The SNP needs to get real about the right-wing

The Scottish nationalist MP Mhairi Black was also at it. The SNP is a progressive party, she said, and any move to the right would destroy the main motivation many party activists have for being involved. The party’s policy chief Toni Giugliano said something similar. “Any lurch to the right, even by an inch, would be game over,” he said.

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The question is though: what exactly do these people mean by “the right”? Mr Giugliano said any leadership hopeful with “rigorous religious beliefs” would need to give clear assurances that the beliefs wouldn’t ­influence their policy direction, and we know who he’s referring to here. Is the implication that “right-wing” means Christian? Is Kate Forbes right-wing?

The concerns of the likes of Ms Black and Mr Giugliano are also based on a somewhat shaky premise that the party is currently left-wing. Ms Black said Nicola Sturgeon’s greatest achievement was to help make the SNP  more progressive and cited examples such as the Scottish child payment, income tax policy, and gender reform, among other things.

But is that accurate? The difference in income tax policy between Scotland and the rest of the UK is marginal at most – some might say tokenistic – and the SNP has still not reformed the distinctly anti-progressive council tax despite promising many times to do so. The actual left in the Yes movement would also be correct to point out there’s been no significant left-wing reform on land reform or the education attainment gap. And the idea that gender reform is left-wing or progressive would be contested vigorously by many of the left-wing, progressive feminists who oppose it.

We then have to deal with the idea that the SNP would be damaged by a so-called “lurch to the right”. Ms Black says any attempt to move the party to the right-wing would destroy the main motivation many activists have for chapping doors. “Take that reason away,” she said, “and you’ll very quickly find no-one under the age of 35 willing to deliver any of your leaflets.”

But again: is that accurate? The latest polls show most of the recent rise in support Scottish Labour has seen has come from No voters, which suggests the main driving motivation for how many Scots vote remains the constitution rather than where you are on the left/right axis. And are we really to believe that if Labour went super-left-wing, lots more Yes voters would support them? It seems unlikely because it is – still – all about independence and the activists Ms Black is worried about are much more likely to stick with the SNP that she thinks they are.

We should also be careful about what we define as right-wing and how quickly we up the ante with phrases such as “far right” or “fascist”. As I say, the critics of the gender reforms have often faced the accusation they are far-right or fascists. But I’ve spoken to many of them, including the protesters who were out in force at Holyrood last December, and what I’ve generally found is that they tend to come from a left-leaning feminist tradition. Far away from far right.

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The fact that the critics of these left-leaning feminists – and others such as Keir Starmer – still label them right-wing anyway is problematic for a number of reasons. First of all, it conflates “right-wing” with “bad”, which is rather insulting to the hundreds of thousands of voters who may lean right on some issues but aren’t very different to the thousands of voters who lean left. Right-wing should be a description, not a slur.

Secondly, phrases such as far-right and fascist should be reserved for people who are genuinely far-right or fascists. One of the first lessons I learned from the wise old chief-subs in my first jobs at the John O’Groat Journal and the Aberdeen Evening Express was that you should reserve extreme words such as “emergency”, “catastrophe” and “shock” for actual emergencies, catastrophes and shocks, otherwise the words lose their meaning and effect. The same applies to words like far-right and fascist.

Ultimately, the SNP should also realise – and for some reason, there are lots of people in the party who haven’t grasped this bit yet – that there are certain rules of politics which cannot be denied. One of them is that all governments eventually go bad and it’s usually around the 10-year mark. For a while, it looked like Nicola Sturgeon might defy that rule, but no: political entropy eventually undermined even her.

The other rule – and it’s even harder to deny – is that political parties win on the centre ground rather than the left or right.  This, combined with the profound awfulness of the Tories, is why Keir Starmer is so far ahead in the polls. The press releases from the Scottish Greens may say Sir Keir is lurching to the right and is guilty of a “sickening betrayal of workers, democracy and Scotland” but the truth is the Labour leader is in the centre-ground, and so is the SNP. And for good reason: the middle is where parties have been successful for the last 40 years.

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So perhaps the real danger here for the SNP, and others, isn’t a lurch to the right, it’s a lurch to the left, or a failure to realise that part of Nicola Sturgeon’s success (putting independence to one side for a minute) is down to policies which have always been distinctly centrist. It’s why some non-nationalists were willing to vote for her.

Mhairi Black and others don’t appear to get this. They also appear to believe that the SNP is somewhere on the left. In fact, with words like “left” and “right”, we all have a responsibility to use them as accurately as we can. The SNP isn’t left-wing and Labour isn’t right-wing. They are modern, centrist, pragmatic parties and that’s why, for the moment, they are the parties most likely to form the next two governments of Scotland.