The National (Scotland) - Seven Days
Who – and what – is left standing after a week of high drama at Holyrood?
IF you didn’t know before, ye ken noo – “hell hath no fury like a party scorned”. We will never know now if the wider Green membership would have deployed the same level of vitriol as their co-leaders did last Thursday morning, shortly aer being handed their jotters. We will never learn whether the wider SNP membership were cheering or jeering when the Bute House Agreement imploded.
Mainly because the First Minister chose not to consult them. But we are where we are, and a messy old place it is too.
Lining up to give the FM a bloody nose are the aforementioned Greens – for the moment, anyway – the Tories because they do enjoy a political stunt, the LibDems – though not exactly a numerical force in the land these days – and “Scottish” Labour.
I listened to the redoubtable Jackie Baillie, Labour’s deputy leader, assure the nation via the airwaves that her troops would never be motivated by anything other than a concern for the Scottish people. The riposte of Aye Right! sprang unsummoned in a thousand mouths.
What “Scottish” Labour hopes is the Nats’ woes will drive more voters into its warm embrace. It has now unveiled its own binding motion of no confidence in the entire government.
Though it has to be admitted that if Mr Yousaf does indeed have to retire hurt from the fray, banging his own neb into one or two doors of late will have caused some of the damage.
Watching First Minister’s Questions last week resembled nothing so much as a Scottish take on a Spanish bullfight where all those would-be toreadors took a turn at sticking a spear into a wounded animal.
Ironies abound here. People who normally line up to loathe the Tories seem content to line up behind their motion. Some SNP MSPs who fervently wanted the Bute House Agreement to be ditched are shedding mock tears at its demise.
And abune them all is the sight of the Holyrood leader – and sole representative – of the Alba Party cherishing the unexpected bonus of being able to decide whether this wounded target will live or die.
For if all the dominoes fall according to party lines, Ash Regan has the task of deciding whether regicide would be good for her party’s soul.
Cast your mind back – if you can bear it – to the day the result of the SNP leadership was announced.
Yousaf and Kate Forbes embraced with what appeared to be genuine warmth. Yousaf absentmindedly patted Ms Regan’s arm in the manner of cheering up the last pup in the litter.
For she notched up a mere 11% in the SNP membership vote, while the other two contenders wound up with very similar results – Yousaf’s winning 52% giving him four points more than his initial vote when Regan’s second preference votes were doled out. Forbes, in that final tally, was just short of 48%.
It is said by the polling gurus that she would have won had the proposition been addressed by the SNP electorate instead of their membership. But politics doesn’t work like that. Just ask the Tories who have perfected leadership by revolving door.
It is widely supposed that the contents of the letter Ash sent the FM, in essence setting out the price for her support, were, if not dictated by Alex Salmond then most certainly suggested by him.
In fairness, Regan is not the only erstwhile SNP defector to Alba who
nd wound up in that party because they were fair-scunnered by the lack of progress on the independence front.
Yet let’s remember too that the immediate cause of her taking her bat and her ba’ elsewhere was her hostility to the Gender Recognition Reform bill.
Since that is a most cherished piece of Greenery – the subject of their only stated red line – you doubt she and Lorna Slater are liable to take tea together any time soon.
In fact, it seemed at least passing odd to all of us wedded to the indy cause, that there was no visible point at which the Green arm of the BHA was prepared to walk over perceived independence failures.
While their rainbow ranks only got up in arms when the Scottish Government decided – in the light of the Cass Report – that it was time to tak tent before pursuing medical pathways which Dr Cass said were devoid of clinical evidence or normal clinical practice.
Alba, of course, are also hostile to the GRR and all its works which must have been at least part of what attracted her to Salmond’s new model army – though the latter does seem a few battalions short of
electoral impact right now.
In truth, there are a number of Holyrood residents in several parties who have become full-blown revisionists over GRR, perhaps aer being in receipt of doorstep conversations around why they had pledged their troth to a policy over which the electorate at large failed to give very much of a damn.
I am in absolutely no doubt that the current hurdles would-be transitioning people have to negotiate are unwieldy, unfair, and downright intrusive. Reform was badly needed, but not the variety which was put to the vote.
It’s not possible to airily dismiss well nigh 400 pages of Cass’s conclusions in the manner some critics have sought to do. It reads like what it is – a compassionate and closely argued case for returning to evidence-based research; an assertion that not all adolescents, and certainly no very young children, who are uncertain of their identity, are necessarily trans.
Some, she suggests suer
from
undiagnosed autism – particularly girls – or other neurodivergent conditions.
The fact that young people who have lost a parent, families with a history of physical or mental ailments, or young careexperienced teens are overrepresented in those who went through gender identity development programmes, should surely give any responsible adult pause for thought.
There is of course a tiny number of people who DO feel from an early age that they are in the wrong gender. They very much need full support. They too have been failed by us allowing the debate to become so toxic that politicians, academics, and medical professionals live in fear for their jobs and and are struck dumb.
Cass said this last week that because of threats she could no longer use public transport. How desperate is that?
THE old saw that week is a long time in politics (copyright Harold Wilson) will never be more true than in the period from last Thursday morning to this coming one. Votes of no confidence need only two working days' notice aer motions are laid. They require only 25 MSPs to agree, so the Tory one is surely in the bag.
Only the stoniest heart will fail to feel sorry for a First Minister who, I fear, may prove to be a high-profile example of the Peter Principle which states that people eventually get promoted to a post beyond their competence levels.
By common consent, he is what is generally regarded as a good human being – an impression underscored by his instinctive visit to a synagogue last October, and his decision to give solace to a vocal protester at his party conference.
These are emblematic of someone who normally values consensus. The fact that consensus broke down so spectacularly last week with his partners in government is already a matter for some conjecture.
My own guess, for what it’s worth, is that he and his advisers thought it would be intolerable and politically inept to allow the membership of another party to determine his political fate.
Decisions are much easier in retrospect of course. Twenty-twenty hindsight is a wonderful thing.
Some SNP MSPs who fervently wanted the Bute House Agreement to be ditched are shedding mock tears at its demise