SNP leadership - Epiphanies edition
in Epiphanies
This discussion was created from comments split from: Scottish Gender Recognition Act and UK Block.
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One of the big progressive candidates expected to run decided not to (Angus Robertson) . The most jaw-dropping bigot of the GRR debate who has no chance of winning is running, by the looks of it, to get more publicity for her views and to keep the media spotlight on this (Ash Regan)
The big candidate from the parties more fiscally right leaning faction (Kate Forbes) turns out to be anti-abortion, anti-equal marriage and hugely transphobic (not just on this bill, she was out there misgendering all trans women today) and whereas she previously kept quiet about those views, she's now doubling down on them all over the shop. She is the current finance minister having replaced her boss who resigned which meant her brief didn't cover these areas but as First Minister she would be in charge of them which is scary.
The one progressive candidate Humza Yousaf is going to fight section 35, so there's that. He's a practising Muslim who takes a lot of stick from social media racists for his religion - he really shows up Kate Forbes' claims that she's being persecuted because she is a person of faith. So is he, but he happens not to use it to attack people who have never harmed him and to undermine their human rights.
So all of this means the GRR bill is going to be a major issue in the leadership election.
Her backers have been withdrawing their endorsements and fleeing.
https://ballotbox.scot/scottish-parliament/snp-leadership-election-2023
I also missed her views on anti LGBT+ conversion therapy for which she wants religious exemptions which will gut the bill due to be brought forward.
The Scottish government have got that, and abortion clinic protestor/harasser buffer zones in the works, as well as the Section 35 challenege - she cant be trusted with any of it.
At better than 50% of registered births, I can see there's going to be skyrocketing demand for cutty stools the better to accommodate all the fornicators of a Sunday.
I know how weirdly insular some Evangelicals are in terms of understanding how completely bonkers they sound to outsiders, especially if they work for a Christian company or for a church, but I thought Holyrood was known for being much more inclusive and diverse than Westminster?
Gawd he's a charmer isn't he?
Nope. Though there might be a handful more defections to Salmond's anti-trans mob.
Considering the reactionary wind that's been blowing in the media - that might have been enough to convince anyone that they could 'say the quiet part out loud' and the 'silent majority' would rise to them. The people who puffed her knew her views and they did it anyway. I think it's part of the way the Overton window has been shifting - first came the attacks on trans people, then attacks on Stonewall, targetting of gay men, and a constant drumbeat of attacks on progressive women.
As I've mentioned on the other thread, I've been reeling from seeing hate campaigning I last remember seeing to such a bad extent twenty years ago during 'Keep the Clause' anti-gay campaign on the front pages of newspapers. I think these folk have scented an opportunity with the UK government now striking down progressive legislation in Scotland.
When Scotland last faced down a big social/religious conservative push, Labour were in power in both Scottish and UK parliaments, and Labour were committed to getting rid of Section 28 in both. When the Scottish parliament pushed forward with repeal of Section 28, a massive moral panic was whipped up in the media and repeal became wildly unpopular with voters as a result but Westminster had their back. The Scottish government held fast and eventually saw them off - but not before losing a key by-election to the Conservatives. At the time, the social conservatives scented a real opportunity and became very very vocal in the media - they really thought they were going to win.
I think in part the current attacks on trans people and the way they've been enthusiastically received in the press - who've whipped up hate and misunderstanding among voters - may have helped embolden someone to think they can say all this and win politically and that they could defy political gravity because it was all going their way now.
By the way, Ian Blackford MP (until recently SNP leader at Westminster) is Free Kirk but not at all like her and not holding such views, so it's too reductionist to put it down to religious denomination. As we were saying in Purgatory a lot of people don't believe what their denomination/religion officially preaches - it's on her that she believes this stuff and thinks it's OK to come out with it on TV in a leadership campaign.
That's the crucial Scottish tabloid which has been driving the anti-GRR campaign with front-page scaremongering splashes - if they're abandoning her, and in these no-nonsense terms, she's way too right wing for centre left/soft right social conservatives. The last time the social attitudes survey looked at it eight years ago, 60% of Scottish RCs and 59% of the Kirk supported equal marriage, so even among most religious people those views didn't wash.
I find this stuff too scary to breathe a sigh of relief yet (and it's bad enough that it's happened) but it's a hopeful sign.
Still, there are not a few who prate on about keeping God's Laws™ in the face of what the evil world insists on doing...
And possibly in parts of Lewis and Harris.
I think the overarching issue is premarital sex, which they oppose. Pre-marital sex, as they see it, leads to bad outcomes, be it out-of-wedlock births or abortions.
A point John Swinney, himself a loyal member of the Kirk, made strongly. The Wee Frees, of course, don't consider the Kirk to be Properly Christian.
Let me introduce you to the Roman Catholic Church.
Secondly there's apparently been a dirty tricks religious attack on Humza Yousaf - where two purported grassroots organisation Hindu and Muslim attacked him on religious grounds- BUT it seems they turned out not to be grassroots - think astroturf - and to seemingly have highly suspicious connections to Alba (Alex Salmond's anti-trans indy zealot mob). The Scottish press rumbled them and pointed fingers at the relevant Albanites (story is behind a paywall in The Herald)
It just happens a certain candidate (not Kate Forbes) has been seen and photographed apparently accompanied in her campaigning by Alba folk whose views (I'm sure entirely coincidentally), she happens to share. I do hope that is just an innocent coincidence.
