Plowing through the early sections of the book, I started to understand the worry. There is certainly a startling mismatch between the former first minister’s famed communicative abilities and the descriptions on the page. For instance, if there’s one thing our author wants you to know, it’s that she loves books. The point comes up time and again: as a child, she was “bookish”; “rarely had her nose out of a book”; had a “fascination with words”. Early on, she became “immersed” in Jane Austen, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott. Later in life, no doubt thanks to all that reading, she describes herself as having the power “to communicate in a way that engaged both heart and head” and to understand “the importance in politics of telling a compelling story”.

But why, then, are her anecdotes from her childhood so plodding and banal? That time when she went to the “retail metropolis of Ayrshire” (i.e. Ayr), and her parents wouldn’t buy her a coveted Cilla Black record, but then… her grandad bought it for her instead. That time when her teenage boyfriend Sparky broke up with her: “it’s not impossible that in different circumstances we would have ended up together. Whether we would have lasted is another matter.” Even seismic events become comically flatfooted in her retelling: “It was from Uncle Dave that I first learned about death. He was thrown from a horse and killed during the annual Laminar (sic) Day celebrations in his hometown of Lanark.” So peremptorily and colorlessly does she rattle through various friends and acquaintances, it is as if she is ticking them off from a list.

An optimistic reader might suspect she is getting the boring stuff out of the way so she can get to the moment when life properly began: the fateful day when, aged 16, she knocked on the door of her local SNP candidate’s house and offered to help with canvassing. But even during the sections recounting her formative years as a political operator in a then up-and-coming party, narrative excitement remains elusive. For instance, the highlight of the 1989 Glasgow Central by-election, as far as she can recall, was a nightly “protest” — quotation marks hers — waged with her pal Shona against sexist bartenders at the Laurieston pub. “Every night after campaigning, we would perch ourselves on bar stools and loudly demand to be served, usually to no avail, leaving us to drink pints bought for us by our male friends instead”. Compared to this, Theresa May’s “running through fields of wheat” admission starts to look like glamorous juvenile delinquency.

Still, by the time we get to the heart of the story — that is, an allegedly unguarded recounting of the period between becoming deputy first minister in 2007 and her eventual resignation as premier in 2023 — there is some evidence that reading Robert Louis Stevenson has left its mark, however unconsciously. For a bit like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, there appear to be two different people battling within the breast of this book’s protagonist. Indeed, Sturgeon is sometimes herself aware of the tension: as when, in a climactic moment just after she has been made first minister, she describes listening to conference applause, and feeling “a sort of dissociation” between “the shy, dour, always self-doubting, frumpy girl… in the wings” and the “confident, articulate, almost stylish version of herself… [on] the stage”. Along with some readers perhaps, she wonders: “Who is that woman? Is she real?”

There are other, less self-flattering, dissociations evident in the book too. Its narrator keeps implying she is good at empathy and warmth; that she has been able to forge a “deep, almost emotional, connection… with a sizable swathe of the Scottish population”. Certainly, that is her public reputation. But warmth is in the showing not the saying, and there is little on show here; only robotic expressions of sadness and shock at various significant deaths and tragic events, before getting onto the more important business of how they might affect ongoing political maneuverings. Similarly, the official version of Sturgeon is admirably high-minded and principled, and particularly on behalf of women and girls. Constantly monitoring for the potential presence of misogyny, she can’t describe accepting a bunch of flowers from Govan trade union officials without noting “a touch of unconscious sexism in the gesture”. Yet at another point, she ruthlessly criticizes Labour leader Jack McConnell for having eschewed cheap sexist vibes and treated her with respect instead, describing his personal kindness to her as “naïve politics” and a “huge tactical error”.

Another mystery is why Sturgeon is a nationalist at all. Her main reflections on the question are that in 1987, when she first joined the SNP, the party was more of a natural home for her youthful socialist politics than Neil Kinnock’s Labour. Given the strength of social conservatism in the party back then, this is implausible; but more importantly, it is also underwhelming as a justification of her life’s work. Where are the traditional tartan romances, the misty-eyed misty glens, even just some memorized lines from Braveheart?

Her avowed heartfelt desire for Scottish independence is certainly not due to any deep knowledge of her country’s history: the occasional forays into this territory sound heavily mined from Wikipedia. It doesn’t seem to be informed by political theory either: there are no detailed discussions of the ideals of democracy or sovereignty here. It is clear Sturgeon loves Scotland; who could doubt it, faced with a sentence like: “Standing on the shore, looking out at Ailsa Craig — the uninhabited island about sixteen kilometers west of the mainland, home to puffins and gannets, and from which microgranite is quarried to make curling stones — still gives me a sense of peace and tranquility that I don’t find elsewhere”? But still, as she occasionally acknowledges rather grudgingly, many Unionists love their country too.

In Stevenson’s novella, Mr Hyde kills an elder father figure; and in a way Sturgeon does the same. The passages describing her complex relationship with Alex Salmond are among the book’s most engaging, though bound to infuriate his supporters. Whatever the truth of her involvement in the investigations he faced for alleged sexual misconduct (he was eventually cleared of all charges) — she says she had none — it is clear that she had to get out from under the charismatic politician’s spell to become the leader she did.

She owed much of her initial success to him, and she knew it: he plucked her from the crowd to serve as his deputy, which led seamlessly to her becoming first minister after he resigned. At the same time, he was everything she was not — a witty, risk-taking gambler, big on charm and low on detail — and the fact obviously annoyed her intensely. Her infuriated tale of writing a crucial White Paper during the highly pressured referendum period, then fielding a phone call from her boss at the racecourse, tipsily promising he would definitely read it before the big launch, will resonate with every i-dotting, t-crossing female employee ever faced with a slipshod superior.

Sturgeon’s own approach was very different: obsessing over minutiae, micromanaging underlings, staying up all night fretting nauseously about how things might go wrong. This seems to have worked well during her time as health secretary: when she was set clear objectives, she was all over her brief (at least, as she tells it). But once put in charge of overall goal-setting as first minister, she seems to flounder. Unable to bring about a second independence referendum, and apparently devoid of concrete ideas to deal with Scotland’s overwhelming social problems, she adopts a generic, vibes-based playbook and hopes for the best: some renewable energy and child welfare here, a bit of gender reform there, free university tuition fees all round. When Covid hits and she is able to return to full technocrat mode, you can sense her relief, even if the huge responsibility nearly breaks her.

But here, too, there are significant omissions. Despite her professed concern for children stuck in poverty, she offers no reflections about how lockdowns might have grievously affected them, making a bad situation even worse; nor about how social isolation might have led to a generation of unhappy teenagers falling deeper into an online world. And speaking of which: in the end, the gender reform thing didn’t work out so well either, indicating another puzzling split in the Sturgeon psyche.

Early on in the book, she tells readers, perfectly accurately, that “building common ground isn’t possible without compromise” and that “it is always a good idea to know your audience”. Yet in practice, Sturgeon plowed ahead obtusely with plans to reform gender recognition processes along self-identification lines, deaf to reasonable objections, and blind to the way her stance would be perceived by ordinary voters. By the end of the book, discussing the fallout from the Isla Bryson scandal — which saw a rapist heading to a female prison because he said he belonged there — the bad-tempered, stubborn version of Sturgeon seems to have vanquished the more politically astute one. Through gritted teeth, she attempts to admit to her own mistakes in this area, suggesting she should have “hit the pause button” on gender reform in order to develop consensus; but she still can’t help monstering her opponents at every turn. They are on the same side as Orbán, Putin, Trump; they stand alongside “raging homophobes”; they deny such facts with “brittle defensiveness” and “howls of outrage”.

Meanwhile, her attempted justification of her own position on the nature of womanhood is made even funnier by the fact she thinks it is “too technical” for people to properly understand: namely (drumroll) “there is no need for a man to claim to be a woman to commit acts of abuse or sexual assault” because “the threat to women comes from predatory, abusive and misogynistic men, not from trans women”. In other words, her new, post-Bryson assumption seems to be that, as soon as a trans-identified man becomes predatory or abusive, “she” ceases to be a woman — QED. Indeed, in a recent interview she has said that a rapist “probably forfeits the right to be the gender of their choice”. Ironically, this is a case of what is known as a “no true Scotsman” fallacy: the circular idea that “no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge” isn’t falsified by the sight of Hamish from Glasgow wielding the sugar spoon over his oats; because all this really shows is that Hamish from Glasgow is not a true Scotsman after all.

There was a time just after the 2015 general election, now hard to picture, when the wider world went mad for the progressive vibes Sturgeon was emitting, her party having just wiped Labour out north of the border. For a while, the first minister was mobbed and fawned over like a “rockstar” (her words) wherever she went — including by journalists in London. But looking back, it seems the whole thing was a comparison-based trick of the light: she looked more organized than Salmond, more authentic than Cameron, more effective than Miliband, more down-to-earth than Corbyn. Things got even easier for her in this respect when chaos merchants Johnson and Trump arrived.

But while she had diligence in spades, ultimately, she never made a dent in the most pressing national problems — rising drug deaths, falling education standards, terrible public health, violent crime in cities — and that’s partly because, in terms of her capacity to understand the bigger picture, her intellect was always too limited, tempting her towards the superficial gesture as a substitute. If Frankly is anything to go by, then, strictly speaking Sturgeon never did have imposter syndrome. To have that particular malaise, your nagging suspicion you aren’t really up to the task has to be wrong.

As voting closed in America on Tuesday night, the leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats was enthusiastically changing his X handle to “Alex Cole-Hamala”, reminding us that last month he had taken leave from the Scottish Parliament to campaign in Pennsylvania on Harris’s behalf. By Wednesday morning, he was forlornly telling The Scotsman that though his heroine “came really close”, “a dark new chapter in American history” was now beginning. “I am proud to have been among the Democrats fighting for Pennsylvania” he continued. “I am sorry it was not enough”.

Overweening delusions of grandeur and an inability to count aside, you could be forgiven for thinking that Cole-Hamilton’s negative reaction to Trump’s victory represented a fairly typical Scottish take. It sometimes seems as if being anti-Trump is the only thing holding an otherwise fractiously divided citizenry together — an antipathy apparently crossing class boundaries, sectarian rivalries, men versus women, Nats versus yoons.

According to her obituaries this week, one of the things for which the late Glaswegian comedian Janey Godley was best loved for was holding a sign saying “Trump is a cunt” while standing outside the then presidential candidate’s Turnberry golf course in Ayrshire. Yesterday, by way of tribute, The Guardian marshalled a series of outraged vox pops from dog walkers on Turnberry beach, primly noting that the only person they found who was pleased Trump won had “relatives in the United States”.

Indeed, such is the Caledonian reputation for hating the man that it seems some pro-Harris Americans are now investigating Scottish citizenship in the wake of his triumph. On Wednesday The National reported that Google had seen a surge in US-based web searches for “how to move to Scotland”, presumably emanating from disgruntled Democrat voters. Though no longer in government coalition himself, Green MSP Patrick Harvie was quoted as responding magisterially that “We believe in a Scotland that is open and welcome to all, a country that removes barriers rather than building walls… we are working to build a fairer, greener and more welcoming society that is the opposite of Trump’s destructive and hateful vision.”

Suggested reading

MAGA must be reborn

By Boyd Tonkin

In fact, though, conditions on the ground might not be as favourable as Harvie assumes. While Americans went to the polls, some fascinating alternative findings were simultaneously emerging from data collector Norstat. These indicated that, contrary to the standard narrative, Trump’s approval ratings are higher in Scotland than anywhere else in Western Europe. A quarter of Scottish respondents wanted him to win over Harris, as compared with 16% in the UK as a whole, 15% in Germany, and 14% in France. When you consider that both of the latter have a surging Right-wing electoral presence — and that Scotland doesn’t, at least on paper — the substantial difference in numbers look even more intriguing. Equally, according to the polling company, Scotland had the second lowest preference for Harris of all the countries surveyed, standing at 56%.

Assuming this data extrapolates more generally, what might be afoot? A simple explanation of the difference with other countries is that some inhabitants of Scotland see Donald John Trump as one of their own. His 18th century ancestors were victims of the Highland Clearances. His mother was born into a crofting family on the Isle of Lewis and spoke Gaelic before she spoke English. Indeed, clever local Labour MP Torcuil Crichton wrote on Wednesday — ruefully referring to the two named halves of the Hebridean island of Trump’s ancestors — “Congratulations to another son of Lewis, though I’ve never wished more to have woken today in the Isle of Harris.”

The President-elect has played up his Scottish origins many times, perhaps preferring them to a less marketable story about paternal German ancestry. He has also heavily invested in Turnberry and a separate golf course he owns in Aberdeenshire, with another one on the way, to be named after his mother. Both facts must have induced at least grudging affection in some. For once you know about his background, the facial features of one of the most powerful men in the world can sometimes mistily resolve into those of a Highland factor or fisherman, while you marvel at the gestalt switch. And the relentless patter suddenly seems more familiar too. As Kevin Bridges once put it: “Everything Donald Trump has said, I have heard from a Glasgow taxi driver.”

But tartan jingoism and a bit of financial self-interest can’t be the only reasons some Scots apparently now view the mogul as the lesser of two evils. When Godley mounted her one-woman protest at Turnberry in 2016, it was a different time. The most the average person knew about Trump was that he had been in the original version of The Apprentice, was the world’s richest ginger minger, and was running for president, to general incredulity. Political aficionados with their fingers on the pulse also knew he advocated grabbing women by the pussy, locking up Hillary Clinton, “draining the swamp” and “building a wall”.

More from this author

The sisterhood is a feminist lie

By Kathleen Stock

It was easy to feel honourably defensive on behalf of immigrants of the non-English sort — Scotland hardly had any. Meanwhile, back then Nicola Sturgeon could still say what a woman was, and the only time a Scottish politician ever took the knee was when celebrating a Celtic win. Intersectionality was probably something to do with town planning, though no one knew exactly what.

Unaware as most were about virtue-signalling excesses soon to come, it was easy to react to Trump’s existence with that most traditional of Scottish responses: mockery of the absurdly rich and entitled. Godley’s action at Turnberry was very much in this vein: an irreverent deflation of elite pomposity and hubris, enjoyably cathartic to witness. She was the underdog David facing off a ridiculous foreign Goliath. What could be more satisfying to watch than that? In the best possible sense, her gesture was a populist one, a fact not belied by the fact that she ended up espousing various woke causes soon afterwards.

Because let’s face it: soon afterwards, nearly everybody did. By 2018 — the same  year Greta Thunberg hit the scene, trans lassies suddenly became lassies, and the University of Glasgow started to decolonise its curriculum — Scottish anti-Trump protests had become both much larger and a lot more sanctimonious. Those attending them were quoted rhapsodising about the “inclusive atmosphere”, a dead giveaway they were moving with the times. Greenpeace mounted a paragliding protest at Turnberry. Owen Jones, never knowingly understated, fronted a short film about the Scottish protests to plead for Guardian subscriptions so that his employer could fight “a man who represents bigotry, hatred, misogyny, and racism, who threatens the environment and who threatens international peace”.

Two years later George Floyd died in Minneapolis, and University of Edinburgh bosses responded by taking 18th century philosopher David Hume’s name off a building for being “racist”. It was probably around this time prescient Scots began to suspect that not all anti-Trumpians were on the same side.

Fast-forward to 2024, and a substantially larger part of the Scottish population have now had their fill of vacuous posturing from politicians, academics, and activist journalists. They are tired of superficially rousing soundbites and high-minded policies about gender, race, lockdowns, farming, fishing, and oil, running directly contrary to the interests of many working-class and lower middle-class voters. It is small wonder some Scots seem to have taken Harris’s verbal porridge with a hefty pinch of salt. It all feels so familiar, somehow.

And given this painful experience, it is conceivable that perspectives on Trump have also changed, at least a bit. Barely glimpsed in 2016, a rival Goliath to Trump has fully emerged into the light: a po-faced modern religion with a west coast American accent, even lighter on laughs than Calvinism, with influence in nearly every Scottish public institution and most especially at the top. Its impenetrable dogma is faithfully mouthed by nearly all those in positions of power, while criticism from outside the members-only club is dismissed as bigoted or thick. And Trump despises and laughs at it all.

Meanwhile, adding to a sense of enraging disconnect, some of the most vocal Scots-adjacent Trump denouncers and Kamala stans recently are obviously drawn from tribes and clans historically more likely to Clear rather than be Cleared: Rory Stewart of Eton and Balliol, for instance, whose family hails from Broich House in Crieff; or Alex Cole-Hamilton himself, descended from Anglo-Irish aristocracy. Faced with the lofty moralising of genetic patricians socially insulated from their own mistakes, discerning the true anti-Establishment Scottish reaction to Trump no longer seems quite so easy.

In the end, the average Scots position on Trump will partly come down to how what direct contact they have had with the hypocrisy and vested interests of progressive poseurs in the last decade, and whether they have suffered because of it. Equally, others won’t have updated their 2016-based priors. As historian Dominic Sandbrook pointed out to Stewart during a much circulated clip, most people are not on X/Twitter, don’t read newspaper op-eds, and have no interest in the political preoccupations of commentators either on Right or Left.

This of course includes Scottish people. To a lot of them, Trump probably still looks as ludicrous and unreliable as he did before: a rambling, self-important buffoon, vaguely reminiscent of that uncle who can’t help showing off at family gatherings and making lewd remarks to his nieces. To others, though, he now looks like he is standing outside the members-only club with them, laughing at the daft cunts inside.

The 21st-century battle began in 2019, as Scotland was on the verge of introducing a law that would allow men to self-identify as women. That same year, Katie Dolatowski, a six-foot-five transgender paedophile, was convicted of sexual offences against two girls aged 10 and 12 in a women’s toilets in Fife. Dolatowski, born male but identifying as female, was placed in a women-only hostel, putting vulnerable women at risk. Despite this, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, the self-professed “feminist to my fingertips”, forged ahead with self-ID legislation that most of Scotland either didn’t understand or didn’t want. Dolatowski, meanwhile, praised her for being a “great first minister”.

Around the same time, a new hashtag was born: #WomenWontWheesht. It was coined by a mother worried that her disabled daughter, given the proposed legislation, might be given intimate care by a male carer. In response to her voicing such concerns, she was accused of being a pearl-clutching transphobe. Her worries for her daughter’s dignity and safety were effectively deemed not inclusive enough of the sensitivities of adult men. And she was told to “weesht”. As a result, the hashtag became a battle cry: the symbol of the feminist resistance to being silenced. And this week, their book was published. The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht tells the stories of the individual women who fought to protect women’s sex-based rights, with testimonies from an SNP MP, a prison governor and J.K. Rowling.

As the book details, Mumsnet was an unlikely forum in which women would organise. In response to Swim England’s new guidance, released in 2018, Mumsnetters organised “Man Friday” events, in which they self-identified as men and rocked up to men-only swimming sessions bare-breasted and sometimes even sporting fake moustaches. Within two weeks, the new guidance had been withdrawn. Such demonstrations were akin to the Reclaim the Night marches, Greenham Common and the Lesbian and Gay Liberation Movement, marking a return to grassroots feminism. This was an antidote to the horrors being visited on women under the cloak of transgender rights.

Yet such movements were often hindered by financial constraints. The pro-gender ideology organisations were often funded by the Scottish government, while the women resisting did so on a shoestring. Women had to resort to shaking tins asking for donations to pay the lawyers, and crowd-funders were plastered all over social media. In the time-honoured tradition of feminist activism, this work was unpaid.

Female campaigners during this period faced appalling abuse. In 2018, the then-newly appointed rector at the University of Edinburgh, Ann Henderson, was plagued by baseless and vexatious complaints supported by the University and College Union. In the new book, she reflects on her experience: “Lesbian staff members felt excluded from networks. Women-only events were increasingly difficult even impossible — to arrange, and women were concerned about losing their female private facilities.”

Then, in June 2019, I spoke at Edinburgh University about the feminist campaign to end men’s violence towards women. As I was leaving the venue, I was attacked by a six-foot male transactivist, who was shouting that I was a “cunt” and responsible for the suicide of several trans people. The next day, Scottish Green MSP Andy Wightman caved into pressure from his party and apologised for attending the event.

That same month, poet Jenny Lindsay took to Twitter to complain about an article published in an arts publication, the Skinny, which advocated for violence against lesbian activists at Pride. The backlash was abhorrent — one friend turned against her, writing an “Open Letter on Transphobia” that more than 250 people signed. Lindsay recalls: “Every name I recognised was an emotional stabbing.”

A major boost to the feminist campaign came at the end of 2019, when J.K. Rowling publicly expressed support for Maya Forstater, who had lost her job after tweeting gender-critical views. Rowling recalls: “I’d watched in silence as girls and women with everything to lose had stood up in the face of a modern-day witch hunt, braving threats and intimidation, not only from activists in black balaclavas holding placards promising to beat and murder them, but from institutions and employers telling them they must accept and espouse an ideology in which they don’t believe, and surrender their rights.”

Suggested reading

Nicola Sturgeon's delusional second act

By Kathleen Stock

But even she couldn’t make the world see reason. Rowling was cancelled, as were all her supporters. After expressing her admiration for Rowling on Twitter, Young Adult author Gillian Philip was cast out of publishing circles and has since retrained as an HGV driver. She says: “I’m a great believer in fantasy fiction for children, but I draw the line at telling them it’s reality — especially when it threatens to do them actual physical harm.”

