Swinney, Forbes and what comes next

“You know, this is the same garbage from last week’s game. I’m starting to recognize things.”

– The Odd Couple, Neil Simon

IT was, shall we say, a study in contrasts. This is what normally happens when Scotland is posed against the outside world of which it is only nominally a part.

As the short, sad, strange saga of Humza Yousaf’s fall from power played out, hastily followed by the coronation of John Swinney as SNP leader and Scotland’s seventh first minister, a different story was unfolding in the United States. Faced with a terrifying nationwide outbreak of young people sitting down, American police – famous for their restraint – were steadily dispatched to demonstrate that opposition to genocide merits nothing less than truncheons and rubber bullets.

Amidst the ensuing arrests and assaults, there was no shortage of prominent and respectable voices eager to explain why this unfortunate reaction was entirely necessary, justified and negligible compared to the terroristic violence of pitching some tents and suggesting that the ongoing eradication of Gaza and its people is not a Good Thing. 

The student protestors who comprised the pro-Palestinian encampments have responded to both the boots upon their necks and those who prefer to attack them from a more cowardly distance with astonishing courage, articulacy and defiance. They have been threatened with the loss of their education, their future employment, their liberty and worse, been condemned by everyone from their university administration to the White House itself, and have pretty much shrugged it off. They know what they stand for, they know what they are demanding, and they have so far refused to budge, whether physically or in principle. That is power.

Meanwhile, in Scotland, John Swinney talked about compromise.

Given this context, you may understand why some of us found it difficult to get invested in the latest spasming sideshow of our national politics. Like a not-insignificant swathe of the independence movement these days, you need to pay me to care about the SNP (which reminds me, Mike – non-sequential bills, please). As the journalist Jamie Maxwell noted in Jacobin recently, “the fight for Scottish sovereignty has, for the time being, been lost”, and the tragicomic travails of the party that was meant to be its vehicle now matter only because of the harm that could be done as it attempts to course-correct.

Somehow, Forbes returned

In his inaugural speech to Holyrood, we were treated to the spectacle of John Swinney – arguably one of Scotland’s most prosaic politicians, who is as likely to be mistaken for a platypus as a Marxist – quoting the legendary communist poet Hamish Henderson. For all the cognitive dissonance, this was hardly unprecedented (I once watched Nicola Sturgeon crib a line from Raymond Williams, which took some nerve) and perhaps even grimly appropriate: the SNP, resolutely un-radical in policy and temperament, nevertheless seeks to bring about the break-up of Britain, the most radical constitutional position imaginable. To square this circle, what else can be done but fall back on borrowed rhetoric?

Recognising that his will be a minority government, Swinney emphasised his desire to “reach out to others to make things happen”, bemoaning how “intensely polarised” our parliament had become. He stood before the chamber a changed man, he proclaimed, and vowed to leave adversarial politics behind him. It will be interesting to see if his opponents extend him the same courtesy – one does not bring a renewed commitment to collaboration to a gunfight.

Performative proof of this apparent eagerness to come together and heal division came, of course, in the form of Kate Forbes. The politician who a noisome minority hoped would finally repudiate the legacy of Nicola Sturgeon and the hazily defined progressivism they associate with it now stands as deputy to a first minister widely perceived as symbolising continuity with Sturgeon’s regime. How did this come to this?

When Forbes confirmed that she would not be standing for leader, the reaction from her praetorian guard of media boosters could roughly be divided by foresight (and possibly blood pressure). Having been deprived once again of the Forbes-led SNP they had lovingly constructed in their collective mind palace, along with all the vengeful fantasies they imagined it would bring to life, much rending of garments ensued among her more evangelical proponents.

Conversely, others concluded that leadership of the SNP at present may be a poisoned chalice, and that Forbes would be better placed to have another stab at the role in the aftermath of the hammering the SNP is expected to receive in the upcoming general election. This, her more pragmatic sycophants comforted themselves, was not a disappointment so much as a triumph delayed.

Anyone clinging to this theory, however, must grapple with the fact that Forbes is now the second-most senior member of John Swinney’s government, and will therefore be linked to anything which takes place under its remit. Forbes may have had successfully dissociated herself from the Sturgeon years – mainly because her supporters were more than happy to help her do it – but that might not be so easy a second time.

Party like it’s 1900    

Until then, the problem facing Forbes is still the problem with Forbes. As became unavoidable during her losing leadership campaign last year, the Free Church of Scotland member is an opponent of trans rights and gay marriage, as well as abortion and having children out of wedlock. Asked after her promotion to deputy first minister if she had “a message directly to the LGBT community in Scotland”, Forbes responded with a string of words that, as many pointed out, in no way answered the question.   

This could be the result of learning from experience – last time Kate Forbes spoke plainly on matters concerning Scotland’s LGBT+ community, an anonymous source within her own campaign team summed it up nicely: “She has fucked it.” 

