Kevin McKenna at the Herald is in SNP Overdrive these days. I keep ignoring it as best I can but something pees me off too much and here I am again.
I come from a ‘Rangers’ family going back decades. My dad, working in an American factory with no closed shops found out Catholics were not aliens and left with me for Falkirk FC. I married Bernadette, in the Chapel and signed things. With a useless Higher History (B) I taught myself about the Empire and it’s atrocities in Ireland.
Why is McKenna’s claim pure excrement of the male bovine?
Scottish Catholics (many of Irish descent) were long a strong base for Labour, linked to working-class communities and social justice priorities. In the 2010 general election, around 63% of Scottish Catholics voted Labour and only about 18% for the SNP (British Election Study data). Support for the Conservatives was very low (single digits). https://www.brin.ac.uk/9323/
This shifted sharply around the 2014 independence referendum and 2015 general election. A YouGov poll for The Tablet found 48% of Scottish Catholics intending to vote SNP versus 38% for Labour. Post-election British Election Study figures showed roughly 55% of Catholics voting SNP and 36% Labour (with Conservatives at about 5%). The SNP gained substantially across groups, but the swing was notable among Catholics, who had previously been one of Labour’s strongest constituencies in Scotland. https://www.thenational.scot/politics/14886604.poll-shows-huge-swing-to-snp-among-catholics/
A YouGov poll for the Scottish Election Study (fieldwork around March 2026, reported in The Times in April 2026) broke down Holyrood voting intention by religion:
Catholics: Constituency ballot: SNP 36%, Reform UK 22%, Labour 20%.
By comparison, among Protestants, Reform UK led with 25%, ahead of the SNP and Conservatives. https://www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/article/reform-curious-christian-election-sff98dgjn
How has that become possible?
I’ve read the research (Tom Devine) – discrimination against Catholics is a thing of the past. They earn as much and are a bit better educated then the average ‘Protestant.’
If Mackay wanted to tell us something true, he might have had a look at evidence from official statistics and/or from a respected academic researcher like, say, Professor Sir Thomas Martin Devine OBE FRSE FBA. Here’s Devine in the Mackay’s host, the Herald, in 2018:
‘SECTARIANISM is in decline and claims of widespread anti-Catholicism in Scotland are “unhelpfully alarmist”, according to the country’s leading intellectual, Professor Sir Tom Devine. The University of Edinburgh historian claims there is little chance of coming up against religious prejudice in 2018, apart from at Old Firm matches, and accused politicians and church leaders of “brazenly spreading fear” and reinforcing “victimhood” among Catholics.’
Might Devine have based his words on empirical evidence? Well, yes. Who’d have thought it? Is that how you get to be a prof? Here is some official evidence from 2015 (latest):
‘In contrast to the strong perceptions of sectarianism in Scotland, there is evidence to show that personal experiences of it are relatively uncommon in terms of harassment, discrimination and criminal victimisation. Over recent years the SCJS has reported relatively low levels of sectarian crime. In 2008/09 1% of crimes were thought to be motivated by sectarianism, falling to 0.5% in 2009/10. In 2010/11 it was 1% while in 2012/13 (the most recently available figure) it was again 1%. Religious hate-crime accounted for around 10% of all hate crime charges in Scotland in 2013-14 (racial hate-crime accounted for 69%) and is at its lowest level since 2009-10.’ https://www.gov.scot/publications/examination-evidence-sectarianism-scotland-2015-update/pages/4/
My father-in-law was a Catholic from Donegal who met me for the first-time only months after Bloody Sunday. Once he knew I would treat him with respect, he did the same for me. My father was a committed Presbyterian, hostile to the Vatican but friends with several Catholics. At 68, I have no memory of ever directly witnessing even sectarian verbal insults far less violence though an Orange Walk did wake me up once.
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Was that not the other way round in Germany 1930s? Nazis did better in RC areas. Priests saw them as defence against Communism?
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In fact it was a bit more nuanced. The Nazis had great support in the rural Protestant heartlands of northern Germany. At the same time there was considerable suspicion and reticence amongst the Catholic clergy who in many cases saw Nazi doctrine a threat to their authority.
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Interesting. Got a source for that?
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https://www.aeaweb.org/conference/2014/retrieve.php
Your underlying intuition is not wholly wrong, John. Some Catholic clergy and lay people did initially see Nazism as a bulwark against Bolshevism, and a few bishops permitted or tolerated Catholic membership in the party.