Together, these women who wouldn’t wheesht contributed to the downfall of Nicola Sturgeon. In early January 2023, the UK government prevented Sturgeon’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill from becoming law, arguing that it illegally impacted the Equality Act. Days later, Adam Graham (also known as Isla Bryson) was convicted of two counts of rape, both of which he committed before he decided he was a woman. Graham was sent to a women’s prison: a photograph emerged of him wearing a blonde wig and tight leggings — his male genitals clearly visible. In a car crash of an interview, Sturgeon was grilled about whether Graham was a man or a woman. Just over two weeks later, she resigned, giving no reason.

It is not my style to be precious, but I found reading this book exceptionally hard in parts. It reminded me of the dozens of hellish scenarios I have had to endure in the 20 years since I first spoke out against gender ideology. The memories of the physical attacks and threats, the humiliation of being de-platformed, the betrayals by women I had thought were committed feminists.

But the book also reminded me of the enduring strength of the feminist movement. Despite facing the worst men’s rights backlash in more than 40 years, feminists from all generations are uniting to fight back. This is a story of a war, written while the bombs are still exploding. But it’s also the story of the resistance — and it isn’t over yet.

Given Sturgeon’s much vaunted twin loves — novels and being a “voice for inclusion” — the venue was a perfect match. Not far from Brighton, we were at Charleston Farmhouse; a place where, for much of the 20th century, core members of the Bloomsbury Group — Vanessa Bell, art critic husband Clive Bell, and fellow painter Duncan Grant — lived experimentally with various illustrious literary and philosophical figures orbiting around them. Immersed in endlessly complicated romantic liaisons, this was a queer pangendered polycule before the SNP had even heard of one. (More simply, though not inaccurately, relatives of mine by marriage who farmed the land nearby would refer to the Bloomsburies as “those funny people up the road”.)

In the present day, those now in charge of Charleston try to capitalise on the frisson of inherited sexual dissidence with lots of queer-themed events, including a recent fashion exhibition sponsored by Christian Dior. Indeed, an event poster displayed onstage directly before Sturgeon’s interview showed a naked female standing crotch-deep in a lake, elective mastectomy scars glinting where breasts used to be. But despite management pretensions to be running a modern-day Weimar salon, the reality of the audience at Sturgeon’s talk was somewhat more prosaic: scruffy middle-aged people dressed in violently clashing prints, their LRB tote bags stuffed with books by George Monbiot and Judi Dench. Only a few bright young things were scattered here and there, paying homage to their second favourite politician. Their first favourite, former Green Party leader Caroline Lucas, swept in just before the start and sat at the front.

To the sound of applause, festival director Nathanial Hepburn introduced the main attraction, effectively warning off audience members from airing “their own views on politics” during the question period — a sentiment which drew further appreciative applause from some. Dawson began the softball questioning, and we were soon immersed in a touching fairy tale: about a shy working-class girl from Irvine who had joined the SNP to “try and make a difference”, and then challenged male dominance and discrimination in Scottish politics by rising to the top. Over time she became the great feminist champion who led her people through their darkest hour during Covid. But in the end, weary of acting as a lightning rod for unjust toxicity — including from those angry with her for being a steadfast supporter of marginalised people — she had altruistically stepped away from power, for the good of her country.

There is a mental delusion called Capgras Syndrome, during which a person becomes convinced that someone in their life has been secretly replaced with an identical duplicate. During my hour in the Charleston tent, I started dimly to understand what this must be like. For in many ways the version of Sturgeon in front of me seemed to bear only the vaguest of relations to her historical doppelganger North of the Border.

Not least, the cause of Scottish Independence — to which I was sure I could remember her devoting almost her entire political life — was mentioned briefly only once, with a reassurance that she had an English granny and wanted the two countries to be the “best of friends”. The ongoing police investigation into SNP finances was similarly glossed over fast, albeit partly for legal reasons. When asked what she had been most proud of during her time in office, she said her government had done “a lot to try and shift the dial on child poverty”, referring to increased funded childcare and the Scottish Child Payment, but not to the fact that child poverty figures overall had remained obstinately static on her watch.

Mistily recounting the Covid years — during which her government closed schools for months, and imposed tougher lockdown regulations than in England yet with no real difference in death rates — she seemed to suggest openness and transparency had been key: it had been important “to stand up every day and explain exactly what we were asking people to do, why we were asking people to do it”. Could this be the same woman, I wondered, who was unable to produce any WhatsApp messages from this period at the Covid Inquiry, having deleted them all?

Suggested reading

Westminster is devolving itself out of existence

By Travis Aaero

And having arguably stuffed her party full of young activists hellbent on promotion within the system — including presiding over a jaw-dropping NEC rule change in 2020 that saw younger candidates with newly self-identified disabilities promoted to the top of regional MSP lists — this Anglicised version of Sturgeon advised young people never to see politics “as a route to a job or a career” because “if that is your motivation, then you are doing it for all the wrong reasons”. In her view, “politics, including in my party, now is probably too full of young people who have just gone through the political ranks”.

By the time she got to the bit about how toxic the public discourse about “trans rights” had become, and how trans people had become a public scapegoat, because citizens “struggling” with “a cost of living crisis” and “rising levels of poverty” — “particularly young people who suffered during Covid” — were looking “for somebody to blame”, I started to check what was in my drink. “I just have this belief that people should be allowed to be who they are, feel comfortable, respected, safe and able to live with dignity as who they want to be,” said the premier who had overseen the putting of violent male felons in terrifyingly close quarters with impoverished, vulnerable female prisoners, with no apparent thought to the safety or dignity of the latter.

Was it really she who had closed her ears to any possible problems with introducing self-ID at age 16 upwards, arguing that some opponents would “cloak themselves in women’s rights to make it acceptable, but just as they’re transphobic you’ll also find that they’re deeply misogynist, often homophobic, possibly some of them racist as well”? Who had personally insisted that puberty blockers would still be used for physically healthy children in Scotland’s youth gender identity service even after serious concerns emerged in 2021; and whose Party was defending clinical standards at the service as late as last month? Did she really not understand why all of this might get reasonable people riled? Apparently she did not.

The audience mostly seemed to lap it up; partly, I assume, because they knew practically nothing concrete about the speaker’s nine years in government. Nationalists often complain that the English media ignores Scottish concerns, but in this case it has clearly worked in their former leader’s favour. Still, it was also obvious that this deeply middle-class and well-heeled bunch mostly didn’t want to know about any potentially complicating factors that might temper their adulation, for that would spoil all the fun of the festival: paying £65 per day ticket to feel appalled about the state of the world and the Tories, but rather better about themselves. To this end, they needed a suitable moral heroine to side with, mentally speaking: preferably someone with a charmingly authentic regional accent, getting intermittent jabs in at their favourite hate figures while decrying toxic masculinity, and whose stated values otherwise were vague enough that you could read almost anything positive you liked into them. And it seems that they found one.

During the Q&A, as instructed, political questions were indeed mostly eschewed, in favour of fatuous queries about who Sturgeon might like to do a podcast with (Theresa May, apparently) and which books she might leave on the desk of an incoming Prime Minister (the crime novels of her good pal Val McDermid, in case you were wondering). Towards the end of the session, a sonorously voiced male admirer seemed to encapsulate the general mood of histrionic unreality by imploring the politician: “Will you promise us, whatever the result of the Police Scotland investigation, that you will find a continuing role to speak out?”

By then, I had heard more than enough. As I left, I reflected on the strangeness of what I’d just witnessed: the creation of an utterly fantastical world, bearing practically no relation to the actual one, being wrought in real time via the psychological co-dependency of two highly unlikely parties: on the one hand, a former Scottish National Party leader; and on the other, the sort of deeply unself-aware, affluent, self-satisfied and soft-minded Southerner who for decades has been a source of both mockery and fury to most Scottish Nationalists in practice. When that memoir eventually does come out, she’ll know exactly where to go to sell it.

But there is a further, non-criminal, charge against both characters: mendacity. In their defence, it went with the job. The project of Scottish nationalism has always demanded that its leaders lie, or at least obfuscate, or grossly exaggerate. Sturgeon, who resigned (on flimsy grounds) as First Minister of Scotland a year ago today, was even better at that than her mentor. While he has always projected something of a wide-boy public persona, she leant on a reputation for rectitude, control and dedication to a great cause.

Since Sturgeon’s resignation, and his victory in the subsequent leadership contest, Humza Yousaf has attracted the same accusation — only without the period of public popularity his two predecessors enjoyed. And this is inextricable from the movement all three represent: their personal and political calamities are the products of an integral deceit at the heart of the independence project.

This first became glaringly apparent with Salmond’s original tilt at secession in 2014. In his reshaping of the SNP, he used (or abused) his economist’s training to produce a 667-page document which claimed that Scotland, the region with the highest public spending in Britain, could single-handedly accelerate to Scandinavian levels of child and maternal care (without Scandinavian levels of tax). This shaky mound of assertions was then blown apart when, in the following year, the oil price crashed from $110 to $50 a barrel and the independence referendum was spurned by a majority of 55%. Without the economic ballast of the former and democratic will of the latter, Scottish nationalism seemed a dead scheme, buried beneath a pile of half-truths.

Suggested Reading

Scotland deserves better than this circus

By Graham Robb

Salmond resigned and Sturgeon slipped into his place. She was left with the job of sustaining confidence in the vision of independence when the oil price fall translated into a “black hole” in Scottish revenue and expenditure of £18.6 billion. Had independence won, as the then leader of the Conservative opposition Ruth Davidson pointed out, it would have meant vast cuts to every public service. Faced with a propaganda disaster, the new First Minister resorted to windy rhetoric: “I believe and always will believe that the best way forward is to be in charge of our own resources, so we don’t have to be subject to the kind of cuts coming at us from the UK government, but instead could be masters of our own destiny.”

This response, ignoring facts in favour of faith, was in part the fruit of Sturgeon’s apprenticeship to Salmond. And given her own steely structure of personal commitment — secular, yet infused with a Calvinist rectitude — it was to be Sturgeon’s sword and shield through years of leadership. Thus when, following a Brexit that had the support of only a third of Scottish voters, she thickly underscored what the loss of membership meant to Scotland. Brexit became a way to showcase, as in one March 2021 speech, Scotland’s national if not actual autonomy: “… a country and not a region of a unitary state. Scotland’s position is therefore unique — a country, in a voluntary union, which has been removed from the EU against the will of the majority who live here.”

Nothing there of the difficulty, maybe impossibility, of re-joining the Union while keeping sterling (as the large majority of Scots wish) or of refusing to join the euro — as all new entrants must. Nor was there any mention of the necessary erection of a trade border between Scotland and the rest of the UK. Sturgeon always waved away such realities, pointing instead to the independence of other “small” countries like Ireland, Finland and Denmark. The latter is a constant comfort blanket for SNP leaders: Sturgeon opened the Scottish government’s Nordic Office in Copenhagen in August 2022, one of a chain of such centres designed to give the impression that Scotland is already a nation with a foreign policy. To serve such a vanity, when denied a meeting with Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, the First Minister submitted herself to a brief early morning photo opportunity with a grim-looking Jeppe Kofod, then Foreign Minister. The cosmetic appearance of international status trumped realpolitik.

Sturgeon’s energetic self-righteousness and authoritarian governing style sustained her and her party — until, on 15 February 2023, she resigned, citing weariness and a realisation that the leader’s post “can only be done, by anyone, for so long”. It was a thin rationalisation of departure by one so dedicated to the goals and power of her office. But in her subsequent public appearances, she has seemed overtaken by fatigue. Appearing for five hours at the Covid Inquiry in January, her self-command was tested by a barrage of questions from Jamie Dawson KC, both on her reluctance to retain email and other messages among her colleagues, and on the possibility she used her daily media appearances to “politicise” the lockdown — something which this most political of politicians firmly denied.

More from this author

2024 is the year of the New Right

By John Lloyd

She was brought to tears at times: whether they were involuntary or staged was much discussed. The breakdowns likely had elements of both. She was, after all, always aware of the need to present herself as the unsleeping leader of her afflicted people, even as she admitted to an overly-delayed lockdown and Scotland showed the highest rate of Covid-related deaths in care homes.

It was a difficult return to political life, but her own successor and protégé has fared even worse. Humza Yousaf has copied Sturgeon in feeling “never really… comfortable” with the word “national” in the party’s name (she had found the word “hugely problematic”). But, little more than an epigone, he proves daily that he has none of her force.

Instead, he makes absurd mathematical leaps: where Sturgeon had the idea that instant negotiations on independence with the British government should begin when a majority of votes were cast for the SNP, Yousaf has proposed that a majority of seats in the UK parliament — where Scotland has 57 seats — would serve as a trigger for an attempted secession. Yet polling in October found only 13% of voters agreed that the SNP’s winning a majority of seats was a mandate, and only 15% supported the “most seats” proposal.

Yousaf has inherited a party that has proved itself unable to fulfil its only policy — secession — while neglecting its other responsibilities. Health, Yousaf’s responsibility before becoming leader, is in deeper crisis than in England. In education, once the pride of all Scottish classes, the decline represents a national catastrophe.

Still, unionists cannot rejoice. Support for the SNP has declined steadily — it is now level with a resurgent Labour Party — but support for secession remains high, in most polls only slightly below 50%. The aspiration of independence has a positive image, and it has young legs — Scots born after the mid-Eighties are more than twice as likely to favour secession than those born in the late Forties or earlier. Graduates, once less inclined towards independence, now support it in droves. Meanwhile, this constituency are repulsed by the party most associated with unionism: the Conservatives.

This social-ideological feat accomplished by Salmond and Sturgeon has meant that Scots’ politics have become very considerably dislodged from material issues — money, jobs, public services — to alight on the more fashionable bases of identity and cosmopolitanism. But again this is an illusion. The SNP, as populist in its policies and propaganda as any party in Europe, might claim a principled difference from conservative England for its liberal views on immigration, gender, the EU and public spending. But it has many fewer immigrants per head than England, and its unpopular attempt to allow men claiming to have changed gender to be housed in women’s prisons failed. The SNP is a liberal vanguard atop a conservative nation.

And this was further revealed in the leadership contest Yousaf fought a year ago. He won narrowly, securing 52.1% to Kate Forbes’s 47.9%. But her aggressive scrutiny of his ministerial record considerably exposed the SNP’s general mediocrity: “You were a transport minister and the trains were never on time, when you were justice secretary the police were stretched to breaking point, and now as health minister we’ve got record high waiting times.” Her religion — she is a member of the doctrinally strict Free Church of Scotland — was held up by Yousaf’s supporters as a threat to the party’s liberal positions on gender and other matters. (Yousaf, a Muslim with as many non-liberal commandments to obey, was not so challenged.) But the fact that she came so close to winning does indicate a strain of conservatism running through the party, as well as some internal doubts about its achievements in government.

Suggested reading

Scotland deserves better than this circus

By Darren 'Loki' McGarvey

A performative politics — developed by two great political performers, Salmond and Sturgeon — has for the moment triumphed in a Scotland whose older self-image as a country of rational, enlightened and prudent citizens has been allowed to lapse. This gives the unionist forces a large problem — but possibly also an opening, especially for the Labour Party. The more that Scotland’s liberal, credentialed classes become dominant in nationalism, the more the material interests of the majority, especially the working- and lower-middle classes, will be ignored. A party which could mobilise the latter, and offer a fresh and genuine image of national renaissance, could benefit greatly from SNP decline.

For now though, while Yousaf’s lacklustre leadership will damage the SNP, it has so far not damaged its cause. He has the capacity of his predecessors to protect himself with false and meaningless rhetoric, covering up the chasm where policy delivery should be. And that’s because he lives in the virtual world Salmond and Sturgeon created, where a country only needs to burst the bonds of UK oppression to become Denmark. They had the rhetorical energy to sustain the illusion: he is unlikely to develop it further. Yet as long as nationalism still endures, someone else — Kate Forbes perhaps, a very Christian soldier — could emerge to pick up the standard, and take it onward as another false promise to an already wounded nation.

For women with impressive careers, one legacy of mainstream feminism is that there’s almost nothing you can do that won’t incite people to think of the potential consequences for the rest of your sex. It’s just about the only area of public life left where your womanhood is reliably judged relevant to your fate. Perhaps you’ll get treated as an inspirational female role model, or perhaps — as Gill would have it — you’ll be a cautionary tale for other women. Either way, you won’t just get to be a person, birthing or otherwise.

Generally speaking though, Gill is right to be suspicious of the familiar trope of the “strong female role model”. For one thing, there’s rarely anything strong about it. It seems we can enjoy a thrillingly cut-throat, venal businesswoman as long as she is entirely imaginary — Shiv Roy from Succession comes to mind — but when it comes to the real thing, we apparently prefer them to present as boring, overtly worthy drips, madly hitting “like” on LinkedIn articles about the value of kindness in the workplace, when they are not otherwise busy saving the planet. (Newton-Smith herself says she is “passionate about… climate and biodiversity” in her Twitter bio.)

Meanwhile within the world of women’s magazines, websites and weekend supplements, a profitable sector devotes itself to imposing dewily soft-focused “inspiring” or “influential” role models upon the seething, sweaty mass of female wage slaves. Basic prerequisites include a photogenic bone structure, comparatively high levels of personal grooming and a willingness to comply with a vapid, generic narrative about your “positive impact” that will empty you of all individuality and spark, in the service of promoting various capitalism-friendly feminine ideals.

The two chief mechanisms of the Inspiration Industrial Complex are the awards ceremony and the list. Each is used to manipulate common enough female emotions such as competitiveness, anxiety and envy, but with a twist — it’s all in the name of sisterhood. Might you be a Woman of the Year; a Woman of the Future; a Woman of Vision; a Remarkable Woman; an Uplifting Woman; a Champion of Women or a Powerwoman? Lured in by the opportunities for networking and showing off, nominees dress up to the nines, neck free drinks, take selfies and rehearse heartfelt speeches about staying passionate about what you do, tackling imposter syndrome and paying it forward. Website editors will then make it all look as glamorous and enviable as possible, further demoralising poor saps sitting in canteens or office cubbyholes, scrolling through their half-hour lunch breaks.

The list, meanwhile, is another stiletto-like weapon of female socialisation, implicitly reminding the reader that she is only as good as her last assessment by faceless others. Whether you are a woman in cycling, hospitality, mining, tech, tourism, shipping, social enterprise, supply chain, finance, sustainability, cybersecurity, or Westminster, you’re never safe from being suddenly catapulted into the spotlight of some top 100 — or else cruelly denigrated by omission. Some lists will even rank you in relation to others in your field. The compilers at 100 Top Women in Shipping note that in their 2022 list, “some retained their previous places more or less”, which makes you wonder about the feelings of those who did not.

More from this author

The crucifixion of Kate Forbes

By Kathleen Stock

Why do women do this to themselves, and to each other? For, I’ll wager, it is mostly women who are organising the awards and making the lists, not men. In most cases the ostensible motive is positive representation of women in male-dominated fields, though this goal doesn’t seem relevant to already female-heavy sectors like social enterprise or tourism. “You can’t be what you can’t see” goes the hackneyed phrase — but equally, if all you see is women tottering about in spike heels and ASOS workwear, ranked like show ponies, mindlessly regurgitating Brené Brown quotes about being authentic and daring to lead, it’s unclear how onlookers are supposed to be inspired. It hardly screams Nietzschean Übermensch, does it?

Women from the past are not safe from list-makers either. Presented as educational tools, lists such as “100 of the most inspiring women from the last 100 years” retrospectively translate complex, difficult, multifaceted human beings into gift card messages. Rosalind Franklin becomes “We have to celebrate our achievements, even when others don’t”; Virginia Woolf becomes “Speak your truth and you could inspire generations of writers”; Hillary Clinton — admittedly, sounding a bit like Napoleon — becomes “Even in the jaws of the most galling defeat, we must learn from our mistakes and carry on fighting for what we think is right”.

The truth is, nobody involved in these efforts is seriously interested in presenting good role models for other women, either in terms of ethics or efficiency — as is plain from the number of times Nicola Sturgeon has appeared on Women of the Year lists. If the three main elements of being an effective role model are, first, inspiring others to desire some goal for themselves; second, demonstrating the possibility of achieving that goal; and third, modelling behavioural skills for how to get there, then awards and lists do none of these things particularly well. Your best hope, rather, is to model yourself on someone you work or otherwise collaborate with, and not a glamorous stranger intoning meaningless platitudes into the ether.

Suggested reading

Did heteropessimism kill the rom-com?

By Kat Rosenfield

What rituals like these are really good at is circumscribing what counts as acceptable behaviour for women in whatever career field is being highlighted. Officially, what is celebrated are the sort of pink and fluffy values that might easily end up printed on a yoga sweatshirt: things like compassion, positivity, self-care, inner strength and authenticity. Perversely, though, the eventual result seems to be an increase in narcissism, envy, self-criticism, weakness and the slavish copying of others.

