SNP's ‘Choose Scotland’ slogan has some alarming connotations – Brian Wilson

In among the other junk mail this week, I noticed a card which implored me to “Choose Scotland”. A VisitScotland plug for staycations this festive season? Alas, nothing so interesting or inspirational. On closer inspection, I found this to be unsolicited mail from the Scottish National Party. Forgive me for just catching up, but I now understand “Choose Scotland” to be their latest campaign slogan. It’s actually a pretty offensive one since the clear corollary is that if you don’t choose Mr Swinney and his band, then you are not “choosing Scotland”.

By this measure, about two thirds of those who bothered to vote in May are guilty of that transgression. READ MORE: SNP's unintentionally funny Choose Scotland campaign debunks nationalism better than I could In its own way, the slogan serves a useful purpose since it should encourage people to consider whether this is really the division they want Scottish politics to be built around for more decades to come. While we fail to progress on so many fronts, is the constitution to be the only ‘choice’ that defines us?

Most who have “chosen Scotland” to live in all our lives do not recognise the suggestion that this correlates with support for any political party or creed. It is arrogant and slightly sinister to imply otherwise. Conflation of party with nation does not have a good historical reputation. One of the more recent scoundrels to cloak their politics in patriotism was Marine le Pen whose campaign slogan, when she ran for the French presidency as candidate of the Front National, was “Choisir la France” – “Choose France”.

If that rings a bell, it should be a warning one. Fortunately, the French people chose France by defeating Ms Le Pen and her nasty ideology. Let’s hope they do it again. The SNP’s marketing geniuses should maybe check their slogans against history, to be sure they don’t carry connotations that give nationalism a bad name. READ MORE: Why nationalists should be concerned by John Swinney's latest outlandish claim about Scottish independence The conceit of the Choose Scotland slogan also needs to be called out for the more practical reason that it underpins the mediocrity of devolved governance that we suffer from on so many fronts.

It is a hiding place for failure. It effectively translates to ‘judge us not by our actions because we exist to serve a higher cause’. A minority of Scots buy into this guff which is enough to keep them in office regardless of outcomes. And so it will continue until a way is found for Scotland to ‘choose otherwise’. The image accompanying the mailshot’s central message is of a young woman gazing into the glens and bens of the promised land.

I can’t resist pointing out that these are even more likely to be part of a vast, absentee-owned estate than they were 20 years ago, as an example of the chasm between Scotch mist illusions and political reality. If there is one issue on which even I am surprised by how little progress has been made over these two decades, it is land reform – the stuff of endless rhetoric and minimal action. From a starting point of having the most inequitable land ownership structure in Europe, it has actually become even more concentrated.

Who chose that? There was an interesting session of Holyrood’s rural affairs committee the other day when the lack of any substantial progress was called out by two witnesses who work in community land ownership which, unfortunately, accounts for only a tiny fragment of our landmass, almost all of it in the north-west Highlands and Islands. Ewen Maclachlan from Assynt spoke of “volunteer fatigue” as fragile, depopulating communities try to keep these places alive without any real structure to support their development.

Josh Doble of Community Land Scotland added: “We must be the only country in the world that is trying to deliver land reform through volunteers.” READ MORE: SNP says it is launching biggest Scottish independence campaign since referendum As on every other subject, there are ‘choices’ to be made in the here and now which will determine whether Scotland moves forward or stays stuck in the rut of pointless dispute about something that isn’t going to happen, at least any time soon.

Under the stirring headline, “it’s time to choose” which itself doesn’t bear any relationship to reality, the mailshot provides a list of well-honed, tendentious grievances, and one caught my eye. “Should Scotland’s pensions be used by Westminster to fund free personal care in England?” In any other context, this would be called out for what it is – dog-whistle politics in which ‘they’ are taking from ‘us’. I have no idea what convoluted distortion is required to carve this particular chip on the shoulder, but it’s not hard to see exactly the prejudice it is intended to play to.

Should we not choose to be better than that? What I do know is that the Scottish government had a crack at creating a National Care Service and made such a mess of it that it had to be abandoned. As with so much else, the headline came first, with delivery as an afterthought. Incidentally, since we are talking about ‘choices’, it would be remiss not to mention that the chief architect of that expensive debacle, and quite a few others, was one Nicola Sturgeon, who has since decided to Choose London and its promise of niche celebrity.

That’s fair enough. It’s her choice. Some of us stick with Scotland. There is a real prospect at present of our two governments working together on many fronts to produce better outcomes for places and people who are desperately in need of them. Almost regardless of longer term views on the constitution, that is a choice which the vast majority of Scots would approve of. Setting aside differences rather than waking up each morning, thinking about how to manufacture them, is the best choice for Scotland at the present time.