But that was not the dominant electoral pattern. The Church hierarchy’s official hostility to Nazism, especially its objection to Nazi racial ideology and its ties to the Zentrum, generally outweighed anti-communist sympathy at the ballot box.
Where individual priests were openly sympathetic to the Nazis, local Catholic resistance to the party was, however, measurably weaker.
Some political scientists tend to distinguish between “confessional” faiths, left-leaning, and unmediated Protestantism, right-leaning.
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Thanks Derek.
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John – I keep telling you in these comments, McKena is a bawbag, best ignored. If he ever achieves his heart’s desire and gets onto the Celtic board, he will fit right in.
As regards sectarianism in Scotland. It appears to me, the Orange Order is an organisation whose active members – those walking our streets – appear to be getting a lot older, there are few young faces on show.
As the organisation ages, it also seems to me: the Marching Season is getting longer, a possible further sign of decline.
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You’re right. That was my last…………..
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“Stalins Granny” used to claim Catholics as “our voters”. They learned that under Labour Scotland got worse, not better. The old murder capital of Europe now has lower rates of homicide than France, Sweden England and Wales. Tho’ Repressing Scotland has morphed from a news programme to Crime Watch Glesca’….presumably to save money on actual journalists.
gavinochiltree
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Like you John, I used to respect Mr. McKenna and indeed reading most of his contributions. That is no longer the case, not least on this latest evidence.
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In the West of Scotland, perhaps as opposed to all of Scotland, and especially Glasgow it’s all still there under the surface. Waiting for the minority NI exodus when Ireland unites…all pre-planned to unbalance Scottish independence. And what of the passing of the Succession to the Crown Act 2013 meaning that my children, resulting from an interfaith marriage (really agnostic) if they had been subject to a surreptitious Roman Catholic baptism by certain relatives (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CAYcCb0KTJI), and even if they subsequently became converts to the Church of England, would be banned from becoming monarch due to the ‘taint of popery’ https://parallelparliament.co.uk/debate/2013-01-28/commons/commons-chamber/succession-to-the-crown-bill (e.g. 17:15). This applies to no other religion, conversion to the Church of England would remove any disbarment. Roman Catholicism, uniquely, remains legally enshrined as the lowest regarded religion in the UK. Only Roman Catholic apostates and especially those surreptitiously baptised as Roman Catholics, rank lower. As of 2013!!! All legal sectarianism could have been declared extinct. But it wasn’t! Any comments Prof Devine?
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Scotland is secular. 32% declare as Protestant. 16% as Catholic. 2% Muslim.
Church membership declines. An elderly women’s club. Women outlive men on average 5 years. The Churches have rights above the Law. The equal opportunity, employment Laws.
The Masonics are declining. Racist, bigoted, misogynist, unequal and unfair. They blackball people. Secret society. Make trouble everywhere. Especially in NI. The Catholics were denied the vote for years. Discriminated against and did not have rights. The illegal Partition. Gladstone. If the Republicans had waited 5 years. 1928 Universal Suffrage. They would have had the vote. Ireland can vote to reunite. Improve their economy.
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Succession to the Crown Act 2013. The debate. https://parallelparliament.co.uk/debate/2013-01-28/commons/commons-chamber/succession-to-the-crown-bill. Jacob Rees-Mogg: “an excommunicated Catholic would be excluded from succession to the Crown because that person would have been in communion with Rome at some point. It is an absolute. If at any moment in their whole life they were in communion with Rome, they are excluded from the throne, deemed to be dead.” John McDonnell: “Over the past 10 or 15 years, I have sat in this Chamber on a number of occasions when successive Members have tried to remove anti-Catholic discrimination from our legislation. Dr Evan Harris and John Gummer did that when they were Members of this House. The simple reason, they argued—I fully agree—is that we in this House should not allow our institutions and our legislation to be founded on or framed by discrimination. This measure is the last remnant of anti-Catholic discrimination that sits within our laws. Frankly, it is offensive to discriminate on religious grounds, and every Government in recent years has said so. We have legislated time and again to remove such discrimination, so why can we not do it in this case?” Exactly, why not in 2013!! Catholics remain, uniquely enshrined in 2013 Law, as the basest, the lowest of all religions in the UK! And everyone at Celtic Park (and all their extended families) knows it. It could have been changed but wasn’t. Why?
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