In real life, everyone knows that career success — whether for women or men — requires some degree of aggression, competitiveness, dishonesty and selfishness. Humans are hardwired to compete with each other for resources, after all, and socialisation can only transform the methods, not remove the trait entirely. In reality, women often resent the successes of other women rather than celebrate them. It is telling that Angela Rayner polls as men’s most popular politician, but only seventh with women — while men take all the spots above her.

Still, it seems that such facts can only be acknowledged by women when swiftly followed by self-chastisement. In this suffocating environment, characteristics like aggression and spite get shoved into what Carl Jung called the “shadow” — still present unconsciously, but explicitly disowned and projected onto others. We’ve all seen it — mixing sideswipes with excessive praise, picking fights while claiming innocent victimhood, finding quasi-objective reasons to criticise rivals, constructing “relatable” confessional narratives for social media with just the right level of humblebragging, and so on.

More from this author

Why philosophers are so weird

By Kathleen Stock

The shadow side of glossy positivity discourse for women also includes the gossip website, where women go to savagely mock and deride other women under the guise of anonymity — and jolly good fun it looks too, as long as you aren’t the unfortunate subject being discussed. Bitching, backstabbing, gossiping, mobbing — all can make a workmate’s life hell and contribute to a toxic environment. Men do these things too but not as much, because masculine culture isn’t as focused on disavowing the originating traits in the first place.

So, what’s the solution? Tempting as it is to imagine an alternative workplace culture involving mandatory secret Fight Clubs for girls, the very least women can do is to stop sublimating our darker instincts into passive-aggressive rituals and ceremonies that ultimately make everyone feel worse. We could just admit to ourselves that we can be as angry, envious or competitive as the next bloke — without immediately feeling we have to confess the fact on Instagram, “educate” ourselves, chant self-help mantras, or otherwise atone for our sins. We could just — and hear me out, here — get on with our jobs. And if that’s not possible, then perhaps we could start giving out much crappier prizes. If any would-be awards organiser is interested, I hear there’s a warehouse full of Women Hold Up Half the Sky: Selected Speeches of Nicola Sturgeon going extra cheap at the moment.

In the late Iron Age, the Debatable Land was a remarkably stable buffer zone between three Celtic tribes. It survived as an independent territory until the mid-16th century, when it became the last part of Great Britain to be brought under the control of a state. In what now seems an impressive act of international cooperation, the Debatable Land was divided equally between Scotland and England. The English deported the most troublesome inhabitants of their half to Ireland; the Scots enlisted a wily local warlord who helpfully hanged, drowned, burned, denuded and dismembered the autarkic groups that made up the local population.

I published a book about this neglected relic of a self-governing British statelet just in time to include the battle for Scottish independence and its aftermath. It gave the normally genteel process of promoting a book a missionary thrill. It also had the strange effect of fictionalising the place I call home. The ideology of nationalism requires a drastic compression and repackaging of the mass of people, geography and history that constitutes a nation. It politicises the very landscape, trivialises local ways of life and promotes ignorance of the country it purports to represent.

As the Manchester-born son of Scottish parents, I knew all about English ignorance of Scotland. Several visitors to our home on the border shared their surprise at discovering that Carlisle is not in Scotland and that Hadrian’s Wall is not the national border. I could understand the Scots’ frustration with oblivious, snooty, Scots-baiting politicians and commentators (the kind who attached sub-racist labels such as “dour”, “canny” and “thrifty” to an entire population). But I was surprised to find similar ignorance in Scotland.

On a rainy night in the spring of 2018, I gave a talk in one of the few council areas of Scotland in which a majority had voted for independence. In the bowels of the Mitchell Library in Glasgow, a red-faced man glowered at me as I spoke. His wife appeared to be egging him on to do something. When the time came for questions, I pointed him out to the chair, and then the pent-up question burst forth: “Where is this “Debatable Land”?”

More from this author

The curse of Northern stereotypes

By Graham Robb

I began a minute description of its bounds, but this enraged the man even more. “I’m not answering your question, am I?” “Well,” he shouted triumphantly, “I’ve never heard of it! And I was born in Dumfries!”

In normal circumstances, it would have been a mystifying remark. The man had never heard of the land 20 miles from his place of birth which had been a major foreign policy issue for English and Scottish parliaments for more than a century and which appeared to have made a mockery of the very idea of nationhood. Therefore, he denied its existence.

The evidence that Scottish borderers had once belonged to neither nation often evoked intense scepticism, as did the well-established fact that few neighbouring nations in Europe enjoyed such long and mutually profitable periods of stability and peaceful cooperation. The bullish brand of nationalism peddled by Alex Salmond had fostered a state of heroic indignation in which historical truths were a matter of personal choice. It was succinctly expressed on local radio by a nationalist representative of Scottish farming interests. Tired of being proved statistically wrong, he brought the discussion to a sudden end: “Well, I don’t care about arguments anyway. I’m a nation­alist, and that’s that!”

Nine days before Nicola Sturgeon unexpectedly resigned as First Minister of Scotland, Salmond accused her, in a tub-thumping Burns Supper speech in Dundee, of undermining 30 years’ of hard campaigning. She had “damaged the independence movement” with “some daft ideology imported from elsewhere”. This was a reference to what Salmond contemptuously called the “self-indulgent nonsense” of her gender recognition reforms. Commenting on Sturgeon’s resignation on The World At One, Salmond adopted a more oleaginous tone. In his view, the First Minister should have “[separated] the case for independence from the day-to-day business of government”. “The articulation of the fundamental case for independence,” complained the deposed leader of the SNP, “has sometimes got muddied and lost in the business of government.’

Suggested reading

Nicola Sturgeon is rewriting history

By Kathleen Stock

This is the populist fantasy of a sacred cause existing in stainless purity far above the mess of daily administration. Nationalism had conjured up a culturally coherent race of non-English Britons battling angrily to free itself from the condescending Auld Enemy. The independence campaign had relied heavily on a brazen simplification of Scottish history. Divisions in Scottish society of which many English people are unaware were obscured and erased.

As little as possible was said on the subject of religious sectarianism: the old antagonism of teuchters (Gaelic-speaking Highlanders) and Lowland Sassenachs was rebranded as a conflict of tartan-wearing city-dwellers and “posh” Edinbourgeois. Some campaigners, envisioning independence as the cause of a despised proletariat, argued that southern Scots with a Morningside or a Kelvinside accent were constitutionally English. The nationalist incarnation of Robert the Bruce was unrecognisable as the ambitious Anglo-Norman landowner whose father was born in Essex and who invited two of his combatant English friends to breakfast after the Battle of Bannockburn.

It was oddly exciting to witness the bonfire of facts to which Scottish history was subjected. One fact proved particularly controversial. In the 16th-century, in the Debatable Land and neighbouring parts of England and Scotland, cross-border marriages had been the norm, despite being punishable by death. Contemplating the copious written evidence, but reluctant to accept that interbreeding had been so prevalent, one Scottish academic historian described reports of those marriages as “scaremongering”. A key concept in the nationalist campaign, “scaremongering” means “unfairly rebutting an ideological argument by using brute fact”. Curious to know whether the modern border had interfered with this tradition, I drew a map of these cross-border marriages and showed it to passengers on the 127 bus, which starts in the Scottish village of Newcastleton and ends 24 miles later in the city of Carlisle. Several passengers were able to mention long-married couples to whom the border meant as little as it did to their ancestors.

The 127 bus follows the route of the defunct North British Railway. On Tuesdays and Fridays, it runs along the southern edge of the Debatable Land before plunging down to the river Liddel and the border with England. On the eve of the Scottish Independence Referendum, when polls suggested a narrowing gap between “Yes” and “No”, the mood on the bus was untypically sombre.

Suggested reading

Scottish nationalism will survive Sturgeon

By Tom McTague

Politicians far away in Edinburgh and London were planning to impose changes of some indeterminable but certainly inconvenient nature. They talked about the Border in ignorance of the people who lived and worked on either side of it. Many of them even confused the borderlands with the vast administrative division called “Scottish Borders”, which ends at the outskirts of Edinburgh. In this impoverished, agricultural region, the main concern was the “day-to-day business of government”, as former First Minister Salmond dismissively calls it.

Here, though the accent changes abruptly from one side of the river to the other, nationality is hardly ever mentioned. When the border was closed during the Covid lockdowns, it seemed a ridiculous, arbitrary measure, as though a dream of ages past had solidified in the present. Whenever I mentioned the book I was writing, no one thought it odd that there had once been an independent enclave whose inhabitants considered themselves neither English nor Scottish. Some people thought it “not a bad idea”.

Nationalist ideology struggles to integrate debatable lands like this one. Humza Yousaf has taken charge of a party which has become addicted to its fictions. By introducing its gender recognition reforms in the knowledge that the High Court of Justice would probably quash them (as it did), and deciding to treat the next general election as a “de facto referendum”, it was acting out a fantasy. The best hope for Scottish nationalism now is to separate itself from the cause of independence and to fight for a less lop-sided and unrealistic United Kingdom.

During her address to journalists, the First Minister’s well-honed rhetorical abilities cast their usual spell — broken only during the Q&A, when she was asked about her legacy of a collapsing NHS, widening attainment gaps in literacy and numeracy in schools, and soaring numbers of drug deaths every year. Before that, though, we were firmly in Sturgeonland, where — a bit like being on a Highland distillery tour — reality tends to disappear in a euphoric haze and temporarily everything looks better than it actually is.

Despite plummeting personal approval ratings, she focused several times on consoling those who, she assumed, would be saddened by her departure, giving the impression of trying to avert outpourings of weeping in the streets. Putting an optimistic gloss on the general mediocrity of her party, she implied that for too long she had eclipsed the many talented SNP politicians with her own brilliance, promising that from now on we would be able to see them more clearly. And perhaps most startlingly — fresh from calling critics of her government’s gender law reforms “homophobic” and “racist” only a fortnight ago  —  she noted that, over the years, she had somehow become a lightning rod for “irrationality” in the “tone and tenor of discourse” on controversial areas, and expressed the fervent desire that things be less polarised from now on.

All of this must have been quite enraging for one of the few actually talented individuals left in the SNP, Joanna Cherry. Cherry is well-known for disagreeing with the party line on gender law reform in favour of self-identification, arguing that it will harm women’s and lesbians’ rights. In 2021, on the same day that an SNP supporter sent her violent sexualised threats for which he was later convicted, Cherry was sacked from her Westminster front-bench role, apparently for her opposition to self-ID. You don’t get much more “intensity” and “brutality” in politics than that.

Equally, Sturgeon’s new turn as a pacifist in the culture wars must have been hard for Joan McAlpine to hear. She was a highly successful MSP for a decade, but was viciously ostracised in 2019 for expressing reservations about the conflation of sex and gender identity in the Scottish Census. She was eventually pushed out of politics via a gerrymandered party rule change that some suspected was deliberately designed to oust her.

Sturgeon did nothing at the time to reduce toxicity in the party with respect to Cherry and McAlpine, even when SNP MPs were openly describing the pair as hateful for views about self-ID which — it now turns out — most of the Scottish population share. Quite the contrary: she frequently turned the heat up, via the regular delivery of public statements of support for transactivist causes that could easily be read as green lights for others to carry on smearing. Right up until the moment a fortnight ago when the First Minister was left havering on ITV about whether Isla Bryson is or is not a woman, she tended to present any dissent towards the “trans women are women” mantra as the product of confused or malicious thinking. When a headteacher publicly sides with the school bullies, she might as well have declared open season on their victims.

More from this author

The problem with 'trans women are women'

By Kathleen Stock

It was also Sturgeon’s government that funded one of the main engines of transactivist insanity in Scotland and the UK more generally, the Scottish Trans Alliance (now Scottish Trans). Effectively, they paid this organisation and its parent charity, Equality Network, to tell them what to think on trans issues, and then obediently did exactly what they were told — including pushing for self-ID, and dismissing all objections to it as hateful.

In 2016, then-director James Morton told the Women and Equalities Select Committee that rape crisis and domestic violence services for women should admit males self-identifying as women, and should work to “educate” any traumatised female service-users who complained — a point that was uncritically incorporated into committee’s final report. And in 2018, Morton wrote about how his government-funded organisation had deliberately influenced the Scottish Prison Service to introduce males into female prisons, reasoning that introducing self-ID in these “very challenging circumstances” would put pressure on other public services to adopt it too. And — factually at least, though not ethically — he was right.

So, for Sturgeon to pose at the press conference on Wednesday as some kind of throwback to the Scottish Enlightenment, urging that “debates should be rational” and that “Scotland should be capable of having them”, may well count as the most brass-necked reverse ferret of her long career. She is certainly no Thomas Reid or Dugald Stewart, two 18th-century philosophers closely associated with the Scottish school of common-sense realism, and who each emphasised the importance of trusting one’s senses and guarding against paradox. For the policy of self-ID is manifestly a failure on both counts.

Never mind that — despite an apparently shared interest in witch-burning, Sturgeon doesn’t even reach the fairly low bar for public rationality set by Presbyterian founder and general miserabilist John Knox. Knox may have been fond of ducking-stools, stocks, and pillories, but at least he thought that people should interpret biblical texts for themselves, without the interposition of priests in funny robes spouting incomprehensible jargon.

Suggested reading

Scottish nationalism will survive Sturgeon

By Tom McTague

Partly thanks to Knox and the high levels of literacy he encouraged in schoolchildren for Bible-reading purposes, Scottish culture has a long and justly famed tradition of valuing independent thinking. There is a rejection of closed hierarchies of power, and a habit of nose-thumbing authority figures. Outward appearances of prestige are supposed to mean little, and the lowliest and poorest member of society is thought equal to the most powerful and well-connected. “A man’s a man for a’ that,” Robert Burns famously told us. “Trans women are women,” piped the incongruent refrain from Sturgeon. To prove it, she put violent, unstable murderers and paedophiles into close living arrangements with impoverished, abused females. And then she left them to get on with it.

Politicians are generally good at rewriting history. In the general Great Forgetting which, I assume, will follow the eventual Great Resetting on gender policies towards something more sensible, the SNP may well feign collective amnesia about their former glorious leader’s role in helping discourse in Scotland on trans matters become as vicious and divided as it could possibly be. For all I know, Sturgeon might be about to announce her appointment as a Visiting Professor of Public Reason at Strathclyde Uni, or something. Stranger things have happened. So just in case — and as the woman herself might say — let me be very clear.

Over the course of her leadership, Sturgeon has presided over a closed system of mutual backscratching between her government and favoured courtier-transactivists, paying them to tell her and her government what to think. She has helped shut down free and lawful public discussion of their demands, enabled the unjust monstering of their critics, and sat silently watching as eminently capable women in her own party suffer unconscionable bullying and smearing from others within the party for dissenting.

More from this author

Scottish nationalism is fuelled by resentment

By Kathleen Stock

Even worse, while posing as both feminist and socialist, she monomaniacally has put the vested interests of a small group of privileged, university-educated activists over the interests of huge swathes of ordinary Scottish women, including many who are vulnerable and traumatised by violence and sexual abuse. And she has apparently done this for what she foolishly believed would be political gain.

Nicola Sturgeon may well be — in fact, obviously is — a human being. But she’s a hypocritical and callous one. She’s right to say that Scottish politics has become more intense and brutal, but she only has herself to blame.

Today, both secessionism and unionism feed off the other’s incoherence. Sturgeon’s press conference in Edinburgh compellingly proved this: she described her decision in ways that made it sound as if she were some kind of martyr. Under her leadership, she said, the cause of Scottish nationalism had suffered because it had become caught up in the irrational partisanship of her opponents, who had grown to dislike her so much that they could no longer judge Scottish independence on its own merits. She was, she intimated, sacrificing herself in the hope that a new leader would be able to bring more people into the tent of Scottish nationalism. Unionists should not be complacent about this prospect — she may actually be correct — but the structural problem for Scottish nationalism is not the prejudice of its opponents, but the failings of its own offer.

Brexit has made Scottish independence a far more complicated prospect than it was before. It is now possible that we will look back on the referendum in 2014 as the moment Scottish independence made the most sense. Fair or not, Brexit means that Scotland cannot dilute the dominating reality of England simply by leaving the union and joining the rump UK in a wider EU. If anything, Brexit has made England’s hulking presence next to Scotland even more pronounced, while demanding answers from the SNP that it does not seem ready or able to provide. What happens at the border with England? Will Scotland introduce the euro? Will Holyrood accept common European debts? Will it rejoin the Common Fisheries Policy? For the SNP, Brexit has turned out to be both the casus belli for its second push for independence and a strategic disaster. The best thing that could happen to Scottish nationalism would be for Britain to rejoin the European Union.

For unionists, however, Brexit might be an unexpected weapon in their constitutional arsenal, but it is one whose very existence is a reminder of the union’s inherent Englishness. Today, it is impossible to escape the reality that the UK has ceased to function in any meaningful sense as a unified British state; it now operates as an incoherent and imbalanced union of separate entities whose English character has not been softened by devolution, but incalculably sharpened. The fact is, the more Holyrood dominates Scotland’s national life, the more English the actual national parliament in Westminster becomes. This is a hole in the national barrel, draining the legitimacy of parliament and in time the union itself. The irony, then, is that just as Brexit acts as both an irritant and a salve to the threat of Scottish independence, devolution itself is a prime source of the union’s instability, the unbridgeable fault line in the body politic which no-one in Westminster is prepared to confront.

Watching Sturgeon’s resignation, I was reminded of the late Tom Nairn, the great academic pin-up of Scottish nationalism whose book The Break-up of Britain argued that the British state was destined to collapse like the Hapsburg, Tsarist or Prussian regimes of the 19th and early 20th centuries. “It is a basically indefensible and unadaptable relic, not a modern state,” wrote Nairn. “The only useful kind of speculation has assumed a geriatric odour: a motorised wheelchair and a decent funeral seem to have become the actual horizons of the Eighties.” Nairn’s book was published in 1977 and yet the geriatric old relic endures, still supported by half  of Scottish voters, despite Brexit and the political crises in Westminster that have followed.

Yet Nairn cannot be dismissed as a false prophet. As a political force, Scottish Nationalism has been transformed since 1977. The SNP is now the dominant force in Scottish politics, with independence supported by almost half the population and most of the young. As a result, Britain is easily the most fragile power in western Europe, or indeed the wider Western alliance. Almost no other country — apart from Canada or Spain — is as close to breaking apart.

Nairn was also right to argue in the 2002 edition of his book, when devolution was being hailed as a great reform which would permanently obstruct the demand for independence, that the British state remained structurally unstable. “A new tide seeking real independence is forming itself beneath the facade of Blairism,” he wrote. “It will rise into the spaces left by New Labour’s collapse, and by the increasing misfortunes of the old Union state.” Thirteen years later, the SNP expelled Labour from Scotland, winning every seat but three.

More from this author

Is Liz Truss really the next Barry Goldwater?

By Tom McTague

Nairn, in my view, was right to see long-term structural challenges to the British state, but wrong to believe that this made it uniquely outdated, or somehow destined to collapse. The fact that after eight years as First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon has resigned, still unable to answer how Scottish independence will be enacted, is testament to the inherent challenges of secession, not just continuity.

When I asked Nairn a few years ago about the challenge Brexit posed to Scottish nationalism, he was thoughtful and reflective, arguing that it changed the type of relationship an independent Scotland would have with the UK after the latter’s inevitable collapse. In his last interview before he died, Nairn argued that what would eventually replace Britain was still being worked out. “We’re trying to replace Great Britain… with something else, but what that is, there is no ready and living example of it to which we can turn. We have to make it up as we go along, because there is nothing else.”

In this he was right, but the truth is both sides are making it up as they go along. None of us have been here; everything is new. Unionism has yet to offer coherent answers to the problems posed by devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland but not England; Brexiteers have yet to offer coherent answers to the problem of Northern Ireland and its border with the Republic; and Scottish nationalists have yet to offer coherent answers to the problem of seceding from Britain after Britain has seceded from Europe. Nicola Sturgeon departs as First Minister of Scotland having failed to find them. But her opponents should not crow, for they have not succeeded in this task either.

Perhaps puzzlingly, this is despite the fact that, faced with practical questions about women’s spaces and women’s sports, there seems to be significant agreement that trans women should keep out of both. Had the latter results been the only ones revealed today, they surely would have suggested that, when push comes to shove, most people do not believe that trans women are women. For the alternative doesn’t add up: large sections of the British public believe there is a kind of anomalously shaped, baritone-voiced woman out there who also, for some reason, shouldn’t be allowed in a female changing room or on the sports field with other women.

A similar impression of confusion in the public mind emerges when the answers to two further poll questions are compared. A majority of respondents agreed that “people should be able to identify as being of a different gender to the one they had recorded at birth”. However, there was markedly less enthusiasm for making it easier to change “legal gender”. This too looks like a strange juxtaposition, at least at first.

In this case, though, the disparity is presumably explained by the fact that “to identify as being of a different gender” in the first question has been interpreted by respondents as nothing much more meaningful than donning fancy dress. To “identify” here mainly refers to men saying that they feel like women, and women saying that they feel like men (or at least, don’t feel like women) — perhaps with some non-conforming clothing thrown in for good measure. It would be an illiberal state indeed that tried to outlaw any of this, and at odds with our generally tolerant national character to try. Still, for poll respondents, rightly allowing people to express themselves freely doesn’t seem to have entailed that we should start handing out gender recognition certificates on the strength of it.

