Sturgeon’s ‘trans’ obsession wrecks Scottish ‘nationalist’ project
Posted by admin978 on February 17, 2023 · Leave a Comment
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.]
