Sturgeon’s ‘trans’ obsession wrecks Scottish ‘nationalist’ project

Nicola Sturgeon yesterday announced her resignation as Scottish First Minister and leader of the Scottish National Party: she will remain in post until the SNP completes election of her successor, a process that will last for six weeks.

For several years Sturgeon (who took over the SNP from Alex Salmond in 2014) was rated as the most effective party leader in the UK – so much so that the Conservative Party succeeded at the 2015 general election by portraying then Labour leader Ed Miliband as a likely puppet of Sturgeon, in the event of a coalition government at Westminster.

When her embittered predecessor Salmond launched a rival party (Alba) two years ago, it proved a flop, failing to win a single election at any level.

But in recent months Sturgeon’s core project – Scottish independence, the SNP’s raison d’être – has seemed to be floundering. Opinion polls were starting to show that Scots would reject independence if offered a second referendum, and in any case such a referendum was not going to be offered until the present Tory government loses office in another couple of years.

Meanwhile Sturgeon had become obsessed by an increasingly weird ‘woke’ agenda, typified by the ‘Gender Recognition’ law that was passed by the Scottish Parliament but vetoed by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. (Under the present devolution arrangements, Scotland has devolved powers in some areas, but does not yet have the right to allow a man to call himself a woman and demand access to female facilities.)

This political row turned into a scandal when a convicted rapist, Adam Graham, was found to have been moved to a women’s prison having decided that he is now a ‘transgender woman’ called Isla Bryson.

Eventually Graham/Bryson was transferred back to a men’s prison, but the First Minister (usually a fluent media performer) struggled to answer interviewers who asked her whether she regarded this convicted rapist as being a man or a woman!

Polls show that the majority of Scots oppose Sturgeon’s ‘gender recognition’ law, and she had failed to win over even a majority of SNP voters on this issue.

No doubt there were other reasons contributing to Sturgeon’s decision to quit (including personal factors), but there’s little doubt that the ‘trans’ issue derailed her leadership, which depended on holding together a broad coalition in favour of independence, rather than incessantly pandering to the ‘woke’ lobby.

Sturgeon seems to have made the mistake of believing her own legend, and revelling in flattery from her acolytes in the left-liberal media.

Her own favoured candidate for the leadership is Humza Yousaf – from a Pakistani family and theoretically a Muslim, but who fully supports Sturgeon’s woke agenda and is a fellow Glasgow MSP, responsible for Health and Social Care in her cabinet. If Yousaf were to win, it would mean that Scotland’s two largest parties were both led by Pakistanis. (Anas Sarwar has been leader of the Scottish Labour Party for the past two years.) Another possible pro-Sturgeon candidate, who might have had more chance of reuniting the party, her present deputy Keith Brown, a former Royal Marine commando who served in the Falklands War, ruled himself out.

While Yousaf is fully on board with the woke agenda, another candidate who has already launched her campaign is Ash Regan, who was among the leading rebels against Sturgeon’s pro-‘trans’ policy. Regan is an Edinburgh MSP: she resigned from Sturgeon’s government in protest at the “gender recognition” plans. Regan has advocated reuniting Scottish nationalism and bringing Sturgeon’s old enemies back into the party, but has no chance of winning the leadership and is more likely to end up in the wilderness herself, possibly in some future alliance with Salmond’s Alba party.

One likely candidate not standing is the initial bookies’ favourite Angus Robertson, who led the SNP contingent in the House of Commons before losing his Westminster seat in 2017 and restarting his career in the Scottish Parliament. Robertson was disliked for years by the SNP’s left-wing because of his role a decade ago in changing the party’s defence policy to a more pro-NATO stance. It’s likely that today’s left cares more about ‘culture wars’, and after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine there is little support for anti-NATO policies outside the fringe of the fringe (whether left or right). But Robertson remains personally unpopular among many of his colleagues, and clearly found less support than expected.

It now seems that the main challenger to Yousaf is Kate Forbes, Secretary for Finance and the Economy in Sturgeon’s cabinet and presently on maternity leave. Her biggest problem is that she is a practising member of the Free Church of Scotland, which takes a conservative line on ‘culture wars’ issues such as the ‘trans’ debate. Fortunately for Forbes, she was on maternity leave during the Holyrood vote on gender recognition last December, but social liberals and the trans lobby will doubtless vote for Yousaf. Ash Regan’s candidature will allow Forbes to present herself as a relative moderate and ‘compromise’ candidate on social issues, but for now Yousaf is the bookies’ favourite.

[NB: An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the Free Presbyterian Church rather than the Free Church of Scotland.]

Change to German electoral system – is Sir Keir watching?

This week the German coalition government of Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals began moves to reform the Federal Parliament (Bundestag) in what would be their country’s biggest constitutional shake-up for many years.

With electoral reform likely to be on the UK’s political agenda after the Conservatives almost certainly lose the next general election (due by January 2025 at the very latest) the choices made in Berlin are worth examining. Especially because their present government is ideologically very similar to a likely Labour-led coalition in the UK.

Germany has a hybrid system, with some MPs elected on a Westminster-style first-past-the-post system, but others elected via a top-up list so as to make the entire Bundestag represent the nationwide percentage share of the vote.

This hybrid system means that the Bundestag is not simply divided proportionally to match the parties’ share of the vote. For example, to gain proportionally-based seats, a party must poll at least 5% nationwide, or qualify for proportional top-ups if it wins at least three directly-elected seats. This happened recently with the far-left party Die Linke.

On the other hand, a party with a very strong regional base can end up winning more directly elected seats than a proportional carve-up would have given them. This is the case with Bavaria’s conservative party CSU. Extra seats are created to balance out such anomalies and are known as ‘overhang’ seats: these have meant that the present Bundestag is the largest ever, with 736 MPs.

This week’s proposed reform would eliminate ‘overhang’ seats, and fix the number of German MPs at 598.

At a basic level the reform is likely to be popular with voters, since it will save money and cut bureaucracy. And it’s a cunning move by the government because it will weaken the CSU. Even though CSU is the sister party of CDU, the present system of ‘overhang’ balancing takes no account of that, and gives an artificial boost to the combined CDU-CSU strength.

Reforming this would be likely to make any future conservative-led government more dependent on a deal with parties further to the right – presently AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) or whichever party succeeds AfD if it splits/declines. Unsurprisingly, the present reform is similar to a policy that the AfD itself promoted four years ago.

Here in the UK the party in a similar position to CSU (though very different ideologically) is Nicola Sturgeon’s Scottish National Party. The present electoral system gives the SNP grossly inflated importance at Westminster, relative to its share of the UK-wide vote. At the last general election SNP won 3.9% of the UK-wide vote, and 48 MPs (i.e. 7.4% of the House of Commons). The system almost doubled the SNP’s importance at Westminster, and this would be far more important in the event of no major party gaining a Commons majority, thus making Sturgeon and her allies kingmakers.

By contrast a more purely proportional system would probably give a populist/nationalist party (i.e. whatever replaces Reform UK and UKIP) more Westminster seats than the SNP. The other big winners from a change to a German-style system would almost certainly be the Greens.

Most importantly for racial nationalists, it would end the ‘wasted vote’ argument that has so far prevented many of those who sympathise with our ideas from voting for a racial nationalist party.