Yet the “trans women are women” answer remains an intriguing one. To my mind, the fact that 34% neither agree nor disagree is telling. And I don’t blame people for feeling befuddled. Pollsters inherit the limitations of dominant public ways of framing particular issues — and there is no more confusing framing than “trans women are women”. For a start, there’s the fact that the phrase functions like a mantra. As transactivists who frequently deploy the phrase no doubt realise, the repetition of the word “women” produces a slightly hypnotic effect. After all, it looks tautological — a bit like asking whether sausage dogs are dogs, or armchairs are chairs.

More fundamentally, there’s a widespread lack of clarity about who counts as a “trans woman” — a characteristic starkly exhibited in recent days by Scotland’s First Transactivist, Nicola Sturgeon. Is a trans woman someone who has had surgery to remove penis and testicles, and had a simulacrum of a vagina put there instead? Does being a trans woman require you to have taken artificial oestrogen for years, or to have had your natal testosterone suppressed? Do you have to own a gender recognition certificate?

Suggested reading

The Labour Party has a woman problem

By Rosie Duffield

Or does the category include men who don’t have any special legal status, and who only cross-dress, and perhaps don’t even bother doing that? Does it include convicted rapists who suddenly find a feeling of womanhood welling up within their bosoms on the way to a sentencing hearing? The more confusion there is about who counts as a trans woman, the less likely it is that people will be able to answer whether a trans woman is a woman or not with any certainty.

Whatever the source of the public’s confusion, it’s a testament to the dogged persistence of the LGBT+ lobbying sector that there is meaningful disagreement about the matter at all. For however you look at the polling, it still suggests that a significant proportion of the general population now think adult human males can change their sex by some kind of behavioural process — whether that’s a medical, legal, or merely sartorial one, or even just muttering “I’m a woman now” to your lawyer as the prospect of a male prison looms.

This bizarre epistemic situation did not arise on its own. Lamentable as the national standard of secondary school biology probably is, it still seems unlikely that many of us have mixed up human beings with sequential hermaphrodites. Clownfish, for instance, really can change their sex, going from the production of eggs to sperm over the course of a single lifetime. But — not to put too fine a point on it — humans aren’t fish.

And nor, I think, should we pay any attention to academics coughing and spluttering about the supposedly well-understood distinction between “sex” and “gender”.  According to some of them, when someone says that a trans woman is a woman, they are not talking about adult human females at all. Rather, the speaker has accurately grasped something much more intellectually sophisticated — that womanhood is a “gender”, which some adult human males can come to possess, and some adult human females can shed.

The makers of this point conveniently ignore the fact that “gender” is used in multiple ambiguous ways these days, including as a polite synonym for biological sex, and alternatively as a name for a set of social stereotypes for femininity and masculinity. If you ask these same academics if they mean that womanhood is a matter of liking pink glittery things and tottering about on high heels, they get quite cross. And if you ask them to further explain what they think womanhood is then, if not conforming to sexist stereotypes, they may try to get you fired from your job. Either way, the idea that the general public is motivated by a deep comprehension of gender studies arcana seems to me somewhat optimistic.

Suggested reading

How I survived my annus horribilis

By Kathleen Stock

So really, the victory here — if it can be called that — belongs almost entirely to organisations such as Stonewall, Mermaids, Gendered Intelligence, All About Trans, the Scottish Equality Network, and associated pals in the rainbow-hued phalanx. You really do have to hand it to them. Quite astonishingly, they have turned what used to be a boringly factual matter about whether Xs were Ys into a quasi-religious question revealing the respondent’s personal values. And at least to some extent, it has clearly worked.

Collaborating together over a decade, these organisations have poured resources — donated to them by well-meaning foundations, generous lottery distributors, and successive Tory governments — into guilt-tripping much of the nation into half-believing something nonsensical. A quick search of charity databases over the last decade shows tens of millions of pounds specially dedicated to trans projects — including many for “trans kids”. Such projects tend to heartrendingly represent trans people as a uniquely martyred class, especially vulnerable to threat and so in need of various kinds of support, resources, and encouragement to compensate. First among concessions demanded on their behalf has been that personal fictions of sex-change be validated by the world. It’s been presented as the very least we could do.

For years then, under the guise of equality, lobbyists have been spinning this line in UK workplaces, youth groups, schools, universities, hospitals, media outlets, government departments, police forces, local councils, and so on — and yes, in prison services too. They have relentlessly insisted that the question “are trans women, women?” is a test of individual character rather than a basic request for information. According to their imposed logic, “strongly agree” correlates with “minimally compassionate”, and “strongly disagree” correlates with “genocidal”. It’s as if the public has been sold a subliminal version of the Peter Pan story: say you believe that fairies exist, and you can save Tinkerbell from dying.

Meanwhile, for most for this same period, the British media has failed in its basic duty to investigate LGBT+ propaganda properly, much of the time simply passing it along to readers unexpurgated, as if doing PR. Even now, if your main news source is The Guardian or the BBC you will be lucky to have come across such complicating facts as, say, that around 60% of trans women in UK prisons are sex offenders; or that the starkly rising rates of rape among “women” may not be what they seem; or that murder rates of trans people in the UK are gratifyingly extremely low, and for the last few years non-existent. The story of the martyred UK trans woman continues to flourish, as does the moral pressure to try to keep her alive by saying the right words. Small wonder, then, that people still seem confused.

Depressing as this might appear, perhaps we shouldn’t despair. Poll results from Scotland in particular suggest that, however vague people seem to be about theoretical questions, when confronted by the practical consequences of treating a trans woman as a woman, thoughts get suddenly and quickly clarified. With the debacle of the Scottish Prison Service’s putting male sex offenders in the female estate perhaps freshly in mind, nine out of  the ten constituencies most strongly opposed to allowing trans women in women’s spaces were Scottish. And this doesn’t feel like a coincidence.

Relatedly, perhaps we should also consider that what people sometimes say might not actually be that good an indication of what they really believe. Many philosophers think that the content of a person’s beliefs should not be identified only in terms of individual things he says. Rather, his beliefs should be gauged in relation to how his statements more generally fit together with his behaviour and other expressed thoughts (or do not). For instance, someone who says she believes that the sky is falling in, but who doesn’t duck or otherwise mention it in other relevant contexts, is perhaps not being entirely reliable.

Equally, someone who in one context seems tempted by the thought that trans women are women, but who in another is clear that they don’t belong in women’s spaces or sports, perhaps doesn’t really believe that trans women are really women in the first place, no matter what she says directly on the matter. In that case, what the polling from Scotland may be telling us — at least, reading between the lines — is that for many north of the border, trans women are in fact men. When confronted with the evidence of eyes and ears, the decade-long guilt-trip is apparently running out of steam.

In Sturgeon’s rhetoric, the former is the SNP itself, its policies for governing and its goal of national independence. All democratic politics partake, necessarily, of some of Mani’s drear religion, but Sturgeon has made it the brand of her party and her leadership, underpinned by the constant grievance that Scotland remains held — after centuries — in servile chains.

Every SNP minister and senior official must display their versions of this: the head Manichee, example to them all, is Sturgeon. And in the matter of the Gender Recognition Recognition Bill — which would allow children of 16 to change their gender, independently of their parents’ consent  — she deploys its mechanisms with practised skill.

In a speech just before the Bill came to Holyrood, she said she would “never apologise for trying to spread equality”, that the Bill would cut away the “intrusive, traumatic,  dehumanising” barriers to transition, and, with the Vox Humana in full flow, that she bore an important responsibility “to make life a little better for the stigmatised minorities”. This is luminous goodness — government as Good Samaritan.

And yet, the opposing forces, evil as they might be, have put down some markers which could cause the less enlightened to pause. London’s Tavistock Clinic, home to England’s Gender Identity Development Service (Gids), became increasingly beset with complaints and controversy. Last summer, it was closed. Scotland has its own Gids centre: the Sandyford Clinic, in Glasgow. It, too, began to receive a growing list of complaints. Last September, Sinéad Watson, who started to identify as a man aged 20, and who had been prescribed testosterone treatments and had a double mastectomy, told UnHerd that she bitterly regrets it, and called for Sandyford to be closed.

The procedures and overall approaches at the Tavistock and Sandyford are not of liberation and joy, but of young men and women inadequately advised by clinicians who were, as one report noted, more concerned with “putting them quickly onto a pathway to transition”. These considerations closed the Tavistock Gids and now threaten Sandyford: they also inform the decision of the UK Government to animate a Section 35 Order under the 1998 Scotland Act — the legal basis for the Scottish parliament — which has, for the present, stymied the Scots nationalists’ momentum.

In response, the SNP has mounted a grand operatic display of outrage. This was “an unprecedented attack on the Scottish parliament”, its Westminster spokesperson warned. For Sturgeon, it amounted to “a full-frontal attack on our democratically elected Scottish Parliament”. There is no denying the importance of this matter: it has elevated what was largely a political manoeuvre of little general concern into a moral issue that illuminates not just the proper age at which life-changing decisions may be taken, but the very nature of parental responsibility.

Those opposed to the legislation have also stressed the possible threat to women. Johann Lamont, a former Labour member of the Scottish parliament and briefly the leader of the party in Scotland, described in the Sunday Post how she found it “hard to believe anyone really thinks that it’s a good idea to have a convicted male sex offender in a women’s jail”. Reflecting on the consequences of the vote, she added: “the Labour Party manifesto is full of commitments around issues like single-sex spaces and understanding women’s health. But if you have dismantled what the difference between male and female is, how do you even begin to meet those commitments?”

Suggested reading

Is The Guardian sowing disinformation?

By Kathleen Stock

Last year, her national leader, Sir Keir Starmer, struggled to address this theme on a LBC phone-in: when asked if a woman could have a penis, he replied hesitantly that he didn’t think “discussing this issue in this way helps anyone”. But Starmer is on Lamont’s side now: he won’t — as most Labour MSPs did — support Scotland’s Bill: “I have concerns about the provision in Scotland, in particular the age reduction to 16 and in particular the rejection of our amendment in relation to the Equalities Act.” Pressed by Laura Kuenssberg on whether he thinks someone of 16 is old enough to decide to change their gender, he replied: “No, I don’t think you are.” In this, Starmer puts himself on the same footing as the UK Equalities Minister, Kemi Badenoch, who argued that it was “not possible” for the legislation to be “fully contained” within Scotland, since it could contradict parts of the 2010 Equalities Act.

The Labour split on this is deep. Where a few in Scotland took the Starmer-Lamont line, more appear to have been convinced that the progressive stance is to stand with the SNP. Labour put up a number of amendments to the Bill’s clauses, but all were rejected. Even so, rather than take the obvious course of abstaining or even opposing on the basis that the legislation is flawed, most voted yes. Kezia Dugdale, herself also a former Labour Party leader, celebrated the SNP Bill, saying, in a style similar to Sturgeon’s, that “this bill will become law this week not because women were silenced but because many female proponents of it refused to be”. Scotland’s current Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, yesterday agreed that the UK Government was “wrong”.

If the controversy continues and deepens, as seems likely, this may affect a future election: at the very least, it shows that many Labour MSPs and supporters are closer to nationalist than centrist Labour thinking — a political gift to Sturgeon.

Suggested reading

Why the Tavistock won't talk to me

By Hadley Freeman

But will it be enough? Perhaps the largest prick to the balloon of righteousness, curiously little referred to, is the SNP project’s unpopularity. Recent polls reported in The Times suggest 62% do not support age-reduction decisions from 18 to 16, while only 19% support them. The proposed cut in the waiting period before a new gender is recognised — from two years to three months — is opposed by 50% and approved by 25%. Ending the need for a medical diagnosis is supported by 26%, but opposed by 39%. (In these, the “don’t knows” range from 19-35%, suggesting widespread lack of knowledge of the issue.) Earlier polls by various pollsters show roughly similar results: in none is the SNP approach approved.

So far, the large force of the project, which has gathered every Scottish party save the Conservatives into the SNP camp, has been that of the progressive vanguard. But the UK government still has the legal advantage over the Scottish nationalist and cultural radicals. The population, now better informed, seems inclined to the former’s view. The larger questions, now being unpacked, have yet to divide our still united state.

By the time I cross the Forth and then the Tay, everything is changed: not just the passenger accents, or landscape, or weather, or light — but also the train itself. I would swear the carriage somehow shrinks. And time bends too. By the time I arrive at the tiny station and alight to the familiar sound of Arctic geese in the tidal basin right next to the platform, it feels like I’ve travelled, if not to an earlier time, then certainly to a different one.

A coastal town of 12,000 people, where many of my schoolmates found work offshore in the oil industry, I thought of Montrose last week as Sturgeon delivered her conference speech 40 miles up the road in Aberdeen. Among her key messages was the announcement of a new £50 million award to Aberdeen and surrounding areas from a government fund called Just Transition. This was not, as some might have worried given the SNP’s current preoccupations, a forward-thinking plan to make Aberdonians more non-binary, but rather a fund dedicated to helping the North East move away from oil and ultimately to make Aberdeen “the net zero capital of the world”.

As usual with the SNP, pesky details about the fast-changing status of Scottish oil in the face of Europe’s current energy crisis were unacknowledged in favour of a soothingly principled-sounding headline. Other progressive lures in Sturgeon’s speech included strong support for refugees, much lamenting about lost EU membership, and motherly requests that everyone get their Covid booster. There was also the requisite Tory-bashing, anticipated by Sturgeon the day before with her statement: “I detest the Tories and everything they stand for.”

How did this all go down in Montrose? My hometown is probably one of the most SNP-friendly in the country. Even when SNP MPs were few and far between, we had one in Angus for much of my childhood. Many — perhaps even most — people I know there are staunchly pro-independence. And yet, as you might expect in a place where farming, fishing and oil have shaped the economy, and where golf club membership is practically mandatory from birth, the Montrose civic character is quite far from the rainbow flag-waving ecowarrior to whom the SNP seems to want to appeal.

The main rival for the SNP in Angus is not Labour but the Tories, perpetually edged into second place (apart from one brief period in power between 2017-19). Generally, Montrosians are cautious, wry, and not easily impressed with flamboyant gestures — and this includes the few natural Labour voters I know there, who are more into nationalising the railways than taking the knee. It’s true that there are a few blue-haired teenagers around these days, but I assume it’s a bit like back in 1987, when I bought myself a BOY London baseball hat and matching sweatshirt on an intrepid foray to Kensington High Street. Back under the grey skies of Montrose, I looked ridiculous and everyone knew it.

More from this author

Real feminists don't need strongmen

By Kathleen Stock

Down in Holyrood, the SNP continues to pursue its own ludicrously incongruent fashion item — otherwise known as revising the Gender Recognition Act in favour of self-ID. Blithely ignoring the evidenced concerns of many women — famous and not-so-famous — Sturgeon continues to present this policy as a mere bureaucratic formality, sensibly ironing out a few wrinkles in the existing Act in a way that only morally bankrupt deplorables could possibly object to. Actually, though, her Bill proposes that any Scottish man can legally become a woman pretty much whenever he likes, with practically no meaningful strings attached. According to almost any local standard other than the one set by (mostly English) Edinburgh University students, that’s clearly the project of a total bampot.

It cannot be overemphasised how poorly this culturally radical, sense-defying policy fits with the temperament of the average Scot — and not just in Angus. Much of Scotland remains what it has been for decades: family-oriented, communitarian, and socially conservative compared to the average metrosexual liberal type. Scottish people may be economically more Left-wing than UK voters but they aren’t more culturally liberal.

At the moment, the SNP are making much of recent findings from the British Social Attitudes survey suggesting that 52% of the population now back independence; perhaps unsurprisingly, they say less about other social trends indicated in the last few years, suggesting that there are significant qualms about uncontrolled immigration or that support for the death penalty is higher in Scotland than the UK national average. Indeed, this is perhaps what you might expect in a place where local communities are still relatively strong. For there to be insiders, there has to be outsiders.

Suggested reading

The SNP won't silence women

By Sarah Pedersen

But to marvel at this mismatch between SNP luxury beliefs and the more parsimonious sensibilities of voters is to ignore the distorting influence of the biggest and baddest outsider of all: the one just over the border. For, although it has become relatively taboo to say so, whatever the official talk of civic rather than ethnic nationalism, a big motivator for SNP supporters in Scotland is still animosity towards the English. You can’t raise a population on endless stories about bloody historical injustices at the hands of their ethnic neighbours and then expect them to feel irenic. Certainly, I couldn’t fail to be aware of the enmity during my childhood, where my Southern parentage and wandering accent made me a constant target for cries of “English snob” at school.

Scratch the surface of grassroots SNP support and — not always but frequently — you’ll find slow-burning disdain, perhaps all the stronger for often being suppressed in favour of a more polite narrative. It’s usually confined to living rooms and pubs, but gets permissibly unleashed during football tournaments via support for that other national team, Anyone-But-England. And of course, as Sturgeon knows, an equally traditional means of expressing your feelings in this direction is to say how much you hate the Tories.

In the Scottish cultural imagination, the archetype of the sort of English man or woman that is most hated — Southern, posh-accented, privately-educated, and prone to seeing the country primarily in terms of its potential for invitations to hunting lodges — coincides significantly with the sort of Tory MP the membership still seems to prefer. Everybody knows that in saying you hate the latter, there’s at least the suggestion that you hate the former too. For some extreme nationalist groups, such as All Under One Banner and Siol nan Gaidheal, the equivalence is made without embarrassment.

More from this author

The problem with gaslighting

By Kathleen Stock

Once you understand that, unconsciously or otherwise, a contrarian anti-English sentiment implicitly powers many SNP decisions, a lot of other things become clearer too. You better understand how a party attached to sovereignty and self-determination can be so rhetorically keen on EU membership without perceived conflict; or why Scottish Covid policies were reliably more draconian than in England; or how an otherwise astute politician like Sturgeon could become so psychologically wedded to a baffling policy like self-ID. Though of course it isn’t the whole story, part of the answer is Any-Policy-But-England’s, and a passive-aggressive game of always being seen to stay on the right side of nice, with England inevitably cast as the nasty villain to Scotland’s noble but wounded hero.

In the case of self-ID, the knock-on costs are likely to be borne by ordinary Scottish women and girls, among them the further dismantling of single-sex services proudly built up by Scottish women for other women since the Seventies. Such is the naked contempt for women’s interests here, it’s tempting to see the whole project as a fig-leaf for deep-rooted misogyny. But if SNP supporters don’t already care about the present government’s many failures to govern well in practice, it isn’t clear why they would hold them accountable at the ballot box for self-ID either. Sticking it to the English will continue to be the more compelling goal for many voters over other practical considerations. And this highlights another way in which radical transactivism and Scottish nationalism can be a good fit, at least emotionally if not rationally. In practice, both can be a politics of resentment, pretending to be something finer.

In reality, the party’s 20-seat gain was very modest, under-shooting prediction models and tying with the Lib Dems, while falling behind the SNP, who were not expected to make any gains. Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar may believe that “Scottish Labour is back“, but his party recorded its second-worst local result in half a century.

Meanwhile, the Scottish Tories have lost a staggering 63 seats. No doubt they will be shouting from the rooftops that it’s all because of Partygate and Douglas Ross’s humiliating U-turn on his call for Boris Johnson to resign over it. But the Conservative result is not as bad as it looks: in terms of seat pluralities, the Tories have placed first in five local authorities, ahead of Labour in three. They’ve also made gains in a few strategic areas such as Moray, Aberdeenshire and Ayrshire.

Nonetheless, there is little room for complacency. The Scottish Tories’ popularity appears to have reached a peak in 2017 in the wake of the Ruth Davidson surge and a fierce unionist backlash against Sturgeon’s plans for a second independence referendum. It has declined in the five years since, and the party’s current vote share of 19.6% will only fall further in a national election for Westminster or Holyrood, where far larger numbers of younger, working class and urban voters will turn out. And of course, the leadership and macroeconomic problems that dogged the Tories across Britain (where their net loss of 487 seats far outstripped the worst expectations) are only set to get worse.

Despite its underwhelming victory, Scottish Labour’s reclamation of the second place mantle matters symbolically — the SNP’s preferred opponents are Tories, who give them the opportunity to define themselves against unpopular Westminster rule. Scottish Labour coming back from the dead would therefore complicate the SNP’s monopoly on the centre-left, even if there’s reason to believe Anas Sarwar has learnt little from the failures of the Jim Murphy era, if his current insistence that no local government Labour groups cooperate with the SNP is anything to go by.

Suggested reading

Scotland has lost its sense of humour

By Daniel Kalder

What does this mean for the fate of the independence movement? There has been talk of the issue being forced onto the back foot by the war in Ukraine and the cost-of-living crisis. Yet these developments only seem to have had a marginal impact on polling, which has hovered between 50-50 and 47 Yes – 53 No. In fact, if anything this election is further proof that the Scottish electorate increasingly favour independence. The vote-share of pro-independence parties was around 45%, while that of pro-union parties amounted to 55%. That’s quite a change from 2017, when 40% of votes were for pro-independence parties compared to 60% for unionist ones — especially when one takes into account that voters in local elections are more likely to be older, more middle-class and unionist compared to national elections.

