The SNP I joined was a broad church - let's not allow it to become a narrow sect

I think Patrick Harvie is a fine politician (his speech in George Square in 2019 was superb) who spends far too much of his time trying to get people expelled from parties, shunned by their peers, or treated as non-persons. It's extremism and it's ugly.https://t.co/ur5SEkiE76

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) February 16, 2021

This is what I was talking about last night - Tom Arthur is directly saying what Patrick Harvie was implying. We can't have people expelled for 'guilt by association'. Whatever people's views on Stuart Campbell (and mine are well known), this is wrong.https://t.co/DTKq88jd5N

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) February 17, 2021

 

Then take it up with Denise. "Not fit to be SNP members" is an appalling thing to be saying about good colleagues, and we know exactly who he's talking about - it's the likes of Kenny MacAskill and Councillor Chris McEleny.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) February 17, 2021

About ten or fifteen years ago, I read quite a bit about the Rwanda genocide of 1994.  One of the key points I learned was that by no means all of the killings were organised - to a large extent ordinary people were relied upon to spontaneously murder their Tutsi neighbours.  That was possible because they had been carefully conditioned to believe that Tutsis were subhuman or verminous, meaning that acts of barbarism that would previously have been unthinkable suddenly seemed acceptable or desirable.  The final step of the process was apparently an official radio broadcast that used "the language of genocide", and that triggered an unimaginable wave of killings.

Now, anticipating the cretinous comments that predictably appear on Twitter after a blogpost like this, I am categorically NOT suggesting that anyone in the SNP is doing anything remotely equivalent to preparing the ground for genocide.  That would be a ludicrous suggestion, I am not making that suggestion, and I hope that is abundantly clear. However, even when the desired outcome is a million times less extreme than genocide, and is merely to remove 'undesirables' from a political party, there are nevertheless similarities in some of the tactics employed.  

Think about what's been happening.  People like Joanna Cherry and Kenny MacAskill are mainstream politicians with mainstream views.  Indeed, Mr MacAskill occupied one of the highest offices in the land (Justice Secretary) for many years, and in international terms was arguably the most famous person in the Scottish Government due to holding the decision-making power over whether the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing should be released. It ought to be unthinkable that people of that sort would ever be suspended or expelled by the SNP, and until very recently it was.  But if we're not very careful, we could be halfway down a path that leads to that outcome.

The ground has been prepared with constant reinforcement of the idea that certain radical feminist views are "transphobic", or the idea that the most popular pro-independence website is so "bigoted" that it must be treated as if it doesn't even exist.  Once enough people accept those claims as normal, you can then become bolder and start naming and shaming individuals whose prominence and popularity would previously have shielded them.  The next step in the process is to change the party's rulebook to at least allow for the interpretation that gender critical views, or a failure to disassociate completely from Wings, should be a disciplinary matter.  The final step is to initiate disciplinary proceedings and get good colleagues suspended or expelled.  And at that point the world really has gone mad, because anyone who takes a step back can see that sharing an article you happen to agree with, or expressing views on the immutability of sex that actually have a decent grounding in the accepted science, is not that big a deal.  By all means disagree with people who do those things, but concluding that you can no longer share the same political party with them is an insane over-reaction.

And even if you do, for some reason, feel that you can no longer work with people who hold alternative views or who conduct themselves in a slightly different way, why not be mature about it and say "no hard feelings, but let's go our separate ways"? Why the need to falsely tar people as "bigots", or as "not fit" for human interaction, and to feel self-righteous as you drive them out?

In truth, though, it would be far better if this madness ended and we all stayed under the same roof.  Remember during the independence referendum when under the Yes banner we had Women for Independence, Labour for Independence, English Scots for Yes, Radical Independence, etc, etc? On what planet was it a bad thing that we had such a broadly-based and united campaign? By the same token, it's a very, very good thing that the SNP contains both radical leftists and centrists, both gender critical feminists and trans activists, both Wings fans and Byres Road coffee collective Bella connoisseurs.  We should celebrate that diversity and make damn sure we don't lose it.  Instead, for some bizarre reason, we seem to be hurtling in the opposite direction.  One morning we'll wake up and find the SNP is a narrow sect, rather than the broad church that it used to be and for the moment just about is.

And, yes, I can already hear the chorus of people saying "so you want transphobes and non-bigots to have parity of esteem?" And that, my friends, is the language of intolerance.  It's the language of exclusion.  It's ultimately the language of expulsion, and that's what it's really been about from the word go.

When I made these points on Twitter last night and this morning, a number of people angrily said to me: "But James, didn't you SEE the Wings article? Don't you UNDERSTAND that it crossed a line?" The problem with that is I actually did read the article, and in spite of my own well-known issues with Stuart, I found it impossible to disagree with 80% of it.  The main thrust of the piece is that Neil Mackay has cynically misrepresented an opinion poll by claiming it proves beyond all doubt that the public back GRA reform and the sacking of Joanna Cherry.  And that's exactly what Mr Mackay has done. I made the point myself (indeed I made it 24 hours before Stuart made it) that the poll questions were hopelessly slanted and leading, and that the results contradicted earlier polling that showed substantial opposition to self-ID.

The main complaints about the piece relate to relatively small sections in which Stuart points out that Mr Mackay comes from a unionist-dominated part of Northern Ireland, and states that Mr Mackay "weaponised" something that happened to his daughter.  Frankly, it's nuts to suggest there's anything illegitimate about drawing attention to someone's place of origin, so I don't take that objection seriously.  When I first read the piece, I did wonder why Stuart was letting himself be distracted with a seemingly irrelevant comment about Mr Mackay's daughter - but "wonder" is the operative word.  I have literally no idea what Stuart meant by "weaponising", and as he didn't explain what he meant, I'm simply in no position to judge whether it was an illegitimate comment or not.  But he can fight his own battles on that one - and that's the nub of the issue.  Stuart Campbell is responsible for his words, not the people who share his articles, or who write other articles for his website.