I can’t see “the majority” of MSPs being willing to put closing a child and vulnerable adult protection loophole ahead of risking being criticised, even just for a few days, on those grounds, but I’m willing to be pleasantly surprised.
— Lucy HunterBlackburn (@LucyHunterB) October 7, 2022
I will never vote for independence until Scottish Parliament proves it is capable of legislating competently. Men can’t be women. Birth certificates shouldn’t lie. Women shouldn’t be gaslighted after rape, dv, imprisonment, hospitalisation. Children shouldn’t be lied to.
— maggie mellon (@maggiemellon) October 7, 2022
It’s no secret that I think the SNP-Green government are making a terrible mistake by pushing ahead with their proposed reforms of gender recognition. Indeed, last year I commissioned a landmark poll for Scot Goes Pop that confirmed beyond any credible dispute that the people of Scotland are overwhelmingly opposed to legally-recognised gender self-ID. But I have to say I find the opening sentence of the second tweet above incomprehensible. It harks back to Johann Lamont’s notorious comment about Scots not being “genetically programmed to make political decisions”. What is it about us as a country that when we see our government making mistakes, we don’t think to ourselves that the problem is the government and that it needs to do better or be replaced, but we instead think “aha, the problem is Scotland itself and how useless we are, best let another country rule us instead”?
In all likelihood, we are now just eighteen months away from a UK Labour government that will do all of the same things on gender identity in England that the SNP and Greens are doing in Scotland. Keir Starmer’s woolly views on how he would define a woman are indistinguishable from Nicola Sturgeon’s. Would it ever occur to anyone to react to that by saying “I will never vote against independence until Westminster proves it is capable of legislating competently”? If not, why not? What’s the difference? The only difference is the Scottish Cringe, which is a form of self-loathing and crippling inferiority complex. What people are effectively saying, whether they realise it or not, is “I’ll never vote for independence until I have confidence in myself”.
When Scotland and England are moving in exactly the same direction on gender identity, it’s hard to see how independence even comes into it. If you argue that the problem in England is Labour, you can’t credibly argue that the problem in Scotland is Scotland. The solution on both sides of the border will only be found via party politics and internal pressure for change within political parties. And, actually, although proponents of self-ID may be winning the short-term battle on the legislation they want to see introduced, they’re losing another battle that they probably regard privately as more important in the long run – the battle to police people’s thoughts and speech. The Forstater ruling was a major setback for them, and although it remains to be seen whether Mermaids’ preposterous challenge to the LGB Alliance’s charity status will be dismissed, there does seem to be a situation evolving where gender critical views are recognised as having strong legal protection. If those views can no longer be outrageously shut down as “far-right extremist hate-speech”, it will make push-back on specific policy areas a lot more achievable. Even the likes of John Nicolson may eventually be forced to echo Al Gore’s famous words by saying: “Although I strongly disagree with these legal judgements, I accept them, and I accept their finality, and I accept that I am bound by them.”
Incidentally, I can think of at least two specific policy areas, unrelated to gender identity, in which I believe the Scottish Parliament has got it wrong and Westminster has got it right. But does that mean I think elected Scottish representatives shouldn’t be making those decisions? Absolutely not. Scotland is always better off governing itself, because nobody understands the needs of our own country better than ourselves. We’ll continue to make mistakes, just like every other self-governing country on the planet does, but we’ll get it right a hell of a lot more often than we get it wrong.
