Reflections on politics of the week
Stephen Flynn yearns for Holyrood; the Women's Equality Party dissolves itself; and a word on Donald Trump's immigrant roots
I think it is probably safest to retire the phrase “Well, what a week” for a while, at least until Donald Trump’s inauguration (presumably the largest ever) on Monday 20 January 2025. As is becoming a regular feature, some smaller stories or those elbowed aside by the bullies of the headlines, to draw readers’ attention briefly, and metaphorically to fold over the corner of the page.
Haste ye back, Stephen Flynn
I am very much not a Scottish nationalist and my Unionism extends from Scotland to Northern Ireland, though of course I accept its dependence on the will of the majority. However, there is an unpleasant streak which runs deep in the Scottish National Party which uses Westminster as a convenient scapegoat for its own failings, consistently abdicates responsibility despite having been in government in Edinburgh for 17 years, arrogates to itself the mantle of patriotism while allowing the inference that Unionism is unpatriotic and at its worst fosters a grim, divisive blood-and-soil kind of nationalism. As a result, I hold my hands up to a predisposition against SNP politicians, though I recognise that some of them are very able. I recently wrote an obituary of Alex Salmond for City A.M., in which I freely acknowledged his significance.
“Wee Eck” was not always an easy man. He could be self-confident to the point of bumptious, overbearing and demanding, and his judgement was far from consistent or reliable. But he was a supremely gifted communicator who made it look easy, and, perhaps the greatest ability of all, he showed that politics could be fun, light-hearted, and yet achieve major change.
In the same vein, I regarded Stewart Hosie, MP for Dundee East from 2005 to 2024 and variously the SNP’s Depute Leader, Treasury spokesman and chief whip in the House of Commons, as a formidable political operator, clever, quick-witted and punchy without succumbing to charmlessness. I also think Angus Robertson, now Cabinet Secretary for the Constitution, External Affairs and Culture in the Scottish Government but MP for Moray 2001-17, is intelligent, articulate and shrewd.
Having laid down those disclaimers, I will be quite honest and say I have not warmed to Stephen Flynn, MP for Aberdeen South and the leader of the SNP group in the House of Commons since December 2022. He is often effective in his role but I find him sharp-edged, opportunist and, to put it kindly, an unreliable narrator, but then, as I am a Conservative and a Unionist, he might well consider that he is doing his job well.
A few days ago, Flynn announced that he would seek election to the Scottish Parliament at the next election, which is scheduled for May 2026. He hopes to secure his party’s nomination for Aberdeen South and North Kincardine, a seat which overlaps with his Westminster constituency, and he seems untroubled at the prospect of challenging his party colleague Audrey Nicoll, who is the incumbent MSP. He did have the grace to say he took “no pleasure” in it, but added “we are a democratic party, this does happen on occasion. It will now be for members to decide the outcome.”
His motivation hardly needs explaining. The general election in July saw the SNP lose 39 of its Westminster seats, meaning that Flynn went from leading a solid phalanx of 48 out of 59 Scottish MPs, to rallying a rag-tag band of nine Members out of 57. There was a 15 per cent swing against the SNP and they are now firmly behind Scottish Labour in second place. The resurgence of the Liberal Democrats also shuffled the SNP back to the fourth largest party in the House of Commons, with a consequent loss of status, opportunities and privileges. So Flynn’s current role is suddenly and substantially less influential and attractive than it was six months ago. To be blunt, it cannot really be said that the remaining SNP Members are the best and brightest; Pete Wishart (Perth and Kinross-shire) retains a talismanic significance because he has been an MP since 2001 and chaired the Scottish Affairs Committee in the last three parliaments; Stephen Gethins (Arbroath and Broughty Ferry) is intelligent and experienced in foreign affairs; otherwise it is an indifferent group.
The SNP is in the doldrums at the moment. Although the weak performance of the Labour government since July has allowed them to eke out a small lead in the opinion polls for the forthcoming Holyrood elections, after occasionally falling behind Labour in the late spring and early summer, 2026 will be a stern test for them. It will mark 19 years in government, under (so far) four leaders, one of whom left the party and died and another of whom is under investigation by the police for various financial matters. Somewhat inevitably, the party looks tired and lacking in purpose. But Flynn is still right to calculate that, for a nationalist, Holyrood is a more promising landscape than Westminster for the foreseeable future. As he put it:
As we make this journey to independence, I believe that we need our strongest voices within Holyrood all pulling in the same direction. I believe that I can contribute as part of that process.
