Sturgeon’s trans crusade is a tribal proxy war

By Pete North - January 28, 2021

You have to hand it to Nicola Sturgeon. Her determination to save her own skin is awesome. I’m not familiar with the exact substance of the infighting over the Alsmond affair, but I did wonder why Sturgeon has taken up the trans cause. It’s apparently expedient to manufacture a moral panic about transphobia within the SNP, as a means to leverage the energy of zealous young wokelings against Joanna Cherry who, as I understand it is a firm ally of Alex Salmond.

In this case it has the added advantage of unleashing a tornado of bile on Cherry. Trans activists are notoriously unpleasant – even surpassing FBPE and the cybernats or yore. They’re intent on hounding critical women out of public discourse altogether and Sturgeon figures she can throw Cherry to the wolves.

This ploy is absolutely nothing to do with trans issues. It is 100% a proxy row, causing Humza Yousaf to take sides, using his own hate crime bill to lodge an amendment specifying that merely expressing critical opinions on transgender issues does not qualify as hate crime.

This is greeted with praise from women who don’t want to let men into women’s spaces and the culture war right salutes it. Though I appreciate the secondary intent, it’s still the state regulating public discourse. But what it actually is, is the SNP using the law to regulate its own internal dialogue.

Ordinarily we see this of bickering inside Labour and it is a matter for the party’s own internal constitution. In this case, though, it’s spilling out on the statute book where governance of Scotland is way down on the list of priorities. So far as the SNP is concerned, Scotland is the SNP. The party is the country. This is the politics of a basketcase.

This actually reminds me of the split within Ukip all those years ago, which then came to blistering rows over who had keys to the Regent Street office, and which faction had control over the party apparatus. This is essentially an upscaled version of that, only the stakes are much higher than a top floor office.

Until the Salmond affair is put to bed we’re going to see more of this war of attrition, and there are no lengths Sturgeon will not go to in order to stave off the inevitable. In the meantime, Scotland continues to suffer from the SNP’s maladministration. Sturgeon thinks, not unreasonably, that the fate of Scottish independence is tied to her own. She’ll take the whole show down with her. What a terrible pity!