Mick Hartley

Alex Massie in the Times:

Vindication is a dish to be served at any temperature. As he counts his misfortunes from the backbenches, Humza Yousaf may at least reflect that he did his party, and his country, some service when he evicted the Scottish Green Party from government.

If any fresh reminder were needed that this defenestration was overdue, last week it became apparent that the party has purged itself of members who dared to suggest that “sex is a biological reality”.

Members who signed a declaration to that effect last November have been ejected after complaints that tolerating such views risked making the party an unsafe place for its trans and non-binary members.

“The welfare of all our members is our primary concern,” a Greens spokesperson said, and the miscreants who believe in the reality of biological sex were guilty of breaching the party’s membership policy. That policy may be summarised as: thou shalt not insist upon the truth. Science, which is settled on climate change, is mysteriously unable to reach a firm conclusion on the question of whether or not humans can change their sex.

The rebel signatories further asserted that women have sex-based rights of association and organisation, that women should be free to discuss female issues “without being abused, harassed, or intimidated”, that sex-based protections “as set out in the Equality Act” should be maintained, that women are too frequently “subject to discrimination … on the basis of their sex”, and that lesbians “by definition” are “women who are same-sex attracted”.

Since believing these things is now incompatible with membership of the Scottish Green Party we may posit that the Greens do not think lesbians are same-sex attracted, that women do not have sex-based rights and protections, that sex and gender are interchangeable and that sex is not, in fact, any kind of biological reality.

All this being so, even those of us ill-disposed to the Greens should welcome this clarification. There is no need for tactful niceties and no reason to indulge the fiction the Greens are a cuddly party of tree and seal huggers. On the contrary, they are the most ideological, most extremist party represented at Holyrood. Their departure from the coalition certainly shifts the Scottish government to the right but it also places it significantly closer to the median Scottish voter.

Even so, the SNP cannot escape their own responsibility for promulgating magical thinking in defiance of millennia of observable reality. The Scottish government’s lawyers argued in court that sex should no longer be considered “immutable”, regardless of the preposterous, indeed biologically impossible, nature of this assertion. Yousaf, meanwhile, struggled to answer the ostensibly simple question: How many sexes are there?. Little of this was encouraging — these were times when madness was let loose across the land — and all of it demonstrated the extent to which the Scottish government was captured by an extremist ideology that, like all such phenomena, brooks no dissent. The expulsion of members guilty of asserting that, yes, the world is round, demonstrates the extent to which the Green Party is now the political wing of the flat earth society. A cult, in other words.

Massie is just talking about the Scottish Greens, where at least – as far as I'm aware – they haven't had elected councillors shouting "Allahu Akbar" and dedicating their win to the people of Gaza, as happened in Leeds.