He denies, of course, any ambition to supplant John Swinney, the First Minister, as party leader, though he is in the unenviable situation where he would say that if it wee true but would also have to say the same if it were not. At the very least, he must be aware that Swinney’s leadership might not survive much beyond the 2026 election and he therefore wishes to be able to pick up the pieces if the opportunity presents itself.
All of this is good, clean fun, even if Audrey Nicoll may feel somewhat aggrieved at a party grandee seeking to replace her in her constituency. But Flynn has said that, if he is elected to the Scottish Parliament in May 2026, he will also see out the rest of the Parliament as an MP, although he will not draw two salaries, meaning that he will have a dual mandate potentially until July 2029. There is no statutory prohibition on this, but the SNP, in advance of the 2021 Holyrood elections, changed its internal rules so that MPs were required to resign their seats at Westminster in order to seek even selection as a candidate for the Scottish Parliament. At the time, Joanna Cherry, MP for Edinburgh South West, had hoped to be selected as SNP candidate for the Scottish Parliament constituency of Edinburgh Central, and felt the rule change had been in part designed to favour Angus Robertson, who had already announced he would seek the same nomination. She therefore unhappily abandoned her bid and remained at Westminster (though she was defeated this July).
Flynn is unfazed by this. He has said that he believes the rule preventing dual mandates was “election-specific”, and pointed to other SNP figures who have been MPs and MSPs at the same time, like Alex Salmond and John Swinney. This is deliberate obfuscation, as both exercised their dual mandates well before the 2020 SNP rule change, and many electoral practices which were once permissible are now prohibited. Joanna Cherry, understandably smarting, tweeted that the rule had not been so much “election-specific” as “person-specific” and predicted it would be waived. The party’s National Executive Committee has yet to reach a decision on the issue of dual mandates, but a cynic might be inclined to agree with Cherry and expect that Flynn’s bid will fall within any new rules.
There is more than a whiff of hypocrisy here, though. The former leader of the Scottish Conservatives, Douglas Ross, is currently an MSP for the Highlands and Islands regional list and from 2017 to 2024 was MP for Moray, as well as standing unsuccessfully for the successor constituency of Aberdeenshire North and Moray East in July’s general election. This dual mandate was undoubtedly awkward, especially as Ross was Leader of the Opposition in the Scottish Parliament, and the SNP regularly attacked him for it, accusing him of trying to “have his cake and eat it”. Richard Lochhead, SNP MSP for Moray, demanded in 2021 that Ross “must resign as Moray's MP if he intends to stay on as an MSP”, setting the bar high by adding:
If he insists on staying on as both an MSP and MP, which in this day and age is unacceptable never mind his other job as a linesman, his arrogance and hypocrisy will be his downfall.
Flynn himself, as the SNP’s annual conference in August, joked that Ross, despite no longer being an MP, “still had one too many work commitments”.
There has been criticism from within the SNP’s own ranks. Emma Roddick, MSP for the Highlands and Islands, tweeted with restraint:
Party members set this rule for good reasons. Rightly, Douglas Ross was criticised for holding two roles simultaneously. I hope Stephen Flynn rethinks. Can’t imagine spending half my time in London & being a good MSP. Key that rules apply to everyone equally; men and women.
Others were less measured. A former SNP MP told BBC Scotland “I’m not sure being seen to do Audrey Nicoll out of her job so that he can have two jobs is a smart pitch”, while another colleague ascribed the move to “naked ambition”.
Meanwhile, the SNP’s opponents have understandably made hay. Liam Kerr, the Scottish Conservative justice spokesman, drew attention to the party’s previous stance on dual mandates. “And now, when it suits Stephen Flynn, and it seems to suit the SNP, they decide that it’s all perfectly acceptable in their world… It’s absolute hypocrisy and it’s appalling.” Anas Sarwar, Leader of the Scottish Labour Party, made the same point: dual mandates had been criticised before but “it seems it’s OK when an SNP politician wants to do it”.
It is hard to have much, if any, sympathy for Stephen Flynn. When Douglas Ross held a dual mandate, Flynn and the SNP correctly saw a political vulnerability and exploited it as much as they could. That is the rough-and-tumble of public life. Extraordinarily, though, Flynn is now making sadly pious noises about how “unedifying” criticism from within his own party as well as from opponents has been.
I don’t want to be doing this, I don’t want to be having these discussions on television, trying to defend myself. But that’s the reality of politics sometimes—it’s not pleasant. I’m not going to shy away, I’m not going to be hounded out from standing for what I believe in.
