Then you agree that Humza Yousaf, a member of a stone age religious cult also cannot be leader?

It's polar opposite of American politics, they seem obligated to embrace religion. Whereas UK politics , it's usually downplayed... unless someone openly shares their strong views.

This is how far dow the rabbit hole the SNP are now

this is their definition of "transphobia" or what we use to shut down a debate we dont like

look at point 5 - the denial of a scientific fact :facepalm:
or six ffs


https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FpfSSQkW...png&name=large

yes i am going to get that in Waitrose tomorrow

No I wouldn't, no doubt about it.

I wasn't personally objecting her to being leader, just saying there's no way she could become so because the members and the other MSPs wouldn't accept it

If they would accept Humza then that's on them I guess.

how many rank and file members are there in the snp

I believe it's around 100,000+

Douglas Ross: Sturgeon’s legacy. She didn’t end the Union. Instead, it ended her.

:clap2:

https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images...DE_400x400.jpg

Nicola Sturgeon’s departure as First Minister – though it will be several weeks before she actually goes – has been hailed by many commentators as a boost to unionism. I prefer to view it in a slightly different way: namely, that continued support for the Union did for her.

Her record is that she failed completely to move the dial towards independence from the decisive “once in a generation” (in her words) referendum result of 2014, despite giving it her full attention to the neglect of all other issues.

There is certainly reason to be optimistic about the Union, but not because Sturgeon presented some uniquely capable challenge to it. Her resignation has led to a lot of commentary listing the problems her successor will have to deal with. It’s a shame we never heard more of this while she was in office, because it’s not a short list.

That was obscured for a long while by the SNP’s electoral success and her series of increasingly implausible ploys for trying to bring the independence issue back. When even her own party woke up to the absurdity of her last gasp option of a so-called “de facto referendum”, and were about to ditch it, the game was up.

She was certainly formidable when it came to winning elections and presentation, particularly in the eyes of those who didn’t have direct, daily experience of the disastrous effects of her government.

Those of us who did found that mystifying, as we did claims that she was a good debater. In First Minister’s Questions, she was quick, but with hectoring, deflection and downright abuse – she very seldom answered a direct question or engaged in argument.

Indeed, one of the last straws for the public was seeing her refuse to say, more than a dozen times, that a brutal double rapist who had initially been sent to a women’s prison was a man. Rather than admit her Gender Recognition Reform Bill’s self-ID provisions would compound that sort of threat to women’s rights and safety, she was tying herself in knots over pronouns.

During the progress of the bill there was almost Stalinist repression of internal dissent in the SNP, out-of-hand dismissal of all objections, and evasion and secrecy about detail.

Most of the Scottish media has been slow to call her out on this, her standard operating procedure. She tended to receive similarly scant scrutiny on other policies and even – for Scots, bafflingly – favourable press elsewhere.

She also faced the fact that the Scottish Conservatives were the only opposition party to hold her to account. Labour and the Lib-Dems were dismal at doing so.

They were both whipped to back the GRR Bill, but that wasn’t especially unusual. On most issues their policies have been either largely the same as hers or identical.

The next SNP leader and First Minister will have to deal with the fact that Scotland, under Nicola Sturgeon’s watch, has been polarised. Public discourse has been corroded. Public trust has been lost. Basic services – the NHS, policing, schools, road maintenance, refuse collection, you name it – have gone to rack and ruin. Life expectancy has fallen sharply. We still have, to our shame, by far the worst drug death levels in Europe.

In many areas, the incompetence would be laughable if it didn’t have such serious consequences. The bill for the construction of two ferries that have yet to sail five years after they were supposed to be in service is now approaching half a billion pounds.

Hundreds of millions more was spent on failed privatisations – such as ScotRail and Ferguson Marine – on loans that have already been written off, and on court cases that they were repeatedly warned were hopeless.

All sorts of things – notably a census that proved unfit for purpose – were botched because they diverged from the rest of the UK just for the sake of it.

And there’s more to come. The imminent Deposit Return Scheme, if it goes ahead as designed, will cost untold millions, and probably bankrupt thousands of companies. The SNP still plans to spend well over a billion setting up a National Care Service about which we don’t have even the most basic details.