Just after the election, a Panelbase survey for the Sunday Times found that more than 55% of Scots want an independence referendum to be held within this parliamentary term. Since the vote, senior Scottish Conservative grandees have said that opposition to Indyref2 is no longer working on the doorstep. The party’s former head of communications has openly acknowledged that the issue of the SNP dominance won’t be solved until a referendum is held. If this was meant to be an election for Scots to send Sturgeon a “no to Indyref2” message, it certainly doesn’t seem to have been interpreted by unionist parties in that way, to say nothing of voters themselves.

Suggested reading

Scotland's drug shame

By Darren 'Loki' McGarvey

Interestingly, however, this hasn’t necessarily translated into support for the SNP. In places such as Edinburgh and Glasgow, it certainly appears that progressive and younger SNP voters are decamping to the pro-independence Greens over a variety of issues such as climate and social policy. That isn’t to say we should downplay the SNP’s performance: another insufficiently discussed consequence of the local elections is that council composition will be quite different now — and in the favour of nationalists. Previously, the SNP were only part of administrations in 14 local authorities around the country, but now it is well-placed to form as many as 25.

In practice, this could make all the difference when it comes to Indyref2. Should the impasse between Bute House and Downing Street end up with an emboldened Scottish Government pursuing an independence referendum outside the Section 30 framework laid out by the 2012 Edinburgh Agreement, it will in large part rely upon the cooperation of local authorities in being able to organise polling stations, counters and observers. While previously the largely unionist composition of many administrations would have been a bulwark against this, the strategic gains of the SNP and Greens across the board will make it significantly easier for a unilateral referendum to be held.

Suggested reading

The SNP won't silence women

By Sarah Pedersen

Still, if there’s one thing that did emerge as a pattern from the local elections, it was that there isn’t a pattern. This is by far the most fragmented election Scotland has seen in a long time. The SNP’s gains were highly uneven and scattered, as were the gains of Scottish Labour and Scottish Conservative’s losses. This is a continuation of the dynamic at last year’s Holyrood elections, where a “national environment” couldn’t really be said to exist because every individual constituency became a hyperlocalised contest between the SNP and whichever unionist party was best placed to challenge it.

In this regard, the local elections are best understood as a microcosm of Scottish politics as a whole: it was a grinding war of attrition where significant developments take place on both sides, but where the momentum continues to be on the side of nationalism.

Local groups of gender critical feminists have sprung up throughout Scotland, from the Borders to the Highlands and Islands, and are making their mark both online and on the streets. Stickers, posters, postcards and suffragette ribbons all bear the same message for Nicola Sturgeon’s government: “Women Won’t Wheesht.”

As Covid restrictions ease and May’s local elections draw close, these women are ramping up their campaign to make the Scottish government think twice about its plans to reform the Gender Recognition Act (GRA). Currently, if you want to legally change your gender in Scotland, medical evidence is required; you must have lived in your “acquired gender” for at least two years. The Scottish government’s proposed reforms would mean that no diagnosis or medical reports would be needed, and the period in which applicants must have lived in their acquired gender would be cut to three months.

In other words, self-identification of gender would be introduced. The SNP government is expected to reveal its draft legislation in the coming weeks. For Scotland’s gender-critical feminists, their fight has never been so urgent.

Many of these women describe themselves as “politically homeless”. Some are considering breaking the habit of a lifetime and not voting in May; others will spoil their ballots. Some are considering whether to vote for the new Alba party, which has pledged to protect and preserve the rights of women and girls. The Scottish Conservatives have also realised this is an issue on which they can appeal to female voters — several Conservative MSPs visited a demonstration outside the Scottish Parliament organised by For Women Scotland in September.

For my research published this week into what I term a Scottish “cooperative constellation” of gender-critical feminists, I spoke to a coalition of women that reaches across the independence/unionist divide and includes women from all sections of society and political tribes. Some began their feminist careers on Greenham Common. For younger members, this is their first step into the political public sphere.

Suggested reading

The inconvenient truth about transwomen

By Debbie Hayton

Putting aside what divides them, these women are united by concerns about the impact of the GRA reforms on women’s sex-based rights: the implications for women’s sport, refuges, prisons, and the myriad services achieved by feminist campaigners since the Seventies.

I carried out 18 in-depth interviews with politicians, researchers, journalists, bloggers, creative artists and grassroots campaigners — all of whom were promised anonymity. I asked all of them to disclose any abuse they had suffered due to their involvement in the constellation. After all, women’s livelihoods have been threatened because of their opinions on the GRA reform, and many involved in the debate are concerned for their personal safety.

What they had to say made for grim listening: they spoke to me of death and rape threats, demands that their employer sack them and attempts at “cancellation”. One interviewee described the response to an essay she posted online, in which she expressed her opinion that being a lesbian is the same as being same-sex attracted. “Almost minutes after it was published, I got a message saying, ‘I hope you get raped, or, better yet, killed. LOL’.” She also had another abuser post pictures of her home and her home address: “And this account was filled with things like, ‘Kill TERFs, TERFs don’t deserve rights. TERFs aren’t women’.” As another interviewee put it: “We seem to have become like the new witches, it’s like the new Salem”.

Of course, during lockdown the activities of this constellation of feminists were confined to social media. Women shared, debated and organised on Twitter, Facebook and sites like Mumsnet, where feminist forums offer a comparatively safe space for gender-critical discussion. Women could keep their anonymity but signal their stance by using the suffragette colours of purple, green and white. In recent months, David Lammy’s dismissal of gender critical women as “dinosaurs hoarding rights” has offered another eye-catching addition to Twitter handles and Mumsnet usernames: the T-Rex emoji.

Suggested reading

Trans activism's war on solidarity

By Julie Bindel

The term “cooperative constellation” comes from the literature surrounding a phenomenon of feminist cooperation that took place in the EU and Nordic countries in the Nineties and early Noughties. In order to achieve women’s rights, female politicians, researchers, activists, and policy advisors worked together across political divisions. The researchers provided the theory, while the activists and grassroots led demand for change, which policymakers and politicians could then use in their push for new legislation.

The cooperative constellation also, importantly, included — and continues to include — female members of the media. The women I interviewed for my project acknowledged how crucial it is to achieve mainstream press coverage of their concerns. In recent years, though, the growth of online commentary has meant that gender-critical voices are less reliant on  the mainstream media. The contemporary constellation in Scotland has expanded to include bloggers and writers with large online followings — including, of course, J.K. Rowling.

But that is not the only difference between today’s Scottish activists and those who came before. Unlike the cooperative feminists 20 years ago, these Scottish women are focused on slowing down policy change, asking policymakers to think more carefully about how proposed changes will impact the sex-based rights of women and girls. And, in comparison to other constellations — where the networks were often supported by national governments that desired an academic underpinning for their sex-equality ambitions — the Scottish feminists are acting as outsiders. Those members of the SNP, Scottish Greens and Scottish Labour — including Holyrood and Westminster politicians — who belong to the constellation are acting in direct contradiction of official party policy.

Although they come from all corners, the majority of the women I interviewed are largely positioned on the centre or Left of Scottish politics. They are women who have been used to supporting, and being supported by, institutions like the BBC, The Guardian and trade unions. Yet when they appealed to these organisations to discuss their concerns about GRA reform, not only did they find their worries dismissed, but they were also vilified and accused of transphobia. One interviewee who had raised her concerns on an email list for union activists was immediately expelled from the group. The heading of the email, sent to all members, was “Fucking transphobes, fuck off”.

Suggested reading

Trans activism has mummy issues

By Mary Harrington

And as well as being rejected by their usual allies, the constellation has also been thoroughly snubbed by established women’s organisations in Scotland. Interviewees stated that they felt betrayed by organisations such as Engender or Rape Crisis, which do not represent their views. In fact, established women’s organisations were perceived to be in a feedback loop with the Scottish government, and to represent only a small section of Scottish women, with no interest in alternative points of view. It was frequently suggested that this was a necessary position, given their reliance on the government for funding. And so gender-critical feminists had felt compelled to start their own grassroots organisations, including For Women Scotland or Frontline Feminists Scotland.

As a result, they have found themselves vilified and abused. But they have organised, and are fighting back. For many there is a new sense of sisterhood and solidarity with women throughout the country. “It’s united people from all kinds of backgrounds and experience,” one interviewee told me. “That’s been one of the most rewarding things.”

With lockdown lifting, they are back out on the streets with their leaflets, ribbons, slates and dinosaurs. “It’s almost like a guerrilla network, getting out there instead of just sitting around talking”. Forget devolution — Nicola Sturgeon is about to discover there’s a new dividing line in Scottish politics.

One of my earliest political memories is of the minister in my grandparents’ church starting the service with a prayer for striking miners. A few years later, at the Glasgow Comic Art Convention, I remember Alan Grant, the Scottish co-writer of Judge Dredd and Batman, exhorting the audience not to pay the poll tax. This was also the era in which a fictional, unemployed, ranting Glaswegian with a bandage wrapped around his head became a beloved national symbol.

Indeed, in the 80s and 90s, a freewheeling attitude of utter contempt for the high and mighty seemed as Scottish as a Tunnock’s Tea Cake. Yet on my first visit home from Texas since pandemic chaos destabilised the world, I detected a very different mood in the air.

This was the first time I had been in Scotland since the government at Holyrood had passed a law making it illegal to utter wicked words in the home, the enforcement of which will necessarily involve family members denouncing the sinners among them to the authorities. I had missed Nicola Sturgeon’s daily briefings on TV, although I was aware that when the BBC had proposed to broadcast them less often, and perhaps not in full, there had been “widespread criticism”, while a petition to keep them on air had attracted over 50,000 signatures.

Meanwhile, I found myself receiving regular moral instruction from the government in the form of signs admonishing me against uttering wicked words on the train, letting my dog shit in the street, or conversely, letting my dog hunt hares; minimal unit pricing for alcohol had also been in place for three years. That finger wagging from the pulpit energy was back: it was as if the Scottish government feared that an irredeemably sinful people might at any moment erupt in spasms of hatred aimed at both humans and speedy animals with long ears.

What happened to the Scotland I remember? It was as if, by voting the nationalists into power, my fellow countrymen had accidentally resurrected Calvinism in woke form. The national poet wouldn’t have liked this much, I thought — and not simply because, were Robert Burns to return today, he would be cancelled in seconds both for his womanising, and his efforts to get a job as a bookkeeper on a slave plantation in Jamaica.

More from this author

The SNP have already won the culture war

By Daniel Kalder

A deep disdain for authoritarian piety runs through Burns’ poetry, informed not only by his rebellious temperament but also his direct experience of being denounced from the pulpit by the moral guardians of his day. Most famously, in Holy Willie’s Prayer he satirised a self-satisfied Calvinist believer who thanks God for making him one of the elect and justifies his lustful nature as a “fleshly thorn” intended by God to prevent him from becoming too perfect. Simultaneously he prays in a most unforgiving fashion for the destruction of his enemies for the same sins. Thanks to Burns, Holy Willie became archetypal, and I have often thought about his 21^st century equivalents while walking around Edinburgh. For Burns, however, it was personal: the man he mocked was no abstraction but a certain William Fisher, an elder in Burns’ own parish, and the poem was so libellous that he circulated it in private.

But it wasn’t just preachy, vindictive hypocrites that earned Burns’ mockery. In To a Louse he describes in loving detail the journey of a louse to the top of a lady’s bonnet in full view of everyone but her. Extracted from the poem, the famous lines “O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us/To see oursels as others see us!” sound like a prayer for wisdom and humility, but read in the context of the preceding verses it is hard to escape Burns’s glee at puncturing his neighbour’s self-satisfaction. Indeed, Burns sought to undermine just about everything that Calvinist worthies presented to him as sombre and sacred; in Tam O’Shanter, a drunkard’s horse outruns a horde of spirits, while in his Address To the Deil, Burns suggests that even “Auld Hornie” himself might have a shot at redemption if he would only change his ways.

Would the religious authorities of Burns’s day have accused him of “stirring up hatred” had such a vaguely worded law existed at the time? It seems likely. And would Burns, so aware of the lines he crossed in his own verse that he circulated some of it secretly, have felt at ease in a country where friends and family are encouraged to inform on each other for things said in their own homes? It seems unlikely.

Suggested article

What the SNP really believes

By John Lloyd

Yet many Scots do appear to be comfortable in such an environment, and place great trust in the authorities to always do the right thing, to adjudicate with wisdom over what can and cannot be said in private as well as in public. The more I thought about it, the more my experience growing up in Scotland in the 80s and 90s seemed anomalous. Perhaps the virulently anti-authority strain in the national character was especially pronounced back then not because of some innate aspect of the Scottish soul but rather because the country was ruled by an indifferent Conservative government in London that had very little support north of the border.

Between Thatcher’s election in 1979 and her resignation in 1990, she managed to alienate large swathes of Scottish voters, and the number of Conservative MPs in Scotland dropped from 22 to 10. When Alan Grant took to the podium to inveigh against the Poll Tax in front of a bunch of youthful comic fans, it had already been in place for a year longer than in England. Mrs. Thatcher had decided to experiment with it first in the test lab of Scotland, where she wasn’t too bothered about alienating voters.

It’s not that all Scottish people were contemptuous of all authority; but many of them were contemptuous of that authority. After all, it’s easy to be anti-establishment when you have nothing to gain from the establishment. Once the SNP came to power, that changed. There was a different power in the land, and many people identified with it, agreed with it, and benefited from it. Meanwhile the Brexit vote and the omnishambles of Boris Johnson’s leadership has made it easy for the SNP to direct that caustic, skeptical, questioning attitude southwards.

Suggested article

The importance of being British

By Nigel Biggar

It was easy, too, for Burns to hate the establishment. When he wrote those poems mocking the powerful and attacking hypocrites, he — a poor farmer and notorious fornicator — was completely alienated from the powers that stood over him. But what if he had lived in today’s Scotland, where a poet of his stature would not need to think about moving to Jamaica to earn money, but might instead be offered a cushy professorship at a state-funded university, prestigious seats on cultural committees and access to funding from Creative Scotland?

I doubt that even then he’d bite his tongue. Following the success of his first collection, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, Burns moved to Edinburgh where he was feted by the literary elites of his day. In this environment his jabs at preachers and rural overlords were about as edgy as attacking Trump in the pages of The Guardian, and he began to focus on collecting and reworking traditional ballads instead of insulting  the church elders who annoyed him.

But he still enjoyed provoking the sacred cows of his new audience, too. His poem, A Dream, which Burns wrote in response to a particularly unctuous encomium to George III not only disparaged the king but included the suggestion that Bonnie Prince Charlie might have done a better job. To the enlightened Edinburgh readership of Burns’s day this was much more ‘problematic’ than whatever derision he aimed at rural ministers: support for the vanquished Stuarts was not only politically unacceptable but regarded as an uncultivated, lower class belief. Burns in fact had written it before moving to the big city, but he kept on publishing it in every edition of Poems, even when it would have been in his interests to leave it out.

As the literary scholar Carol McGuirk observes, Burns was a man “stimulated by prohibitions”. He would find plenty to stimulate him in Scotland today. The love poet, the man of the people, the composer of odes to haggis — I like that poet. But the Burns I find most inspiring is the annoying guy, the rebel who doesn’t trust overbearing Calvinist types, and who doesn’t pander to self-satisfied elites, even when it’s in his best interest to do so. It is those qualities that make him a poet not only of his time, or more generally of ‘all times’, but specifically for our times.

After my little stint on camera, I chatted to my interrogators. The politician representing the Irish nationalist community told me how closely Scotland’s referendum debate was being followed across the Irish sea. A Yes vote, I was informed, would do more for Irish unification than any bombing campaign during the troubles, or any politics since. If Scotland were to go, Northern Ireland would be next.

A decade on, UK constitutional politics is still obsessed with the Scotland question, yet events in Northern Ireland remain relatively underreported. The Stormont Assembly was suspended for nearly three years, from 2017 to 2020: a significant piece of our country’s political apparatus was broken. And barely disturbed the bulletins. Had MPs all been sent home from the Commons on full pay for three years, had Nicola Sturgeon sat around in Bute House while civil servants ran Scotland without political direction or control, news editors would have got hours of content out of it.

The almost complete silence on Northern Ireland ahead of the Brexit vote was a disgrace. All those 1.8 million lives, hundreds of businesses and millions of pounds worth of trade upturned — without discussion, dissection or negotiation, until after the fact. The imperfect patching currently underway won’t mend this constitutional tear.

A mega poll of more than 3,000 voters by Lord Ashcroft, published last week, shows the Irish Nationalists, Sinn Fein, winning the next Northern Irish election at a canter — and most people in Ulster believing that a border poll in 10 years’ time would deliver a united Ireland. It is not an outlier.

Perhaps our gaze needs to shift from Scotland — where even the sustained, bellicose sabre-rattling of our First Minister has seen her move not an inch closer to securing a second referendum in her seven years of leadership — to our neighbours across the Irish Sea. New and resurgent political parties and movements, along with the great disruptor of Brexit, mixed with some good old-fashioned political regicide, has created all the ingredients for a generational shift.

Suggested reading

Northern Ireland has little hope left

By Carlo Gebler

Many Brits don’t realise that the power-sharing requirement of the Good Friday agreement means that both the leading Unionist and Nationalist parties must be represented in Northern Ireland’s government, with the offices of First Minister and Deputy First Minister occupied by a member of each. The DUP has been the major Unionist force in the region for almost two decades, recording between a quarter and a third of overall votes at Assembly elections, in a five, six or even seven-party system.

The pro-Brexit party was instrumental in sinking Theresa May’s proposed EU deal, which would have avoided extra checks and red tape for goods travelling between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and minimised disruption between Northern Ireland and the Republic. The protocols agreed following Boris Johnson’s deal gave no such protection, and are currently being renegotiated. But the anger in Ulster contributed, in no small part, to the defenestration of the DUP’s leader, Arlene Foster, earlier this year. Her successor, Edwin Poots, lasted just 21 days in post. The DUP’s chaotic transition has resulted in a current party leader who does not sit in the Stormont Assembly and therefore cannot be the First Minister of Northern Ireland.

To me, there is a sour, bleak, almost Old Testament defensiveness to the DUP’s unionism. And as someone who believes in the UK, and has spent all my political life espousing the positives of co-operation within wider unions (whether that is Scotland in the UK or the UK in the EU), I worry that defensive unionism does nothing but harm its own cause.

But the DUP are not the only pro-UK force in Northern Ireland.

More from this author

Sturgeon's drugs shame

By Ruth Davidson

Enter the most popular leader in the province, who has a Boys’ Own backstory to send any spin doctor into raptures. Born in barracks, the son of a soldier, he suffered childhood trauma when he accidentally shot a friend in the head with his father’s service weapon. At 16, he joined up as a boy soldier, rising through the ranks to become regimental sergeant major, and later commissioned as an officer. In Afghanistan, he was awarded the Military Cross for retaking a town from the Taliban.

There is an earthiness about the man, and a wicked humour. He passes the “pub test”, of whether voters would want to go for a drink with him, with ease — not least because he sends out plenty of pictures of himself on social media enjoying a pint of Guinness or large dram of good malt whisky. Commenting on an internal squabble between DUP MP Sammy Wilson and party leader Jeffrey Donaldson last week, he suggested a “bare belly fight to sort it out”. He has the highest approval ratings of any political leader in the country. And yet he is practically ignored by a UK political press happy to dissect every word, action, belief or motivation if the source is Keir Starmer or Boris Johnson.

But, still, Doug Beattie is the man, quite probably, who will save the Union.

Beattie took over as leader of the moderate Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) in May. In making his pitch, he said he was “able to reach out to all people in Northern Ireland regardless of what your religion is, sexual orientation or ethnicity”. In the last six months he has done just that, convincing Cllr Julie-Anne Corr-Johnston, NI’s first openly lesbian elected Unionist, to quit the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP) and join his party. In Autumn, Beattie was pictured smiling next to Stephen McCarthy, introducing him as the UUP’s first working-class Catholic candidate for an Assembly election. Mr McCarthy, who grew up in a nationalist household and whose grandfather was murdered by loyalist paramilitaries, says there are many “de facto unionists within the Catholic community”, and that the only way that Unionism would win a future border poll was through “reaching out to people like me”.

Suggested reading

What England owes the Irish

By Tom Holland

Beattie’s unionism is expansive, seeking to embrace groups that have often felt excluded. He also wears his unionism lightly, knowing that not everyone is as passionately entrenched as some of the representatives sent to Stormont. He seems to instinctively understand that his impeccable unionist credentials — military service for the crown, his uncle’s death at the hands of the IRA, the fact that he grew up on Union Street in Portadown — give him much greater licence to talk freely and generously about Irish identity.

He can face down hardline unionist critics by declaring, “I always viewed myself as Irish … clearly I’m British as well but my whole life I’ve identified as Irish”. On talk radio in Dublin, he’s confident enough to dive into that identity:

“I’m Irish. I’m an Irishman. .. I’m also an Ulsterman. You know, I’m British, I’m a European. I’m all of these things and I’m multilayered … God Save the Queen represents me, as does The Sash My Father Wore, Ulster rugby. But so does the shamrock, so does Gaelic games. So does Guinness. So does St Patrick’s Day. All of these things are part of my identity.”

