'I'm just a wee bam from Grangemouth' says Green leader hopeful Mackay

She worries about the lack of any meaningful legislation emerging from Holyrood this session, despite being the woman behind the creation of Scotland’s abortion buffer zones. The new law hit the headlines globally, and enraged America’s vice-president.

Halfway through lamenting the paucity of ambition at Holyrood, she suddenly stops, realises she’s forgotten her own legislation, and says: “I’m a really bad one for always doing down my own work and thinking, ‘well, that’s done now, what am I doing next?’.”

Mackay suffered – and still suffers – terrifying abuse and intimidation over buffer zones.

Men threatened to rape her. She’s flooded with hate messages. Reports have been made to the police.

Yet unlike many politicians, she has little interest in speaking about the attacks. She doesn’t seek attention or talk of victimhood. Instead, she shrugs her shoulders – quite literally.

Educated to master’s level in marine biology, she even downplays her academic achievements, at one point referring to herself as “just a wee bam from Grangemouth”.

For any politician – especially one like Mackay, who is running to lead the Scottish Green Party – her diffidence is both remarkable and refreshing.

Is she naturally modest? Is she even aware she’s downplaying her achievements? Is this a defence mechanism? A tactic to lure opponents into a false sense of security?

“I’ve always been like that,” she says, “and it frustrates my team sometimes that I don’t take the time to celebrate my achievements. Some of it is absolutely a defence mechanism but I am also really aware that we don’t do anything alone.

“These aren’t just my wins. My team, campaigners and a whole load of the public put effort in too and I am just privileged enough to get to be the voice for some of them. I think there is a need as well to show that anyone could do what we do.”

Gillian Mackay is running to lead the Scottish Green Party

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Mackay is at her childhood home in Grangemouth, relaxed in a black hoodie. If you had to turn her political philosophy into a slogan it’s “Be Nice”. At just 33, she retains her idealism and genuinely wants to put decency back into politics.

Politics favours the loud and aggressive so why did she choose this path in life? “I got into politics entirely by accident,” Mackay explains. “I never wanted to be a politician. I wanted to be a primary teacher.” Her mum, who she lost five years ago, was a music teacher. Mackay wanted to follow in her footsteps.

However, her mum warned her to get another string to her bow rather than simply qualifying as a teacher. “She said that if I was 10 years into my career and decided I didn’t want to teach any more that I’d have something else to do.” So she picked her best subject at school: biology.

She became a marine biologist and ended up studying the seas around the Western Isles. The first flicker of her political awakening happened then. Holyrood “seemed very detached from the small communities there”. Folk from the central belt “didn’t have a clue” about islanders’ concerns.

Her interest in politics piqued, and she applied for a Holyrood internship under a scheme for disabled graduates. Mackay is hearing-impaired. “I should wear my hearing aids, but I can lip-read pretty well – which makes people watching in the Chamber quite fun,” she jokes.

By chance, she was placed with Green MSPs Alison Johnstone and Patrick Harvie – who she’s now running to replace as co-leader. She wasn’t even a Green at this stage.

“We never really had a political education as kids,” she says. “It just wasn’t something done at school. We voted the same way mum and dad did. It’s the same for many communities I represent.”

She’s MSP for Central Scotland, representing former Labour heartlands like East Kilbride, Hamilton, Motherwell, Falkirk and her own hometown Grangemouth. “I found a party that really spoke about kindness and compassion, things that felt very me.”

She was 23, and it was just after the independence referendum. But she hadn’t voted Yes. In 2014, she’d voted No. “I changed my mind,” Mackay says. She dislikes the idea that politicians can’t change their minds. Her biggest worry was the Yes movement finding out she’d voted No. She got some grief, but not much.

Being close to where decisions are taken made her realise how little power Holyrood has, she explains. “If the Western Isles felt remote from Edinburgh, how remote does London feel?”

Anti-abortion protests outside Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow. Image: PA

Bullied

SHE also began to view many of the arguments which persuaded her to vote No as “scaremongering”. Mackay adds: “And actually, things haven’t got any better as a result of still being in the UK.”

Where does her “be kind” approach to the cut-throat world of politics come from? “Definitely my parents. It was instilled in me that kindness goes a long way. You don’t know how someone else’s day in going. You can be having a great day and someone else is having the worst day of their life.”

She pauses, then says: “And I really didn’t enjoy school an awful lot.” She makes another self-deprecating joke about how she wouldn’t get to study marine biology today with the grades she got back then, and adds: “I picked my uni as there was nobody from my school going.”

Was she bullied? “Yes,” she says. “It wasn’t…” she pauses again. “Yeah, it wasn’t great. I was quite happy when I left. So there’s an element in me of ‘just be nice to people’ as it’s a lot easier than being horrible.

