Iain MacWhirter gets it wrong again
Speymouth
Former Herald columnist Iain MacWhirter has completed his journey from semi-detached sympathiser with Scottish independence – although he never fully abandoned his delusional hopes of a federal UK – to fully fledged cheerleader for the British establishment. MacWhirter always used to position himself as one of those “critical friends” that the Scottish independence movement seems to have so many of. The Scottish independence movement doesn’t need “critical friends” with a media platform. It needs allies.
MacWhirter stopped being commissioned by the Herald in 2022 following outcry over what many felt was a racist tweet he published about Liz Truss’s cabinet, and he moved on to writing for the right wing Spectator magazine and The Times newspaper, but his rightward and socially conservative leanings were apparent even before then. For someone who wasted so many column inches railing against transitioning, he has himself now fully transitioned into an angry old man shouting at clouds.
Naturally MacWhirter leapt on the anti-trans bandwagon, becoming one of the legion of heterosexual men who suddenly declared themselves voices of authority on issues of sex, gender, feminism, and lesbian and gay rights, promoting the scientifically nonsensical view of biological sex so beloved of the self-declared ‘gender critical’ as binary. It’s not me who described it as scientifically nonsensical, it’s the British Medical Association, which knows a great deal more about human biology than anti-trans activists and commentators.
In essence, biological sex is not binary, as wrongly asserted by anti-trans activists and now the UK Supreme Court, it is bi-modal, a vital difference. Binary implies two absolute states of being, a person must be all one or all the other. Bi-modality implies that variation and gradation is possible between two states of being, two magnetic poles. Human biological sex is bi-modal, while gender, the cultural and social expression of bi-modal biological sex, is complex and multi-faceted.
The phrases “biological woman” and “biological man”, adopted by the UK Supreme Court from the framing of anti-trans activists, ignore the considerable evidence that there’s a biological component to being trans, including the interplay of genetics and epigenetics, prenatal hormone exposure, and brain structure, all of which contribute to shaping gender identity and expression. Anti-trans activists like to portray being trans as a matter of behaviour, exactly as homophobes in the 1980s and 1990s described homosexuality as a “lifestyle choice”.
But this article isn’t about how MacWhirter has been wrong about the trans issue just as he was previously woefully wrong about the prospects of a federal UK, an idea which even he now accepts is a non-starter. As someone who studied human biology and spent many hours as a student in a dissection lab, dissecting human cadavers, scientific illiteracy annoys me intensely, particularly when that scientific illiteracy is used to frame laws, shape public policy, and cause harm and distress through fearmongering.
I had to get that off my chest.
MacWhirter has now found his natural home in the right wing British press, a platform from which he spreads comforting nostrums to Anglo-British nationalists allowing them to continue in their British exceptionalist fantasy that they’re better than lesser nationalists by virtue of not being nationalist at all.
MacWhirter’s latest exercise in being insultingly wrong came in an article he published in The Times newspaper on 4 May. Provocatively entitled “The SNP has always been a Reform for Scotland” MacWhirter argues that the SNP, the very epitome of civic nationalism, is in fact an ethno-nationalist populist party in the mould of Nigel Farage’s limited company.
link to paywall free version here:
MacWhirter writes: “People forget that the SNP was the original national populist party. It has benefited previously from promoting ethnic nationalism.”
The SNP has always shied away from anything that smacks of ethnic nationalism. In this it reflects wider Scottish society. The overwhelming majority of Scots accept as Scottish anyone who has chosen to live in Scotland and throw their lot in with Scotland. People who were brought up in Scotland and who speak with a Scottish accent are pretty much universally accepted as Scottish by other Scots irrespective of their race or ethnicity. The same is true for anyone born in Scotland. Such individuals are not even considered New Scots, they’re just Scots, no qualification necessary.
In this respect it is telling that Scots of Asian heritage, like Humza Yousaf, Labour’s Anas Sarwar or the SNP’s late Bashir Ahmad define themselves as Scots Asian whereas the Asian community in England typically describes itself as British Asian not English Asian. It was after all Bashir Ahmad, the first Scottish Muslim and Scottish Asian MSP who said of being Scottish, “It is not where you are from, it is where you are going.” That sentiment has always been at the bedrock of the SNP. English nationalism is ethnic nationalism in a way Scottish nationalism is not.
The SNP has always promoted an open and inclusive definition of who is a Scot. This is after all a party which was lead until recently by Humza Yousaf, a Scottish Muslim of Asian heritage. His Scottishness has never been questioned by anyone in the SNP, it has only been questioned by the racist fringes of Anglo-British nationalism in Scotland – the kind of people who now support Reform UK.
Further evidence of the non-ethnic nationalist character of the SNP comes from the fact that the party has always supported extending the franchise in Scotland to everyone who is resident here, including migrants and asylum seekers. Equally the SNP has never made an issue out of the fact that in the 2014 independence referendum a majority of those born in Scotland voted Yes. An ethnic nationalist party would not have stopped screaming about this.
MacWhirter went on to claim that the Reform UK battle cry “I want my country back” is the essence of the SNP’s mission statement. There is a world of difference between campaigning for the Scottish Parliament to have the full powers of the Parliament of an independent state and Reform UK’s racist dog whistle. To liken the movement for Scottish independence to a racist dog whistle is insulting and reductive.
However MacWhirter is now in the business of making the English right wing feel better about its own nationalism and doing so by demonising an ‘other’. That in itself is a classic tactic of the populist right which MacWhirter purports to decry.
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