I went for a very long walk before writing this post, because I wanted to make sure I wasn’t doing it in anger. But 8.5 miles and 18,753 steps later it still needs to be said and there’s no getting out of it, so batten down the hatches, folks.
Last night SNP MP Mhairi Black tweeted what may be the most ill-advised, destructive, offensive, repellent and just downright idiotic thing we’ve ever seen an elected SNP member do. (Maybe not just the SNP.)
The video, bizarrely made for the amusement of readers of comedy lad-mag website Joe.co.uk, sees Black reading out a series of supposedly “transphobic” and “mean” tweets – almost all from women and only two of which were in any way rude – and reacting to them with a mixture of condescension, mockery and horror, alongside a tirade of flatly wrong and endlessly-debunked myths.
It concludes with the smirking, sniggering suggestion that women, including survivors of male violence, who’ve expressed their serious concerns over reforms to the Gender Recognition Act – concerns shared by the overwhelming majority of women, and of the population as a whole – are “Jeremy Hunts”, a piece of rhyming slang that doesn’t need any translation.
The video pretty much speaks for itself, but let’s look at some highlights.
The first “transphobic” or “mean” tweet comes from Pam Forsberg.
The tweet is clearly neither. (Interestingly, the feminist Black was originally replying to has subsequently been banned by Twitter, as many gender-critical women have been, in this case for exposing paedophiles.)
Black responds with her face contorted in sheer disgust at this outrageous request and shamefully misrepresents the tweet – which was specifically about “intimate spaces” like toilets and changing rooms – as a demand for “a room alone wherever you go”, before chiding Forsberg that “that’s just not how the world works” and that she should expect to see penises swinging in her face at all times.
The next woman in the firing line is Chrisoula Drakopolou:
Her tweet does contain a very mildly rude phrase (“take your head out your ass”), but otherwise makes a perfectly reasonable statement of opinion that people should not be able to change sex in law (since humans, y’know, can’t actually change sex), but the woman gets called “transphobic” and a “bigot” for her view founded on basic scientific fact, with another series of incredulous and contemptuous expressions designed to clearly convey that Black thinks Drakopoulou is loathsome scum.
The next perfectly civil question comes from J J Shields (sex unknown):
Autogynephilia (AGP) is a well-documented psychiatric condition in which men are sexually aroused by the thought of themselves as women.
For which it’s laughably easy to find hundreds of examples on social media. (Click image to read text.)
Absurdly and without giving any sort of reasoning, Black dismisses the entire concept of AGP as “old school homophobia rebranded”, because if there’s one thing we know about gay men it’s that they all like to dress as women, right?
She then rattles off a list of supposed statistics about transwomen, every one of which is entirely untrue.
The oft-cited suicide figures for trans people are pure junk science. As for murder, a Channel 4 Fact Check from last November found that trans people were (per capita) approximately five times LESS likely to be murdered than the general population, and significantly less likely than either “cis” men or natal women.
If you’re a man, you can actually reduce your statistical chances of being murdered by an impressive 80% simply by putting a frock and some lipstick on.
The video goes on for several more minutes in the same style, including a bit where Black ironically accuses someone else of misrepresenting statistics, before concluding with some wild allegations about “a group of core transphobes” (presumably including her own gender-critical SNP colleagues like Joan McAlpine and Joanna Cherry) and the “Jeremy Hunt” line.
So it’s all unutterably, massively dreadful. But so far so what? It’s just one person’s opinion, isn’t it? Well, not so much when it gets retweeted by the official SNP account, which it was until this evening when the retweet mysteriously vanished.
But the party’s line, were it not already clear, can be easily enough discerned by the nature of some of Nicola Sturgeon’s tweets today.
At this point, readers might like to entertain themselves with the hypothetical scenario where a male SNP MP had made a video reading out some pretty innocuous tweets from trans rights activists, before sneering and mocking and abusing them.
Given that the party has thrown countless elected representatives under the bus at the mere suggestion of any wrongdoing – Mark McDonald, Neil Hay, Michelle Thomson and more – it seems fair to imagine that their feet wouldn’t touch the floor.
Yet here’s Mhairi Black attacking and insulting the majority of the people of Scotland, the majority of SNP voters and the majority of women, in a staggeringly aggressive and obnoxious manner, without so much as a tut.
And as we struggled to think of an explanation for this blatant and indefensible double standard, a couple of comments from readers on Twitter struck home.
There have been rumblings in the SNP grassroots for a long time that the party was altogether too comfortable with devolved power, prompted in particular by its lack of activity towards securing a second indyref and its curious commitment to invalidating its own mandate by preventing Brexit.
But the party’s behaviour in the last 12-18 months, especially but not solely in relation to the gender debate where it seems hell-bent on catastrophically alienating the female vote, has added fuel to the fire.
Spend five minutes on social media and you’ll trip over hundreds of variants on the comment “We need the SNP to get independence so I’ll keep voting for them until we do, but never again after that”, for various reasons. But what if the SNP has been reading them and working out what they mean?
As things stand, there’s no serious threat to the party’s hegemony in Scotland for the forseeable future. The Unionist vote is splintered and the Unionist parties are barely-functional jokes, torn apart by Brexit and a whole raft of other things. Polling shows the SNP comfortably winning the 2021 Holyrood election by a double-digit margin, and perhaps returning 50+ MPs again should there be a UK general election soon.
We couldn’t tell you how many times we’ve been privately told by insiders – ironically including sources very close to a certain Mhairi Black – that a significant section of the party’s Westminster MPs are enjoying the glamorous London life a little too much, and wouldn’t be unduly bothered if they had a 30-year career there on a nice fat £80K-plus-expenses salary without ever achieving independence.
So we’ve arrived at a situation where a rational, reasonable argument can be made that independence is in fact the greatest threat to the SNP’s hold on power. In a Scotland where the constitution was no longer the defining issue, the party and its vote might splinter along many lines – left/right, Leave/Remain, radical/centrist and others.
Its domestic dominance would be at an end, and all its Westminster MPs would be out of a job and fighting like rats in a sack with MSPs for Holyrood seats. It would also have a huge impact on the party’s finances in terms of Short money – the 2015 election saw its payout rise by over £1m a year, which is serious cash in SNP terms and would all vanish overnight with independence.
Readers, we don’t want to believe that’s the case. Really and truly. It’d be a shattering blow. But faith in the SNP among its own members and supporters is now worn so thin that many already do, and yesterday’s fiasco might be the straw that breaks the back of many more.
If no disciplinary action is taken against Mhairi Black, the leadership will have proven itself to be hypocritical, reckless and unfit for purpose and should step down, and the sooner the better. We have no more time to waste, and enough is enough.
