John Swinney will unveil his second programme for government in Holyrood today – the first minister of Scotland’s equivalent of the King’s Speech. He will promise measures to cut hospital waiting lists, address climate change, eliminate child poverty and, above all, promote economic growth. But what is more interesting than what is in today’s programme is what has been left out of it. John Swinney has been quietly burying his predecessors’ progressive policies. He would never use the word, but the First Minister is waving farewell to woke.
He has already made it clear he will not resurrect Nicola Sturgeon’s disastrous Gender Recognition Bill. This is the legislation, passed overwhelmingly by the Scottish Parliament in December 2022, which would have allowed 16-year-olds to change their legal sex by making a simple declaration. Swinney remains confused about what a woman is, but he has welcomed last month’s UK Supreme Court ruling that trans women are not women in equalities legislation.
Swinney has also shelved a promise to ban so-called ‘conversion therapy’ in this parliament. This was the Scottish Green party’s fairly transparent attempt to promote gender-affirming care by making it a criminal offence to not affirm it. Dr Hilary Cass condemned the move, arguing that a ban on conversion therapy might leave clinicians and therapists ’frightened’ that they could be prosecuted if they counsel young people that their identity confusion might not be a result of being born in the wrong body.
Few will lament the passing of those quintessentially ‘woke’ measures. But Swinney has also angered some feminists by quietly abandoning Nicola Sturgeon’s bill to outlaw misogyny. In 2022, she commissioned Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws to propose legislation to combat hatred of women, which she duly did – for a reported fee of £1,000 a day. Kennedy advocated a new standalone offence of ‘stirring up hatred of women’. Since threatening and abusive behaviour is already illegal in Scotland, not least under the 2022 Hate Crime Act, it was never entirely clear what this new misogyny law would add.
At any rate, Swinney has now said he will adapt existing hate laws to combat abuse of women. Baroness Kennedy remains unconvinced. ‘We are seeing a retreat,’ she says, ‘from some of these areas that are being characterised as “woke”.’ She is right. Another piece of what she might call ‘woke’ legislation – the planned pilot of trialling rape cases with a jury – has also been quietly dropped. (The Scottish government believed that too many jurors were believing ‘rape myths’, and so coming to the wrong verdict.)
It seems that the Scottish government has, at least subliminally, noted the ‘vibe shift’, as they call it in America. Swinney has realised that voters are losing patience with identity politics and the progressive agenda in general. This may explain why a number of measures to promote net zero are also conspicuous by their absence from today’s programme for government.
The SNP has never been an ideologically left-wing party, but a nationalist one
Swinney has abandoned much of the environmental legislation which Nicola Sturgeon took on board after her Bute House coalition agreement with the Greens. The first minister has dropped the 2021 Heat in Buildings Strategy, which sought to scrap a million gas central heating boilers by 2030. A bill to compel homebuyers to install heat pumps or similar within two years of purchase has also gone up the chimney, along with the law to ban wood-burning stoves. That latter measure ignited a Highland revolt – even including many environmentalists, such as the former Green MSP, Andy Wightman.
Swinney had already binned the SNP’s supposedly legally-binding target of reducing Scottish greenhouse gases by 75 per cent by 2030. They now have no annual targets for cutting carbon dioxide. He’ll promise a raft of measures today to advance carbon capture, ‘green’ the electricity grid and promote investment in wind farms. But Swinney realises that, with Scots facing some of the highest domestic heating bills in the UK, and with thousands of jobs at risk in oil and gas, he cannot afford to go the full Ed Miliband.
There is fierce debate in the SNP about the future of the energy sector following the closure of Scotland’s last remaining oil refinery in Grangemouth. Swinney is under pressure to reverse Nicola Sturgeon’s opposition to new drilling in the North Sea. His deputy, Kate Forbes, claims that the SNP never ruled out new exploration for oil and gas.
The SNP is no longer speaking in the language of student politics. Forbes is a socially conservative politician who opposed gay marriage in 2014 and is anti-abortion. This may seem an extraordinary ideological volte-face, but the SNP has never been an ideologically left-wing party, but a nationalist one. It was, and is, the original populist party. If promoting the cause of independence means shedding some progressive measures, now past their sell-by date, then so be it.
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