Sitting on the precipice of World War Three, the SNP response gave me the cringe

Trumpian politics might well turn our sensitive stomachs. I suspect our prime minister finds them as abhorrent as most. Afterall, slugging it out in public is hardly the ‘British way’. But the unedifying scenes in the newly-dubbed ‘Awful Office’ might well have provided a turning point for Keir Starmer, offering a new post-Brexit European order that allows Britain back on the world stage, with our prime minister as the honest broker, acting with integrity and showing how both soft and hard diplomacy is done. 

Perhaps it’s too early to tell if this helps undo all the missteps that have taken Starmer from an historic general election win, just eight months ago, to one of the least-loved political leaders in the UK. And with an erratic occupant of the White House running roughshod over presidential etiquette, normal negotiating rules may not apply. 

But there is one thing for sure and that is that it was a good week for the prime minister, placing himself firmly for peace and with the UK acting as a respected bridge between two presidents. And, by extension, giving us international relevance and a vital link back into European politics, while simultaneously exposing the SNP for its childish rhetoric. No mean achievement in what could have been a disastrous day at the office.

For while the SNP and the Greens played trigger-happy Twitter, demanding to know why Starmer hadn’t taken to Elon Musk’s social media site to condemn the president of the United States for his clear bullying of Volodymyr Zelensky, Starmer himself was doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes as a peacekeeper between two leaders whose public fall-out had the potential to do more damage to global security than just a few knee-jerk tweets.

In this, Starmer has defied expectations. It may have been a low bar, but it was a tightrope he successfully traversed, revealing the skills of a natural diplomat. And for that, he has rightly won cross-party plaudits and European support. He also helped mobilise and deploy an unexpected asset in the King. And while this may be playing to the narcissistic baby in Trump, it seemed to work. For now. 

Conversely, it was not a good week for the SNP. At a moment when it felt like we were sitting on the precipice of World War Three, the SNP response was to call out the PM for not being quick enough to respond on Twitter. It felt petty, ridiculous and small, and in the context of the geopolitics being played out, I, for one, got the cringe.

Meanwhile, a picture, as it so often does, said so much more than a collection of ill-judged words, with first Starmer and then the King shown separately and warmly embracing Zelensky when he flew to the UK directly from his bruising trip to Washington. It didn’t need to be said, but we were on his side.

Speaking on the BBC ahead of a meeting with European leaders he had hastily convened in the aftermath of the row, Starmer responded to questions about how he was handling the complexities of what was a febrile situation by saying: “I’m not going to be diverted by the SNP or others trying to ramp up the rhetoric without really appreciating what is the single most important thing at stake here – we’re talking about peace in Europe.”

It doesn’t get much more serious than that. We are, as the prime minister said, at a crossroads. And this was diplomacy done right. And the SNP would have been wise to have just coalesced around that clear and unambiguous shared ambition of peace rather than attempt to shoehorn its own agenda into a matter that requires a solidarity of approach.

First Minister John Swinney talks a lot about Scotland’s so-called shared values. He repeated it once again in positioning himself as the bastion against the encroachment of the far-right. He said it was time to “draw a line in the sand” against “a politics of fear” and called for parties and civic leaders to come together to agree “a common approach to asserting the values of our country”. 

The SNP has played a leading role in creating an environment of division in Scotland, so excuse me if I am sceptical about an SNP first minister calling for cohesion now, when on the same day that one of his predecessors was publicly bemoaning the fact that, as first minister, she would find herself ignored and talked over by men, I was at a meeting in the parliament full of women ignored by Nicola Sturgeon. Women outrageously labelled bigots, transphobes, homophobes and, most likely, racists. Women who came to talk about how a harmful pursuit of gender ideology championed by Sturgeon has infiltrated public services and allowed women to all but be erased as a sex class. Women who came to talk about the shocking numbers of rapes and sexual assaults in Scottish hospitals. Of female victims who matter so little we don’t even collect the right data, so that of the 276 sexual assaults and 12 rapes reported across 57 of Scotland’s hospitals over a five-year period from 2019 to 2024, we can only assume that is a massive underestimate. Ash Regan, a former community safety minister, described the findings as “state-sanctioned abuse”, which the first minister emphatically rejects. But what else is it? One rape in a hospital is one too many. The SNP has been in power for almost two decades, effectively as a whole generation of baby girls have grown into women burdened by the same all-pervasive threats of sexual violence that I grew up with. They are not even safe in a hospital. Let that sink in. Raped in a place of care in a country of so-called zero tolerance to violence against women and girls, led by a government that pays lip service to equality while it challenges the very definition of what a woman even is. My values don’t condone women being gaslit, hounded, attacked, violated and ignored. My values respect democracy and offer empathy to those who feel disenfranchised, unheard, and set apart. Is it too much to expect my government to uphold the same?

But what else is it? One rape in a hospital is one too many. The SNP has been in power for almost two decades, effectively as a whole generation of baby girls have grown into women burdened by the same all-pervasive threats of sexual violence that I grew up with. They are not even safe in a hospital. Let that sink in. Raped in a place of care in a country of so-called zero tolerance to violence against women and girls, led by a government that pays lip service to equality while it challenges the very definition of what a woman even is. 

My values don’t condone women being gaslit, hounded, attacked, violated and ignored. My values respect democracy and offer empathy to those who feel disenfranchised, unheard, and set apart. Is it too much to expect my government to uphold the same?