IN a week when our politics seemed never so tawdry and divorced from the reality of everyday life, one image conveyed hope that Scotland can be better than this. 

It was a picture of Joanna Cherry rising from her party’s Westminster frontbench to deliver a towering, eloquent and heartfelt speech to mark Lesbian Visibility Week. 

Ms Cherry is, by a considerable distance, the best advert for an independent Scotland that the Yes movement possesses. 

Yet she was marginalised by her party and relegated to the backbenches simply for stating the scientific truth – shared by the overwhelming majority of reasonably-minded Scots – that trans women are men.  

What made this image so poignant was that Ms Cherry was surrounded by empty chairs. Not one of her party colleagues had chosen to support their colleague deliver her disquisition. The principle reason for their absence is rooted in the cowardice, misogyny and lesbophobia which has hollowed out the SNP in the Sturgeon/Yousaf era. 

It exposed them as supine frauds. They claim to be supportive of gay and lesbian rights, but only so long as these are secondary to the rights of men who decide they want to be women. Ms Cherry rejects this lie and is thus considered by her party to be the wrong type of lesbian. Shame on them. 

In standing up for women’s and lesbian rights Ms Cherry has endured a campaign of hostility and intimidation orchestrated by the SNP leadership. She has faced threats of sexual violence by former party members resulting in criminal convictions.

Yet her complaints about harassment and bullying continue to be ignored by her party. The SNP’s former leader Nicola Sturgeon couldn’t bring herself to offer support when the threats directed at Ms Cherry became known. 

Happily, under Stephen Flynn’s group leadership at Westminster, the threats and intimidation from some of Ms Cherry’s party colleagues are no longer tolerated.

Mr Flynn has proven himself to be a formidable politician who is one of the tiny few SNP figures who possesses the qualities necessary to lead this psycho party out of the mess it has become under Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf. 

Last week, though, as his colleague stood alone to support lesbians, was not his finest moment. If Mr Flynn wants to be considered authentic leadership material he should have ensured that some of the cowards in the SNP group stood with Joanna Cherry. What an embarrassment to Scotland this shower have become.

Poor political class
CONTRAST Ms Cherry’s display of grace under fire with the absurd and inchoate jostling on show at Holyrood last week. It removed any doubts that our Parliament has been brought low by a political class characterised by mediocrity and mendacity. They have come to represent the worst of Scotland. 

No-one emerged from the Bute House agreement shambles with any credit. Humza Yousaf chose publicly to humiliate his Scottish Green partners in government just a day after endorsing their credentials. How did he think this would play out? 

The First Minister’s supporters insist that their man’s action showed decisive leadership. Yet, if he’d wanted to show true leadership he’d have ditched the Greens long before now. 

Instead, both he and his predecessor preferred the easy option of indulging the misogyny and pseudoscience of the world’s most malevolent Scout troupe to taking heed of the concerns of smart women in their own party.

The Scottish Greens had an opportunity to respond to Mr Yousaf’s clumsiness by reaching for a measure of dignity and proportion. Instead, they talked about reactionary forces of the extreme right wing. Yet, it was their vindictive and crazed reaction to the Cass Review the previous week which made even Mr Yousaf realise they were a liability and an embarrassment. 

Theirs is not a party of progressive values, but of dictatorial contempt for women and working-class communities. 

Ash to the rescue?
HUMZA YOUSAF must resist returning cap in hand to the Scottish Greens over the course of the next few days in a bid to placate them before next week’s no-confidence vote on his leadership. 

The Herald:

Rather, he should accede to the reasonable conditions Ash Regan has set for saving his career. 
When she ran against Mr Yousaf in the SNP leadership contest last year, Ms Regan pledged to end the Bute House agreement and warned of the dangers of sacrificing honesty and integrity to the extreme gender dogma of the Scottish Greens.

In her letter to Mr Yousaf outlining her terms, Ms Regan wrote: “Independence for Scotland, protecting the dignity, safety and rights of women and children, and providing a competent government for our people and businesses across Scotland remain my priorities.”

It’s everything the Scottish Greens reject and truly represents the hopes and aspirations of the overwhelming majority of the Scottish people. 

Wrong on Rwanda
THE Holyrood flea circus shouldn’t be allowed to deflect from the malevolence still being practised by the UK Tories in England. 

When Boris Johnson became leader of this party in 2019, the red flags were all there: professional and personal treachery; borderline racism; laziness; and greed. In several ways, though, Rishi Sunak is even worse than Mr Johnson ever was. 

His Rwanda policy is perhaps the cruellest enactment of any UK Government in the post-war era. It’s deliberately designed to exacerbate the suffering of some of the most vulnerable and marginalised people on the planet. 

And it’s been engineered by bribing a poor African nation with a questionable human rights record to provide an uncertain future for people that the Tories deem to be scum. 

The half-billion-pound cost of this evil policy could have wiped out the people traffickers and slave traders while creating safe routes of entry into the UK for people fleeing wars and famine. 

A smarter and more thoughtful policy would seek to enable refugees, migrants and asylum seekers to plug the yawning gaps appearing in many sectors as a direct result of the Tories’ adherence to the most extreme form of Brexit.