STEPHEN DAISLEY: The out-of-touch political dreamers who've now been handed a rude awakening by reality

Daily Mail​

2 days ago

Ten years and a few months ago, I was dispatched to Paisley to try to interview Mhairi Black. I say 'try to' because everywhere we went someone would interrupt to tell the 20 year-old they were voting for her.
It's not easy grilling a candidate on currency options for an independent Scotland when every few minutes a passing stranger suddenly downs their Tesco bags and asks for a selfie.
This was the eve of the 2015 general election and the SNP was poised to sweep Labour from its west-central heartlands.
Nicola Sturgeon was selling out the Hydro. Black was about to become the youngest MP since the Great Reform Act. I still had hair. It was another Scotland.
A decade on, Black says she's done with the SNP and is no longer a member.
She pinpoints 'capitulation on LGBT rights, trans rights in particular' as her reason for leaving, though adds: 'I thought the party could be doing better about Palestine as well'.
Much as I don't share Black's views on gender or Gaza – or a great deal else, for that matter – I respect them.
They're sincerely held.
If you're going to hate anyone in politics, don't hate the ones who disagree with you on principle, hate the ones prepared to agree with you on any principle just to get ahead.
Unfortunately her principles are far removed from those of the median voter, who remains baffled by the notion that someone can 'identify' into a different sex and even more baffled as to how this became a priority for politicians across the land.
Many feel strongly about the deaths in Gaza but for most voters it is nowhere near the top of their concerns, which are dominated by their family, then their social circles, then their neighbourhood, then their country.
Idealists who make a virtue of empathising more with those on the other side of the world get very angry about this. They even invented a term for it, 'hierarchy of death', which seems superfluous when we already had a term for it: human nature.
For the SNP to have clung onto Black's membership subs, it would have had to return to a subject (trans rights) which has caused it no end of internal division and political misery, and adopt an even more strident stance on Israel's military response to the Palestinians' October 7 invasion and murder, rape and abduction of its citizens.
The SNP is a political party, not a moral philosophy seminar. It exists to win elections and, in theory, achieve Scottish independence. What votes would it win by taking Black's advice? What votes is it at risk of losing by not?
The former Paisley and Renfrewshire South MP comes close to identifying the problem herself, when she says: 'If anything, I'm probably a bit more Left-wing than I have been. I don't think I have changed all that much. I feel like the party needs to change a lot more.'
The SNP does have to change, but not in the direction Black wants.
The Nationalists and most other parties have spent the past decade or so breenging off on a tangent about trans rights, systemic racism, Donald Trump and the rest. A correction was long overdue.
This agenda lacked popular consent and stoked resentment among both those who opposed it fiercely and those who protested over so much time and effort being frittered away.
The Supreme Court judgment in For Women Scotland has helped immeasurably. Party leaders and policy-makers were able to point to the ruling and pass responsibility onto the justices. They weren't backsliding, the court was clarifying the law.
For John Swinney, this has been a blessed opportunity to ditch positions he went along with at the time, I've no doubt against his better judgment, but which he knows have gravely damaged his party's standing with the public.
A man with more gumption would have stood up and said something when it mattered, but if Swinney isn't much of a leader – and he certainly isn't – nor is he alone in that category.
During the initial consultation stage for reforming the Gender Recognition Act, a senior politician in one party admitted to me that they didn't understand the issue, or why it was a priority, but they'd be voting for it because they had been told to.
Politics is the trade of dreamers and cynics and while Mhairi Black might be wrong about everything at least she's sincere about it.
She isn't the only dreamer to be rudely awakened lately by political reality.
Maggie Chapman has found herself dumped as the Greens' lead candidate in North East Scotland, replaced by Guy Ingerson, ex oil-and-gas worker turned Net Zero enthusiast.
According to a pet theory of mine, that makes it unlikely that Chapman will be re-elected next May. The theory: a person's likelihood to vote for the Scottish Greens correlates with their proximity to a Pret A Manger.
Edinburgh and Glasgow, home to 11 and six branches of the posh sandwich chain respectively, just so happen to be the Greens' best and second-best performing areas on the regional lists.
Aberdeen, with just two, lags far behind in Green support.
Whether or not my theory holds water (or overpriced coffee), Chapman's Holyrood career appears to be over after years of headline-grabbing pronouncements. Her principles also deserve respect.
Not because they're sincerely held but because we should remain open to ideas from other planets.
When the landmark ruling was handed down in For Women Scotland, Chapman attended a rally to denounce the 'bigotry, prejudice and hatred coming from the Supreme Court'.
She once told an interviewer that allowing eight year olds to change their legal sex was something that 'in principle we should be exploring'.
Following the October 7 attack on Israel, she shared a tweet saying the murderous rampage was not terrorism but 'decolonisation'.
Yes, her views are deranged, but the more pertinent question is how these came to be the views of someone elected to make sure Scots can see a doctor, find a good school for their children, and not get mugged at knifepoint.
The answer is that ideologues like Chapman are not interested in all that boring, quotidian stuff that fixates middle-class taxpayers.
Simply ghastly people, those bourgeois types, with their petrol-guzzling cars, their authoritarian demands for more police on the streets, and their grasping fixation with ambition and acquisition.
Don't they know there are more important issues in the world?
There are far too many in Holyrood or keen to get there who think like this. For them, life is just one long university debating society match, in which enlightened elites like them exchange barbs and bon mots over affairs of state.
The little people might fret about bills and savings and leaving an inheritance for their children, but they are above such vulgar materialism.
They are here to change the world, you know.
In my observation, those most keen to change the world tend to have the least experience of it.
They make terrible politicians because they quickly find out the world doesn't work the way they want and they resent the voters for that.
If the voters set the agenda in politics, Mhairi Black and Maggie Chapman wouldn't be the only ones in our insular, self-righteous governing class that would be stampeding for the exit.
Democracy is still the most radical idea of all. Maybe one day we'll give it a try.