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IT’S one thing to propose criminalising election materials produced in Gaelic and Scots and threatening those in breach of the law with jail.
It’s another to then plead an “administrative mess up” as you desperately try and explain a full-blown assault on two of Scotland’s official languages.
But this is what has occurred with Reform UK over the past 24 hours.
The saga began when Nigel Farage's party moved an amendment to a Westminster bill that would, if passed, criminalise all political materials that are not in English or Welsh.
After being approached by The National, a Reform UK spokesperson then claimed that the "amendment was drafted for application in elections in England and Wales, not Scotland and Northern Ireland" .
They claimed it was not the intention of the amendment to include Scotland and described it as an “administrative mess up”.
The trouble is, it’s there in black and white. The amendment features two paragraphs which explicitly lay out criminal punishments in Scotland.
“A person who commits an offence under this section is liable on summary conviction a) in England and Wales to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 6 months, to a fine or both; b) in Scotland or Northern Ireland, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding six months, to a fine not exceeding level 5 on the standard scale or to both.”
The act it would amend also extends across the UK, it does not just apply in England and Wales.
What’s more, if it is an administrative mess up, it’s quite a big one when there are specific details of how a fine in Scotland or Northern Ireland would “not exceed level 5 on the standard scale”, a detail not included in the England and Wales part.
Are they seriously suggesting this level of detail was an accident?
It’s frightening in any case. If they did mean it, they are proposing to repress two of Scotland’s official languages, which as former MSP and Gaelic speaker Alasdair Allan laid out, is completely against a decades-long cross-party consensus in Scotland to protect these languages.
If they didn’t, there’s every reason to be terrified that a party who could govern the UK in the future could do something like this by accident.
Forgive me for being a little cynical too when this attack on Gaelic and Scots has not exactly come out of nowhere.
Earlier this year, when Nigel Farage described Welsh speakers as “foreign” in a video, I spoke to Gaelic speaker Eilidh Munro about whether she feared Gaelic would be next to come under threat from Reform.
She said that cross-party support for the language could come under threat for the first time in the Scottish Parliament if Reform MSPs got into Holyrood.
“I think anything that threatens their very narrow view of what they think Britain should be is something they’re likely to turn around and attack,” Munro said in March.
Afterwards, Reform backed out of appearing in our live hustings podcast event , sending out a press release saying The National was “lying about us apparently wanting to ban the Gaelic language".
It was speculation at the time, of course. We had nothing to prove Reform would attack Gaelic, but certainly had legitimate reason to believe they could after Farage’s remarks about Welsh.
So, you can imagine my horror when I subsequently saw this proposal appear on my social media on Monday evening. How the chickens have come home to roost.
If indeed this was all just a misunderstanding, Reform have so far not made it clear how they propose to clear up this “mess".
Even if their proposal is somehow altered, they’ve shown their hand now, and Gaelic and Scots speakers are unlikely to forget it.
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