THE founder of a pro-Union think tank which operated during the first Scottish independence referendum has been given an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honour’s list, The National can reveal.
Dr Azeem Ibrahim was behind the now defunct Scotland Institute which fell off the radar in 2016, but has now been given an award for “services to the Union”.
The Glasgow-born academic has penned numerous opinion pieces arguing against independence, particularly in regards to foreign policy and defence, and holds numerous titles. He runs his own foundation, which funded numerous Scotland Institute projects.
The Ibrahim Foundation’s website boasts photographs of its chairman alongside former Labour MP Alistair Darling, former LibDem leader Jo Swinson and former Scottish Tory leader Jackson Carlaw at a number of events headed by the Institute.
Darling would later go on to head up Better Together alongside other pro-Union politicians during the 2014 independence campaign.
Speaking to The National about Ibrahim’s appointment, SNP MP Tommy Sheppard said he wasn’t surprised by the news.
He explained: “It just tells the story that the entire honours system is skewed towards supporting the establishment and making sure that dissenting voices are ignored and sidelined. So quelle surprise, it’s not shocked me, it’s not upset me, it just is what it is.
“The whole honours system is about patronage, cronyism and rewarding people for favours.”
Sheppard added that the Honours system, alongside the House of Lords, are both “thoroughly undemocratic”.
He added: “They are designed to ensure that power and privilege in Britain are not challenged, and that extends to people who argue for Scottish independence with knobs on when it comes to here.
“I think an award that’s called the Order of the British Empire is screaming out for modernisation.
“It really is time that the entire honors system was replaced by a more democratic egalitarian approach where we can reward people for their civic contributions and for the distinction they bring in public life.”
Ibrahim is a prolific anti-independence columnist, having recently penned an article for an American magazine critisising the First Minister’s recent visit and writing that it was the “worst possible time for independence”.
Published on May 16 this year, Ibrahim wrote: “For readers who are not familiar with the SNP and Sturgeon, they exist to secede from the United Kingdom. They have few other fixed policies, and everything else is in service of that ambition.
“The party fought and lost a referendum on secession in 2014 when the people of Scotland voted 55-45 percent against it. The issue was supposed to have been settled for a generation.”
The National Interest, the magazine to which Ibrahim is a contributor, is an offshoot of a foreign policy think tank established by former US President Richard Nixon to “serve as a voice for strategic realism in US foreign policy”.
Ibrahim is currently a research professor at the Strategic Studies Institute at the US Army College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and Director at the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy in Washington, D.C.
He made it onto the Sunday Times Scot’s Rich list aged 32, set up The Scotland Insitute in 2012, and went on to be named as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.
Ibrahim has been contacted for comment.
