online. Their abuse is endless."

One cannot help but be struck by the curious keenness various Labour politicians have on this relatively novel concept. Remember, if you can, that just prior to Iain Gray’s demission from office as leader of his party, the concept so excited him that he committed a substantial section of his valedictory address to it, following up with a Scotsman column, arguing that he was:

"... increasingly worried about it undermining the decency of the country I love, damaging the freedoms its citizens enjoy, and poisoning the vital debate we now face on the future of that country."

Such histrionics wildly exaggerate the influence, impact and - frankly - the public exposure of your average soul, bent on denouncing the "great Unionist conspiracy" and its creatures. While Labour politicians may entertain clear conceptions of the Cybernat, and strive to promote them, the concept is not, I fancy, common currency with the public at large. What strikes me as interesting, however, is why the idea of the cybernat seems to resonate so attractively with Scottish Labour politicians? What function does the concept serve? It would be a misunderstanding, I think, to see their pushing of the figure of the cybernat as purely an attempt to gain partisan advantage, conscious, knowing and manipulative. There will be a bit of that, certainly.

However, the ‘cybernat’ isn’t a given. He (and it is almost always a he) has to be created, and has a very limited conceptual history. I’m not arguing that there aren’t folk online slagging off Lord Robertson as an “unelected hypocrite”, but we have to ask ourselves, at what point does an abusive individual become generalised, no longer merely a git with a keyboard, but suddenly one of many, an instance of a category we are invited to understand homogeneously, as representative of "the world(!)" of SNP supporters online? The answer seems to be some time around 2008. A search on LexisNexis’ archive suggests that the word ‘cybernat’ was first seen in newsprint in Scotland on the 10th of February 2008, in the Sunday Herald letters pages, attributed to our old chum, Lord George Foulkes. As of yesterday, the term generates 108 articles. Of the total, the Scotsman and Scotland on Sunday are by far the most prolific users, constituting a third of instances (36), as compared to the Herald and Sunday Herald’s more modest count of 20.

Far more than strategy, the character of the "Cybernat" is a way of hanging on – increasingly desperately – to the "pathologised" figure of the Scottish nationalist. It is a concept to be peddled on and for the Scottish market, and if the mainstream SNP didn’t exist, the Cybernat would not have to be invented.  Even the name implies a merely technological development – a shift of scene. Remove his online platform and the Cybernat becomes a plain old Nat.  Again, none of this is to deny that there is plenty of online correspondence informed by vitriolic feelings, Quisling rhetoric, unyielding partisanship, a personally indicting, indelicately expressed approach to political discourse with those with whom you might disagree. Fire up any popular news site or blog in any part of the world, and you encounter a birling tempest of ordure.

The crucial thing, however, is that figure of ‘the cybernat’ has no interest or utility, conceived as individual and personal. For the Labour politician, that utility is curiously self-involved. The "cybernat" none-too-subtly reassures the existentially wracked Scottish Labour figure that the Nats remain, in the fundaments, loopy as the rings of Saturn, their civic nationalist masks concealing their essential, suspected, gut-rending hatred of the Other. Behind the prose of Robertson and Gray, you can almost feel the mad zeal of the paranoid detective, who, having discovered some marks which confirm a cherished thesis about whodunnit, wildly rejoices to find his hunches confirmed: "I knew it! I knew it!"

Although keen to promote the idea that "Cybernats" are a problem for the SNP, it strikes me insofar as it helps sustain a delusional political identity that pathologises their Nationalist opponents, the Cybernat represents far more of a problem for the Labour Party.  No longer able to imagine itself as the crucible of Scottish sentiment, the once and future right ruling political outfit enjoying especial access to the true public will and feeling, their "Cybernat" fetish feeds Labour addiction to self-flattering suspicions, which cannot see the Nats as anything but perfidious usurpers and secret racists, who have illicitly snatched the crown.