[Robin McAlpine Blog] This is the one tall tale that matters

[ALBA-Bot]

This is the one tall tale that matters

The world is made of stories. The stories we tell define our past and shape our future. If our stories about the past are wrong, our guide for the future is wrong. We have to understand properly why things didn’t work if we want to not repeat mistakes.

So in the volley of Sturgeon’s book promo/desperate career Hail Mary storytelling, there is an awful lot not to care about and so much of her usual manipulation to roll our eyes at*. But there is one tall tale that is important, one that we need to understand properly if we are to learn anything.

It is the tale of Sturgeon and gender self-ID. If you actually know what happened then you’d quickly come to realise that it was Sturgeon who did the most damage to trans rights, not the gender critical feminists, most of whom started out being sympathetic.

You may not know or remember the details of this so let me recap. I started tracking the gender ID debate in parliament around 2016. It’s not a policy issue I had any deep knowledge of or personal interest in but I tracked it because it was so clearly going to lead to adverse political consequences.

The briefing and the mood music kept changing all the time. Urgency and prevarication seemed interchangeable – in public they were bullish, behind the scenes they had the hand break on. By 2019 I was told reliably by a number of people that there was too much opposition in the SNP group, Sturgeon didn’t want a split and so was desperately trying to make it all go away.

But why were we in this position in the first place? The one thing people who have known Nicola Sturgeon over her long time in the SNP will tell you that she was never noticeably interested in gender politics or issues of sex and sexuality.

In 2000 Wendy Alexander was trying to repeal the homophobic Section 28a (banning the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality). Alexander was right – but Sturgeon tried to avoid giving her the backing she should have had. When Brian Souter ran a private ‘referendum’, Sturgeon said “the result confirmed that many Scots were concerned about repeal” and that the issue was "difficult".

In fact she tried to not support straight abolition and proposed a compromise involving a load of Christian-baiting stuff about the sanctity of marriage and family life being put into legislation. Far from her much-heralded allyship, this would now be considered straightforwardly homophobic and most of the rest of the SNP supported straight repeal.

To be clear, Sturgeon tried to triangulate the gays and the homophobes because of political cowardice. A decade later she was the Deputy Leader of a party which was visibly trying not to outright support gay marriage. This gives you a pretty reasonable sense of the depth of her commitment to LGBT issues.

The more difficult she found it to kick the can further down the road, the more her rhetoric escalated to compensate, constantly adding fuel to the fire

So why the turnaround? Certainly the issue became a cause célèbre of liberal Twitter and Sturgeon is basically an AI that does rapid summaries of the consensus on liberal Twitter. It was also incredibly fashionable and getting photoed on a Pride march was on everyone’s bucket list. I did it in support of the excellent Time for Inclusive Education campaign whom I advised because in 2017 the Scottish Government was still giving no ground on proper support for LGBT education at school.

These are obvious. What I think people miss is Sturgeon’s internal allies. Sturgeon and Murrell operated through fear and punishment beatings and their most aggressive punishers were young, digitally savvy activists – who happened to be strongly committed to trans politics.

Sturgeon’s most effective thug squad had to be kept placated. That (I believe) is why Sturgeon was so quick to announce gender ID legislation and so slow to produce it. She needed their rage, but not the legislative headache. This Mephistophelean bargain would end up in a broom cupboard, as we shall soon see.

This desire to keep her thug squad happy but not at the expense of splitting the party led to a pattern which was really similar to the pattern of her obfuscations over a second independence referendum – the more difficult she found it to kick the can further down the road, the more her rhetoric escalated to compensate, constantly adding fuel to the fire.

Then something else happened; the fall-out of the Salmond trial and the parliamentary inquiry. This nearly finished her career and some of the most dangerous revelations were down to her lack of parliamentary majority when the Greens voted for disclosure.

It is really important to understand the significance of this. Sturgeon was utterly desperate to close down the Scottish Parliament as a body that would scrutinise her and the way to do that was to have an overall majority bound by collective responsibility.

She could have had a parliamentary majority with the Scottish Greens in 2016 (she was only three seats short of a majority and the Greens had six seats). She was not the slightest interested and went on to pass most of her legislation with votes from the Scottish Tories (oh how short are memories in Scottish politics…).

The Bute House Agreement was an anti-transparency move, but it tied her to a party that prioritised gender self-ID over almost any other policy. And that happens round about the same time as we find ourselves in the broom cupboard.

Having failed to progress gender ID legislation for five years, her trans activist hit squad started to smell a rat. They began to get the (correct) impression they were being played. It is hard to understate how threatening to Sturgeon it would have been not only to lose a grouping important to her party management but potentially also turning them into antagonists.

Hence her panicked video filmed in a cupboard. Hence further escalations in her rhetoric. And hence what happened next.

The self-interested way this was driven through public life with no thought other than how it would affect Sturgeon’s personal interests has done nothing but harm to all concerned

That is how we get from the never-never strategy of 2016-2021 to the headlong charge that followed. Just in the same way that nothing anyone could have done would have actually got legislation passed before 2021, now nothing in the world would stop it. The one-sided railroading process which followed is well documented elsewhere so I won’t go through it here.

