There are a number of very good reasons that Kate Forbes is not standing for SNP leader. Chief amongst them is that she’d lose again. John Swinney is not Humza Yousaf. He has been an MP or MSP continuously since 1997, led the party through four difficult years in the early 2000s, and spent seven years as Alex Salmond’s right-hand man then eight at the side of Nicola Sturgeon. He is liked across the factions and respected for his decades of service to the party. There is probably no one who could beat him.
Another calculation that Forbes will have considered is that her party is careening towards a general election in which it is expected to lose a sizeable number of seats. Although neither she nor Swinney could be blamed for the scale of potential losses, it is still a less than auspicious start to a leadership. Better to let that particular clobbering go on Swinney’s Wikipedia page rather than hers.
SNP progressives, like progressives elsewhere, are not respecters of conscience
Then there is the chance of a return to the frontbench, something hinted at in Swinney’s leadership launch speech in Edinburgh this morning. A cabinet post would hand Forbes the opportunity to reacquaint herself with the party membership (and the public) as a senior figure in the SNP, rather than a backbencher associated with criticism of the party leadership and government policy. With sufficient smarts and gumption, a cabinet minister can contribute to leadership and help shape policy. Forbes can re-establish herself in the minds of members as both a team player and a big beast.
If Swinney hadn’t put himself up, Forbes would have stood a better chance, but there remains a stubborn stumbling block for her. She is a Bible-believing Christian, with all that entails for things like same-sex marriage and transgender identity. Forbes’s honesty about her convictions sunk her campaign last time, with plentiful help from a Scottish news media that abandoned all pretence of fairness or objectivity. Her failure to toe the line on these issues has earned her enemies within as well as outside the party. SNP progressives, like progressives elsewhere, are not respecters of conscience or tolerators of dissent. Theirs is a public, totalising faith. You must recite the catechism or you are a heretic.
This hostility to Forbes is counter-productive. She is a young, Gaelic-speaking Cambridge graduate who talks fluently about the party’s ideals but is also capable of appealing to the cautious, independence-sceptical voters of Middle Scotland. Winning those voters is the surest way to build a sustained majority for independence and prise a referendum from Westminster. The purity spiral into which the SNP has got itself over Forbes is largely a product of elite politics. Among the electorate, including the vast majority who do not share her religious convictions, few would withhold their vote for the SNP solely on the basis that Forbes does not sign up to gender identity ideology. Unfortunately for Forbes, and unjust as it might seem to her, if she ever hopes to become leader, she will have to overcome this stumbling block.
That is not an impossible task. It could be that the SNP declines even more precipitously under Swinney and enough parliamentarians and activists fear losing power at Holyrood to put aside their misgivings and support a future Forbes leadership bid. It could equally be that, given a few more years, and with the emergence of more evidence about the harms of gender ideology and puberty blockers, this dogma no longer holds the same sway it currently does within the parliamentary group and the activist base. Not impossible, then, but difficult. The ideological orientation of elites changes over time but instead of bringing vindication to dissenting voices, it is often accompanied by a common desire to ‘move on’. The presence of the conscientious objector reminds too many that what they did was objectionable.
There is also the fact that Forbes is a gifted woman. I hate to labour that point because she’s also a separatist and therefore hopelessly wrong about the constitution. I know, too, that every time I say nice things about her it wrecks her nationalist street cred, and I’m truly sorry about that. But you have to wonder what appeal Holyrood could possibly hold for her if her Christian faith will forever exclude her from the top job. The Scottish parliament is not exactly a hotbed of political talent nor overly burdened with big thinkers. It is only a few months since Forbes’ fellow Gael and one-man Scottish Tory brains trust Donald Cameron quit to become a UK government minister.
It would be an awful shame for Scottish politics to lose Forbes, and I hope it doesn’t happen. I’d like to go on pointing out her talents and potential, even if she would much rather that I didn’t. But constantly bumping up against a faith-based glass ceiling can’t be pleasant, especially when it allows much less able people to rise above you. I don’t care how practiced you are at resisting temptation, the thought must occur that you could have a top-flight career in any number of other professions instead of being treated like this. And if the SNP cannot forgive Kate Forbes her epistemic trespasses, she may one day give in to that temptation.
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