The SNP faces collapse – progressive orthodoxy is the cause

What is happening to political parties? In the classic historical profile, parties were terminated, despite their struggles to survive, by the advent of a more attractive rival or by voters’ gradual disengagement. Over the past three years, however, we have witnessed the spectacle of the Conservative Party committing suicide, starting from the base of an 80-seat majority and the unlooked-for conversion of Labour’s Red Wall electorate – a phenomenon that offered the prospect of a permanent electoral revolution keeping the Tories in power indefinitely.

Within three years, those prospects have collapsed, to the point where the Tory Party is now fatalistically waiting to be euthanised at the next general election. Yet ineffectual Labour never laid a glove on the Government: the Tories destroyed themselves by persistently alienating their supporters. It often seemed as if Conservative parliamentarians woke up each morning and asked themselves: what can we do today to enrage our voters? Nothing deflects them: they are at it again, trying to engineer another servile sell-out to Brussels on the Northern Ireland Protocol.

The self-immolation of the Conservative Party has been a startling sight and, until very recently, unique among political parties. Within the past two weeks, however, we have seen a similar fate overtake the seemingly immovable Scottish National Party. The parallel is startling: a decline from an apparently unassailable position to the loss of a leader supported by the membership and speedy dissolution into squabbling factions, while plunging in the opinion polls.

Is political self-harm contagious? Are we at the start of a pandemic of auto-destruction? A month ago, the SNP was admittedly looking frayed at the edges, as was Nicola Sturgeon. The failure to find a path to the holy grail of IndyRef2 was aggravating tensions within the SNP membership. Sturgeon’s ploy of treating the next general election as a de facto referendum on independence was infantile and betrayed desperation, besides representing a dangerous disincentive to that section of the electorate that rejects independence but whose preferred choice to run the devolution settlement is the SNP.

Scandals were accumulating too, and it was generally recognised that Sturgeon was on the way out. But so is every politician, from the day of taking office, and both the First Minister and her party had weathered storms before, so few observers expected the imminent demise of a regime that had come to seem set in stone.

It was the Gender Recognition Bill that did for Nicola Sturgeon. Some among the SNP leadership may have regarded it as a useful displacement activity, to distract from the failure to secure a second independence referendum; but that should not obscure the fact that Sturgeon and her clique genuinely believe in all the gender nonsense. They would have preferred to turn Scotland into a woke La La Land post-independence, but since separatism has proved stubbornly elusive they elected to carry out that social engineering exercise in preparation for independence instead.

The kind of dystopian society the SNP would create post-independence is evident from their recent legislative initiatives, most notably the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act. The SNP, like Labour and the Conservatives, has been captured by progressive fanatics. That potentially presages the destruction of the party for a generation. The SNP leadership seems not to have realised how unpopular its gender policy was among its supporters. That speaks volumes about how out of touch it has become.

The party is in serious danger, partly due to a coincidence whose timing was lethal. The Scottish public was unimpressed when MSPs (Labour as well as SNP) voted down an amendment to the Gender Recognition Bill to prevent sex offenders who identified as female being sent to women’s prisons. The security of women was the concern that prompted the UK government to block the Bill via Article 35 of the Scotland Act. Sturgeon cynically attempted to convert her irresponsible, misogynist legislation into a constitutional confrontation with Westminster.

But theory is never as incendiary as practice, so when Isla Bryson (née Adam Graham), a double rapist, was sent to Scotland’s only all-women prison, it was curtains for Wee Krankie. It was as if the SNP, like the Tories, had a death wish. A large majority of Scots approved of the blocking of the Bill – a fatal rebuff for the SNP.

That was the point when the SNP could have retrieved the situation, by putting the gender distraction behind them and uniting around a new leader who could lead them back to popularity. The party establishment would have preferred pompous Angus Robertson (hardly an electoral asset), but he has ruled himself out. By the beginning of this week, the leadership contest had effectively turned into a three-cornered fight. The economics minister Kate Forbes was the front-runner, the health secretary Humza Yousaf was the establishment candidate and Ash Regan, who resigned as a minister in protest at Sturgeon’s gender law, was regarded as the outsider candidate.

This line-up was causing private concern in unionist circles. Forbes, aged only 32, just returned from maternity leave and possessed of a pleasant personality, seemed likely to prove popular with voters. Her greatest asset was that, of all women supporters of separatism, she was the one most unlike Nicola Sturgeon. Granted, she is something of a lightweight: during the great “English taxpayers will gladly pay for Scots’ pensions post-independence” debacle, she meekly deferred to Ian Blackford. But, overall, she appeared the nationalists’ best hope.

Until, that is, the same forces that had precipitated the party into crisis came back for more, seeking to eliminate the most promising leadership candidate. Forbes is a Wee Free (evangelical Presbyterian) and adheres to traditional Christian teaching. To the progressive extrmists in her party, the prospect of a Christian governing Scotland is unacceptable. Journalists were encouraged to ask her questions about her faith and its potential conflict with the neo-Marxist agenda, rather than any ideas she might have for rebuilding Scotland’s collapsed public services.

