This week’s Behind the Headlines comes from political reporter Hamish Morrison. This newsletter is now subscriber-only. Subscribe for just £1 for three months here.
The Palais des Nations is a sprawling complex of buildings which creeps up the hill from the eastern shore of Lake Geneva.
It is the European headquarters of the United Nations and made up of a series of uniform buildings all done in the same inoffensive style which gestures noncommittally at classicism.
I was there to report on Liberation Scotland and Salvo’s first public event in their quest to have Scotland recognised as a colony.
It will doubtless be an arduous task for campaigners to convince the international community that a developed nation like Scotland, a nation which played a leading role in colonising swathes of the rest of the world, is in fact itself a victim of imperial oppression.
But that’s exactly what they intend to do.
While it might prove a challenging task, it is certainly not without its rewards, as anyone who has had the luck to have a window seat on the plane for the lakeside descent into Geneva can tell you.
Their presentation was held in S4 of the UN complex, a room inspired by Moroccan design; all ornate wooden panelling and geometric patterns engraved on the glass table which dominated the centre of the room.
After a bewildering journey attempting to locate the room (the UN is not famed for its efficiency), I found our campaigners. They had talked a representative of an African human rights group and the deputy presiding officer of a committee of the African Union into coming along after attending their event the night before, a little diplomatic quid-pro-quo.
The day’s running order had been disrupted by the last minute rescheduling of a networking event to do with Palestine – sure to be the diplomatic mixer of the week – which meant it now clashed with Liberation Scotland and Salvo’s planned drinks reception that afternoon. Organisers speculated about scheduling skullduggery to draw people away from the Scottish independence event.
Over the course of four hours, we were talked through the case for Scotland being a colony – a heady mix of revisionist history, legal analysis and high political theory.
I hammered away at my laptop to keep our live blog updated until it gave up the ghost, and I had to resort to texting updates to my colleague Fiona Brown to keep the engine turning over.
On reflection, the moment which seems to have most captured the hearts of supporters was what I had thought at the time was a relatively innocuous comment.
Since Thursday’s event I have seen a comment from George Katrougalos, the UN expert on equitable international order, shared numerous times. He said: “The people if Scotland have, in my opinion, a constitutional right to determine their political future.”
His speech was short and did not address the central question of whether Scotland was a colony. But the mere involvement of one with UN bona fides, who made such an emphatic statement on Scotland’s right to self-determination, was read as tacit approval of the wider project. It will be a galvanising piece of encouragement, whether real or imagined, for Liberation Scotland and Salvo.
Their task is to slowly build up support for their campaign with the aim of eventually winning round a “friendly” country to put Scotland’s case to the UN formally.
That is a long, hard slog. But anyone in the room with those campaigns can tell you, they think they’re standing on the brink of something big.