Is it just me, or has the SNP gone from being The Grooviest, Most Inclusive Nationalist Movement on the planet, to being a transphobic, sectarian slapstick show, virtually overnight?
Unfortunately in many ways Labour being unwilling to deal with the TERF problem (and while Corbyn has posted trans-supportive things, he didn't exactly seek to root the TERF problem out) is responsible for spreading the issue into more mainstream spaces. There's also an obvious elephant in the room with A Prominent Person taking them and their (publicly Labour) votes from England to Scotland...
Of those two, one is quite simply an anti -trans hate candidate and the other used to have the finance brief and was on maternity leave so wasn't talking about these issues but has now opened her mouth and made it quite clear she (unlike her fellow Free Kirker, Ian Blackford) holds truly awful views and would vote for them.
Two people who were expected to run from the much bigger progressive majority didn't run because of personal reasons and that means that 6/7ths of the party are represented by one candidate - Humza Yousaf
There's no excuse though, because people warned the SNP repeatedly about the transphobes and religious conservatives still left in the party and nothing was done about them. They then thought they'd ride on the coat-tails of the massive media press assault on trans folk after Westminster stopped the GRR bill and be guaranteed great press coverage, so here we are. (a ray of hope is that Forbes has been so incompetent, that press adulation for her has suffered a blow)
If the SNP had thrown the transphobes out they'd have been utterly monstered in our press for intolerance - which is likely why Keir Starmer of UK Labour has done nothing about similar transphobes in his party like Rosie Duffield and refused to help fight the Tory attack on Scottish GRR.
But the SNP should still have done the right thing - if they'd passed GRR when it was first in the manifesto years ago, instead of trying to appease the transphobes with extra consultations, it would have passed almost uncontroversially as it was UK government policy then too, but they bottled it. And nothing appeased the transphobe faction. They don't actually have 'reasonable concerns' - the leaders of their movement hate trans people to a fanatical degree and want rid of them and will sacrifice almost anything else to do it.
It would have been better to be wrongly monstered for intolerance than rightly accused of fostering it.
So, if the SNP were heading into its own reactionary valley-of-darkness, that would be following the same path as the PQ. Though from what I'm reading here, the sudden prominence of transphobic Scottish Nationalists might be more of an issue-specific fluke, whereas the PQ's rightward drift was related to their own traditional issues, but with a different spin than what the earlier, more progressive versions of the party had.
I doubt it. The bigot elements of most religious groups tend to be unionists. Remember the Orange Order still has strength in the west of Scotland.
So, the anti-trans contingent of the SNP is no larger than in other parties, but circumstance has just made them a little more influential at this time. Is what I would glean from the comments here.
If anything the anti-trans group in the SNP is smaller than in other parties (Alba took in many of the reactionary pro-indy members) - Labour is equivocal about trans rights and the tories actively court transphobes.
Right. I think the Alba connection is one of the reasons I might have viewed the SNP as having a stronger-than-average reactionary contingent. Though, of course, you can't blame a party for what its schismatics do after forming their own group.
(It is a bit of a stretch to portray Alex Salmond, of Russia Today fame, as being a fringe character within the context of the SNP, but I do recognize that a party-leader can have views that aren't shared by most members.)
Though to be fair, the Tories do have one openly trans mp.
I think that the fact that they consist of multiple factions united mainly by independence creates one pole, on the other hand that one of their strongest arguments for independence for the longest time has been a Tory government that Scotland never voted for creates another pole. Lastly, a lot of the reactionaries already departed when Alba was formed.
With Salmond it's not all clear whether he's actually a transphobe or merely plays one on TV (not that one is better than the other, but it wasn't apparent while he was leader and FM that he had those tendencies).
He's a late addition to Scottish transphobia though, the original promoter of that in nationalist circles was a certain very litigious blogger who shot to prominence ca. 2013 from critiquing talking points in the anti-independence press but who then turned out to be into all kinds of alarming prejudice.
Salmond didn't take up his virulent transphobia until after being acquitted of harassing women and leaving to form Alba.
A very cynical person might say that transphobia can be a cheap and nasty way of laundering a bad reputation on feminism by posing as a 'defender of women'. Salmond isn't the only one - one of the leadership hopefuls is hanging out with someone very similar.
No. Generally transphobia in UK politics is not religious in nature (and indeed has much bigger links to the 90s sceptic movement and New Atheism). None of the most prominent transphobic MPs/MSPs are more than nominally religious iirc.
I'm not sure you can really call UK Labour equivocal on trans rights when Starmer is talking about having trans kids outed to their parents.
There is quite a lot of evidence that a [content removed] transphobe got radicalised after hitting on and being rejected by trans women, so I wonder if that's also a factor. Very Blanchardian.
Gwai,
Epiphanies Host
Yeah, those New Atheists have a pretty checkered record on a number of issues. As was pointed out at the time, it often seemed that the only thing "new" about them was that, unlike Voltaire and Mencken, they seemed most obsessed with attacking the forms of god-belief embraced by marginalized immigrant groups.
And there's been a meaty chunk of racist and/or Islamophobic bigotry directed towards Yousaf (though not, in this case, from Kate Forbes).
Yes, mostly along the lines that he's actually secretly homophobic and against gay marriage.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/kate-forbes-snp-christian-action-research-education-care-anti-abortion-dark-money/
She got into politics from being an intern for the lobby group CARE (Christian Action, Research and Education)