Alba moves yet another step closer to splitting in two as Ash Regan lodges a Holyrood motion on surrogacy that directly contradicts Alba policy

Ash Regan, with the support of John Mason, has lodged a motion in the Scottish Parliament calling for a total ban on surrogacy.  The Scotsman has reported on the motion, but has completely missed the party political significance of it, which is that it's in direct contradiction of Alba policy as decided at the party conference only a few weeks ago, when a motion on banning surrogacy was rejected.  That rejection was almost inevitable given that the new Alba depute leader Neale Hanvey has spoken publicly about his own past attempts to have children via the surrogacy route - 

"We had three protracted and ultimately failed surrogacy attempts, but it was always clear to me that the genetics of the child were not important. What was important was the provision of a loving home and providing a role model or someone who would believe in the child."

I don't doubt for a moment that Ash Regan genuinely believes in a ban on surrogacy, but she's not a fool and she knows the signal she's sending by lodging a motion in support of a policy that her party has only just rejected.  It's identical to the signal she sent very recently by taking on Chris McEleny as staff at the expense of the public purse, only weeks after the Alba leader Kenny MacAskill had sacked him for gross misconduct.  That signal consists of two fingers in a raised, vertical position.

It was of course McEleny himself who first brought up a surrogacy ban during the Alba depute leadership election - and few people I spoke to at the time doubted that he had only zoned in on the issue because it was so personally sensitive to his sole opponent in the race, who was none other than Neale Hanvey.  To say that there's an ongoing ugliness to Alba's internal politics would be the understatement of the century.

As I pointed out the other day, Regan is systematically putting herself in a state of open rebellion against the Alba leadership and it's hard to see how this ends without a formalised split in the party, with her and McEleny going their own way.  Maybe she's daring MacAskill to sack her or to take disciplinary action against her (that would be a novelty in Alba!) in the hope that it will give her a convenient pretext for launching a new party.  Or maybe she's calculated that he literally can't take any action against her, and she's trying to make a public demonstration of that fact so that she begins to look like a de facto party leader autonomously setting policy for the "Alba parliamentary group of one".  But that's a dangerous game, because if she stays in Alba, she's only twelve months away from losing her seat, at which point she'll no longer be of any great importance and MacAskill, the Tas Tyranny and the Corri Nostra will dump her like a hot brick for disloyalty.  She would then have to choose between starting a new party from a much weaker position, or leaving politics altogether.

My view is that she's being very badly advised by McEleny.  All of the mis-steps she's made in recent months, for example her ill-judged warm words about Reform, have had McEleny's fingerprints all over them.  Whatever "Mad Dog" may be telling her now, you can't make your own party leader irrelevant through sheer force of will.  Assuming she has no interest in returning to the SNP, she has three basic options open to her: a) stay in Alba and accept MacAskill's authority over her, b) make a clean break in a new party, or c) try to emulate Margo MacDonald by standing as an independent.  At the moment she appears to not be choosing any of those options, and that's not a sustainable position.

On the substance of the issue of surrogacy itself, I do personally have some sympathy with a ban.  It's one thing imagining yourself to be happy with a surrogacy agreement before conception occurs, but expecting any woman to be held to that agreement after nine months of pregnancy, then giving birth, and then potentially bonding with the baby, seems to me to be expecting far too much.  The only counterargument I can see is a libertarian one, which is that in a free society people have to be free to make even the most foolish decisions that they may later regret.

But I'd be interested to know how Ash Regan thinks a ban should actually be implemented, ie. who should bear the criminal responsibility for breaching the ban and potentially end up in prison.  As long-term readers of this blog will know, I'm very strongly opposed to Regan's so-called "Unbuyable" bill on prostitution law, which essentially would introduce the Nordic Model.  That's rooted in classical Marxism, because it reimagines all prostitution in an almost metaphysical sense as "male violence against women" (just as classical Marxism reimagines paid work as "wage slavery"), and thus holds that only males can be held criminally responsible for transactions that women have also entered into.  The women are not only absolved of all responsibility for those transactions but are held to be victims of them due to "false consciousness".  It essentially reduces women to the legal equivalent of children who are not permitted to know their own minds or to have any agency.

Would the surrogacy ban work in the same way?  Would the surrogate mother be classed as a victim of a transaction she has freely entered into, and would only those paying her be held criminally responsible?  I certainly couldn't support a system like that - it would be blatantly discriminatory.