CHARLIE WHELAN: SNP leadership race is opening up a whole can of worms
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So it’s farewell Nicola Sturgeon and hello Kate Forbes?
I first met Sturgeon when she was an SNP candidate for Govan in the Holyrood elections as I was making a documentary for STV.
I have to confess that I never considered she could possibly one day be First Minister but what do I know? When I first met the newly elected MP Tony Blair I certainly didn’t think he would ever be Prime Minister.
As a person I always found Nicola Sturgeon a very rounded human being who was more than willing to have joke with me, usually at my expense.
I wish her well in her retirement but her legacy will remain as one who divided this nation rather than bringing it together.
Sturgeon may not have been pushed out but she saw the writing on the wall. She completely misread the mood of the nation over the Gender Recognition Reform Bill which is probably now dead in the water.
The great irony is that the SNP high command knew that they would lose their talented Finance Minister if they didn’t get the bill through before she came back from maternity leave because she would have been forced to resign.
How ironic that this has now blown up in their faces.
Every single one of them knew Kate Forbes as a practising member of the Wee Free church could never support any socially progressive legislation as her views are more from the Stone Age than a new enlightened age.
The sheer hypocrisy of those MSPs who withdrew their support for Kate when she publicly expressed her views is staggering and especially guilty is fellow Highlander Drew Hendry.
With friends like that who need enemies?
The truth is that the Nationalist party is just that, a nationalist party which, as you would expect, has members with views across the political spectrum.
Indeed we should not forget that in its infancy the SNP supported Hitler against the United Kingdom thinking that would advance the cause of Scottish Independence!
Here in the Highlands particularly, our SNP representatives have been on the more conservative wing of the party. No one could accuse Fergus Ewing of being a socialist! And Ash Regan, also standing to be First Minister, sends her kids to private schools!
It’s in the Central Belt where most Scots live and where the main opposition has been the Labour Party that the nationalist party has pretended to be more left wing.
It’s true that the more progressive wing of the Nats probably holds sway but that’s only because of political necessity.
The row over Kate Forbes’ religion has at least laid bare the belief by some that the SNP is a radical left wing party but is in fact a genuine broad church of people whose sole aim is to see the back of the English and a break up of the UK.
This at least now seems further away than ever as people come to realise that a party now so divided will never win the majority support of the Scottish people.
Kate Forbes may well win the election amongst SNP members to become First Minister even though no other modern political party in the UK would elect a leader with such views.
What I don’t doubt is that the voters will not have liked what they’ve seen in the demonisation of the most obviously talented SNP leadership candidate by her so-called comrades and will surely punish them at the ballot box.
The latest polls have a united Labour Party with a very credible leader both here in Scotland and in the UK challenging the nationalists to be the largest party in Scotland.
That’s another Nicola Sturgeon legacy.
• Charlie Whelan is a former spokesman for Gordon Brown.
