When men resign from office ‘to spend more time with their families’, literally no-one pretends like they have left office to spend time with their families. But when a woman politician cites ‘childcare’ as a reason we assume female politicians aren’t political at all and it is simply ‘girls stuff’ that causes them to leave politics.
What I’m trying to say is that Kate Forbes’s departure from frontline politics in Scotland tells us big and important things about politics in Scotland just now and childcare arrangements are the least of those things, important as they are.
What Forbes’s departure demonstrates is what lots of people know but the media won’t really acknowledge – Swinney’s SNP is in meltdown. The party is more divided than at any time I can remember, I’ve never seen its activists so demoralised and its parliamentary presence will never have been so weak person-for-person than it will be after next May.
People with talent don’t gravitate towards this party any more and people with options don’t hang around. It’s stuck polling at the level which was considered a disaster a year ago and there is no sign whatsoever that anything is turning round. But let’s have some more articles about creche provision, because this is a women’s interest story, is it not?
Nope, it’s not, and this has been driving me daft for a while now. I know a number of senior politicians who’ve either been pregnant or had young children. In fact I’ve discussed this with them at some length. It is 100 per cent true that politics in Scotland isn’t geared up to be young-parent-friendly.
Then again, what is there that is designed to be young-parent-friendly? Capitalism doesn’t do creches. But the workload, working patterns and pressures of the job make politics particularly unfriendly to family life, and particularly to family life with young children.
This is difficult for me to write about because the conversations I mention above were all private conversations and it’s not my place to disclose what was discussed. But I think I can tell you without betraying any confidences that women who are supposed to have walked away from politics because of ‘family life’ did no such thing.
They walked away from politics for the same reason everyone else does who isn’t forced out by scandal – they became deeply disillusioned with the politics they were meant to be representing. I had a long chat with someone who gave up on politics and childcare wasn’t mentioned in the whole conversation.
Forget the crap – Forbes is leaving because John Swinney’s SNP is a shitshow
I sometimes wonder if the whole Me Too thing has actually been helpful for women in certain big picture ways. It has of course shone an important spotlight on sexual abuse and violence against women. But it has also created an entire brand of ‘explaining things from a women’s perspective’ content too.
This reinforces the idea that women are somehow different. And ironically a lot of the time what crops up in these articles explaining a women’s perspective is what looks to me like stereotyped femininity tropes. It’s different for women because they have to look good/look after children/try and not cry.
It’s not really my place to offer opinions on this given that I’m a man. But this whole narrative about ‘politics isn’t family-friendly’ strikes me as often teetering on the verge of sounding an awful lot like ‘politics is just too hard for women’. It seems patronising to me.
What it is my place to say is that it has been no secret for ages that (a) Kate Forbes has hardly been loving being separated from her young family but that (b) her main concerns have been political, the state of her party. If you know the chatter you’d know that there has been at least two years of speculation on whether she would leave Holyrood.
And if you know anything, her issue isn’t childcare. She stood for leader when she had a newborn. She knew what that meant. She wasn’t choosing to put herself forward to lead the party out of ego but because she was being leant on hard by colleagues who thought she was the only credible candidate. She was willing to make that sacrifice. She understood what it meant.
Forget the crap – Forbes is leaving because John Swinney’s SNP is a shitshow. I spoke to one of the ‘rebels’ pushing the amendment to the party’s independence strategy at the party conference and if this person is a rebel, something is deeply wrong.
I ask people all the time what morale in the party is like among activists. Rock bottom is the only answer I’ve had. They’re pissed off at the domestic policy agenda that they think is excessively cautious when it isn’t cowardice. They’re pissed off at government performance because the government doesn’t even seem able to do cautious things successfully.
They’re pissed off at the party constantly being stolen out from under them. Watching Swinney swagger about how he’s unified the party would be less laughable if he wasn’t also desperately pushing outrageous constitutional amendments that make it all but impossible for anyone to challenge him. I mean, name me a politician who is actually confident and in control who rigs his own constitution to prevent any chance of a challenge.
They’re pissed off at their own elected representatives. I know many are pissed off that it was made exceedingly difficult to oust their own disappointing elected representatives. They’re pissed off at all the fork-tongued stuff on Gaza. And above all they’re increasingly clear and increasingly pissed off about the garden path they’ve been led up on the question of achieving independence.
If John Swinney was run over by a bus tomorrow, who is the SNP’s next leader?
Does anyone seriously think Kate Forbes would be leaving politics if she thought there was any chance Swinney would achieve independence in the next five years?
I took the bank holiday off and I’ve had a pile of deadlines today so not really had a chance to take the mood on Forbes’s departure, but I’d imagine that even those who’ve been so utterly hateful to her online must be getting wobbles. They might do character assassinations in public but in private they know that she is as close to talent as the party has.
The wiser among them therefore went for ‘great and capable politician but can’t be leader’. And now they’ve got – what? If John Swinney was run over by a bus tomorrow, who is the SNP’s next leader? Who is First Minister? The only people who could lead the party in parliament (Shona Robison or Kate Forbes) are stepping down. Can you imagine how that would play in next year’s election?
The pro-Sturgeon wing of the party keeps winning big, or at least it keeps believing it has won big. It defeated Kate Forbes in a campaign which was clearly rigged (again, I challenge you SNP, produce the financial returns of the three candidates…) and got Humza Yousaf who drove the party to new lows in the polls.
It fiddled the inevitable need for a rapid replacement to stop the party voting for Forbes (she would be party leader now if there had been a contest) and then fiddled the constitution to prevent a further challenge. It got all its loyal footsoldiers reselected for Holyrood next year. It has forced all critics out of the party. It has watched Alba stutter and die. It has won everything.
Now it stands in the ruins and what it won doesn’t look worth winning. It has no ideas, it has no energy, it has no talent, it has little support. It is a faction that cannibalised a party, a party now stripped of all dissent with what is left is barely worth having.
So let’s by all means talk about childcare in the Scottish Parliament. In fact, no, let’s talk about what it means to have a family-friendly society. Countries that achieve this get better outcomes than countries that don’t. There are a million reasons that life should’t be such a brutal trade-off between family and work.
But don’t kid on that this is the reason Kate Forbes is leaving parliament. She is leaving parliament because she is clever enough to realise that she is stuck inside a party which offers only further decline and failure. That is what we should be taking from this, not that women can’t think straight when a baby is involved.