What it meant was that nothing but nothing but nothing was allowed to interfere with the passing of this legislation in its purest form. All the bollocks now about ‘looking back, had I known…’ is rubbish. She did know, she didn’t care. Her coalition-of-protection was going to implode if she didn’t pass an undiluted version of the legislation.

She passed it, it took about ten minutes before we got real world illustrations of what this refusal to have any caveats to self ID would mean in the real world, the public realised what this looks like in practice, her popularity cratered, she leaves office before the police could arrest her and now she’s out of politics altogether.

But not popular and with her reputation a mess – meaning she’s ready to flip sides again, to give the impression she thinks the whole thing was a bit of a mistake really.

The truth is that Sturgeon was softly homophobic when she thought that was the best electoral calculation, was neutral when it was hard to work out the electoral calculation, was mildly interested when it became fashionable, was vocally interested when it was beneficial for her career, was wildly, madly up for it when her career was at risk, and then was actually sort of against it again once it harmed her reputation.

That’s it. There’s no more to it than this. It involves no soul searching, no ‘journey of discovery’, no tortured debate about the rights and wrongs of any of this – at every single stage Sturgeon has done whatever she thought was best for her and she was more than happy to thrown people under a bus in the process, even though this issue merited care and proper attention.

That is the learning point here. I am furious at all of this because this ego-driven debacle for all concerned has left us all with the impression that this debate could never have been resolved without acrimony. That’s what Sturgeon wants everyone to believe – there was nothing anyone could do, it is just a divisive subject. Not her fault.

I do not believe that. I firmly and steadfastly believe that a proper process undertaken in good faith from an early stage, without manipulation and by treating all sides with respect, by rejecting rather then embracing the most extreme fringes of either side and by accepting that both sides had valid points that required more than an arrogant dismissal, a compromise could have been reached.

It wouldn’t have pleased everyone completely, but it would have worked to hold a much broader coalition together without the culture war mess that resulted, a mess Sturgeon actively encouraged as a way to target her enemies.

I don’t really care much about Sturgeon’s attempts to rewrite history but I do very much care about this. I care because the self-interested way this was driven through public life with no thought other than how it would affect Sturgeon’s personal interests has done nothing but harm to all concerned. The targetting of gender critical women was awful. And now we have an utterly unnecessary backlash against trans people which could have been avoided.

We will face further difficult and polarising issues of public policy in the future. This sorry affair is a case study in how not to resolve them and reframing this as a sort of shrug, a sort of ‘oh well, it was just impossible’ is actively unhelpful. If we don’t learn from this, we will repeat our errors.

 

* Sturgeon bingo:

 

• 
  

  Welling up and crying, making it an emotional rather than a political issue, turning herself into a victim when she was the one with the power, trying to get you to side with her ‘humanity’ through performance.

  
  


• 
  

  Complicated word formations designed to mean the opposite of the truth without a direct lie. ‘Salmond admitted his abuse to me and some of the allegations made me sick’. Nope, Salmond had two fairly minor complaints made against him ten years earlier which were both resolved through the complaints procedure, resulted in him apologising and the complainers accepting that apology. He didn’t ‘admit it to Sturgeon’, he admitted it in public. None of these had anything to do with the ‘allegations that made her sick’, but they are now carefully linked in an intricate web of words.

  
  


• 
  

  The speculative lie. She often wondered if it was Salmond that leaked to the Daily Record. It wasn’t, it was Sturgeon’s people and Salmond was taking legal action to prevent release, plus the journalist concerned has dismissed it. Everyone in Scottish politics knows who is behind the leak, but if only she can come up with a plausible sounding distraction without having to provide any evidence or logical explanation…

  
  


• 
  

  Elaborate processes of self-examination as deflections from having to account for failure by shifting the conversation rapidly away from the failure. For example ‘did you spill the milk?’ – ‘well [use of first name], in recent years I have been thinking really hard about gravity and the role of lactose in the human diet and I think I can say these are complicated subjects’.

  
  


• 
  

  Constant appeals to reason. She was only trying to do the reasonable thing, and it is reasonably reasonable that the reason for her failure was lack of reason on the part of someone else because fundamentally you agree that she is reasonable because she’s said it a lot and by now you’ve forgotten what the thing was and whether you ever through it was reasonable. Because Sturgeon’s reasonable. Right?

  
  


• 
  

  Constant appeals to unreason. Making things that she wants to go away sound incredibly complex and unreasonable through exaggeration. ‘The conspiracy theory is mad because [list of the people involved but stated as if the entire category of person was involved, for example the implication that it was the entire civil service was part of the conspiracy rather than two or three people she was close to, etc]’.

  
  


• 
  

  Respite in the personal. She’s getting divorced so you must shut up. She’s mistakenly calling herself non-binary (not having a gender) when she means bisexual (not having a set sexual preference) but apart from this faux pas so you must shut up. Whatever, just as long as she’s dragged you kicking and screaming into a personal matter where it is reasonable for her then to demand privacy (i.e. you have to shut up).

  
  

[/list]

Source: This is the one tall tale that matters