All while Scotland has become the highest taxed part of the UK. Despite Scotland receiving the biggest block grant ever, and getting more public spending per head than other parts of the kingdom, we get less for it under the SNP.

It’s because these simple truths are now getting more of an airing and that, after Sturgeon’s years in office, people can see that the country is demonstrably worse in almost every respect, that the SNP may finally suffer at the polls.

Many expect Labour to be the beneficiaries. I disagree.

As I said, they have the problem that they are just as complicit as the Nationalists in the discredited GRR Bill. But they’ve fallen into line with them in most other areas too – including breaking their promise not to govern with them at council level.

Their policies, even when they claim a difference, are almost identical – Gordon Brown’s fresh plans for constitutional tinkering, if not as calamitous as independence, would have similarly divisive effects and distract just as much from the real priorities of most Scots.

And in practical, electoral terms, the contest in much of Scotland is between the Conservatives and the SNP. Labour’s support is – or rather, was, until a few years ago – almost entirely concentrated in the Central Belt. In the vast majority of those seats, they are miles behind the SNP.

Sturgeon’s mismanagement had a particularly devastating effect on rural Scotland, farming, fishing and the hugely important whisky industry – the UK’s single biggest food and drink export.

But it’s also been devastating for oil and gas and related industries in the North East, which support around 100,000 jobs directly and are crucial both to energy security and the wider economy.

Its immense resources and skilled workforce should be part of any responsibly managed move to Net Zero, not abandoned.

But that’s true of many other areas where Scotland, with its extraordinary history of intellectual, economic and engineering success, deserves so much better. That record was largely forged since we have been part of the United Kingdom and a clear majority of Scots, having rejected the SNP’s obsessive pursuit of separatism, want that to continue.

The only party that has robustly backed that stance and provided strong opposition during the disastrous years of SNP rule is the Scottish Conservatives. I firmly believe only we can provide the real alternative Scotland needs so badly.

https://conservativehome.com/2023/02...-it-ended-her/

The SNP's treatment of Kate Forbes shames Scotland

Does Kate Forbes’s personal faith preclude her from leading her party or her country?

The commonly accepted view – of Scotland’s politicians, at least – seems to be that it does. In response to a question on how she would have voted on gay marriage had she been an MSP at the time, Forbes said, with punishing honesty, “against”. It triggered an outpouring of carefully choreographed outrage from both supporters and opponents. Add to the charge sheet her opposition to abortion and to self-ID for trans people and you have the perfect hate figure for these woke times.

Yet demands for Forbes to withdraw from the race to succeed Nicola Sturgeon as SNP leader and Scotland’s First Minister are missing the point of what representative government is actually about. A large minority of Scots are Roman Catholics, and a significant proportion of them, as well as followers of many protestant faiths, will sympathise with Forbes’s views on abortion and even same-sex marriage.

Polls have already established that it is Sturgeon and the Scottish Parliament, in pressing ahead with gender recognition reform, who were out of step with the public they represented. But such facts are inconvenient for our politicians, who prefer to believe that society has been recast in their own image. It is they, not Forbes, who risk making Scotland an international, intolerant embarrassment.

Scotland, just like the rest of the country, is more complex than its leaders would have us believe. It is a collection of people with diverse and opposing views, even on those issues that MSPs regard as sacrosanct. It can be easily forgotten that when Westminster, closely followed by Holyrood, legislated for same sex marriage, there was actually a debate. There were votes, with large numbers of MPs voting against. MPs received hundreds of letters from constituents imploring us to oppose the legislation; sent not by demented extremists living in survivalist cults, but from ordinary men and women – respectable, polite, thoughtful, concerned.

It’s likely that a few of those letter-writers have since changed their minds, given that same-sex marriages has led neither to the apocalypse nor to the general collapse of society. Many will have remained irreconciled to this particular reform. That doesn’t make them monsters or homophobes; it makes them a minority with the right to express a view. Isn’t democracy about allowing contrary opinions to be freely expressed?