That such criticism still dogs Forbes remains a source of outrage for Forbes backers, whose never-ending quest continues for the political equivalent of a note from the school nurse: “Dear polity of Scotland – please excuse Kate from accusations of prejudice, due to her religious convictions…” 

It has been argued that some, if not all of Forbes’ views are “a function of her Christianity, not her politics.” Frankly, it doesn’t matter if they’re a function of her kidneys – there is no situation in which putting those views in a position of power is anything less than terrifying, unless you care nothing for the vulnerable and marginalised people they terrify (and make no mistake, there are plenty who do not). Hence, we get the usual rejoinder from Forbes’ volunteer publicists: She may hold these beliefs, we are told, but she will not act on them, so there’s no need to worry. Honest.

If some find this less than convincing, it is because many who welcomed Forbes’ elevation to the second highest office in the land are expecting Forbes to act on her beliefs – so much so that they have barely been able to hide their salivating anticipation. 

Between their delight at her regressive convictions and their consistent claim that anyone who criticises them is engaging in a slanderous witch-hunt, her acolytes must therefore reconcile the irreconcilable: the characterisation of Kate Forbes as a crusading social conservative who would eviscerate the rights of the LGBT+ community and return Scotland to the days when even the swings in the playgrounds would be padlocked on the Sabbath is a) completely untrue, and b) why she’s so great. You can argue she isn’t a reactionary extremist or you can idolise her because she is. You cannot do both.

Besides, Forbes has over the past two weeks revealed herself as a politician capable of reading the political landscape and maximising the benefits for her own career (an awkward reality for those among her supporters who habitually use ‘careerist’ as a four-letter word). Having done so, does Forbes think it wise to disappoint the lunatic fringe who have invested their hopes in her to turn back the insidious tide of Wokeness? Given the common assumption that a deal took place between Swinney and his new deputy, what if anything was demanded or promised in exchange for playing her part in Swinney’s grand pantomime of unity?

Death by compromise

This points to larger problems with Swinney’s apparent desire to win some kind of peace within both party and parliament through compromise. Such a plan ignores the fact that his predecessor’s attempt to do the same – albeit in so clumsy a manner that it virtually qualified as slapstick – ended with his ignominious resignation. One does not need hindsight to know that ejecting the Greens was never going to satisfy the SNP’s right flank or Scotland’s legion of angry potatoes, not only because it gave them a whiff of blood in the water, but because these are people who have no interest in compromise. 

Instead, they demand an apocalyptic denouement to the War on Woke – the humiliation and defenestration of the myriad enemies who have haunted their feverish imaginations for years, from those who practice the dark art of ‘identity politics’ (the definition of which not a single one of its moronic critics actually knows or understands) to the irritatingly young, whose pronouns, hair colour and very existence they take as a personal insult. Those who cleave to such a worldview will never be satisfied until such subversives are barred from power, stripped of influence, and required by law to write a personal letter of apology to JK Rowling.  

This attitude extends beyond what is so often airily dismissed as the ‘culture war’: writing in the Spectator this week, Euan McColm wondered if Swinney’s accession to Bute House would “end the SNP’s war on business?” (Here’s a fun question: if there is such a war, who exactly is winning?) 

Despite his claim that he would not assume the office of first minister as a ‘caretaker’, that is absolutely how Swinney saw his erstwhile role as finance secretary; Scottish business ‘leaders’ – no giggling, please – have, on the other hand, always been quite clear that they would prefer a grovelling supplicant. It is difficult to tend to the Scottish economy like a mindful gardener when it is full of weeds demanding to be watered until you die of thirst. Capital only compromises in the interest of its own survival, and Swinney’s government poses no threat to that whatsoever.

It is because of this that justifiable concerns have emerged over the long delayed, still unrealised implementation of national rent controls. The dragging of feet and repeated failure to convincingly explain why this policy has taken so long to put into action stands foremost among the valid criticisms that can be made of the Greens’ tenure in government; arguably, the Living Rent tenants have done more outside of parliament to get and keep rent controls on the agenda than the Greens have done within it. However, even Living Rent have acknowledged that the Greens’ forced exit leaves the future of rent controls more uncertain than ever. If Swinney’s new administration is to stand with the Scottish people against the currently untrammelled spectre of landlordism, there has been so sign of it so far.

The bare minimum

It is uncontroversial to suggest that the reign of John Swinney as first minister and SNP leader, however long it turns out to be, will be judged according to a pretty low bar. And yet.

Midway through Humza Yousaf’s premiership, Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and the Palestinian people emerged as the defining political litmus test in the world right now. Despite a tenure in Bute House replete with failures and unforced errors, Yousaf – whose parents-in-law fled Gaza for Scotland in early November last year, after weeks trapped under siege – passed that test as few other politicians in the UK have.

Under his leadership, the SNP established itself as the only major party in the UK (Sinn Fein, of course, do not operate within the UK, but within a regrettably delayed republic) that favours a ceasefire in Gaza without caveat. For his forthright advocacy of Palestinian survival, unremitting racism and Islamophobia was Yousaf’s reward.

I have no idea whether the SNP’s position on Gaza – perhaps the one remaining distinguishing feature of the party compatible with the Left that has not been sacrificed or placed in jeopardy – will stay the same, or if it will be prioritised and vocalised to the same degree. Yet as my attention has drifted between developments in Scotland and the unyielding protests which still rage on American campuses, it occurred to me that holding the line on Gaza would require an SNP which understands…

There are some things that cannot be compromised.