https://www.notanotherfakenewscast.com/shahmir-sanni
If you don’t know who Shahmir Sanni is, feel free to read a bit about him.
In brief, he’s a young (initially closeted) gay British Muslim man who worked for the Vote Leave campaign and in 2018 reported them to the cops for financial and electoral crime. He was then outed in a blog post shared by Dominic Cummings in retaliation for this act of whistle-blowing, endangering his family in Pakistan and his own life. Just another delightful permutation of the completely normal and unbroken society Britain has.
In this podcast, Sanni gets more than an hour and a half to talk largely uninterrupted about his experiences. Credit to the hosts who obviously recognized they had an articulate, voluble guest with a story to tell and the best thing to do was give him room.
I recommend you listen to the whole thing. This is an extended firsthand account of the internals of the Vote Leave campaign from somebody who at some point internalized their psychology and now has more concrete reasons than most to loathe them. Genuinely fascinating glimpse into the hell factory.
The most sensational line (at least for Scottish audiences) comes in the last couple of minutes of the cast, and got turned into the front page pull quote in the article The National newspaper (a poison raglet) ran about the interview the other day.
At about the 1h33m mark, the discussion turns briefly to Scotland, and Shahmir confirms he is pro-independence.
Host Gerry McCann replies along the lines that the Westminster culture they have just been discussing is reason enough to want independence, and before he has even finished speaking, Shahmir replies, “They *hate* the Scottish… what people need to understand is that they genuinely *genuinely* do not like Scotland. The whole idea of Scotland, they don’t like it… The way they would talk about the Welsh, and the Scottish, it’s like, you really *should* seek independence.”
I have been talking about this growing English nationalist centrist position that was leveraged to get people voting Brexit and then to turn people against Corbyn. This is a cross-party faction or tendency that really coalesced in the last days of Gordon Brown’s tenure as PM. They locate in Englishness (and grudgingly in its wholly-owned subsidiary, Britishness) the only source of virtue. Their social and economic politics are often confused or even incoherent because they have no ethical framework beyond this nationalist clannishness. We can see it clearly in Sanni’s testimony, but this attitude is by no means confined to the Leave campaign. English nationalism has become the dominant discourse in Westminster and the English press, at the expense of all other discourses. It is in a mutually reinforcing feedback loop with resurgent British fascism. All of this hideous Vera Lynn pageantry and malignant blitz spirit idiocy we’re seeing now is the fault of this same disastrous brigade of incompetent bluffers who understand how to mobilize imperialist chauvinism and nothing else.
This effect goes far beyond even Chomsky’s warnings about the strangling effect of editorial considerations on public reason. Establishing the consent of the governed no longer requires an unprofitable and unreliable manufacturing chain, it can simply be asserted, projected, by firebombing the fragile amygdalae of millions of digitally-illiterate boomers with absurdly false targeted facebook posts about immigrants, or antisemitism in the Labour Party, or EU chiefs, China, Russia, whatever works. The press have become largely superfluous and the old Vote Leave campaign crew, notably Chloe Westley, are running the communications for Downing Street. This week they have been running the same kind of fraudulent smear campaigns against Starmer that they ran against Corbyn.
Honestly, until British people get sick of being culturally British, until they get bored of congratulating themselves for all the things they never did and won’t ever do; until they recognize that their toxic culture’s principal defining feature is its tendency to inflict harm on anyone who can’t defend themselves, and that the carnivorous rule of the strong over the weak is the way of the world in large part because British people helped more than any others to make it so; until there is a widespread recognition that the whole national culture of the UK is a material and moral danger to the human beings who have to share this rock, there can be no more urgent goal for Scotland and for the British left than the dismemberment of this radioactively evil union.