That really is grotesque. No-one is preventing him for “standing for what he believes in”. What is being made very clear is that he is seeking to do exactly that for which he excoriated a political opponent. The plain hypocrisy is made immeasurably more unpalatable by the sanctimony with which he has chosen to combine it, and that it is widely suspected that the whole business is in pursuit of furthering his own career adds a third noxious element.
Flynn has exemplified the worst of his party in this business: hypocritical, duplicitous, arrogant, transactionally ambitious and seeking refuge in victimhood. I dare say he will win his seat at Holyrood and see out his time at Westminster, and I would not be at all surprised if he becomes First Minister at some point in the future. But I am allowed to hope he has to fight hard for it and is put under severe pressure over this matter.
Girls who want boys/Who like boys to be girls?
Following an online special conference, the Women’s Equality Party has voted to dissolve itself. A statement from its Executive Committee blamed financial challenges and an increasingly polarised political atmosphere.
We no longer have the resources we need to drive through the changes we are fighting for as effectively as we once did. We could have tried to wait out this period of turbulence, but that would have diverted energies urgently needed for activism now. Not one of us joined this groundbreaking party because we were content to wait around for equality. We must now find new ways to deliver it.
The WEP was founded by broadcaster Sandi Toksvig and author and journalist Catherine Mayer in March 2015 after conversations at the Women of the World Festival led them to conclude there was a need for a party dedicated to campaigning for gender equality. The initial steering committee appointed journalist Sophie Walker as party leader in July 2015 and she was overwhelmingly confirmed in post at an election in February/March 2018.
The party formally launched itself in October 2015 at the Conway Hall, setting out six objectives:
equal representation in politics, business, industry and throughout working life;
equal pay and an equal opportunity to thrive;
equal parenting and caregiving and shared responsibilities at home to give everyone equal opportunities both in family life and in the work place;
an education system that creates opportunities for all children and an understanding of why this matters;
equal treatment of women by and in the media;
an end to violence against women.
Walker explained that the WEP would take a non-partisan approach to elections, deciding in consultation with its members which seats to contest, and it distinguished itself by offering affiliate membership with other parties. She told the BBC:
We will work with other political parties where they want to work with us and, where we see that other political parties are adopting our goals and taking on our agenda, then we would consider joint candidacies with them.
The party’s first electoral test was the London mayoral election in May 2016, in which Walker was its candidate. She finished sixth, with 53,055 votes (two per cent of the total), beating George Galloway, Leader of the Respect Party and journeyman former MP for Glasgow Hillhead, Glasgow Kelvin, Bethnal Green and Bow and Bradford West. The WEP also won 91,772 votes (3.5 per cent) for the London Assembly. Walker was upbeat.
This party has advanced at breakneck speed—right now we’re just taking stock. We’re about getting the job done. Everything we do is about creating a country where women are equal to men. None of the other political parties talk about women’s needs, lives and experiences in any way other than as a detail… the current political system doesn’t answer women’s questions.
She also claimed that the existence of the WEP had forced other parties to consider gender equality more carefully and improve their policy offerings. However, in the elections for the devolved assemblies in Scotland and Wales, held the same day, the party registered only 0.3 per cent of the vote.
British politics can be a cold climate for new parties. With the exception of the separatist parties and especially the irruption of the SNP in 2015, we still largely operate a tripartite system, or one of two-and-a-half parties, that became prevalent when the Labour Party overtook the Liberals as the main opposition to the Conservative Party in the 1920s. The fate of the Social Democratic Party in its brief life fro 1981 to 1988 is a cautionary tale for any would-be insurgents.
Even so, one has to observe that the WEP never looked like making any serious electoral impact. In London, after possibly promising initial results in 2016, new leader Mandu Reid won only 0.8 per cent in the delayed 2021 mayoral election, coming 10th, although it mustered a slightly better 2.2 per cent for the London Assembly. For the Scottish Parliament elections the same day, only 1,896 cast their votes for the WEP, and it did not contest the Welsh Senedd elections at all.
Nor could it make any headway in elections to the House of Commons, notoriously stony ground for outsiders. In June 2017, the WEP fielded seven candidates, Sophie Walker standing against Conservative MP and outspoken men’s rights campaigner Philip Davies in Shipley. She finished fourth and last with only 1,040 votes, and nationally the party won 3,580 votes. December 2019 was even worse: three candidates collectively received 416 votes, less than fringe groups like the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, the Christian Party and the English Democrats. In July’s general election, with four candidates, the WEP rallied very slightly to register 1,275 votes in total, but again languished deep among the also-rans and no-hopers.
