It was, on the face of it, an odd fight to pick. Devastated Scottish nationalists, deprived of their greatest sporting moment for decades, turned in united fury against . . . the Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling.
In the aftermath of Scotland’s last-minute defeat to Australia in the Rugby World Cup, Britain’s bestselling living novelist faced a full-blooded digital assault by the Scottish National party’s cyberstormtroopers.
Rowling, who was born in England but lives in Scotland, was labelled a quisling, an 80-minute patriot, a self-hating Englishwoman and told, in the pithy language of Twitter, to f*** off.
And her offence? She dared to say the team had been magnificent and had done “us proud”.
Rowling was targeted by the Scottish Twitter fanatics, known as the cybernats, because she was a prominent opponent of Scottish independence before last year’s referendum.
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Not taking the assault lying down, she hit back at her detractors, the most prominent of whom was Stuart Campbell who tweets under the nom de guerre Wings Over Scotland (usually from his home in Bath, Somerset).
“I know Scotland’s a nation,” Rowling wrote. “I live there, you see. I pay tax there and I contribute more than bile there.”
There was more.“This is the Scotland you want to show the world, is it? Get out if you’re not pro-nationalist?” she asked.
“Nae whisky here for you,” came the reply from one cybernat.
The unsavoury abuse meted out to Rowling did bring her high-level support however. The Scottish crime writer Val McDermid said that she was “proud” to call Rowling “my fellow countrywoman”.
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It even drew into the fray the Scottish first minister, and figurehead, if perhaps not fervent supporter, of the cybernats. Nicola Sturgeon appealed to them not to abuse opponents of independence.
“Note to my fellow independence supporters,” she wrote. “People who disagree are not anti-Scottish. Does our cause no good to hurl abuse (& it’s wrong).”
In June she warned that any cybernats who were members of the SNP could be disciplined if they used social media to “threaten violence, or hurl vile abuse, or seek to silence the voice of others through intimidation”.
The cybernats first came to prominence during the referendum campaign. While the SNP was credited with having mastered social media and winning the online battle against the forces of unionism, some of its supporters dispensed virulent abuse against their political opponents. Their Twitter bullying antics bore similarities to the antics of some social media supporters of Jeremy Corbyn in the weeks before his election as Labour leader.
Just before this year’s general election, Neil Hay, the SNP’s candidate in Edinburgh South, was unmasked as an internet troll. He had used a false name to insult elderly constituents and label unionists as quislings, the cybernat insult of choice.
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While Ms Sturgeon declined to sack him, he was one of only three SNP candidates in the election who failed to secure a seat.
One of the party’s successful candidates, Paul Monaghan, had to apologise after it emerged that he used Twitter to post a series of offensive remarks about opponents.
Willie Rennie, the Scottish Liberal Democrat leader, warned the nationalist movement yesterday that pro-unionists would not be “browbeaten”.
“This reveals the scale of the problem for the nationalist movement, which has been infected by large numbers of people who believe the way to win an argument is to be offensively aggressive online,” he said.
And as for the referee, who controversially, and arguably wrongly, awarded a last-minute penalty against Scotland in the rugby match: he is probably praying that no long-lost Scottish ancestry comes to light.
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The referee with a disappearing trick
The South African referee’s sprint off the pitch as soon as he blew the final whistle, having just awarded a controversial last-minute penalty to Australia, was ridiculed online yesterday.
A still of Mel Gibson in Braveheart, with hundreds of Highland warriors, appeared with captions including: “Outside Craig Joubert’s dressing room right now”. Another tweet had a clip of a man running across a desert and said: “Craig Joubert makes good progress on his journey back to South Africa.”
Brett Gosper, the chief executive of World Rugby, said he thought that the referee had just needed to go to the bathroom.