JOHN MACLEOD: After Westminster leader's outburst on Elgin Marbles…The SNP has form for the lazy rewriting of history

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How one longs for the princes of Scottish Nationalism to discover the power of deadly understatement. Or quiet, self-deprecating humour, instead of constantly fire-hosing us with totally pointless venom.

Like Stephen Flynn the other day, weighing in on the barnacled issue of the Elgin Marbles, central to a hissy fit earlier this week between the Greek and British governments. 

An issue, as was immediately evident, this dunderheid of an SNP Westminster leader knows nothing about – and not only did he embarrass himself, he embarrassed us.

It all took off with a weird spat between Rishi Sunak and his Hellenic counterpart, Kyriakos Mitsotakis. 

Stephen Flynn has weighed in on the issue of the Elgin Marbles

 A frieze which forms part of the "Elgin Marbles", taken from the Parthenon in Athens

A planned grip-and-grin was called off after the Greek premier publicly emoted about the ‘Parthenon sculptures’, as our more affected Leftist lounge lizards like to call them, after allegedly promising not to.

Some senior Tory subsequently briefed the papers: ‘The Elgin Marbles are part of the permanent collection of the British Museum and belong here. 

It is reckless for any British politicians to suggest that this is a subject of negotiation.’

‘Absolutely agree, this shouldn’t be subject to negotiation,’ the SNP’s Westminster leader promptly flared. ‘The Elgin Marbles were stolen and should be returned. Easy.’

Actually, they weren’t, and they shouldn’t be. Parliament concluded way back in 1816 that Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, had acquired the sculptures quite fairly, in his capacity as our ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.

He was accordingly given leave to sell them to the British Museum, where they have been ever since. 

And, in so doing, Lord Elgin almost certainly saved these treasures for posterity – after centuries when the Parthenon had been seriously shelled and tourists were constantly hacking off bits to take away.

It may have been a bit patrician. Even high-handed. But, had the Scot not intervened, it is unlikely these sculptures would have survived.

But the Greek government has been hollering for their return since at least 1983, has long involved Unesco – whose offers to mediate we continue politely to decline – and is constantly kicking up a fuss about the historic rocks.

Our line has always been that the Elgin Marbles were obtained lawfully, that handing them meekly to Athens would establish a precedent that could see the stripping of all sorts of treasures from the great museums of the world, and that their display in the British Museum – in the context of artefacts from many other ancient cultures – usefully complements the other significant collection of Parthenon sculptures, in Greece’s Acropolis Museum.

Left unsaid is that in 1816 the Greek state did not exist. It was only finally established as a confection by the Great Powers in 1830, and it has been a bit of a basket case for as long as anyone can remember.

There have, for instance, since 1830 been 14 successful military coups – to say nothing of untold failed ones, the latest in 2018. 

And the Greek government has always been faintly ridiculous, from its ongoing feud with the reconstituted Macedonia to its reaction when its late former king, Constantine II, braved a 1993 holiday in the land of his birth.

Furious ministers in Athens had him pursued by gunboats, shadowed him with military planes, and – a year later – confiscated all his Greek belongings, trumping that by stripping Constantine of his citizenship. Not the sort of small, independent country that SNP panjandrums might be wise to highlight.

Well, so much for the Elgin Marbles. What is far creepier is Stephen Flynn’s endeavours here to rewrite history – and in this, of course, the Nationalists have serious form.

Nationalists do not, for instance, like to be reminded that, as late as the 1983 general election, their party stridently opposed membership of what is now the European Union.

And, hilariously, Alex Salmond himself has been unpersoned. Quite written out of the party’s history on the SNP website. The 2014 independence referendum campaign was ‘spearheaded’, innocent visitors are assured, by Nicola Sturgeon – who struck all mention of her predecessor from the official record, much as Stalin airbrushed Trotsky out of the pally photos with Lenin.

On her final downfall in February, the retiring First Minister herself tried to rewrite events, complaining of the ‘intensity’ and ‘brutality’ of public life these days and that she had somehow become a lightning rod for ‘irrationality’.

A bit rich right after our Nicola’s protracted insistence that a convicted, incarcerated rapist was actually a woman.

But if top Nats have been less than candid about their own history, there have been disturbing efforts to twist and distort that actually taught to our children in Scotland’s schools.

In December 2020 horrified historians Sir Tom Devine and Chris Whatley slammed an averred ‘Timeline’ to devolution in 1999 that had been taught to our children for several years and was proudly displayed on a Scottish Government website for all to see.

It was basically a portrayal of Scots as the Most Oppressed People Ever – a chronicle of our sufferings at the hands of the dastardly English since 1296.

It left out such minor details as the prominent part of many important Scots in slavery, and was clotted with such falsehoods as the suggestion that in 1919 Churchill had dispatched ‘English troops’ to suppress a ‘major revolution’ in Glasgow.

‘Arrant propaganda,’ thundered Devine, ‘dangerous nonsense’. 

It was, said Professor Whatley quietly, ‘a perversion of history... frightening as it was blatantly political and clearly designed to support the cause of independence’.

The material was shortly removed from the Education Scotland website to ensure, said a spokesman shamelessly, ‘our resource is not open to misunderstanding or misinterpretation’.

History is messy and often inconvenient. Few Scots today are comfortable with our long (and lucrative) part in colonisation. Or our enthusiastic plantation of Ulster, with all the trouble that ensued.

Or that the worst religious persecution in Scotland’s history happened under a Scottish dynasty, the Stuarts – with such atrocities that, when the current King assumed the throne in September 2022, the very first oath he had to take was one to uphold the Protestant and Presbyterian order of the Church of Scotland.

Or that more Scots actually fought against Charles Edward Stuart in the ’45 than for him. Or that the Highland Clearances were largely administered not by English gentry but home-grown clan chiefs and their Edinburgh lawyers.

And then there is the ‘wee white rose of Scotland’ Nationalist pols like to don as a buttonhole.

It’s a mawkish allusion to a poem by Hugh MacDiarmid – indeed, a poem most petty and parochial. And MacDiarmid himself was a truly nasty piece of work. 

A sponger, a plagiarist, who flirted in his career with both fascism and Stalininism.

For a party banging on about its outward-looking civic nationalism, is it wise to identify with a man who in 1941 said ‘I regard the Axis powers, though more violently evil for the time being, less dangerous than our own government in the long run and indistinguishable in purpose’?

Months earlier, he had mused, ‘Although the Germans are appalling enough, they cannot win, but the British and French bourgeoisie can and they are a far greater enemy.’

Then there was a horrid poem crowing about the London Blitz. 

This is the man Nationalists delight to honour with their boutonnieres, who seriously thought Scotland would be better off with Hitler.

This is not culture: it is historical illiteracy. And, in Mr Flynn’s latest exhibition of himself, we are reminded that, even in its present agonies, the SNP is less a political movement than an unnerving cult.