Joanna Cherry is wrong about almost everything.
Wrong about independence, wrong about Trident. Wrong about a People’s Vote, wrong about the Internal Market Act. Wrong about Israel, wrong about Catalonia.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Yet I read the news that she is stepping back from frontline politics with disappointment if not surprise. Cherry was defeated in the election, swept away in Labour’s landslide along with 38 other SNP seats.
Assessing the lessons of that result, she has reflected on how intra-party tensions contributed to it.
Former MP Joanna Cherry has raised concerns about the ‘culture of hate’ within the SNP
Writing in a separatist newspaper, she decried ‘a culture of hate’ inside the SNP towards ‘those who dare to disagree’ and urged the party to examine its ‘internal culture’ and ‘the poison that has been allowed to spread’.
Female MPs bear the brunt of social media vitriol and Cherry was no exception. The difference is that much of it came from her own ‘side’: from people within the SNP and pro-independence politics more broadly.
Some of it was vile, frighteningly so. One man was convicted for sending her threatening messages.
If she had known the ‘abuse and harassment’ she would face, she says she would never have stood to be an MP.
Cherry was a thorn in the side of the SNP hierarchy over independence strategy and Alex Salmond, but let’s not be coy about the driver of most of the bile sent her way.
Cherry is a feminist lesbian and a critic of gender identity ideology, which she considers harmful to women and gay and bisexual people.
She tried to warn her party against embracing the doctrine of self-identification, which holds that a man is a woman if he believes himself to be one, and argued for the law to continue protecting sex-based rights, including women-only spaces.
If she was ever hateful in expressing her concerns, I never heard it. Nor did I detect intemperance or prejudice or alarmism in her statements.
She struck me as an emphatic but thoughtful voice making compelling interventions from the perspective of a left-of-centre woman who has spent her life studying and practising the law. She was outspoken. Of course she was. Someone had to be.
But her thoroughly mainstream opinions were met not with the tolerance and pluralism essential to free and open debate but with contumely, contempt and ostracism. She says the party failed to support her.
She was sacked from the Westminster front bench and the rules on MPs contesting Holyrood seats were changed just in time to hobble her bid for the Edinburgh Central candidacy in 2020.
A black mark was very publicly placed against Cherry and this set the tone for her treatment.
That treatment was meted out to a figure whom other parties would have gladly welcomed to their ranks.
Highly regarded advocate, distinguished in government and private practice, a King’s Counsel no less.
A natural parliamentarian who brought Downing Street to heel at the Supreme Court.
When Jacob Rees-Mogg protested Cherry’s sacking and called her ‘one of the most intelligent and careful scrutinisers of government, not just on her party’s benches but in this House’, I could only concur.
I have more respect for Cherry than for some politicians with whom I agree on most issues.
Politicians whom I know to have grave reservations about their party’s position on gender but who keep their heads down for an easy life.
The older I get the more I tire of arid tribalism.
Cherry believes in biological reality, freedom of expression, and Scottish independence. Two out of three ain’t bad.
It’s true that I am a fellow gender atheist but that is not the primary reason I regret Cherry’s withdrawal from active politics.
I feel the same way about Stewart McDonald, who lost his Glasgow South seat on July 4, and he is as ardent a supporter of trans self-identification as they come.
Much more importantly, though, he is like Cherry a person of substance prepared to tell his party some hard truths.
His analysis is that a ‘culture of unseriousness’ has come to take hold in the SNP and Cherry’s diagnosis is much the same, if more brutally worded.
‘If the SNP cannot govern themselves or the country well then they cannot expect people to trust them to deliver an independent Scotland,’ she says.
What the party needs is ‘an infusion of fresh talent that brings with it experience from all walks of life rather than more time-served professional politicians’.
Nicola Sturgeon has faced fierce criticism from Ms Cherry over the way she ran the SNP
And while she won’t stand for Holyrood ‘unless the party addresses the culture of bully and harassment’, her rating of the party’s chances at the next Scottish Parliament election is bracing: ‘Eternal opposition is not for me, and opposition is where the SNP are heading at present.’
The party came to power in 2007 because it projected an air of credibility.
It looked like a government in waiting. Seventeen years later, we’re still waiting.
The root of the problem is Nicola Sturgeon. Hardly an original conclusion from me but I was arguing against her personality cult long before it was fashionable and what was true then remains true now.
She was an electoral juggernaut, taking the SNP to unprecedented victories at the ballot box, but while she consolidated power and political capital she failed to use them wisely.
The Sturgeon years are a tale of potential squandered, of idolatry over ideas, of poses over policies. Two decades in office and precious little to show for it.
Where the SNP government has been transformative it has been so for the worse: in education performance, in health outcomes, in drugs deaths.
Sturgeon not only trashed her party’s credibility on governance, she put it in the worst possible position with her reckless constitutional strategy.
By ramping up the rhetoric on indyref2 without a viable plan to deliver it, Sturgeon hardened Unionism within the Labour and Tory parties in a way that will make it harder to secure a Section 30 order in the future.
She did so much to bang on about independence and so little to bring it closer.
There is probably nothing the SNP can do at this point. In all likelihood, and unless Labour fouls up something rotten, the election is already lost.
Matters are out of the Scottish Government’s hands. There’s no money, no big ideas, and no appetite for reform. Just a big clock tick-tick-ticking down to polling day.
The defeat will be generational and the rebuild agonising. SNP politics is losing people like Joanna Cherry, but just as ominous is the calibre of many in the next generation.
Too many MSPs and party office-holders have advanced because of their loyalty to former leaders and their willingness to recite the latest mantras.
They lack strategic intelligence, tactical skill, and a familiarity with that fringe element in Scottish politics known as ‘the voters’.
They lack the ability to speak to or for the nation and there is scarcely a worse predicament for a nationalist party to be in.
They lack credibility and so does their party.
