Why I was disappointed by John Swinney's Kneecap intervention

The National

01-05-2025

It was the worst kind of 'gotcha' journalism and Swinney should be too savvy to fall for it. The idea that politicians should have a say in the line-up of a music festival is laughable, and unhealthy for a democracy.
We've been here before. Music, particularly hip-hop, has often served as a useful distraction device for the worst of our politicians. I'm not quite old enough to remember Streets Of Sorrow by The Pogues being banned, but I am old enough to remember the Guildford Four being released as innocent men, showing the song to have been entirely true.
I also remember Cop Killer by Body Count. It was a song about, well, killing cops, written to be controversial and succeeding.
US Republicans and Democrats fought over who was more outraged, urging ridiculous sanctions on any shops which dared to stock the CD.
The CEO of Time-Warner, the record company in question, begged people to consider the socio-political context around the song, calling it an 'anguished cry' from a suffering community.
Cop Killer was a response to the brutal racist beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police and to long decades of discrimination and abuse of African-Americans by police forces around the United States.
Neither Body Count nor Kneecap are issuing instructions, they are protesting. Kneecap are protesting against the Tories, who have been in government for the majority of their lives. The United Nations reports that the last Tory government literally starved a quarter-of-a-million of its own people to death with its vicious benefits reforms targeted at the most vulnerable in our society.
If Kneecap are guilty of anything beyond bad taste, it's that they've given some of the worst politicians this country has ever suffered an opportunity to cast themselves in a more sympathetic light, for a week or so at least. Directing the public gaze away from their vile decisions and at some convenient rappers is about as good as it gets for the spiralling Tories right now. Kneecap took the Tory government to court over a decision by Kemi Badenoch to deny them public funding because of their beliefs about a united Ireland. Their lawyers described the case as 'a penalty kick with no goalie'.
The Government ended up handing close to £20,000 to a trio of West Belfast hoods and Badenoch, then a government minister, had her prejudices put on public display. There is perhaps an element of revenge at play here.
As with the Cop Killer controversy, we are surely required to look a little deeper. Why do the Tories elicit such responses? Why do people actively hate them, rather than just disagree with them? Is it because their decisions in government lead to the 'systematic immiseration of millions' according to the UN; disproportionately women and children, many of whom died?
We should remember David Clapson, who died because he was so heavily sanctioned he couldn't afford electricity. The insulin in his inoperable fridge spoiled, and he died from untreated diabetes.
Four years later another diabetic, Amy Driver, died after being sanctioned for missing an appointment at the JobCentre.
I could go on as there is an endless list of vulnerable people who have suffered and died as a result of inhumane policy decisions made by Tory MPs.
Arguably, they aren't entitled to demand civility from Kneecap, or anyone else, and they definitely are not entitled to drape themselves in a cloak of victimhood and demand our sympathy.
David McDonald
Clarkston via Belfast