The SNP is paying the price for whipping up the ‘cybernat’ mob

I’m not one to say ‘I told you so’ but the thing is, I did. At the SNP’s mass-recruiting, concert-touring, swingometer-skelping zenith, I warned that the party’s failure to rein in its most fervent ideologues, not least the digital stormtroopers known as cybernats, would do it a mischief one day. Instead, the Nationalists not only tolerated cybernats, but some got in on the act themselves. None more so than Pete Wishart, the sneer on the snarl of Scottish nationalism, whose late-night maledictions against ‘nawbags’ and ‘wanks’ had the faithful testifying and retweeting with equal fervour. 

Now the boot is on the other foot and he is coming in for a kicking from his own squad. Wishart’s near-defeat to the Tories last June concentrated his mind and he has declared himself in opposition to a second independence referendum any time soon on the reasonable grounds that they’d lose again. For his heresy, he has been excommunicated from the cybernat faithful, execrated as an ‘Etonian boot-licker’ and charged with becoming ‘well settled into London life’, the gravest of crimes for a Scottish nationalist.