Mick Hartley

Scarfgate – the banning of a woman wearing a scarf in suffragette colours – is just the latest sign of the SNP's intolerance of dissent. Susan Dalgety in The Critic:

Leading SNP MP Joanna Cherry spoke for many when she tweeted, “I don’t think the security staff who made this decision should bear sole responsibility. An underlying political culture typified by the #NoDebate lobby and a new misogyny which has been allowed to flourish is what’s at fault. It’s time to address this problem.” 

Cherry — no friend of the First Minister’s — has been an outspoken critic of her party’s plans to introduce self ID, and her career has suffered as a result. A brilliant lawyer, she was dumped as the party’s justice spokesperson in Westminster for her refusal to toe the party’s line on gender ideology. Since then she has become, along with author JK Rowling and former Scottish Labour leader Johann Lamont, the face of the women’s rights campaign in Scotland. 

She was right to point out that there is something even more rotten in the state of Scotland than an attack on women’s sex-based rights. There is a growing political culture that brooks no dissent. At the heart of it, her lips pursed, gathering her wrath, sits the self-identified Lord Protector of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon….

Nicola Sturgeon is no dictator, she’s not even a Trump, but she is an emotional nationalist, whose primary political objective is to leave the UK, no matter the cost. It seems the price we Scots have to pay is blind obedience to the First Minister’s chosen cause, whether it’s independence or gender ideology. 

Those who question the economic and social cost of independence — or are sceptical that a man really can change his sex by filling in a form — risk censure, ridicule or worse. Little wonder that some Scots have enthusiastically joined Sturgeon’s New Model Army, grateful for the crumbs swept off the cabinet table in Bute House. 

The majority, however, remain silent, fearful for their job and their reputation. More than one senior person in business and the public sector has told me, “It’s simply not worth speaking out.” 

This is the underlying political culture that Joanna Cherry fears has infected her country. The evidence bears her out. Scotland — the home of the European enlightenment — has become a country where even the act of wearing a scarf is viewed as seditious.