“But I can have an argument when I want to. Just ask my colleagues. But we can do that from a point of decency. I try to be like that in the Chamber. I’ve got colleagues who have these ‘Chamber personas’ .

“They’ll take you out at the knees and then as you walk out say ‘oh, how was your weekend?’.

“I’m absolutely not like that. If I disagree with you in the Chamber, I will tell you why but I won’t be an a**e about it. I’ll say, ‘I don’t agree with that idea, and this is what I think instead’. I think the public prefer that. It makes for entertaining social media clips if we’re tearing strips off each other but it doesn’t get anything done. It doesn’t make us any more likely to work with each other if someone is being horrible.”

Mackay and her husband – a “very clever” clinical medical specialist – are expecting their first baby in July. It makes the loss of her own mother all the more painful. Her father is a retired officer with the local council.

Although she’s reluctant to make an issue about the abuse she’s faced, being routinely called “baby killer” wounds her. The attacks hurt much more now that she’s pregnant. “It hits home differently when you’re so focused on getting to the end with nothing bad happening.”

When JD Vance attacked Scotland’s buffer zones, the abuse ramped up. Vance spread misinformation by falsely claiming letters sent by the Scottish Government warned people against praying within their home.

In reality, the letters warned people living within the buffer zone not to do anything which could be seen or heard by patients such as displaying banners or protesting in their garden.

What was the worst that happened? “Rape threats, things like that. Some were saying they knew where I lived. I don’t know whether I dismiss it too readily as part of the job. My family and husband definitely worry more than I do. We’ve had to report some to the police.”

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Religion

HUGE numbers of opponents attacked her looks. She’s regularly accused of being a bigot and anti-religion. “I went to Sunday school every Sunday,” Mackay says with a weary shake of her head.

Is she religious? She still goes to church occasionally. “I like it for the community aspect,” Mackay adds. If pushed, she says she’s “maybe a bit more agnostic than I was”. She and her husband are pondering whether to get their baby christened.

Her dad is a Church of Scotland elder and her husband was raised Catholic. “We had a humanist wedding so we couldn’t offend anyone.”

Mackay’s work on buffer zones ran in parallel to campaigns by young feminists around Britain – like the group Back off Scotland – highlighting religious demonstrations outside NHS facilities providing abortion. “It was affronting to me,” she says. “I just felt terrible for those women.”

She was particularly affected by women NHS staff who had lost babies or had miscarriages and had to walk past protesters. Most didn’t work in reproductive health but in other parts of hospitals.

In Scotland, Mackay explains, most abortions happen in general hospitals, not specific sexual health facilities. So members of the public arriving for routine consultations or operations were also exposed to protests.

“It could be ENT, cardiology, anywhere,” she adds. “That captive audience was massive.” Protests became a “barrier” to staff doing their jobs and patients accessing services. It was also just “cruel”, Mackay says.

“I cannot stand cruelty in any form. Disagree with people but cruelty is not my vibe. The impact this was having on other people was massive.”

Mackay says she has no wish to stop protesters protesting, and the legislation doesn’t silence them. It just moves them away from hospitals. “The whole way through the bill I’ve been saying that there are more appropriate places to make your views known. Please do it there. This isn’t about not having those views. It’s about saying you’re in the wrong place, you’re in a bad place to be doing that. Please go somewhere else.

“I was like ‘come and protest outside Parliament’. If you want to change abortion laws, then we’re the politicians, we can do that. Folk going for appointments can’t, doctors can’t, why not come and see us instead. That happened just once, and I welcomed that they were outside Parliament rather than somewhere else.”

Claims of religion “being erased from society are just inflammatory”. Rather, she says, it’s protesters who are trying to “get rid of anything they find uncomfortable, don’t like, or don’t have an argument for. It’s pure ideology, not reasoned conversation. It’s what the left is accused of with cancel culture and being woke. If being woke is not harassing people outside hospitals, then I’m grand”.

Opposition was “very organised and very well-funded”. It wasn’t, she says, simply old ladies praying. American organisation 40 Days For Life was involved. “There was obviously opposition from the Catholic Church which was also very well organised.”

Vance

She says that “40 Days For Life certainly has money coming from the US. I never thought I’d be defending my legislation against the vice-President of the United States because he decided to take a potshot on a stage in Munich. That was a fun weekend”.

Vance’s attack came “just as we’d literally got out of our 20-week scan. There was another flurry of abuse, but that really cast the net an awful lot wider. Now I’d a whole host of new delights. It ramped up quite a bit. It changed the dynamic as once one starts to ramp up their behaviour the next lot do too and everybody spirals”.

U.S. Vice President JD Vance 

One threatening email even came with the writer’s home address. “That was very kind of them. It did Police Scotland’s work for them.”

She says attacks on her party for defending trans rights involve the same attempt to “erase your viewpoint”. People become “scared” to speak up, she says. “I can’t say I’m immune to that sometimes as well and think ‘will I touch this today? Do I need this today?’. We’ve come to the point where being that voice is actually not the norm any more. We need to be a wee bit braver.”

