Why should we expect Nicola Sturgeon to support Team GB?

It hasn’t been a great month for Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon. First, there was the announcement that an official police investigation would take place into missing money from donations supposedly ‘ring-fenced’ for a future independence campaign; then questions about why Scotland’s vaccination targets had been missed led, apparently, to Sturgeon’s ‘Trump like meltdown’ (how she must have hated that comparison); and to cap it all off, Team GB started off rather well at the Tokyo Olympics.

The sporting success led to politicians from all hues of the political spectrum tweeting their congratulations: all hues save the bright yellow of the Nats that is – from whence silence. Not one member of Sturgeon’s top team appeared to express public support for GB’s early medal winners in Tokyo.

Perhaps the First Minister was too busy single-handedly running Scotland and waging war against the coronavirus? Well, perhaps not, as Sturgeon did find time to tweet about a fresh independence drive and share her recommendations for summer reading (Val McDermid and Elif Shafak, if you’re interested). Other leading lights of the independence movement seem to have been similarly time rich – Ian Blackford delighted his followers with anecdotes about his vintage record player.

Condemnation for Sturgeon’s silence came from, among others, Labour’s shadow Scottish secretary Ian Murray, who wrote that ‘the ethos of the Olympics – unity and working together as a team – goes against everything the SNP stands for, so perhaps it’s no surprise they can’t get behind our amazing athletes.’ Under pressure Sturgeon did finally tweet out congratulations on Wednesday for the efforts of Glaswegian swimmer Duncan Scott.

But, is this criticism a bit unfair? After all, if you’re in any doubt about the SNP’s contempt for, and desire to break up, the UK, you really haven’t been paying attention. And it is not as if the SNP haven’t made their partisan sporting allegiances plain in the past. At the time of the 2012 Olympics, the party’s then-leader Alex Salmond said he hoped it would be the last at which an all-British team took part. And Sturgeon pointedly failed to join the chorus of praise for Gareth Southgate’s England at the recent Euros, her only comment being to point out that – prior to the final – Scotland had been the only team England had failed to beat.

So, Ian Murray is correct. We shouldn’t be surprised. The SNP’s antipathy to the UK or GB, which is focused mainly on England (or ‘Westminster’ as it is encoded), is rarely openly expressed, but is well attested to.

Occasionally the mask slips, as it did when Ian Blackford was accused of ‘singling out and bullying’ a private English citizen, whom he accused of breaking Covid rules by travelling to Scotland. (The man was actually a resident of Scotland.) And then there was the time the fervently pro-SNP actor Brian Cox blurted out that exiting the UK was entirely different from exiting the EU, as Scottish independence was all about ‘leaving England’.

These ugly sentiments have surely grown stronger in recent years. Since gaining power in 2007 the SNP seem to have been involved in an ‘othering’ project designed to loosen the ties and accentuate, or just invent, differences between Scotland and England with a view to fostering a sense of grievance that puts the wind in their sails and may one day propel them to the promised land of independence.

Rebadging UK institutions as ‘Scottish’ is part of it. Firms such as Tesco and Marks and Spencer have been ticked off for not making plain the Scottish provenance of some of their goods, and for – the horror – of using union jacks on their packaging. The BBC was obliged to set up an additional Scottish sub channel.

And the corona crisis has been treated as a revival of the long gone home international championships, with ‘healthy competition’ on the vaccine rollout encouraged. At every step of the way differences with England have been highlighted, and a distinctly Scottish approach employed. This has even extended to outlawing travel to the north of England on spurious health grounds. Cynics would suggest the SNP discourage all travel to England for fear that people might find they quite like it, and that the natives are actually quite friendly.

So, anyone urging Sturgeon to express support for an entity that she wishes to terminate, and has a track record of dismissing, is simply asking for additional servings of hypocrisy and cant, commodities of which we surely have an ample sufficiency.

And to anyone that supported the SNP at the last election who was minded to condemn Sturgeon’s silence the inevitable question must be – what exactly did you think you were voting for?