As we write this, voting has just ended to elect the membership of a number of key SNP internal bodies, including the Member Conduct Committee which has the power to discipline members and even expel them from the party.
This year has seen a concerted attempt by a small but active faction within the SNP, led by the Young Scots for Independence and Out For Indy groups, to flood the MCC (which in normal times struggles to fill its ranks) with officers aggressively committed to transgender ideology, with the openly-declared intent of purging “gender-critical” women from all party candidate lists and ensuring that anyone seeking to protect women’s sex-based rights can be expunged for “transphobia”.
(An attempt to deselect Joanna Cherry on such grounds failed earlier this year, but with control of the MCC the faction could pretty much dump anyone it wanted to.)
The matter has not escaped the attention of the independence-hostile media.
We avoided discussing the committee elections while voting was taking place because it’s not our business to interfere in the internal affairs of the SNP, and also because a certain element of the party has been having a massive tantrum over some poll results we published last week and it might have ended up being counter-productive.
But make no mistake – the outcome of these elections will have a huge impact on both the SNP’s electoral fortunes and the chances of securing independence. We’re about to find out, in other words, how screwed we are.
That’s because we know, beyond any shred of doubt, that the trans issue is toxically divisive everywhere, because every single party is spectacularly at odds with its own voters on it. Poll after poll after poll finds the public opposed to the proposals being put forward by every party to allow “self-ID”, by which men can declare themselves to be women just by saying so, and access by right anywhere that women have previously prized as a penis-free space.
Some of those polls have been conducted by this site, and are invariably leapt on by trans activists as having featured supposedly “leading” or “unfair” questions, even though we check all our questions with Panelbase first and the results have without exception been identical, often to within a single percentage point, to those revealed in polls featuring differently-worded questions commissioned by extremely trans-friendly organisations like Pink News.
No matter how you frame or phrase the question, a huge majority of voters (usually by margins of 50-60 points), across every demographic and political affiliation, is against the idea of letting people change their legal sex on their own say-so.
But what if you don’t mention transgenderism in the question at all?
Oh. It’s exactly the same. Again. There was no preamble to the above question, no lead-in, no related questions. But when we asked a UK-wide sample of over 2000 people which of the facts recorded on a person’s birth certificate should be alterable (other than a person’s own name), two-thirds of them said “None”.
Scottish voters were even more opposed to the idea than English ones, with the Welsh the least supportive of all. And in the Scottish half of the survey, SNP voters were more opposed than Labour or Lib Dem ones. (By a net 43 points, compared to 32 for Lib Dems and 36 for Scottish Labour voters.)
There was only a modest difference in opposition between Yes and No voters:
Nothing between men and women:
Nothing between middle-class and working-class:
And while the age gap was the largest by miles, young men and young women were both still solidly against the idea overall (by 11 points and 10 points respectively).
Support for the idea was still remarkably high, by any rational measure – six times higher than the no-less-absurd idea that you should be able to decide your own age, eight times as high as the notion of retrospectively redefining your place of birth (so there goes that cunning post-Brexit plan to get an Irish passport), and three times as high as claiming different parents, so no pretending that you’re actually Prince Dave when the Queen dies and demanding to inherit Windsor Castle.
But even though it was far more than sanity would allow, opposition to self-ID still runs at around 3:1 against – and when people are opposed to it, they tend to be REALLY opposed to it. It WILL cost votes, and even when other parties back an idea, it’s the one in government, which actually enacts it, that voters hold responsible and punish.
The degree to which the SNP will alienate the vast bulk of the electorate over the next 12 months has now been determined. All we can do now is wait to find out just how bad it’s going to be.