He talks about “the union” not as an immutable object, preserved in aspic, but as a “Union of People” with all the scope and contradiction that entails. He wants little short of a complete transformation of Northern Irish politics — reshaping the devolution architecture to allow for what he calls “working power-sharing” and “power-sharing opposition” — coalitions that bring unionists and nationalists together in order to get things done, rather than (as he sees it) forcing them together in a way that means mutual vetoes often result in stasis. He wants what the rest of us in the UK take for granted: the ability to vote politicians and parties out of office, which he believes will make them work harder and concentrate on voters’ priorities over their own constitutional posturing.

And his confident, positive vision is transatlantic. In Washington DC, recently, he spoke to members of Congress, who are more used to seeing Sinn Fein and the Irish-American organisation Noraid making their nationalist case before passing round the hat. In seeking to address this one-sided view of Northern Ireland, he said: “Unless we engage, they will only hear one story. And it will not be our story.”

Suggested reading

Can Ireland survive the new cultural revolution?

By Angela Nagle

Beattie’s mix of statesman and soldier, parliamentary chamber and sergeant’s mess hall has struck a chord. In August, a LucidTalk poll for the Belfast Telegraph saw the UUP overtake the DUP in voting intentions for the first time in more than 20 years. Of all the party leaders in Northern Ireland, Doug Beattie was the only one to record a net positive rating of +20%. Sinn Fein’s Michelle O’Neill recorded -16%, while the DUP’s Jeffrey Donaldson recorded -20%. For context, Boris Johnson recorded -70%: even if most people in Northern Ireland want to remain in the UK, they don’t think much of the person leading it right now.

With the DUP regularly dropping in the polls to half of their 2019 general election high of 31%, it’s clear that there are thousands of Northern Ireland Unionists feeling politically homeless right now. Doug Beattie’s message to them at party conference was clear: “We have self-belief. And that self-belief is contagious. The public are picking up on it and tuning back into the Ulster Unionist Party … We are confident unionists, we are positive unionists, we are inclusive unionists, we are welcoming unionists. We are the Ulster Unionist Party and we are back.”

And, as someone who believes in our union, I breathe a sigh of relief to see a modern, moderate voice making its case across the Irish Sea.

For me, the fabric of the UK is always in tension. And the “otherness” of my part of it, is, in part, offset by the “otherness” of Northern Ireland. What I couldn’t say, all those years ago, to the nationalist politician impressing upon me Scotland’s potential role in Irish reunification, was that they were probably right. I see the counterbalance that one province provides the other and can accept that Scottish secession, had it occurred, may well have helped tip majority opinion in Northern Ireland towards Irish reunification.

And if I accept that, I must push myself to acknowledge the counter may also be true. That were Northern Ireland to go, and part of that fabric in tension rip, desire in Scotland to be a northern outpost of an English and Welsh block would be less strong than desire to remain part of a four nation union.

So those who believe in the union must turn their gaze west. Scotland is no nearer another referendum than it was the morning after the votes were counted in 2014; but Northern Ireland is probably less than six months away from having its first ever nationalist First Minister. And if the Scottish example is anything to go by, a Sinn Fein victory would give the party a platform to campaign relentlessly to end the UK, just as the SNP have done.

The fight for the future of the UK is about to enter a new phase.

Depressingly for thoughtful nationalists, the folly of independence is now also passing into the “beyond question” area. Scots-born, Ivy League economist Mark Blyth, who recently (remarkably) accepted a role as an adviser to Sturgeon, claimed that the endlessly repeated trope that an independent Scotland would quickly become like Denmark and other Scandinavian states was impossible, and that plans for an independent economy showed “a complete lack of specificity”. In earlier comments Blyth said that the effect of independence on the Scots economy would be like “Brexit times ten”.

That Scotland should now be careening towards an economic train wreck has many authors. But one above all stands out, for imbuing the country with a heady, and electorally powerful mixture of Anglo-hatred, romanticism and boundless faith in European Union membership.

The mixture was concocted over 40 years ago by the Scots writer and academic Tom Nairn, who will be 90 next year. He can reflect that his writings — especially The Break Up of Britain (1977) and to a lesser extent After Britain (2000) — provided Scottish nationalism, the most potent of European secessionist movements, with a framework within which secession could be seen as essential for Scots’ self-respect. Though a Marxist, his is not primarily a programme for a more equitable economy, or a march through the institutions to craft a political system dominated by the working classes. It is most powerfully a textbook for despising England.

He has been adamant that his polemics are not anti-English, and has pointed to polls showing that Scots don’t hate English people – denials which are echoed by First Minister Nicola Sturgeon (her now shamed predecessor, Alex Salmond, is a different matter). But that is not the point.

Scots can be as friendly to the English as they like, but England can only be seen as a ball and chain round Scots legs. In The Break-Up, Nairn’s favourite trope is firing off baroque fusillades of abuse aimed at the degraded husk of England — and the Britain it dominates — which now finds itself “a creaking English snail-shell of archaic pieties, deferential observance and numbing self-inhibition”; a country of  “rapidly accelerating backwardness, economic stagnation, social decay and cultural despair;” “a sinking paddle wheel state”, a “palsied corpus of Unionism”, an “indefensible and inadaptable relic, neither properly archaic not properly modern”, requiring “a motorised wheelchair and a decent burial” within the “hopelessly decaying institutions of a lost imperial state”.

As well as hopelessly decaying, England is hopelessly racist. In After Britain, Nairn yokes a “malign Euro-scepticism” to England’s “own brutish (racial) prejudice” and “post-imperial exclusiveness” — and produces the murder of Stephen Lawrence in south London as the prime example. Yet it was a murder which produced an outpouring of revulsion from all layers of British society, a report accusing the Metropolitan Police of institutional racism, a campaign by the Daily Mail — that most English of papers — to bring the culprits, at first acquitted, to justice, an appointment of Stephen’s mother, Doreen, to the peerage and the funding of a Stephen Lawrence Trust. The Lawrence killing showed the opposite of Nairn’s slur: it showed an English population, with a proportionately much higher number of people of colour than Scotland, appalled by it: in 2012, nearly 20 years after the event, a poll showed 66% of the British thought the sentences on the two men convicted too lenient, while two per cent thought them too harsh.

The casual attribution of a racism, which infects all of society, is indicative of Nairn’s style: sweeping generalisations of social malignity as a kind of jelly to hold his abuse. In The Break-Up, he devotes a chapter to the former cabinet minister Enoch Powell, finding that a speech Powell gave on empire in 1964 — ironically, in Dublin — had the effect of re-creating English “in the obscene form of racism”. Powell was in Nairn’s eyes England’s “nemesis”. When, in 1968, he gave a speech presaging “rivers of blood”, Edward Heath, the party leader, quickly fired him from the shadow cabinet.

More from this author

The Scottish town that rejected nationalism

By John Lloyd

But even when Nairn was writing The Break-Up in the mid-late Seventies, it should have been obvious that English nationalism was a weak thing, that liberal, leftist and much centre-right opinion recoiled from racism and that institutions as the universities, the broadcasters (BBC and ITV), the trade unions, the churches and business corporations were similarly minded. Yet, 23 years later, in After Britain, the same urge to paint England as mired in “brutish prejudice” is peddled.

Nairn’s other large gift to contemporary nationalism is to propose that nationalism is next to socialism. Complaining, in The Break-Up, of Marxism’s “notorious inability to come to terms with modern nationalism”, he emends that fault, claiming that his analysis, which has shown the “moribund nature” of the British, has given the Scots “good reason to want out, and good cause for claiming that their exit is a progressive action.” He continues: “Lenin argued that nationalist upheavals could contribute to socialist revolution… in the great centres.” Lenin does argue, in The Right of Nations to Self-Determination (1914) that national revolution leading to secession can be supported by revolutionary socialists on democratic grounds: but stresses that this can only be a transitional phase from “a completely victorious and consolidated socialism to complete communism”. To invoke approval of the main creator of the Soviet Union shows an ambition for a socialist Scotland of the “vote once, and forever” variety.

The SNP, which Nairn has consistently and enthusiastically supported, has never been socialist: it had been, for much of its history, incoherently pro-free market. Even Salmond, a little before taking power, commended the economic policies of Margaret Thatcher, until forced to retract. Nicola Sturgeon’s social democratic stance is largely window dressing: in its governing years, since 2007, it has presided over a sharp decline in the quality of education in schools — once a source of pride: a recent survey by Legatum found it the worst in the UK, hurting the poorest children most. Health care is better — but drug use is the highest in Europe, children in care are double the UK national average, its biggest city, Glasgow, has record rates of murder, knife crime and domestic abuse, local government has been enfeebled by the centralising policies of the SNP and investment prospects are the weakest in the UK. Socialism of any kind is neither an option nor a real ambition of the nationalists: were it to become independent, it would be forced to compete with Ireland in providing a low-tax environment for mobile corporations.

Suggested article

Sturgeon's drugs shame

By Ruth Davidson

Europe is seen as the saviour — built up by Salmond’s rhetoric, mimicked by Sturgeon, focusing on vague issues like “ideals”: as she put it in 2019 in a speech at the European Policy Centre, “the basic values” are common, these being “an idealism to the EU project which appeals strongly to us… it is, at its heart, a peace project”. But it is not a peace project: its core mission to replace European states’ nationalisms by an all-Europe federation.

Nairn has a long and consistent attachment to Europe, publishing, in 1972, “The Left against Europe” as a special issue of New Left Review, using the insights and policies of the then-powerful Italian Communist Party, which argued that Europe’s states must transcend “narrow national limits” in order to confront the international trends governed by capitalist integration. The SNP did a U-turn — Salmond, who took the leadership in the early Eighties, was among the first to grasp that the leaving of the British union, fearsome for a majority of Scots (as the 2014 referendum on independence showed) would be moderated by the prospect of a safe and “progressive” European home.

But Europe is not a home for secessionist regions or nations: many, especially the Spanish and the Belgians, look on Scots nationalism as a threatening example for their own secessionist-tending movements. Even if no veto is wielded over its entry bid, it will — as Fabian Zuleeg, director of the Centre where Sturgeon spoke, has made clear — be required to “uphold and defend the principles of European integration, not least in accepting the terms and conditions of membership in full… shoring up stability and highlighting the benefits of EU membership”. Thus no opt outs, no long-term avoidance of membership of the Eurozone nor Schengen, no special treatment. Nor, for that matter, the  £10-12 billion a year, presently paid from the UK Treasury under the Barnet formula, from EU funds; and a hard border with the rest of the UK. States are about power, and the ability to enforce policies; and the EU, as a would-be state, can be no exception.

Suggested article

The rot at the heart of Westminster

By Aris Roussinos

In this, Nairn has broken with his former comrade, the long-time editor of the New Left Review, Perry Anderson — whose voluminous and often savage critiques of the EU posits it as an undemocratic and undemocratisable monster, with a parliament as ‘“the least consequential component of the Union” which provides “the appearance of a democratic assembly behind which oligarchic coteries are comfortably entrenched.” Wolfgang Streeck, a former director of Germany’s foremost sociological centre, the Max Planck Institute and a Review contributor, writes that “there is no supranationalism (in the EU) at all, or only as a veil behind which the real action, national and international, takes place. France sees Europe as an extended playing field for its global ambitions; Germany needs the European Union to secure production sites for its industries… and Italy needs ‘Europe’, in particular Germany, for its survival as a capitalist nation-state and economy.”

What does it need Scotland for? Only as an irritant to the rest of the UK, but it must be a well behaved irritant. Streeck and Anderson’s hard-headed assessments are a reproof to Nairn’s — and Sturgeon’s — cloudy romanticism. In this, as in his view of England, as in his ambitions for socialism, Nairn operates in a sphere of abstract utopianism, and has taught the nationalists to do likewise — at least in public. It has worked: romance, idealism, anti-Englishness, national pride, a mixture which has succeeded so far, beyond what even Nairn could have dreamed. But is it now, itself, in the kind of decline it attributes to England? That’s another day’s work.

This week, the roll call of substance abuse fatalities during the SNP’s period of government is set to hit 10,000. That’s more than the number of people killed in Hurricane Katrina, or who perished as the Titanic went down. More than those killed at Pearl Harbor, in 9/11 or during the 7/7 London or Manchester arena attacks — more than British troops killed at the charge of the Light Brigade. It is more than the number of people killed in the Blantyre mining disaster or the Dunblane Massacre or the Lockerbie bombing. In fact, it is more than all ten of these events combined. And yet, while each of these losses of life have been faithfully recorded in our history books, there has been no equivalent recognition or examination of the current unfolding tragedy.

Why? Because of the people who are dying. According to the national figures, people in the most deprived parts of the country were 18 times more likely to have a drug-related death than those in the least deprived. The poor. The marginalised. The people who don’t vote.

But these people aren’t just statistics. Every death is a person with a story and loved ones mourning their loss. Bryan Hogg died in 2019 from street valium abuse. He was 29 years old and not long out of prison. His mum, Sandra Mackin, says the system failed him. “The politicians don’t care — it’s just another number to them. I think my boy was failed. After he died nothing was done — there was supposed to be an investigation. He had a wee boy and now he has to live without his dad.”

During May’s Scottish elections, Nicola Sturgeon was tackled on the issue and admitted her government had “taken its eye off the ball”. Public Health Scotland says that “every drugs-related death is preventable” and “quality treatment options” are “essential”. But as deaths have spiralled, funding has been cut and treatment options have narrowed. Over the first 12 years of the SNP’s time in office, funding to Scotland’s drug and alcohol services was cut by more than half. For those trying to pull themselves out of their addiction and get better, it’s had a devastating effect.

Suggested reading

Britain's criminal approach to drugs

By Ian Birrell

Scotland has some of the best residential rehabilitation facilities in Europe. So good, in fact, that Dutch authorities and insurers pay to place patients in facilities such as the Castle Craig hospital in the Scottish Borders. In 2002, Castle Craig admitted 257 patients funded by the NHS; in 2019, the number dropped to just five. There’s no shortage of demand for services, but they aren’t accessible to the Scots most in need. Currently a quarter of Castle Craig’s places are being filled by Dutch patients, with most of the remainder being funded privately or via health insurance.

Meanwhile Glasgow’s largest residential rehab centre, Phoenix Futures, was forced to abruptly cut its number of beds from 54 to just 14 in 2019, after a Government tender was revoked. The Mungo Foundation’s Cothrom Eile service — in Nicola Sturgeon’s own Glasgow constituency — was forced to close its doors completely in 2019 due to funding cuts.

Those who have benefitted from such services are concerned at their closure. When Bruce Munro started at Phoenix Futures he was “eight stone and taking food from bins and begging to fund a drug habit — I didn’t feel part of society”. He had been abusing substances for more than 20 years, becoming homeless and suffering mental health problems. After five months of rehab, he was ready to move into supported accommodation. “To have only 14 beds for a city the size of Glasgow is disgraceful. I think this model works for me because it’s not just about putting down the drugs. You are getting therapy, bereavement and trauma counselling rather than just putting the drugs down, because that’s the easy part.”

The outcry over these cuts — and the spiralling death toll which has accompanied them — forced the Scottish government into action in January. As well as reversing some of the funding cuts, Nicola Sturgeon established a Drugs Death Task Force and appointed a minister to directly oversee the issue. But huge question marks remain: there has been little change of direction in policy that has spectacularly failed over the last 14 years.

More from this author

Scotland's mid-life crisis

By Ruth Davidson

Dr Neil McKeganey, Director of the Centre for Substance Use Research in Glasgow, worries ministers are intent on just doing more of the same. “We have the same people advising the same government year after year, with no evident impact on the number of drugs deaths and no real accountability.” Dr McKeganey has repeatedly advised ministers and officials to better support residential rehabilitation —

“only to be told that their preference is for methadone and now benzodiazepine prescribing. That methadone is implicated in 53% of Scottish drugs deaths and benzodiazepines in 74%, should tell even the most ardent refusenik of the importance of abstinence-based treatments that prescribing addictive drugs is part of the problem — not part of the solution.”

CEO of the charity Faces and Voices of Recovery, Anne Marie Ward is more blunt: “The Drugs Death Task Force insists on pursuing the same failed options that got us into this mess.” She insists “we need the Scottish Government to start properly funding rehabilitation and recovery programmes”. The Scottish Government currently funds just 13% of the residential rehab places in Scotland (even Universal Credit funds twice as many) and their own figures show waiting times of up to year.

Of course, the barrage of criticism which has accompanied its sustained failure has prompted the SNP to hit out, trying to switch blame. The SNP has long campaigned to introduce consumption rooms — also known as shooting galleries — where addicts can access clean needles and inject in a safe environment. But the Scottish Parliament does not have the legislative power to introduce them — that is reserved for Westminster, and the UK Government does not support the policy.

Suggested reading

How drug dealers won lockdown

By David Matthews

When the record drug death figures were announced last week, SNP members were quick to point the finger south. Nicola Sturgeon tweeted that “we will continue to argue for reform of drugs law, which is not currently within our power” while Edinburgh East MP Tommy Sheppard stated that “major changes in UK law [are] required to really tackle the problem.”

Pretty shameless stuff, as well as being self-incriminating. On Tuesday, England and Wales released their drugs death figures, both now five times less than the Scottish rate. Pointing out that the laws are exactly the same on both sides of the border indicates that some other factor or combination of factors is to blame for the enormous discrepancy. As Anne Marie Ward has previously stated: “Bluntly, the obsession with drug consumption rooms (DCRs) is making it inevitable that more people in Scotland will die from addiction. DCRs are the same silver bullet trope I’ve heard for 30 years.”

A public health emergency that has built up over many years is not about to be fixed by a stroke of a legislator’s pen, and it is dishonest for those in charge to pretend otherwise. Still, even ideas with limited impact are something the UK government should be prepared to discuss with their SNP counterparts. The people being killed are UK citizens, too.

The truth is both complicated and mundane. We need better data and analysis of those who have died and the factors contributing to those deaths; we need earlier interventions, a number of different pathways, and joined-up support — so those dropping out of treatment or switching between areas or options are not lost in the system. We need to review the extent to which “stabilising” drugs such as methadone and benzodiazepines are prescribed and what the patient journey looks like once a more stable living situation is achieved.

Yes, replacing the funding that the Scottish Government has cut over the years is important — but only if it is directed well. Residential rehab will not be the best option for everyone, but it needs to be available and attainable for those who would benefit from it.

The hard work of policy development and service delivery is the only thing that will start to unpick the thousands of individual human tragedies that led us here. Unfortunately, this work is unglamorous. Until now, there hasn’t been much incentive for the SNP to do it. It has taken 14 years and nearly ten thousand deaths for the Scottish Government to be shamed into acting on drugs deaths. And now the party is wasting time and energy on glib finger-pointing. The country is watching, and waiting.

Putin aside, Scottish voters are now having to contend with the return of two Scottish political heavyweights of yesteryear: Galloway and Alex Salmond, two RT hosts who now find themselves leading two new political parties.

Each is attempting to outflank their former tribes on the constitutional question, playing to their respective unionist and nationalist bases as strongmen who will hold the current crop of MSP’s feet to the fire. But in doing so, both risk doing more damage to the cause they claim to support. North of the border, there’s more than a lingering suspicion that both are using their creations as a vehicle for their respective egos, rather than as a genuine attempt to shake up the body politic.

The comparisons don’t end there. For while Galloway and Salmond are not quite the opposite of each other, they represent, in a phrase favoured by the former, “two cheeks of the same arse”. They are both, in effect, attempting to game the Scottish electoral system.

Unlike the House of Commons, where an MP simply has to record one more vote than their nearest challenger to win a constituency, the Scottish Parliament — as well as the Welsh Senedd — is elected using the Additional Member System. In Holyrood, there are 129 seats, of which 73 are elected using the traditional first-past-the-post system. Scotland is then divided into wider electoral regions, where 56 further MSPs are elected on a proportional basis. This “list” is designed to ensure that parties are not penalised for recording their support evenly across the country, rather than seeing it pooled geographically in a number of individual seats. Or so goes the theory.

But when the architects of devolution were deciding on this modified “d’Hont system”, there was a general assumption that the same parties competing on the list would also choose to stand candidates in the constituencies; this matters, because the number of constituencies a party wins is ratio’d out of their list returns to make the result more proportional.

Both Galloway’s party, All for Unity (also, confusingly, called Alliance4Unity), and Alex Salmond’s vehicle, Alba, are standing solely on the list. And at least in tactical terms, that may make electoral sense.

In Galloway’s plan, the SNP will likely take the overwhelming number of first-past-the-post seats, but with less than half of the vote. So if pro-UK voters simply cast their wider politics aside and vote for the leading unionist candidate in the constituency vote and the Alliance4UK candidate in the regional list vote, the SNP would be crushed. Nicola Sturgeon would be out on her ear and there would be no more talk of independence referendums.