The bigger shock came when Forbes answered all questions straightforwardly, unambiguously and honestly. (This is a politician!) In contrast to Sturgeon’s stammered equivocations, she declared that the transgender rapist at the heart of the crisis “is a man”. Her Christian beliefs mean that she is opposed to abortion and gender ideology; but what provoked an eruption on Twitter was her admission that, if she had been an MSP in 2014, she would have voted against same-sex marriage.

Instantly, her supporters, including three Scottish ministers, began to desert her. There is something strange here: did senior politicians imagine a practising Wee Free would have supported same-sex marriage? Why is it an issue, considering the legislation was passed eight years ago and there is no likelihood of its being revisited? In practical terms it is as relevant to Scotland’s current politics as how she would have voted on repeal of the Corn Laws.

In response to the orchestrated criticism, Forbes has raised some points with significance beyond Scotland. “We need to be very careful,” she said, “that we are not saying in Scotland that you cannot hold public office, even the highest public office, if you are a member of a particular faith. Or, you can hold public office, but you actually need to strip your faith out. That seems to me a very illiberal approach.”

That is exactly right. A practising Catholic would have the same moral objections with regard to abortion, same-sex marriage and gender ideology. If that is a bar to participation in public life or holding high office, then the Penal Laws are back in force. The cross-questioning of Forbes is based on precisely the same principle as the Test Acts and other historical disabilities imposed on Papists and Dissenters.

The underlying reality is that religious orthodoxy is not confined to the Christian side of this argument: it applies at least as strongly to the woke side. That is why they attach so much importance to Forbes’s notional vote against same-sex marriage: to the inquisitors it is not opposition – it is blasphemy. No matter that the issue would never arise under a putative Forbes administration, she is guilty of Wrongthink.

Under our former democratic dispensation, once universal suffrage was established, on various issues of conscience people of different denominations took a minority stance and were respected for it, as members of the community contributing a legitimate viewpoint. No longer. Under the tyranny of woke, no dissenter may be tolerated in public life. We are regressing at breakneck speed away from a pluralist society.

The beneficiary from the implosion of Holyrood support for Kate Forbes is Humza Yousaf, the architect of the extreme hate crimes legislation that empowers prosecution of Scots for voicing opinions categorised as “hate” in the privacy of their own homes. As health secretary, he has treated the Scottish NHS much as Vladimir Putin treated Mariupol, with similar outcomes in the shape of crumbled ruins. Yousaf is the candidate of the powerful Sturgeon faction: he is Continuity Krankie.

Yousaf is pledged to reopen the SNP’s wound by challenging Westminster’s block on the unpopular gender recognition Bill. Yet, while seeking to profit from the anti-Forbes backlash, he is in an ambivalent position with regard to his religious faith. He claims to support same-sex marriage, but is a practising Muslim: “I’m a supporter of equal marriage. Let me get to the crux of the issue that you’re asking me. I’m a Muslim. I’m somebody who’s proud of my faith. I’ll be fasting during Ramadan in a few weeks’ time. But what I don’t do is, I don’t use my faith as a basis of legislation.”

Critics might detect some contradictions in that statement, but after all he is the proposed heir of Krankie. Despite his opportunist harassment of Forbes, Yousaf did not take part in the final vote on same-sex marriage in 2014, having arranged a meeting that clashed with it. He is a unionist’s dream, the best prospect of burying the SNP for a generation. So, his promotion to favourite in the leadership stakes is potentially very good news for the Union.

However, all may not be as it appears. Kate Forbes has insisted that the attack on her beliefs comes exclusively from Twitter, not from the SNP membership, totalling 104,000 a year ago, though possibly slightly reduced in the disastrous interim. The SNP membership is generally regarded as pretty left-wing, yet there was polling evidence of mutiny over the gender fiasco. That suggests there is an unquantifiable element among the leadership constituency that could be sympathetic to the Forbes position.

Against that, the SNP executive committee has been captured by a fanatical element that will raise a cry that Forbes is unacceptable to their Green Party cronies (which is true), so that voting for her would dissolve the Bute House agreement and conceivably remove the SNP from government.

At present, therefore, the true position is obscure and little light is cast upon it by a poll being run by The National, the SNP’s tartan Pravda, which shows Ash Regan in the lead and Humza Yousaf trailing on 19 per cent – less dramatic than it appears when one realises that this useless exercise has been trolled by jokers repeatedly refreshing the page to register large numbers of votes. In other words, it works as well as everything else controlled by the SNP.

It is conceivable that Kate Forbes could experience a Liz Truss moment: elected by her party membership but undermined by the parliamentary establishment. If Yousaf triumphs as Continuity Krankie, the dissolution of the SNP will be accelerated. Either way, the trajectory is downwards, due to the woke albatross around the neck of separatism. But the real significance of this Lilliputian contest is the revelation that, in this country, Christians are progressively being excluded from the public square: what kind of travesty does that make of the religious solemnities that will surround the coronation of our new monarch?

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