It had been obvious for some time that the concept of a single political party dedicated to gender equality was, for various reasons, not gaining any traction. The WEP Executive Committee’s statement emphasised that, while the party would no longer exist, its members would remain activists championing the same causes.
We will all go on to fight and win the next steps forward for women’s rights. We can’t wait to see the growth that springs up from the movement we have built together over the last decade… the changes we have won will endure. The communities and friendships we have built together will last. The people who we have brought into politics will continue on in this fight. This is our legacy. You are our legacy.
In an interview with The Observer last month, Mandu Reid stressed the influence the WEP had exercised, despite its lack of electoral success.
We have dragged into the mainstream issues that other parties at best overlooked, at worst wantonly ignored… [in 2019] we stood survivors of male violence against MPs who had allegations of abuse or harassment against them that their parties were not investigating. We targeted those seats, gave women a voice, and not a single one of those MPs was returned to Westminster. We effectively performed a laundry service.
I am sceptical, looking at the numbers, that the WEP really had as much impact on the 2019 general election as Reid claims. It may be that its presence induced the mainstream parties to focus more explicitly on gender equality, though it should be noted that there have been two female prime ministers, Theresa May (2016-19) and Liz Truss (2022), during its lifetime, who may have had their own independent views and policies on gender issues.
By definition I can only comment from a male perspective, but I question the concept of asking women to vote for a political party principally on the basis of gender. Of course there are many very serious issues which affect all women and only women, and discrimination and safety affect women across the political spectrum. But for the WEP to be a success in the conventional sense was to expect women potentially to relegate other important issues like wider economic issues, law and order, healthcare, housing, transport and infrastructure, and defence. (Some may make the argument that gender is intrinsic to all of these issues, which I can accept, but when it comes to casting a vote at an election, I’m not sure where that leaves us.) To an extent, the party relied on the expectation that, say, Kemi Badenoch and Zarah Sultana would agree to make common cause on grounds of shared gender, prioritising it above any other consideration.
Whatever one’s analysis, the result is undeniable. The Women’s Equality Party has not worked as a conventional political organisation. No-one would pretend that gender equality is no longer an issue or that problems have all been solved, but there will have to be another approach to them, and I suspect progress will mostly come, as it generally has done, at least through and often from the mainstream parties.
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free
Donald Trump has expressed more strongly nativist and anti-immigration views than any president for generations. As early as 2014, he was warning fellow Republicans that immigrants were “taking your jobs”, and the following year told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough that the number of illegal immigrants in the United States had been seriously underestimated. “I am now hearing it’s 30 million, it could be 34 million, which is a much bigger problem.” (There was no evidence for a number anywhere near this.) When he announced in June 2015 that he was running for president, he made immigration a major theme of his campaign, and his rhetoric was explosive.
The US has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems… When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you, they’re not sending you, they’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
Famously, Trump declared that he would “build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.” By the end of his first term, 455 miles of new barriers had been built along the 1,954-mile border.
For his second presidency, Trump has promised to execute a mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, and he has appointed Tom Homan, formerly acting Director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as “border czar”. Homan said recently:
They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025. Trump comes back in January. I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen.
Moreover, the President-elect has made it clear that the deportation is “not a question of a price tag… we have no choice… there is no price tag”.
No doubt this is a typically cosmopolitan, liberal, globalist observation, but there is an irony that Donald Trump is from more recent immigrant parentage than many presidents. His mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, was born in Tong on the Isle of Lewis and arrived in New York a day after her 18th birthday in 1930, while his paternal grandfather, Frederick (Friedrich) Trump, came from Kallstadt in Bavaria and emigrated to the United States in 1885, aged 16.
Barack Obama, of course, was half-Kenyan, although his father, Barack Obama Sr, only spent the years of his university education (1959-64) in the United States before returning to Kenya. Ronald Reagan had Canadian and English grandmothers, while Woodrow Wilson’s paternal grandparents were from Strabane in County Tyrone and his maternal grandfather was from Paisley.
Trump and Obama are the only presidents since Chester A. Arthur (1881-85) to have a parent born outside the United States. On the other hand, of the 45 men to hold the office of President of the United States (remember, Grover Cleveland, 22nd and 24th, and Donald Trump, 45th and 47th, are double-counted), 23, including Trump have had Scottish ancestry. A melting pot indeed.