Mackay says the lives of trans people are now “horrendous. The mental toll is incredible. It’s really heartbreaking. They don’t even know which toilet they can use when they go out. They feel like they’re being erased, like folk are trying to design trans people out of public life which is absolutely awful. There’s not actually words to say how terrible it is because anything I say doesn’t do justice to how they feel”.

Referring to reports that trans men will now be expected to use female toilets, she said: “It doesn’t make women any safer. If you’re worried about men dressing up as women to get access to women’s toilets all you’ve done is made sure that men can walk in.”

She feels the debate about trans people has “reduced women to our biology. That’s excellent feminism – to knock us back years”. Reports have emerged which seem to imply proof of gender can be required before women who appear masculine can use facilities. “That could be any of us at any point,” Mackay says. “Any of us could be challenged.”

This means, she believes, that women are being held up to “unobtainable beauty standards. We’ve gone backwards. We’re going full trad wives”.

She laughs out loud at the suggestion Nicola Sturgeon isn’t a feminist. The buffer zone law – hailed as a major piece of feminist legislation – would have been impossible without the former first minister, Mackay says. “I couldn’t have done that job without her saying ‘right, let’s have some round tables about this’. She signed her government up to not only back the bill but get it through Parliament.

“So to say she isn’t a feminist is just absolutely wild given how integral her support was. She put herself on the line for a first-time MSP who wasn’t even in her party.”

Feminist

MACKAY says that those who attack Sturgeon for not being a feminist “belie their own insecurities. They’re saying things to be the notable critic of Nicola, and who could you pick that’s more notable to be the critic of than Nicola. I think there are folk who haven’t done stuff themselves and are trying to make out that doing nothing is better than doing something”.

She adds: “From the women who are driving the anti-trans side, there’s almost certainly some internalised misogyny.” Mackay also suggested that whether or not male critics were motivated by homophobia and transphobia, “either way, the voices are equally dangerous in terms of eroding trans people’s rights and the situation we’re seeing right now”.

Much of the religious opposition to both her buffer zone legislation and trans rights “overlaps”, Mackay believes. She worries about “abortion rollback” given the political atmosphere.

The overturning of Roe v Wade in America was “an alarm bell that we’re not immune to that happening here. Take your eye off the ball for too long and that’s something which can absolutely happen here because these things are incremental. They come for the easiest group first and it ramps up from there”.

She adds: “I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say this is a real tipping point for rights in the UK, especially when we’re seeing the rhetoric around trans people and migrants at the moment. It’s horrible and not what politics should be about.”

Was it politically savvy to make trans rights so central to the Greens, did it cost them support? “It was the right thing to do,” Mackay says. “If you want a lovely Green mantra: there’s no climate justice without social justice. And who else was going to stand up for these folks if we weren’t?”

The LGBT community “won’t forget”, she says, how politicians in other parties betrayed them. The “heady days” when there was near universal support for LGBT rights at Holyrood “feel long gone. That’s really concerning”.

She fears matters deteriorating through the “rightward slide” of both Labour and the Conservatives, as well as the prospect of Reform performing well at the next Holyrood election.

Mackay says she “thinks” that equal marriage would still be passed if legislated for in the “current Chamber”, but not with the positivity of 2014. “We’ve changed,” she says. “I like to think enough of my colleagues would still repeal Section 28 but I just don’t know.”

In terms of how Scotland’s Parliament functions, Mackay believes “we’ve lost sight of some of those big set pieces of legislation that in other sessions would have been seen as the best thing we did, the crowning glory.

“I’m worried the crowning glory of this session was that we all just sat and had a go at each other for five years.” It’s at this point she remembers her own buffer zone legislation which is now nearly a year old. “I’m really bad for doing down my own work,” Mackay adds.

Green MSP Gillian Mackay at Holyrood. Picture: Gordon Terris /Herald & Times

Reform

THE rise of Reform doesn’t surprise her like it does most MSPs. “I’m appalled that people feel that’s the choice they’ve been left.” However, the way Labour and the Conservatives have governed was “catastrophe after clusterf***.” She says: “It’s baffling how badly things have been handled and the inability to step back and think ‘of course that’s going to be people’s reaction’.”

In Scotland and England, Reform are stealing Tory and Labour votes. “There are also a few from the SNP but not many. It’s a very broad church and I’m sure they’d say themselves that there’s some hanging round the edges from the eons when the party wasn’t aligned to where it’s evolved to now.”

People who haven’t voted before are also opting for Reform, she adds. They want better lives, some hope and feel disenfranchised, she says. Mackay believes the Greens can target these voters.

Certainly, she feels that the SNP could have done more to help people in poverty. “We’re missing ambition from government today.”

