Divide, distract, dominate is the oldest political trick in the book

The National

13 hours ago

The symbolism is chilling. These aren't just bonfires; they're public performances of dehumanisation. That such displays are treated as cultural tradition by some only deepens the irony. When protesters are accused of stirring division, yet coordinated burnings of ethnic and political identities are dismissed or even celebrated, the moral compass has not only spun but snapped.
READ MORE: Calls for removal of migrant effigies in boat on loyalist bonfire
There's a pattern here. Infringements of human rights provoke resistance from those with lived memory or historical understanding of injustice. When that resistance is ignored – or worse, criminalised – it becomes troubling to those invested in the status quo. At that point, bigotry is no longer covert, it erupts into entitled performance. We're closer to square one than should ever have been allowed.
This isn't just a Northern Irish issue, nor is it confined to sectarianism. It is mirrored in how Westminster handles Scottish democratic expression. Repeated refusals to permit a second independence referendum have stalled not just political process but political imagination. Yet instead of scrutinising Westminster's intransigence, much of the media, and therefore the population, blames the SNP government for not having 'delivered' independence – as if permission wasn't withheld in the first place. This is precisely the kind of misreading and misattribution the UK Government depends on to suppress dissent.
Ironically, the Scottish Government has achieved a great deal despite these constitutional constraints. Standards in public services have been maintained above what should have been possible without mitigation under Westminster's fiscal tightening. Meanwhile, many English councils – Labour-led ones among them – are buckling under austerity. English voters and commentators routinely spout the lie that they're subsidising Scotland, instead of recognising their own shared victimhood under the same system of centralised indifference.
READ MORE: Scottish depot trying to bring back Tesco pallets from loyalist bonfire
Just as the bonfires burn symbols of international solidarity, so too Westminster pits nation against nation, and citizen against migrant. Divide, distract, and dominate: it's the oldest political trick in the book. Whether it's asylum seekers turned into effigies, or Holyrood turned into a scapegoat, the effects are the same: dehumanisation, delegitimisation, deflection, and denial.
And this is not unique to the UK. Globally, we see the same game playing out. Refusal to address historical or structural injustice leads to protest reframed as provocation, then those in power manipulate grievance to embolden reactionary forces. The rise of religious nationalism in India, Israel's settler-state exceptionalism fuelling genocide in Palestine, and racial retrenchment in parts of the US all follow this well-worn pattern.
We are not trapped in this cycle because it is inevitable. We are trapped because those with the power to break it choose instead to preserve it. They conflate silence with peace, and protest with peril. That's why symbolic violence like these bonfires is tolerated, and even encouraged in some circles. It's why legitimate calls for democratic self-determination in Scotland are rebranded as political failure.
Until this cycle is broken by those in the middle ground recognising that complacency is complicity, we will keep returning to these same flames of hatred, denial, and distraction.
The real danger is not just that we forget history or fail to celebrate sociocultural traditions, but that we keep choosing to relive history's worst moments and immolate the progress those traditions should represent.
Ron Lumiere
via email