Salmond’s offer to independence supporters is the inverse of Galloway’s claim. Because the SNP records so many first-past-the-post wins — and will likely do so again in May — they return very few MSPs from the regional list. In effect, goes the Alba narrative, thousands of true believers in independence have their list votes cast aside. But, says Salmond, if they decided to split their vote — SNP in the constituency and Alba on the list — Scottish nationalists could record what he calls a “supermajority” for independence. With so many pro-independence MSPs in Holyrood, Boris Johnson would be forced to capitulate and offer another independence referendum immediately.

More from this author

The fall of the Wall powered up my politics

By Ruth Davidson

On paper, there appears to be a logic to both arguments. But in reality, they are to varying degrees a combination of sleight of hand, misdirection and utter cobblers.

Both Salmond and Galloway fail to appreciate that Scottish voters are unlikely to put all other considerations to one side when they cast their ballot. Yes, there is tactical voting between Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem voters — Conservatives sweep up thousands of Lib Dem votes in the borders, many Tory voters in West Dunbartonshire are happy to vote for their local Labour MSP to keep the nationalists out and a fair whack of both Labour and Conservatives will cheerily vote for the avuncular Scottish Lib Dem leader in his NE Fife constituency.

But there is no wholesale transfer, nor would you expect there to be from such diverse political traditions. Indeed, because Scottish councils are decided on multi-member wards and with a single transferrable vote, where voters rank their choices, it is easy to track their second and third preferences. In the glut of council by-elections we have seen following the lifting of Covid restrictions, it is clear that as many  — and sometimes more — Labour voters would rather give their second vote to the SNP than to the Conservatives, even if the Tories are best placed to keep a nationalist out of office.

Moreover, as the vast majority of pro-union MSPs are elected on the list system, rather than winning constituencies outright, adding another unionist party such as Galloway’s and splitting the vote four ways, rather than three, is likely to reduce each party’s share and allow more nationalists in through the middle.

I suspect that George Galloway — whose itinerant political career has taken in the Labour Party, The Respect party, the Workers Party of Britain and now All For Unity — probably knows this. This is not, after all, the first time he has stood for Holyrood; in 2011, he managed to record 3.3% on the Glasgow list.

Fast forward to today, and the most recent three Scottish polls have All For Unity failing to cut through. But while it looks unlikely that Galloway will return any MSPs, he could still gather enough votes to keep some pro-UK members out. For a man who refused to join the Better Together campaign at the 2014 independence referendum because “I hate the Union Jack”, who has previously called for a United Ireland and last week saw a clip resurface of him calling on the UK government to deliver a second independence referendum, it is almost as if his new party is just another grift to keep himself in the public eye.

Suggested reading

The SNP are falling apart faster than the Union

By Henry Hill

For Alex Salmond, however, even his most devout opponents accept that he believes fervently in Scottish independence. It is a cause to which he has committed almost his entire adult life. Whether, though, he is fully invested in seeing his protégé, Nicola Sturgeon, be the one to deliver it is another matter.

The fallout between the two former allies has been seismic. It centres on a complex and unedifying series of events, involving Salmond winning a civil battle over Sturgeon’s government over the way it investigated allegations of sexual assault against him, and culminating in Salmond being acquitted of multiple allegations of the same nature. Along the way, Ms Sturgeon traduced the character of her former boss, mentor and friend of 30 years — and she has carried the attacks into this campaign, highlighting his gambling habits and suggesting his new party was about putting “self-interest first”.

For his part, Salmond appears to have buried the enmity he showed throughout the investigation into the Scottish Government’s handling of the harassment complaints, during which he accused a group of Sturgeon’s allies (including her husband) of colluding to have him removed from public life and jailed. He now claims he simply wants Alba representatives to help get the SNP over the line with a majority that the UK government can’t ignore.

But is this likely? While a new nationalist party throws a spanner into some of the statistical modelling of polls and results, the general rule of thumb is that you need 5% of the regional vote to start taking seats. Get more than 5% of the vote and Alba begins doing damage to the pro-UK cause by displacing some pro-UK MSPs; receive less than 5% and the damage is mostly inflicted on the nationalist side by taking SNP and nationalist-supporting Green votes without anything to show for it.

Suggested reading

Scotland's failed #MeToo moment

By Sarah Ditum

The most recent three polls, in which Alba has recorded between 2-3% of the vote, suggest the latter scenario is increasingly likely. Indeed, it’s hard not see Alex Salmond’s power play as anything other than a revenge mission. When he stepped down in 2014, he handed his deputy a parliamentary majority. Nicola Sturgeon promptly squandered it in the 2016 Scottish election — a setback which allowed the UK government to deny all claims that an independence referendum should be rerun.

But even if Alba does somehow manage to return the sort of “supermajority” Alex Salmond claims to be hoping for, there’s nothing to say that it will pay off. The UK Government would be well within its rights to point out that gaming the system isn’t the same as gaining support. After all, in recent polls a majority of Scots have not been in support of separation. It would also, I suspect, be easier to counter a fractured nationalist Scottish movement composed of squabbling splinter groups than an SNP majority.

Come election day, though, far more important will be the fact that voters simply don’t like the sense that they are being played; that so-called big beasts think the political stage is theirs for an encore even if there’s no applause.

Is this about a senior male politician’s power over the women beneath him in party and government? Did his heir as FM and SNP leader, Nicola Sturgeon, act with honest feminist intentions throughout her involvement in the case? Or is this a situation whereby a former protegee saw her chance to neutralise her predecessor and gracelessly jumped on it, making a hash of justice in the process?

A key part of Salmond’s defence was the invocation of a plot intended to bring him down. His QC was overheard on a train saying that he intended to “put a smell” on the accusers, and whether or not that was the strategy that secured Salmond’s acquittal, it was a strategy that worked: “he is not guilty” does not equate to “she lied”, but Salmond’s fans on social media have no compunction about drawing that conclusion and stating it in the most misogynistic terms.

On the other hand, if Salmond’s defenders are just a clique falling in line behind old privilege, what to make of the involvement of someone such as Joanna Cherry, who has been an outspoken defender of feminism on the gender identity issue? Here, though, she takes the part of the accused man over the women who accused him.

More from this author

Confessions of a female journalist

By Sarah Ditum

Those accusations may have failed to meet the burden of proof for criminal conviction, but they added up to a coherent and consistent picture of at the very least inappropriate behaviour. As Dani Garavelli, who covered the whole trial, wrote: “much of the evidence was He said, She said. Or rather He said, She said, She said, She said.” And if Salmond thinks he was failed by the system, his accusers have been too, and badly. One of the worst allegations to come out of the Holyrood inquiry is that one accuser was identified to Salmond’s allies.

There’s something deeply unsatisfying about a set of circumstances that refuses to be reduced to easily identifiable heroes and villains. How you read this tangle depends to a large degree on where you’re aligned on the SNP’s internal split between Salmond and Sturgeon. So if you don’t have an alignment, the whole matter appears hopelessly opaque — and since most people aren’t SNP members at all, the temptation to dismiss this as an impenetrable party dispute of no wider significance is great.

Great, and wrong. This was not Scotland’s #MeToo moment, but maybe it was a lesson in the limits of justice. The Salmond case left a scratchy, inconclusive feeling. He was not guilty, but nor was his reputation wholly vindicated. For his alleged victims, there was no restitution, despite the uncontested fact that Salmond had crossed several lines, albeit not lawbreaking ones.

The repercussions reach far wider than the courtroom. For women who recognised their own experience in the testimony — the boss who keeps you for a drink, who strokes your face, who slithers his hands beneath your clothes — the trial served as a warning against ever seeking redress. Garavelli noted that Salmond’s QC’s closing submission “appeared to play to male fears about past behaviour. How did things that people thought nothing of later find themselves on a charge sheet, he wondered. ‘It’s scary, scary stuff.’ A couple of jurors nodded along.”

Suggested reading

Test article

By Jenny McCartney

But even without this, most victims of sexual assault already know that the courtroom will be a hostile environment. In the service of getting to the truth, their reputations will be attacked, their motivations impugned, their accounts of their own lives recast as fiction by the defence. Their private messages picked over, humiliatingly, for any one thing that could be used to undermine them with a jury.

The law is an especially cruel instrument for assessing sexual crime, because a rape conviction requires the jury to agree not only that a man penetrated (or attempted to penetrate her) against her will, but that he could not have “reasonably believed” that she consented.

Internal institutional processes — HR departments, political parties’ own investigations — don’t have to meet the high bar of criminal proceedings, but they still have to be robust and independent to be effective. Instead, formal responses to #MeToo have been piecemeal and erratic. That’s most obviously been bad for those men who’ve had the misfortune to take the brunt of wild justice in the pushback against sexual harassment.

But while it’s impossible not to feel pangs for men such as Mark Tunison, whose career was torpedoed by his inclusion on the “Shitty Media Men” list, due process isn’t something that’s only owed to alleged perpetrators. Women like Salmond’s accusers who seek justice for past wrongs and security against future ones can achieve neither without a system that can deliver solid judgements and stand up to scrutiny.

Suggested reading

The SNP are falling apart faster than the Union

By Henry Hill

Long before the Salmond case could come to court, the kinds of grey-area-blurring things that he accepted he had done should have been dealt with by the SNP and Holyrood. A concerning admission from Sturgeon’s evidence to the Salmond inquiry is that as long ago as 2017, she had a “lingering fear” that allegations about his conduct would be made public.

And so, while I can see the irony in (as Sonia Sodha put it in the Observer) “a woman being held to account for a man’s transgressions”, this is about power not sex. If the processes of the party Sturgeon ran and the government she led weren’t fit for purpose, the buck would have to stop with her.

Salmond’s QC’s closing argument landed with the jurors because he had a half-point: #MeToo has forced a reassessment of actions once accepted. That does not mean that women are retconning cheerful-at-the-time sexual experiences as acts of violence. It means that they are, in many cases, refusing to go on telling the lie that something was OK when it was always wrong. It means that the encounter which hurt and degraded you is no longer something you bury in shame and self-reproach. Instead, you can look at it and say: I never wanted this, and this was never fair.

That’s a cultural shift, and a significant one for individual women. But it’s only half a reformation. The other half is the hard bit: ensuring the legal, judicial and tribunal processes can truly handle allegations of sexual misconduct. And there are a lot of these to get through: almost all young women, and 80% of all women, say they’ve experienced sexual harassment. The Salmond inquiry will tend, inevitably, to become about the question of whether or not he was a victim of machinations. But whatever that conclusion, the women who accused him are already victims of a broken system.

They have been blessed (or so it seemed until recently) to have had two extremely capable and charismatic leaders in succession. Alex Salmond took them first to a supposedly-impossible overall majority in Holyrood, and then to the cusp of breaking up the United Kingdom in 2014. Nicola Sturgeon, his anointed successor, helped to transform the referendum’s Yes Movement into a standing Nationalist army that swept all before it at the 2015 general election.

They have benefited, of course, from outside assistance. David Cameron’s extraordinary complacency ahead of the independence referendum handed them a long campaign and a favourable question. His needless invocation of English Votes for English Laws the morning after the vote poisoned the well of Better Together’s victory. Boris Johnson is deeply unpopular north of the border. And let’s not forget the generations of devolutionaries who have systematically handed the separatists vast constitutional arsenals, treasuries, and pulpits, while rendering the Union practically non-functional across vast areas of policy, including key bread-and-butter areas such as education and health.

But beneath all of this, the SNP’s real secret sauce has been its extraordinary discipline. After years as an enthusiastic but rabblesome force, Salmond forged the Nationalists into a veritable phalanx. Largely freed from the need to bargain with the base, the SNP leadership won extraordinary freedom of political manoeuvre and has used it to build a hegemonic position as ‘the party of Scotland’.

Suggested reading

The secrets of Scotland's ancient capital

By Daniel Kalder

After 13 years in office – long enough to have seen off New Labour and reduced the Conservatives, in their Thatcherian pomp, to a morbid state – the Nationalists look set to remain comfortably the largest party at next year’s Scottish Parliament elections. With the support of their separatist foederati, the Greens, they also seem (almost) certain to retain control of the Scottish Government. But not even the luckiest and most capable politicians can outrun time forever, and beneath the SNP’s perfumed poll ratings it isn’t difficult to detect the stench of decay. Sturgeon’s embattled administration is besieged within and without.

On the outside, MSPs investigating the Scottish Government’s botched investigation into sexual misconduct allegations against Salmond are on the warpath. The former First Minister’s successful legal challenge against the handling of his case ended up costing more than £500,000 of taxpayers’ money, and the central question now is what Sturgeon knew and when. Her predecessor alleges the original investigation was stacked against him; her own sequence of events has been called into question; crucial meetings with senior civil servants weren’t minuted; and Scottish ministers have twice defied votes by the Scottish Parliament for them to release the legal advice they received during the Salmond case. Opposition MSPs scent blood.

But it isn’t only opposition MSPs. Linda Fabiani, a Nationalist and convenor of the Holyrood inquiry into the Salmond affair, has been as vocal a critic as anyone of the Scottish Government’s response – and this is just one of the fast-growing spiderweb of cracks in the SNPs seemingly perfect façade.

Suggested reading

The Scottish town that rejected nationalism

By John Lloyd

At the centre of this web is Salmond himself. The one-time darling of the separatist movement may be a diminished figure, dogged by the sexual misconduct allegations and hosting a talk show on Kremlin propaganda network RT, but he remains a capable operator and commands a loyal following among the Nationalist grassroots. Feeling that his hand-picked successor at best tried to hang him out to dry — and at worst actively designed the Scottish Government’s anti-harassment policies with him in mind — Salmond is on the warpath.

Unhelpful interventions in the battle between Sturgeon and the inquiry MSPs are the least of it. The split between the SNP’s two titans, personal as it is, reflects growing divisions in the wider party, and Salmond has not been shy about exploiting this. His pose as the Nationalists’ radical conscience well-positions him to exploit activists’ unease about the potential softening of the party’s totemic commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament, independence strategy, and much else.

Meanwhile, Joanna Cherry, a high-profile MP and close ally of Salmond’s, has risen to prominence as a vocal critic of Sturgeon’s approach to gender issues, adding social policy to the growing list of axes  the SNP phalanx is turning on itself. She has made headlines with a plea to Sturgeon to condemn the vicious social media attacks she endures from parts of the nationalist movement for her positions on transgender issues.

She has also spoken out against the party’s “cult of the leader”, a rallying cry to those growing increasingly frustrated with the command-and-control culture which has helped the SNP ride so high for so long. And it is slipping: at their recent conference, one in four delegates backed Craig Murray, a former ambassador sacked by Tony Blair who has previously been barred from standing for election as an SNP candidate, to be party president.

For their part, the Nationalist leadership clearly think Cherry sufficiently threatening that they shamelessly changed the party’s selection rules to prevent her contesting a Scottish Parliament seat at next year’s elections.

A charismatic leader out for revenge; a devoted base of energetic partisans; a strong clutch of emotive ‘wedge issues’ in divisions over separatist strategy and gender; and a tired, over-centralised opposition fighting fires on multiple fronts – the Salmondites have all the raw materials for a sustained political insurgency.

Even those who don’t agree with them might wish them well. It is past time that Scotland was rid of the SNP’s hyper-disciplined politics, the upshot of which is that parties elected by a diverse range of voters end up reflecting only a narrow band of officially-sanctioned views. It was good that the Scottish Conservatives’ attempt to operate as a Westminster ‘bloc’ failed, and the fracturing of the Nationalists into a more chaotic, democratic, indeed normal party would be welcome. The fact it would almost certainly hasten the end of their extraordinary winning streak is, for unionists, simply a bonus.

Yet there is one thing that still binds the Nationalists’ increasingly unhappy alliance together: the imminence of next year’s Holyrood elections, and beyond them the chance of a swift re-run of the 2014 vote.

The Tories should understand this. It wasn’t all that long ago that Brexit was working a similar magic on their own fortunes, holding Theresa May’s Government’s poll ratings above 40% even as it shed Cabinet ministers almost monthly – and while the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, by removing the threat of an election, reduced Conservative internal discipline to rubble. As she learned, these peculiar conditions do not endure forever.

Suggested reading

Nicola Sturgeon's canny doom-mongering

By Douglas Murray

Sturgeon is key to the SNP’s current moment: new research from These Islands reveals the extraordinary hold she has on swing voters. But the First Minister is no political immortal and the magic is starting to slip. Even her much-vaunted handling of the pandemic has been called into question by new data, and an attempt to whip up anger at Westminster over a bung for NHS employees has been slated both by the Fraser of Allender Institute (‘Scotland’s leading economic think-tank’) and now by doctors themselves.

This is why Boris Johnson needs to defy the defeatists in his Government and stand by his refusal to grant the SNP another independence referendum in this Parliament.

There are plenty of good arguments for doing so, but on a purely tactical level it would almost certainly place a future vote beyond the end of Sturgeon’s leadership, and there isn’t another politician of her calibre waiting in the wings. It would also give the Nationalists the space to have the civil war they’re spoiling for.

The Prime Minister should let them fight it out, and then give battle to the survivors.

In order to achieve these goals, however, Prof Sridhar’s suggested strategy is the opposite of Sweden’s more laissez-faire approach. Instead of being more permissive, she is calling for governments to follow the Scottish lead and commit to a “ZeroCovid” strategy — ie that any level of Covid-19, no matter how low, is considered unacceptable, and that within national borders, governments should aim to eliminate the virus completely. Liberty, achieved through greater suppression, is the paradoxical idea.

If you want a preview of the next phase of the political debate around Covid-19, this is it. Nicola Sturgeon (who Professor Sridhar advises) is calling for England to join the other home nations in committing to a ZeroCovid strategy, the so-called “Independent Sage” group of scientists is in agreement, and the Liberal Democrat Layla Moran has begun to demand that Boris Johnson takes the pledge. The group has a distinctly Left-progressive-idealist flavour, perhaps unsurprising given that the policy is driven by a conviction that, with enough willpower, governments and collective action can remake the world.

The key argument is as follows. “Health versus the economy” was never the right framing — the countries that have fared best so far in this pandemic, whose economies and societies are returning to normal fastest, are the ones that acted to lock down decisively and early, drove the virus down to very low levels, and are employing massive testing and track and trace programmes to keep it there.

If you try to open up society while the disease is still in circulation it will firstly not work because people are still feeling afraid (Prof Sridhar points to the mostly empty cinemas and theatres since they reopened) and, what’s more, the virus will come back. She gives Spain as an example of a country that had driven the virus to low levels but, since opening to tourists and restarting the “night-time economy” of bars and clubs, has seen a large surge in case numbers. In her view, they should have controlled the border more aggressively, been more activist in testing, tracing and isolating, and kept things like nightclubs closed.

Related interview

Why we aren't wearing masks in Sweden

By Freddie Sayers

When I pressed her on what exactly would be different from today in a ZeroCovid-committed England, the impression is of “do more of the same, but do it better and try harder”. More testing (up to 1 million a day), replace 14-day quarantine with testing twice at the border, and improve the NHS Test and Trace programme. Partly, she feels that change would already come from making the commitment, as it would give citizens clarity as to the national strategy. One striking detail was the idea of making ZeroCovid zones within the country, ringfenced with limited movement in or out, that could link up until the whole country was rid of the disease. (I wouldn’t want to be the one to inform the inhabitants of a town that they couldn’t leave because it had become Covid-free!)

I asked her about the dramatic improvements to mortality rates that we are seeing in these apparent “second waves” across Europe. She acknowledged the trend and thinks it is down to spread among the younger population and improvements to treatment, but says that she has not yet seen convincing proof of either widespread T Cell immunity or mutations towards a milder strain. I asked whether, if the virus becomes provably less severe, it would reach a point where she would abandon the ZeroCovid idea altogether:

“Of course. We have to change our strategies based on the evolving nature of this virus and that’s why my mind has changed over the course of watching this virus. What worries me is the health impact — not only on the deaths but the disability for younger people. I’m concerned about the long-haulers. If a new strain emerged that was more infectious but less severe like the common cold — well then that would be fantastic and I would not be saying we have to push for zero Covid.”

Related article

From Covid to crime: how media hype distorts risk

By Tom Chivers

She’s keen to emphasise that, despite the name, the policy is not a plan to live in perpetual lockdown until the last human being is cured of Covid-19. She describes herself as “anti-lockdown” and that “CovidZero is not about keeping restrictions forever — you don’t want to destroy a society chasing down the last person who has the virus. It’s actually saying that we are going to continue seeing spikes and mitigating the economic effects… It’s about mass testing, good tracing and getting life back…”

So what about a disease-like flu, which according to some estimates is already killing more people per week in England than Covid-19? Should we have a zero-flu policy, with mass testing, local lockdowns and a test and trace system?

“Covid is nothing like the flu,” Prof Sridhar says. “Flu is a respiratory disease, whereas Covid is a multi-system disease. You have young people a few weeks after catching Covid having heart attacks, which does not happen with the flu, along with kidney failure, blood clots and pulmonary embolisms. There is something different about this virus — it is nothing like the flu.”

Opponents will say that the ZeroCovid goal ends up being fanatical, potentially consigning us to years of life-altering restrictions in pursuit of a goal we will never achieve, in response to a threat that doesn’t warrant it in the first place. Yesterday’s announcement by New Zealand that Covid-19 sufferers will be removed to a quarantine facility and Scotland’s drive to require masks in schools will only add to their concerns. But Professor Sridhar clearly believes that concerted activism and short-term pain is a more responsible route back to life as normal — she makes an eloquent case and our thanks to her for such a stimulating discussion.

