CURRENT intelligence on the groups which might be said to constitute
the ''darker side of nationalism'' is that, while most are dormant, some
are quietly beavering away, gathering resources against a day when overt
terrorism may once again be -- in their eyes -- a necessity.
A ballot box victory for the SNP at a General Election, say the
winning of a clear majority of Scottish seats, followed by the kind of
delay and obfuscation which is at present taking place in the
British-Irish peace talks might be such a scenario.
Although more recent heads of the British state have signalled that if
the Scots voted for independence no impediment could be placed in their
way, one former Prime Minister also said that a clear majority SNP vote
at a General Election would merely lead to a very difficult
constitutional position, but nothing more.
It is that idea, that Westminster would do everything within its
powers to delay, deny and ultimately frustrate any attempt of a Scottish
pro-independence majority to move the country towards statehood and the
inevitable change of the Union, or total severance from it, which
exercises the extremist fringe the most.
That is what it would take very probably to bring a return of the kind
of activities, including politically-motivated bank raids, bombings of
oil installations and electricity pylons and the dafter types of gesture
extremism which were regular punctuation marks in the seventies and
eighties and which invariably ended in elaborate High Court trials
accompanied by swingeing prison sentences.
It would be foolish to believe that the types of people and groups who
have inhabited the wilder shores of fringe nationalism have simply faded
away through time. It would be very probably correct to surmise that
wherever they currently exist they are already infiltrated by Special
Branch informants, much as the Scottish offshoots of the Northern Irish
terror groups, from the Provos on the Republican side to the UVF and UDA
on the misnamed Loyalist side of the fence, traditionally have been.
It is through such infiltration, and, if your paranoia is sufficiently
healthy to embrace such concepts, through the deliberate planting of
agents provocateurs and the dubious use of entrapment, that the streets
of Scotland have been maintained in a clean condition, largely free of
terrorism for the past three decades.
Practically every group has had its informants and these were well
documented in the standard work by Andrew Scott and Iain Sutherland
Macleay, Britain's Secret War. They averred that the first, and probably
most active, of these Government agents was Major Fredrick Boothby, a
key figure first in the Army of the Provisional Government in the late
1960s but also in a broader sense in relation to the non-existent
Scottish Liberation Army. The claim made was that the activities of the
daft Major Boothby resulted in 11 people being jailed, some for very
long periods.
Scott and Macleay alleged that what really damned Boothby was his
emergence just at the precise moment when the SNP were racing towards
ultimate success. With hindsight, given the subsequent decline of the
SNP's political fortunes, that might seem to be a plausible theory; the
British state created violent nationalist terrorism with the deliberate
aim of discrediting the entirely legitimate aspirations of a democratic
political movement.
Boothby took part in at least two episodes, both involving abortive
bank raids allegedly aimed at securing funds for revolutionary activity,
before he was himself swept up. In practically every subsequent group,
infiltrators or informants were used to secure and give evidence against
participants. There have been persistent allegations that agents were
used to actually create tartan terrorism.
It stretched the credibility of practically all who attended the
Scottish National Liberation Army trial at the High Court in Glasgow of
Thomas Kelly when the key Crown witness, Goodwin, said he had gone to
the police because he had been shocked and dismayed by what he had heard
being plotted.
Goodwin was sacrificed as an informant to convict Kelly, a rather fey
amateur, while the real SNLA -- all three of them -- remained at large.
The leader still is and is seldom out of the headlines for long.
The dramatically-wild appearance of Siol Nan Gaidheal and Arm Nan
Gaidheal members were a constant source of embarrassment to the
mainstream of the SNP and did much to turn off ordinary, sensible
voters. They were undoubtedly heavily infiltrated and a number of them
went to trial for terrorist offences.
There were also key informants involved in the trials of the Tartan
Army, the Scottish Citizens' Army of the Republic -- allegedly now
reformed -- and in the dramatic High Court trial in Glasgow of
schoolteacher Donald Anderson, who was acquitted, and teenager Creag
Browning, who eventually admitted possessing explosive. It was, and
still is alleged that the Bridgeton scrap merchant, Andrew Wilson, and
his employee were set up by the Special Branch with gelignite belonging
to UVF men, then under close surveillance, to entrap Anderson and
Browning.
There have been numerous other fringe groups varying in the degree of
danger they have presented to ordinary Scottish citizens and to the
integrity of the state. Between 1968 and 1990 there had been around 52
Scottish terrorists jailed. The pace has diminished since then, although
the Scottish National Liberation Army is kept alive by the presence of
Adam Busby in Dublin. He was allegedly behind the last hoax bomb episode
in Aberdeen and it emerged from that trial that the new groupings,
including the absurdly-named Flame, have a North-east orientation.
If the pattern remains true to the past, then it looks certain that
the current crop, including such militant anti-English bodies as Settler
Watch and Scottish Watch -- proscribed by the SNP -- are even now being
targeted by the police or the intelligence service despite public
protestations of strict non-violence.
The cynics of the nationalist fringe believe that the time is ripe,
with the current buoyant fortunes of the SNP and their current
respectability in the eyes of the Scottish electorate, for another major
political trial. The other, correct, reading of the situation is that
controlling the loonies leaves Scotland free for the legitimate,
democratic aspirations of those who believe in nationalism to develop
their aims in a safe society.
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