SNP should ‘nick our policies’ on gender equality, says WEP leader
NICOLA Sturgeon should team up with the Women’s Equality Party (WEP) to speed up the pace at which Scotland becomes a “gender-neutral country”, its leader will tell the First Minister this week.
Sophie Walker also said that any successfully elected WEP MSPs should be the SNP leader’s first choice of coalition partner should she fail to win a majority at Holyrood in May.
The Scot also urged the First Minister to “nick” her party’s policies, including its call for help with childcare to start from nine months.
In an interview with The Herald before her meeting with Ms Sturgeon later this week, Ms Walker said the WEP had attracted supporters from other parties, including the SNP. In less than a year 45,000 women and men across the UK have joined, including thousands in Scotland.
Ms Walker said her party was attractive to many voters because it had hit a nerve. And she suggested that the WEP was, in some ways, emulating the SNP.
“(It is) the SNP’s own model, for goodness’ sake,” she said. “They have just absolutely annihilated the competition by putting one issue above all others to the top. So, you know, ‘after you, Nicola’.” She added: “I’m going to meet (Ms Sturgeon) and sit down and have a chat about all this stuff.
“And my proposition is going to be that Scotland could be the world’s first gender-neutral country. But there are still some things, really, really essential issues that we need to work very closely on.”
She said progress had been made on the issue of childcare. “But what we are saying is we should be looking at childcare from nine months... from the end of that parental leave period, because that is where we lose (women from the workforce)”.
She also said that the situation in Scotland in terms of violence against women was still “horrific... it is horrific in every country.”
In her discussions with the SNP leader, Ms Walker will not be able to rule in or out support for independence. The party will not take a position on the constitutional question, she insisted.
Rather, if the WEP manages to get an MSP elected, independence issues would be deemed a “free vote”. The party is still in the process of selecting candidates for Holyrood and has yet to decide if Ms Walker, or an MSP, would lead the party in Scotland.