TIME to come absolutely clean: I spent many years voting for Scottish Labour.
I still have friends in that party! I knew the late John Smith (and still see some members of his family). I spoke, at the invitation of his children, at Donald Dewar’s memorial service.
I was, and am, that quaint old-fashioned thing, a Scottish socialist. Which is why, frankly, I can never vote Labour again. There have been many attempts to define what the modern Labour party stands for. Not much of it appeals to me. Not much of it would be recognised by those electors who thought they were electing a “Labour” government.
I was shocked at the decision to target pensioners, Waspi women and, reportedly, welfare recipients, in a bid to fill the big black hole left in the Treasury by the Tory government.
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There has been no mention of increasing taxation on the very wealthy or going after the many millions stashed away in tax-avoidance schemes by those who an afford the “right” kind of savvy accountant. Sums which totally dwarf any alleged benefit fraud.
UK governments always say they’ll go after the cheats. They never do.
There are many people in Britain who specialise in defrauding the taxman. Very few are migrants. None of them work at Grangemouth.
And spare me the tearstained pleas of parents who decide to send their kids to private schools in Scotland which are no longer to be given charitable status. Allowing your children to let the great unwashed use your sports fields when you don’t need them is not charity.
Ok, you can certainly argue the brightest and best don’t currently thrive as well as they should in the state system. And given the small window of opportunity our kids have to become properly educated, that matters. Especially to parents.
But surely the answer is to upgrade the state sector, not further privilege the already privileged. If state schooling was the only game in town, things would have to change for the better.
Not least as the avenues to syphon off the cream of the crop would be closed to people who buy private provision. Those with the sharpest elbows would require to deploy them to improve the status quo.
Some elections ago, I concluded that Scottish Independence was the only route for this ancient nation of ours which made any kind of sense. I have since encountered nothing to persuade me otherwise.
My belief in the Scottish nation needing to decide its own future remains unchanged. And unchangeable. It’s called basic democracy.
As for Scottish Labour? As their conference got under way, they thoughtfully gave me yet another reason to abandon their cause.
In the latest Holyrood Sources podcast, Anas Sarwar and his deputy Jackie Baillie seem to have had a collective Damascene conversion to common sense over trans ideology, or, more particularly, to supporting Sandie Peggie.
For those of you in hiding over the past few weeks, Peggie (a nurse in Fife for some three decades) is accused of objecting to a transwoman using what Peggie assumed was a female-only changing room. The transwoman in question has retaliated by questioning the professional behaviour of Ms Peggie. The tribunal resumes in July.
This hiatus has rather conveniently allowed the First Minister and his Health Secretary to say they cannot be expected to comment on matters which have yet to reach a conclusion. A shaky backstop which cannot survive late July.
The Equality Act states, very plainly, that there should be safe, women-only spaces where necessary. You might think that changing rooms, rape crisis centres, women’s aid refuges etc would automatically come into the necessary category.
All of this leaves us with a shedload of questions.
Why did it take so long for Scottish Labour to consider they may have got it wrong in whipping their troops to support self-identification?
(Image: Andrew Milligan/PA)
And in not accepting the amendments of some of their own back benchers. (Though, in fairness, the SNP also rode roughshod over the protestations of some of their own.)
In fact, why did all parties not accept amendments which would have exempted certain categories from the new rights? It takes a lot for me to nod in agreement at Conservative suggestions, but they got that one right.
Why was this legislation railroaded through despite the fact that the electorate – had they been properly and widely consulted – would have been overwhelmingly hostile or, at best, utterly disinterested?
And, not least of all, why did the rights of some 0.4% of the Scottish population, according to the most recent census, appear to trump the rights of some 52% of the electorate – AKA the female populace?
To even raise some of these questions is to invite kneejerk accusations of transphobia. As if, somehow, those of us who have spent a lifetime marching and lobbying for universal rights have suddenly been transformed into bigots.
The other issue you’re not allowed to raise in polite company is men born as such participating in women’s sport. Even though basic logic tells you that a bloke who has gone through puberty as a man is likely to have superior strength and muscle power to any lassie.
Some sporting disciplines have attempted to fix this without bans by asking athletes to both suppress testosterone levels and take female hormones. None of which stopped high-profile female athletes like Martina Navratilova and Sharron Davies from being roundly trashed for the mortal sin of taking a stance.
Nor did it prevent an Italian boxer quitting after just 46 seconds in Paris having been fiercely hit in the face by another competitor who had previously been prevented from competing in an earlier contest over doubts about their eligibility.
It’s a conundrum which has caused many sports to take quite disparate attitudes – how to keep the integrity of female competitions without discriminating against transgender athletes.
I know folks who go around loudly parroting that “transgender women are women”. Actually, transgender women are transgender women, which doesn’t make them at all inferior, just different.
As Professor Robert Winston, who knows a thing or three about biology, famously declared on Question Time, your sex at birth predetermines every cell in your body.
The issue of so-called intersex people is trickier given that they’re often arbitrarily assigned a sex even though their chromosomal make up is outside the “normal” range. Ditto self-describing as non-binary.
This only becomes a hot topic with folk like the South African athlete Caster Semenya who effortlessly destroyed 800-metre fields, but refused to take anything to suppress her testosterone levels and won a court case backing her stance.
Caster was assigned her female identity at birth but has struggled to be accepted as a female competitor; not helped by the fact that when you see her run, she does seem to have many male characteristics.
To say so is not to be transphobic, merely to accept the evidence of your own eyesight. Not to put too fine a point on it, like some of the East German female runners of yore, she runs like a fella. Caster is not unique, but she is one of a very small cohort of people who are likely to emerge as world-class athletes.
As the Labour team address the still faithful this weekend, they will not have been buoyed by recent polling suggesting that Mr Sarwar might have been a wee thing premature in checking out the Bute House facilities.
They might have been surprised too at the number of Scottish benefits and bonuses he’s pledged recently to keep if he wins.
More pressing than which is his relationship to Sir Keir Starmer. Anas keeps insisting that where Scotland is concerned, he’s in charge. Aye, right!