Everyone involved in the play — playwright, actors, the producer, the director, even people who handed out flyers on the streets of Edinburgh — could find themselves under investigation. In time, they might be charged with a new criminal offence, whose penalties include up to seven years in prison.

Sounds like scare-mongering? It’s not. A whole section of the bill, snappily titled “culpability where offence is committed during public performance of play” [sic], has been drawn up with theatrical performances in mind. Its definitions are so widely drawn as to catch stand-up, one-person shows, even opera. One of the bill’s critics, the Faculty of Advocates, has pointed out that there does not have to be “any intention on the part of the performer, director or presenter to stir up hatred”.

Suggested reading

Hate crime is the new blasphemy

By Mary Harrington

Have MSPs ever been to the theatre? Read a book? Don’t they know that authors often create unattractive characters without endorsing them or condemning an entire group? There would be no way of knowing in advance what might lead someone to use the new law to close down a production that offends their views on religion, say, or one that focuses on gay men using surrogacy to have a child. The chilling effect on the performing arts is not hard to imagine, but the legislation would also have the bizarre effect of criminalising performances in Scotland that would be perfectly legal in England.

What kind of government blithely steams ahead with legislation that would muzzle one of the world’s most successful arts festivals? Let me introduce you to the SNP’s Justice Secretary, Humza Yousaf. The 35-year-old MSP for Glasgow Pollok has managed to create an impressive coalition of opponents to his Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) bill, even though it’s being presented as a tidying-up exercise that merely brings together existing hate crimes laws into a single piece of legislation. Its critics, who include everyone from the crime writer Val McDermid and the comedian Rowan Atkinson to the Humanist Society Scotland, the Scottish Police Federation and the Catholic church, take a very different view. Earlier this week, McDermid was among 20 writers and performers who signed an open letter warning that the bill could stifle freedom of speech.

Yousaf’s response is best summed up by a tweet he posted last month, which managed to be patronising and dismissive while also getting a core part of his own legislation wrong. “The Bill will not prevent you expressing controversial or offensive views”, he lectured his critics. “Just don’t do it in a threatening or abusive way that is likely or intended to stir up hatred”.

https://twitter.com/HumzaYousaf/status/1286690052479877123

As I’ve already pointed out, you don’t have to intend to stir up hatred to be caught by the legislation, something that the Justice Secretary should surely know. Rank-and-file police officers in Scotland are horrified: “We are firmly of the view this proposed legislation would see officers policing speech and would devastate the legitimacy of the police in the eyes of the public,” says Calum Steele, the SPF’s general secretary. New powers to forcibly enter and search premises in pursuit of an offence of “possessing inflammatory material”, whatever that may be, are hardly likely to improve relations between the police and the public.

Suggested reading

Why won't liberals defend liberalism?

By Peter Franklin

The Scottish government has fallen into a familiar trap, in assuming that we all agree on the definition of subjective words like ‘hate’, ‘insult’ and ‘offence’. We don’t — and there isn’t even agreement on which groups need enhanced legal protection. To return to my theoretical example for a moment, if I were offended by the negative portrayal of the feminist in the play, I would just have to lump it. I’m not complaining about that — I’ve campaigned for the right of authors and performers to offend for years — but it’s striking that women have been left off the list of people who will receive additional protection under the bill. (Age is being added to the protected characteristics, joining disability, race, religion, sexual orientation and transgender identity.)

This is par for the course: misogyny isn’t a hate crime anywhere in the UK and senior police officers baulk at the very notion, on the grounds (I paraphrase) that there’s so bloody much of it. The omission speaks volumes about the motives behind hate crime legislation, which are well-meaning — but only up to a point. Governments are selective about who they see as vulnerable, even though women are far more likely than men to be on the receiving end of sexual harassment, murder and rape threats.

The Scottish government says it is considering adding women as a protected group at a later date but the bill won’t protect Edinburgh’s most famous resident, the author J. K. Rowling. She has been the target of a vicious campaign of abuse in recent months, facing nonsensical accusations of ‘literally’ killing trans women for defending women’s rights. If the legislation is passed in its present form, however, Rowling might well find herself reported to the police for stirring up hatred against trans people, an offence that will be very much in the eye of the beholder. Indeed the legislation seems to have been drafted by people who haven’t given any thought to the possibility of vexatious or misguided complaints.

More from this author

Our dangerous approach to misogyny

By Joan Smith

Countless people have been driven off social media sites, not for “stirring up hate” but for posting material that zealots of one sort or another disagree with. The acronym DARVO — deny, attack, reverse victim and offender — refers to a common tactic used against feminists, describing the way hateful people turn the tables and present themselves as victims. That’s bound to happen if the bill isn’t amended, and women will be among the biggest losers. Genuine hate speech — threats to kill, rape or hurt someone’s family — is already a criminal offence and should be prosecuted under existing legislation, without putting authors, comedians, playwrights and campaigners at the mercy of malicious reporting.

To be fair, there is one aspect of the hate crimes bill that has been almost universally welcomed, and that is the abolition of blasphemy. It is an outdated law, incompatible with the values of a modern, secular society, and it has not been prosecuted in Scotland for almost two centuries. Yet the very same legislation threatens to criminalise the free expression of ideas that challenge prevailing orthodoxies, whether they are religious or (more likely) rooted in social movements. It would be ironic if Nicola Sturgeon’s government was to go down in history as the administration that got rid of blasphemy, only to introduce a secular form of heresy into Scottish law.

Who knows where it comes from, this trait? Most likely some hangover of Presbyterianism, an ultra form of that puritanism which H.L. Mencken summarised as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy”. Scottish joy at the opportunity to impart bad news is some extension of this: the knowledge that someone, somewhere, may have been happy and that the universe has finally made them pay for it.

The thought recurred to me as I watched Nicola Sturgeon addressing the Scottish people on Wednesday night about a fresh outbreak of coronavirus in her native land. The tableau was almost perfect in its grimness. The Scottish First Minister stood at the podium with a black background. Slightly off to one side behind her was a woman who was signing, not deemed necessary on all political occasions and adding to the solemnity of the event. Nor did it help that the signer was wearing dark clothes, so that her alabaster-white arms and face were the only things flashing out from the pitch-black. If this tableau had been given a paint name it would have been “Banquo’s ghost”.

Mrs Sturgeon’s words, too, were of the darkest hue. ‘This virus hasn’t gone away,” she began: “If you doubted that then today we have evidence of how true that is. It is still out there. And it is still highly infectious. And it is still highly dangerous. The outbreak in Aberdeen is a sharp reminder of that. It shows what can happen if we let our guard drop. And it should serve as a warning to all of us.”

Using the language of fires, firewalls and firefighters, Sturgeon warned: “Our job as citizens, as human beings, is to try to make sure that the fires don’t start in the first place.”

Always good to hear a politician to remind us that we are human beings.

Of course, to hear this talk you would think that the Scottish people are dropping dead at an even faster rate than usual. As it happens a certain level of panic should exist in the voices of Scotland’s politicians at all times: life expectancy in Glasgow, for instance, is the lowest (for men and women) in the whole of the UK. During the years of SNP rule life expectancy in parts of the country, such as Dundee, has actually fallen, a phenomenon rarely seen in modern times outside of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.

More from this author

Cambridge University's very modern bigotry

By Douglas Murray

But for the SNP to address such problems on their watch would be to take some responsibility, and Scottish Nationalists like Nicola Sturgeon never take responsibility. Not when there is “Westminster” to blame, and the opportunity to grandstand by issuing the direst imaginable warnings.

Yet what was striking about Sturgeon’s words were not just how grim, but how misleading they were. True, the general public in Scotland might have got used to being mislead by Ms Sturgeon, but even by her own standards, Wednesday’s doom-mongering was extreme. Her words about the lockdown in Aberdeen suggested that the city and wider country was facing a death toll on a gargantuan scale. The figures say something very different.

The fact is that there have been exactly zero confirmed Covid-related deaths in Scotland over the last three weeks, an astounding figure. Meanwhile what non-public sector employment exists in Scotland has been decimated, as everywhere, by this shutdown, a shutdown that we are told is crucial in order to save lives.

It is a shutdown that has become contestable as more and more evidence emerges, but what is not contestable is that what remains of the private sector will be unable to survive repeated shutdowns of the kind now being imposed. To imagine that they could is to engage in the economics of fantasyland in a country already used to consuming several economic fantasies each day before breakfast.

The lockdown announced in Aberdeen is a consequence of exactly 18 new corona cases, including 13 linked to a single pub. This tiny number of cases is the justification for Nicola Sturgeon to quarantine an entire city, a quarter of a million inhabitants who are now once again forbidden to enter each other’s houses, forbidden to go to restaurants or pubs, and forbidden to travel for any purposes other than work.

More from this author

Who controls the Covid-19 narrative?

By Douglas Murray

Of course all of this could be seen as a terrific and necessary precaution. Or it could — and perhaps should — be seen as a wild and politically-driven over-reaction. Here is displayed a strange dynamic, which is not peculiar to Scotland, but is certainly epitomised in the place — ultra-caution on the part of the politicians for reasons that do not directly have any bearing on the case at hand.

It now seems clear that the total shutdown of the UK that started in March was primarily put in place in order to stop the embarrassment of the National Health Service being overwhelmed by corona cases; specifically to avoid similar scenes to those emerging out of northern Italian hospitals. Underneath this ultra-caution another dynamic existed, which was the decision that the NHS could not be put under such strain during the time of a Tory government.

For years the Conservative Party has been pushing back at Labour efforts to portray them as in some ways callous or uncaring towards the NHS (or even seeking to privatise it). While never sincere and never less than cynical, still the Conservatives deeply feared this line of attack, and worried that Italian hospital-like scenes would offer their domestic political opponents a weapon for many years to come.

A similar dynamic is seen in Scotland. The SNP exists for a single purpose — to remain in government, to be seen as ultra-competent in the tasks of government and from there to be able next time (whenever that might be) to persuade the Scottish electorate that a one-party state ruled forever by the Scots Nationalists will be a land of milk and honey. Or oil and whisky. Whatever your poison is. That is now, as it always has been, the sole ambition of the SNP. Anything that deviates from that goal is of no interest to them.

Suggested reading

Why we aren't wearing masks in Sweden

By Freddie Sayers

So how to explain Wednesday’s speech? Simply that Nicola Sturgeon would rather do anything — including shutting down the Scottish private sector, such as it is — than have another coronavirus death on her watch. This isn’t because of the extreme and unusual “compassion” of the Scottish people that the SNP claims exists (in fact we Scots are at least as bloody and vengeful a people as any) but rather because Sturgeon knows that if her own mortality figures come out any worse than England’s then she and her fellow Nationalists may be held responsible for the fact.

Just as if the death tolls in England turn out higher than those in Scotland, then Sturgeon and co will highlight this as yet one more example of “foreign” malfeasance and incompetence which only highlights the case for independence. Of course, happily for them the SNP can further wreck and immiserate the Scottish economy, safe in the knowledge that they will be able to continue relying on the support and largesse of taxpayers in the South-East of England.

So it is that after weeks of zero deaths Sturgeon stands in front of the Scottish people and warns them of fires, and gloom and doom and the importance of taking action “as human beings” to avert a catastrophe that was in fact averted weeks if not months ago. Shutting down Aberdeen for a dozen cases of corona portrays Sturgeon as a strong but determined leader.

When the financial consequences of her decision hit then she can portray them as further evidence of how much better off the Scots would be without the English yoke. The grim warnings Sturgeon issued on Wednesday will have given her the greatest possible satisfaction. Not just because she is a Scot, but because she is a Scots Nationalist who knows that everything — including the worst possible catastrophe — can all be made to work very happily in her own favour.

To seek to understand this polarisation is to intrude on a kind of painful family feud. So I tread carefully. But the story goes, I think, something like this.

There was a time when politics in Scotland was a fairly staid and predictable affair: Labour was dominant; most Scots hated the Conservatives; the Lib Dems (or old Liberal party) controlled a few seats in the Highlands and Islands; and the SNP, known as the ‘Tartan Tories’, was seen as something of a crank outfit and its raison d’être — independence — a fringe position.

But that was then. Now the SNP reigns supreme and Labour is in sharp decline. (It’s pretty much as you were for the Tories and Lib Dems.) This seismic shift in the popularity of both Labour and SNP is a tale of hubris, complacency, the politics of grievance, and a rediscovered national self-confidence and sense of identity.

Devolution was seen by the new Labour government as not only desirable in itself, but also a tactic designed to end the debate over independence for good. But, the law of unintended consequences being what it is, millions of Scots went and got the taste for running things themselves. And their ultimate unwillingness to settle for what they came to view as an ersatz version of the real thing ensured that the independence campaign, and thereby the SNP, was suddenly emboldened.

Suggested reading

Does Scotland resent the Royals?

By Ewan McColm

Meanwhile, Labour, having taken Scotland for granted for too long, began to haemorrhage support. Its pursuit of austerity-lite policies in the years after the global financial crash, and then its alliance with the other ‘English’ parties, particularly the Tories, in the Better Together campaign for the 2014 independence referendum, accelerated its demise. Again, the SNP, which had long since reinvented itself as a progressive alternative to Labour, reaped the dividends. As far as Scottish politics was concerned, all had changed, changed utterly.

Glasgow was the last Labour bastion to fall, the party’s long hegemony over the city eventually collapsing in the Westminster, Scottish parliament and city council elections in 2015, 2016 and 2017 respectively.

But, despite all that, vestiges of support for the party in this most working-class of cities do remain. In fact, as I travelled around the constituency of Glasgow East, I found it hard to believe that it was anything but Labour. But it is. Only just, mind. The seat is a hyper-marginal, with the SNP holding it by a mere 75 votes.

The East End of this city was once a major industrial centre, home to sprawling manufacturing, engineering and textile works, including the vast steelworks of Parkhead Forge. The sounds and smells of heavy industry would permeate through the nearby slums, of which row upon row of poverty-infested tenement blocks were the main feature. The history of this part of the city is one of working-class solidarity and culture, of cranes and mills, of deprivation and squalor, of the Irish diaspora and Celtic football club, of the notoriety of the Gorbals district and 1920s razor gangs.

Suggested reading

Scotland's drug shame

By Darren McGarvey

Today, the old industries may be a fading memory (Parkhead Forge is now a shopping centre) and the remaining tenements sandblasted to look clean and new, but the hardship is still all too prevalent. The East End contains some of the most deprived areas in the UK. Unemployment and levels of poor health are comparatively very high; the number of benefit claimants well above the UK average.

Every one of the seven Glasgow constituencies represented at Westminster voted Remain in the EU referendum; but, of them all, Glasgow East saw the largest share voting Leave.

After the war, huge new municipal housing estates – known as the ‘schemes’ – were constructed across the city to rehouse families displaced by slum clearances. I headed out to one of these – Easterhouse – an infamous place that over the years has gained a national reputation for gang culture, violence and drugs. If Glasgow East is deprived, then Easterhouse feels like its most impoverished corner.

The place has attracted much media attention and the occasional famous visitor – Princess Diana and Jacque Chirac among them – over the years. They are brought here, no doubt, to discover what life is like for those living on the breadline in one of the most disadvantaged pockets of the nation, almost as junior doctors having a somewhat unusual and stubborn medical condition demonstrated to them.

It was after a visit here while leader of the Conservative party that Iain Duncan Smith was inspired to launch his crusade for ‘compassionate Conservatism’. The moment was, it is said, his ‘Easterhouse epiphany’.

Suggested reading

The town that should shame our politicians

By Paul Embery

If you come here expecting some kind of benighted, lawless ghetto, you will be disappointed (or pleased – depending on how you look at it). True, mattresses and other discarded furniture are piled up on some streets, drab and unsightly low-rise blocks of flats abound, shop fronts are shabby and uninviting, and you’re likely to stumble upon some untended grassy wasteland every few blocks.

But Easterhouse is fighting hard to reinvent itself, and vast amounts of money have been pumped into the place to help it along the way. Much of the original estate has been pulled down, to be replaced by modest but modern housing, and there is the odd shiny new building, including the Kelvin college campus (which wouldn’t look out of place in a Home Counties town) and an art and culture facility called ‘The Bridge’.

You can’t help but feel, though, that much of this is little more than cosmetic surgery – a superficial makeover on a timeworn body which, beneath the veneer, still suffers from the wear and tear of the daily grind. It’s clear, when you look at the poverty statistics, that the regeneration scheme, which dates back to 2002, has been little but a sticking plaster.

Suggested reading

Will Brexit tear Belfast apart?

By Paul Embery

What can the mainstream parties possibly say to convince those whose existence here has been marked by constant need and privation that their lives really will change for the better after the general election?

At St Benedict’s Roman Catholic church on Westerhouse Road, 67-year-old Mary Maguire, until now a lifelong Labour voter, is helping to prepare a special Mass. “Labour are a joke these days. Not just Corbyn; the whole party. They are a joke,” she tells me. This time she will vote SNP because it is the only party standing up for Scotland. She supports independence. “Scotland is a rich country. We’ve lots of resources, but we don’t get a say. Everyone says that England pays to keep us, but that’s rubbish.”

She voted Leave in the EU referendum. “I thought it was the right thing to do,” she says. “I voted Yes to the Common Market first time round, mind.”

“Is unemployment a big problem around here?” I ask. She bristles. “Yes, but lots of people work too. People want to work. Easterhouse isn’t just full of people claiming benefits.” It’s a common theme here. Locals are acutely aware of the reputation of the place, but are desperate to convince you that it isn’t as bad as all that.

I thank Mary for her time and offer five quid for the donation box. She gently rebuffs me. “Don’t be daft. We don’t take money off people who come to see us.”

Suggested reading

Don't call it poverty porn

By Jenny McCartney

For all the problems caused by a lack of decent jobs, low wages, inadequate housing and social exclusion, there’s a kindness and warmth in Easterhouse. Folk are friendly and eager to chat.

Friends Donna and Fiona are walking along Aberdalgie Road. Donna, 41, tells me she is “on the fence” but veering towards Labour. “I’m a single parent and would probably be better off financially under Labour. Plus, Labour would look after the NHS. And I don’t trust the SNP.” I ask about the challenges facing Easterhouse. “Drugs. They are a big problem here. And some of the teenagers have no respect and no manners. They trash the place. Mind you, there’s nothing for them to do. And over there,” she points, “is a homeless centre filled with young men. I don’t always feel safe walking around.”

“What do you think of Boris Johnson?” Donna widens her eyes and puffs out her cheeks at my question, as if to say, “Don’t get me started!” I do get her started. “Let me just say,” she snaps back, “that I bought a Donald Trump toy for my dog. He ripped it to pieces. So now I’m looking for a Boris Johnson one.”

I ask Fiona how she will vote. “I won’t,” she retorts sharply. “It’s a waste of time. Nothing ever gets done. They are all a load of shite.” She reflects. “Although at least the gang fights have stopped now.”

Crawford Irving, 24, has lived in Easterhouse for two years. He moved here because “the rent is cheap” and earns his living as a door-to-door fundraiser for a charity. “Yeah, we’ve got our problems,” he says. “Drug issues. Poverty. You go to the shops at 10 in the morning, and people are lining up to get their cans of beer. Or outside the chemist the junkies are queuing to get their methadone. But all places have their problems, don’t they?”

He likes living in Easterhouse and is in no hurry to move on. “Underneath it all, there is a real sense of community on the schemes. It’s like we’re all struggling, but we’re struggling together.”

Suggested reading

Why I'm going to spoil my ballot

By James Bloodworth

He will vote Labour on 12 December. “I trust Corbyn. He’s genuine. Rides a bike and stuff. I like that.” And though a supporter of independence, he is no fan of the SNP or its leader. “Nicola Sturgeon is dishonest. She hasn’t made Scotland better. She said she would restore the NHS to its former glory, but it’s in decline.”

History tells us that the evils of unemployment and low wages are primary factors in so many other social problems that can plague communities such as Easterhouse – not just the usual mix of crime, drugs and vandalism, but the absence of self-worth, of dignity and a sense of vocation.

Give people meaningful, rewarding work and the rest will follow. It’s a truism as relevant now as when man was fashioning tools from flint. Yet it is rare these days to hear any party – not even Labour, with its radical economic programme – make the case for full employment as a prime goal of economic policy.

On the train back to the city centre, I read on my iPhone a breaking story exposing an old column written by Boris Johnson, in which he stereotyped British working-class men as “drunk, criminal, aimless, feckless and hopeless”. I guess if you were fortunate enough to brought up on the playing fields of Eton rather than the streets of Easterhouse, you can deceive yourself into believing that such simplistic garbage provides any explanation at all for the trials and tribulations faced by our most blighted communities and the mindset of those who populate them.

Alighting at Queen’s Street station, I walk the few yards to George Square, home to a statue of Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns.

“Ye see yon birkie, ca’d a lord / Wha struts, an’ stares, an’ a’ that / Tho’ hundreds worship at his word / He’s but a coof for a’ that,” wrote Burns in “A man’s a man for a’ that”, his paean to the poor.

For some reason, I am still thinking of the Prime Minister and that old column.