Ash Regan quit Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP government almost three years ago in protest at the former first minister’s controversial gender reform bill. Regan rose to prominence after she left her role as community safety minister over the legislation and then stood, unsuccessfully, to be leader of the party in 2023 after Sturgeon stepped down. Fast forward about six months and Regan ditched the SNP altogether, defecting to the late Alex Salmond’s Alba party. Now, the pro-independence party’s Holyrood leader speaks to The Spectator about the changing state of politics north of the border, the first in a series of special Coffee House Shots episodes in the run-up to the 2026 Holyrood elections.
It was only a few months ago that Regan contested the Alba party leadership, following the death of Alex Salmond. She narrowly lost to political veteran and Salmond’s deputy, Kenny MacAskill, receiving 48 per cent of the vote to his 52. ‘I think it’s fair to say that his view of where we should be going as a party and my view were quite different,’ she tells me, quick to address the surge of support for Reform in Scotland. ‘I felt that we need, as a party, to really be addressing the public’s concerns. I mean, that’s why people are saying they’re going to be voting Reform – because they’re fed up with the main parties. To my mind, there’s no point going out there and just being a smaller version of the main parties, repeating the same things that they’re saying.’
So in what direction does Regan want Alba to go in the lead-up to next year’s Scottish Parliament elections? ‘Obviously I want us to put a very bold strategy forward on Scottish independence, but the other thing is really the cost of living. I think it feels as if, in Scotland – and I’m sure this is the same in other parts of the UK – that the social contract between the public and the government, and the way the government is delivering, is kind of starting to break down.’
In fact, while Reform is gaining followers in Scotland – a recent Survation poll suggested the party could gain as many as 14 MSPs next year from a standing start – the country’s mainstream parties are holding meetings to discuss how to tear down that support, rather than address the problems that are driving their own voters away. Regan attended First Minister John Swinney’s ‘anti-Reform’ summit last month – but wasn’t impressed: ‘They spent quite a lot of time saying that it wasn’t an anti-Reform summit and yet that’s certainly the way that everybody outside of Holyrood was perceiving it.’
The Glasgow gathering saw Swinney bring together trade union leaders and political opponents, with all of Holyrood’s parties attending except the Scottish Conservatives, whose leader Russell Findlay described the meeting as being used to ‘deflect from the SNP’s dismal record’. Regan found the get-together stifling:
Being in that room – I would consider myself to be ‘anti-woke’ – I would say that it just was very much one view of how Scotland should be. There wasn’t much dissent; there was no debate about anything.
I just thought that these people and the way that they conceptualise things and the way that they think about Scotland is so distant from the average person outside.
It’s a problem that the First Minister thought that that was a good cross-section of people. Reform was excluded. If this is meant to be a democracy, that’s a problem.
Reform’s presence in Scotland has only grown significantly in recent months, but the party was formed in its current state in 2021, the same year as Alba. Polling suggests that Alba could at most have seven MSPs elected at next year’s election, while some forecasts suggest Reform could become the third-largest party north of the border. Does Regan think her lot should take tips from Nigel Farage’s crowd? ‘I’m not sure,’ she admits, ‘because they exist in a very specific media bubble.’
And there is a challenge even to pro-independence parties presented by Farage: ‘We know that people who might consider voting Reform were the type of people who might have voted SNP in times gone by, but also voted for Brexit.’ The threat is real for Alba, which will only stand candidates on the regional list, as opposed to in constituencies – and Reform is expected to pick up most of its support via the list vote.
Yet Regan does find Farage’s ability to ‘shake things up’ refreshing, particularly at a time when, she says, Scottish politics has become so ‘dull’. The way in which Holyrood operates doesn’t help this, Regan says: ‘We are in the run-up to an election. You’re in this sort of limbo situation where everyone’s just waiting to see what’s going to happen next. And I do think that sometimes the things that are debated, and the way that they’re talked about in the Scottish Parliament, is very distant. Sometimes it feels like it’s performative – it’s like virtue-signalling, performative politics where everyone’s trying to out-compete each other to show how perfect they can be on certain issues.’
On the recent Supreme Court ruling, Regan describes how she was attending a secret gathering in Edinburgh to watch the ‘incredibly significant moment’. While she had celebrated with others when the judgment came through with ‘a couple of glasses of fizz’, she described how later in the day she began to feel ‘a bit maudlin about it all’.
‘So many people had lost so much through this fight. You know, I would include myself in that but I’m not alone,’ she added.
There are lots of women – and some men – who have had their reputations trashed over this, where people just stood by or people left them. I mean, Sandie Peggie is a great example of this. People who have been in careers where they’ve had an unblemished service record for, in her case, 30 years – and then she expresses discomfort and disquiet about being forced to change with a biological male in the women’s changing room and she’s suspended from her job. People that have had their publishing deals cancelled; people that have just been cancelled from public life. So much has been lost through this. And it just felt like, in some ways, it was almost ridiculous to have come completely full circle back to what we’ve always known had to be the case. It had to be the case that women were biological women – and that had to be the case in law.
Regan was scathing about the response of the Scottish Parliament – where a majority of MSPs had supported the gender reform bill – to the ruling. No action had been taken a week after the judgment had been made, she said, and gender-critical feminists like herself were ‘still being lectured on our tone’ while the Scottish government dragged its heels on issuing new guidance in line with the ruling. ‘They haven’t even apologised,’ Regan added. ‘I think that shows there’s a deep, deep problem in politics now… If you’ve done something wrong, nobody resigns any more. Nobody takes any accountability for anything – and then we wonder why the public are fed up with politicians and fed up with the main political parties. Well, this is a good example of why: they’ve been gaslighting the public for years.’
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