There is nothing in Kate Forbes’s recent comments to suggest she is remotely inclined to revisit the issue of equal marriage: she merely stated that had she been an MSP at the time her faith would have compelled her to oppose the legislation. As a democrat she would also have accepted the final vote, just as she accepts that gay couples today can get married if they choose.

Ironically, Forbes’s stance is more liberal than that of her detractors who are now revealing that their own, much-vaunted tolerance for other people stops short of tolerating a politician with different views to their own.

The finance secretary’s abilities, her talent, her impressive rise through the ranks, even her potential to appeal to voters outside the SNP’s traditional orbit – a skill that one assumed would be considered gold dust in these difficult times for the nationalist movement – are of no value when placed next to the accusation that she holds opinions on some cultural issues which are shared by many, many Scots.

We’ve been down this path before, leaving many political careers by the wayside. Tim Farron, as leader of the Liberal Democrats, proved that it was nigh impossible for an evangelical Christian to lead a major political party when he was plagued by questions as to whether homosexual sex was a “sin” (a concept that was alien even to his interrogators).

Sixty years ago, in the United States, John F Kennedy was considered by many to be unfit for the office of the presidency because of his Catholic faith: he would inevitably owe his loyalty to the Vatican, not the constitution, they erroneously claimed.

Given the chance, Scotland’s voters would judge Forbes’s leadership on her stewardship of the Scottish Parliament’s key functions, not on her personal faith. Because ordinary members of the public either hold, or know other people who hold, the same views as Kate Forbes. And because they are rather more in tune with reality than their politicians, they see no threat to anyone’s civil liberties or rights as a consequence of those views.



https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/other...258af48d874271

Good summation of the situation,, I don't agree with some of her views specfically on gay marriage and abortion but she is entitled to her views as she sees them

I always find it odd that only some people of faith are questioned about their stances on these issues while others slide away scot free.....pun intended

Id imagine most Scots would admire her faith and not hold it against her and most scots are smart enough to realise she isnt going to bring her faith into any policy

and unlike that weasel Yousaf she would not lie and run away when a vote hit parliament

Angela Merkel, opposed same sex marriage but accepted the democratic decision to introduce it.

The SNP need to state what they will do about the economy, health and education and forget about minority bollocks for Twitter likes

The SNP was fractured before Nicky threw in the towel. In this one, i actually agree with Alex Salmond. If independence is the ultimate aim, it has to be completely separate from every day politics. Now what they have is people that want independence, but can't agree on anything else :laugh:

Kate Forbes
Should Quit the Race

It is getting worse each day for her

NO

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/...g?imwidth=1280

anyone without 100 votes will be out tomorrow anyway

Catholic Church warns of damage to politics after attacks on Forbes

https://www.heraldscotland.com/resou...ds-article-962

PEOPLE of faith will be reluctant to enter politics in the wake of attacks on
Kate Forbes over her moral views, the Catholic Church has warned.

In a dramatic intervention, the church's spokesman in Scotland Peter
Kearney said political parties had helped foster a culture of intolerance
towards people's "religious orientations".

It came as one of the country's most prominent historians Sir Tom Devine
said Ms Forbes should be praised for her "steadfast personal commitment" to
her principles as a backlash began against criticisms of the finance
secretary.

https://www.heraldscotland.com/polit...ttacks-forbes/

yes, its ridiculous to exclude someone for their ideals, also, the wee free kirk is big in the north of scotland which is where the core support for the snp is

What's the general feeling on Ash Regan? All I know is that sbe resigned in lieu of supporting the gender BS.

Statement from the Free Church
 

I don't think she should quit.
However I'd hope myself she doesn't win.

There's no way I'd be able to support her for her stance on a fair few issues if I was part of the SNP.
Because all I can see likely from her will be more controversy being highlighted on certain issues.

It will be, in my view, extremely hard to follow Nicola Sturgeon, replacing her with Kate Forbes could end up being disastrous overall for the Party.

Has he been quizzed on his beliefs yet?

Douglas Ross ripped him a new one today :hee:

Bloody hell, I bet he gets in

Liz Truss 2 incoming