Alex Salmond inquiry: Conspiracy theories about a 'plot' are now being used by mainstream opponents of Nicola Sturgeon's government – Joyce McMillan

It’s a long 21 years since Vladimir Putin first became president of the Russian Federation; and part of the secret of his success, in rapidly changing times, is thought to lie in the thinking and advice of his close confidant and former deputy prime minister, one Vladislav Surkov.

A key ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin has boasted that the Kremlin is “playing with the West’s minds” by using social media in ways with which western governments cannot cope. Similar tactics are now being used by politicians all over the world, warns Joyce McMillan (Picture: Mikhail Klimentyev/Sputnik/Kremlin pool photo via AP)

Surkov is the man credited with the idea that modern governments can now control the information environment so thoroughly, both through conventional media and through “bot farms” designed to transform debate on social media, that they can make people believe whatever they like; and also change those narratives almost at will.

Surkov has boasted that Russia is now “playing with the West’s minds”in ways with which western governments cannot cope; and while such statements doubtless overstate Russia’s influence, it’s also true that Surkov, with Putin’s backing, has been a pioneer in ways of exploiting the social media revolution to change political conversations, and challenge the traditional arbiters of public debate in western counties – a pioneer who now has many followers, notably in the English-speaking world.

So it’s perhaps not surprising that this winter, Scotland’s political debate has become the latest victim of one of the most striking features of this new age of political communications; in essence, the development of polarised, parallel universes of perception and belief, in which real dialogue and consensus become all but impossible.

The syndrome is already familiar, of course, from the recent traumatic history of the United States, from the moment in 2015 when Donald Trump first announced his candidacy for president, to the events at the Capitol on 6 January this year, driven by the widespread unfounded belief among Trump supporters that the 2020 US presidential election had been “stolen”; and the same aggressive polarisation of world-views was also implicit in the UK’s Brexit Leave campaign, run by one of Surkov’s most dedicated western admirers, Dominic Cummings, and characterised by an astonishing campaign of lies targeted via Facebook towards voters with no previous discernible interest in politics.

Like the intervention of Donald Trump in US politics, the Brexit debate has left the UK profoundly and bitterly divided; and probably more vulnerable than at any time in its history to actual disintegration along national lines.

So it’s perhaps not surprising – in this post-Brexit world, with the maintenance of the UK’s remaining territorial reach and assets suddenly at the top of the Johnson government’s agenda – that Scotland has become the latest site of struggle for this new kind of politics.

Nicola Sturgeon's government probably would have sailed through the Salmond inquiry affair relatively unscathed, if not for a series of conspiracy theories about a vast and labyrinthine plot against former First Minister Alex Salmond, says Joyce McMillan (Picture: Andrew Milligan/PA)

Many factors have come together, of course, to create the current crisis surrounding Scotland’s governing party; and the case of former SNP leader Alex Salmond, now dominating the headlines, is perhaps only the match that has served to set the whole pyre of tensions ablaze.

Yet given Alex Salmond’s rock-bottom popularity ratings among Scottish voters, and the relative sustained success of his successor Nicola Sturgeon, it’s difficult not to conclude that the Scottish government would have sailed through the Salmond affair relatively unscathed, if it had not been for the emergence via the internet of a series of conspiracy theories of what is by now a highly recognisable type, asserting a vast and labyrinthine plot against the former First Minister involving huge swathes of the Scottish political and legal establishment.

These theories have spread like wildfire through small but vocal dissident sections of the independence movement, and have been eagerly taken up by Scotland’s opposition parties, and by a hostile UK government and media.

And although they are based to some extent on genuine concerns about aspects of governance in Scotland, 22 years after devolution, the terms of the debate, particularly on the internet, have now reached a categorical point of no return, with phrases like “unfit to govern”, “cesspit of corruption”, and “government of lying vipers” rolling freely across social media, along with some strangely familiar demands that Nicola Sturgeon be consigned to prison.

Scotland is now bitterly divided, in other words, between those who believe that Nicola Sturgeon and her party are profoundly corrupt and unfit to govern, and those who continue to find her a far more honest, credible, lucid and hard-working leader, in the present crisis, than Boris Johnson could ever hope to be.

As in all of the countries which have experienced this kind of political crisis, Scotland’s capacity to act as an effective political community will be weakened by that division, quite possibly to the point where the independence project cannot succeed, despite the current sorry state of UK government.

And like the United States and the UK, Scotland will struggle to achieve any sense of reconciliation, healing and progress, following such a rupture, unless we can find new and effective ways of dealing with the scars left behind, and of encouraging citizens to avoid bitter battles of belief and projection fought out largely in the lurid light of cyberspace.

It goes without saying, after all – or should do – that the only ultimate beneficiaries of this process of exaggeration and hyper-polarisation in political debate, and the undermining of political institutions and social consent that follows, are those who already hold massive economic power, and wish to see governments everywhere too weak to regulate or oppose them.

And if the ideals of active and democratic citizenship are to survive at all, in this turbulent century, we need to become wise right now to the dangers posed by the evolution of these parallel universes of political understanding and perception; and more determined than ever – in the words of the late MP Jo Cox, who lost her life for her beliefs – to find those places in our lives, and in our minds, where more unites us than drives us apart.

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