SEX & SAINT NICOLA

You would really have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the way in which the Holyrood government has been hoist by the petard of its fixation with sexual politics. Even as the convicted rapist Isla Bryson (nee Adam Graham) was photographed sporting a well filled codpiece, flowing blonde locks and sabre sized nails, the First Minister was  denouncing sceptics of her policies on sex and gender as homophobes, transphobes and even racists. With Sturgeon moving ever closer to the point of being made to look a complete chump, the gay rights activist, B-List actor and SNP luvvie Alan Cumming was quickly launched to provide some diversionary chaff from the mid-air disaster rapidly engulfing Bute House. Alan, who is no slouch when it comes to virtue signalling, told his followers that he was handing back his OBE as he had just discovered the "toxicity" of the British Empire. Poor Alan's delicate conscience and miniscule intellect may have forced him to disclaim one gong, but he can rest easy with the Iron Cross he will surely receive for distinguished service in the culture wars. As intended, the Times obliged him by giving Cumming the whole of page three of its Saturday edition in Scotland, while pushing Nicola's prat-fall to the bottom of page nine. 

By Sunday 29th January however, even the Times had to recognise it had an absolute stinker on its hands. For whatever one feels about the rights and wrongs of banging up a criminal trans woman with a penis in a women's prison, the story also waved another red flag that is now simply too big to ignore. Which is Sturgeon's clear belief that she herself is the law. 

For a certain type of person, and regardless of political persuasion, there is a distinct whiff of the Wehrmacht about the First Minister which is pure cat-nip. Many of them will fondly recall her authoritative and uncompromising performances at the lectern during the Covid pandemic, which contrasted with the embarrassing cabaret turns in 10 Downing Street. Even some implacable Unionists were moved to admit her sure-footedness. Covid handed Sturgeon the opportunity to give some real substance to her authoritarian instincts: edicts that were presented as guidance south of the border became hard law in the hands of the SNP government. There was also the way that Covid regulations set in Westminster were invariably gold-plated as they were copied and pasted north of the Tweed. Lockdowns were always longer in Scotland and the regulations more intrusive on the grounds that Nicola was more "prudent" and "caring" than those alleged incompetents in London. She did not surrender to the shrill and increasingly demented demands of the Scottish public sector - remember the shameful behaviour of the teaching unions - because as far as she was concerned, she was the public sector.  

Further back, who can forget as well the determined efforts of her government to push through the SNP's "Named Persons Act", despite the near total inability of the cerebrally challenged education minister John Swinney to produce even a basic code of conduct which would have reassured detractors. Branded a "snoopers charter", sceptics criticised the bill for its further and heavy intrusion of the state into the private lives of citizens and their families. The bill was finally killed off in 2019 when it was formally shown beyond doubt to be a breach of human rights under the ECHR, a judgement that had been entirely foreseeable at the legislation's inception. Naturally, Sturgeon learnt nothing from this beyond the need to find some other way to burnish her "progressive" credentials. 

Post Covid, there was nothing, not the care of those medically neglected during the pandemic; nor the education of children left behind by the stupidity of school closures; nor the restitution of businesses torched by the total elimination of social life outside the home, that was more important to Sturgeon than her demented obsession to prove that women and men are sexually interchangeable and therefore biologically the same. Her Gender Recognition Reform act (GRR), which she disingenuously presented as a small bit of administrative tidying, is not the half of it.

For it turns out that the Scottish government and under its aegis the Scottish Prison Service (SPS) has effectively been abusing the existing statute on gender recognition since it was first promulgated. In all the justified outrage (and incredulity) about male bodied trans rapists being placed in women's prisons, a recent court judgement has thrown light on the way Sturgeon seeks to gainsay existing law. This was Lady Haldane's landmark judgement in late 2022 upon the change in the Scottish government's "guidance" on the proposed GRR, itself made in response to those seeking to protect women's rights. The women were further rebuffed as the new guidance stated that for the purposes of the proposed law, there was no distinction between biological sex and gender. Lady Haldane ruled that, notwithstanding an earlier judgement that women and trans folk were distinct categories under the 2010 Equalities Act, the new guidance (and its novel elimination of the differences between biological sex) was "lawful". Men and women in possession of a Gender Recognition certificate, she said, would be considered to be biologically the same as their declared gender for the purposes of law.

Yet by incarcerating offenders like Bryson/Graham in women's prisons the SPS has been behaving as if the Scottish government's new "guidance" (on a piece of legislation still to be passed), already had the force of law. Preposterously, Sturgeon asserted last week that the SPS operates independently of ministerial diktat, while in almost the same breath she insisted Bryson/Graham be conveyed to a men's prison forthwith. Order, counter-order, disorder. But the real point is that Sturgeon thinks the law is whatever corresponds to her interpretation of it. Or, in the absence of a law, it is what she personally decrees.

It's no good blaming Haldane. Some fear her ladyship has gone down the same rabbit hole as Sturgeon. But another interpretation of her ruling is that tho' the law be an ass, there is nothing illegal about elected politicians making it so. The First Minister has taken this one step further by bringing the law into disrepute even before it has been passed.

Nicola Sturgeon has spent nearly her entire adult life espousing the politics of grievance. It has played well with those who genuinely seem to believe that if only Scotland was freed from the oppression of London, all its problems would be solved in a trice. Yet for the lady herself, the experience has been thoroughly corrosive. As a result anyone who criticises or even questions her is accused of bad faith or moral failing. Like a lot of folk with severely limited horizons and an almost complete absence of a mental hinterland, her self righteousness is used to polish her self-esteem. Once you surround such a personality with sycophants as can be found among the ciphers that are her ministers, the governance of the state is in big trouble.

Sturgeon's absolute determination to defend one of the most heavily sand-bagged redoubts of the culture wars suggests that she no longer believes she will be remembered as a transgenic William Wallace. She does however stand a better chance of secular canonisation, like the androgynous Saint Sebastian, her body pierced by the arrows of homophobes and transphobes everywhere. She and her craven and witless fellow travellers in the Scottish Labour Party have chosen not to understand that the objections to the GRR are not transphobic. Instead they are based on (justifiable) fear that the law will be abused by those who wish to rape, assault and otherwise endanger women under the guise of being "women" themselves.

It is not as if her government has explained what is the problem the GRR is designed to address. Her fanaticism would be justifiable if there was some gaping chasm between the rights enjoyed by the "Rainbow Community" and those of the wider citizenry. But there is not. There is not even a crack. Like a lot of so-called "progressives", Sturgeon thinks that difference (and especially sexual difference) is deserving of a special status that trumps that of the ordinary citizen and which elevates the rights of micro-minorities whenever there is a conflict at law. In her world, the rights of a criminal perpetrator should be on a par with those of their victims. What this has got to do with the righting of real injustices is anyone's guess. Instead, it promotes division, erodes our sense of a common citizenry (even of a common humanity) and diminishes our sense of responsibility to one another. It is the politics of self love above all else - live your "best life" and the Devil take the hind-most. 

The crusade of Saint Nicola is politics at its most vacuous and decadent. In any self-respecting democracy both she, her party and their fellow travellers would get a proper thumping at the polls. It may yet happen - and they will deserve it.