Why is the SNP trying to rewrite history?

One of the joys of living under a nationalist government is the exciting pace at which the facts change. What was axiomatic yesterday may be contested today and heretical tomorrow. There is no burden of knowledge because what has happened can unhappen as the need arises. Nationalists, Orwell diagnosed, are ‘haunted by the belief that the past can be altered’ and the spectre of revisionism is never far from the SNP’s account of even recent events. So it is that Nicola Sturgeon deplores ‘the appalling treatment of the children of the Windrush generation’ and urges ‘a system that respects human dignity’ rather than ‘unjustly forcing people to leave the country that they have come to call home’. Washed down the memory hole are Sturgeon’s words four years ago, when senior Brussels figures cast doubt on an independent Scotland’s chances of EU membership:

‘There are 160,000 EU nationals from other states living in Scotland, including some in the Commonwealth Games city of Glasgow.