Her criticism is relatively muted given how much anger there is within the Greens towards the SNP over Humza Yousaf ending the Bute House agreement. Does she feel the party was stabbed in the back? “Well it definitely wasn’t in the front.”

She’s astonished at the naivety of Yousaf’s decision, which ended his own premiership. “It was a staggering inability to read people and think two steps ahead. We didn’t start the fight.” Removing the Greens meant Yousaf no longer commanded a majority. “It wasn’t the government we lost confidence in,” she adds caustically. “There was a certain amount of bad advice which Humza took, daftly.”

From his cabinet? “I don’t necessarily know it was cabinet. There were others around. I’m kind of sad that was the way he went as there were more things he could have done, good things. He was just very, very silly. He definitely ended his own career early.”

And what now for independence? “Part of the problem is the case is being made for us, not by us, by what is going on down south. Labour have come in and been just as bad as the Tories.

“It’s not bad when the case is made for you, if there’s also active campaigning to make the case yourself too. At the moment it just feels like that’s stalled completely.

“How we get another referendum is the toughest question. How we win is more straightforward as again the case is being made down south.” She favours calling an advisory referendum and then if Yes wins “petitioning to get a proper referendum”.

Her pitch as Green leader focuses on building the party’s base. They’re doing well in big cities, but need to grow in towns and rural Scotland. She worries that the party is seen as too “middle-class and urban-centric”. Focusing on improving poor rural public transport and housing is a position she wants to push. Mackay prefers being out campaigning than stuck in Holyrood.

She wants to broaden the policy areas associated with the Greens, so issues like health – her current portfolio – would get prominence alongside the environment. “There’s a wider set of policies we can and should get into,” she adds.

Economy

THE party must get better at telling working-class voters that it’s on their side, she believes. “It’s about how we communicate. Typically, we’re quite academic, and as just some wee bam from Grangemouth I think there’s a way to speak to communities who might write a lot of politicians off as they don’t sound like them. We speak very technically. We don’t say ‘this means things will be easier for you’. The one thing Reform gets right is that really simple messaging.”

Honesty is also required on issues like heat pumps. The party should admit if policies are going to “be a pest to start with, but in the long term it will do this, this and this for you”.

Mackay adds: “It’s about treating the public as grown-ups. You don’t have to present every policy as wonderful from the word go. That’s how you end up with people sceptical of politics as everyone dresses everything up.”

Does she appreciate voters’ fears that shifting to net zero could see jobs lost or repeat the deindustrialisation of Thatcherism? “Absolutely. I grew up in Grangemouth. Folk who’ve known me since I was tiny are worried about green policies – partly because they’ve been misrepresented – that we’re coming to take everything nice away. That it’s ‘become a hermit, but here’s a heat pump’.” She blames the “right-wing press”, adding: “I don’t want workers to lose their jobs. These are neighbours I’ve known all my life.”

So how do you have a “just transition” which doesn’t destroy jobs and communities? “State involvement,” she says.

What does that mean? Mackay says the state must ensure that for every old fossil fuel job which goes a replacement job is waiting, and that those jobs will exist in the same communities so people don’t have to relocate for employment.

Amid austerity, how does government accomplish that financially? She’d “love” to introduce policies like wealth taxes for individuals and corporations, and equalise dividend and capital gains tax with income tax. “We should have done that while I was in primary school.”

Her economic policies feel quite broad brush, to say the least. “The principle for me is more money in your pocket and jobs staying local. People can interrogate that and decide whether they like it or not. Ultimately you must convince people your policies are better than somebody else’s.”

Should the Greens be more populist, from the left? “We have elements of that at the moment, stuff about taxing billionaires.

“We need to put that further forward. We shouldn’t be comfortable with people having that level of wealth when we have such depths of poverty.”

Claims of the rich fleeing the country if taxes rise are “scaremongering”, she says, adding: “When there’s talk of millionaires leaving I’ve gone ‘and…?’.”

Those who push that line are the commentators “quite happy to get rid of refugees. They’re not good people. They’d sacrifice those with the least to continue making ridiculous amounts of money.

“I don’t know how they sleep at night. It’s callous. It gives me the ick”.

When Mackay has downtime she indulges her inner nerd. She and her husband are into Star Wars cosplay. They’re part of a fan club which dresses up as characters from the franchise and raises money for charities, usually for sick children. She’s got a Jedi outfit and an X-wing fighter pilot’s uniform.

“I’m a massive nerd. People think cosplay is something weird, but it’s generally just bucket-shakes for charity and visiting children’s hospices.”

She’s just finished decorating the nursery. There are Star Wars murals on the wall “complete with Ewoks”.

Her baby is “going to be absolutely spoiled with friends making costumes. Many of our guys make their own costumes”. She adds: “They’re disgustingly talented. I can’t knit to save my life – which is very ungreen.”