David Torrance: ‘This is the SNP’s Section 28 moment, and it is proving just as unmanageable

THE discipline of the SNP since 2007 has been remarkable. As the party’s raison d’être apparently got closer, its MSPs became better behaved.

Even those suspected of being unreliable – left-wingers, fundamentalists and, indeed, social conservatives – kept quiet, fearful of giving journalists precisely what they wanted.

Recent electoral history demonstrates that the electorate does not like divided parties.

To a great extent, that situation is unchanged, although the ongoing row about same-sex marriage in Scotland has betrayed inevitable internal tensions. Papering over the cracks that exist in any party cannot last forever. And although Gordon Wilson is not considered by Alex Salmond or his party to be a credible critic, his views on this consultation are shared by at least a few sitting SNP MSPs.

It causes tangible problems for the First Minister, whose big tent (or indeed “big bothy”) approach to Scottish politics has been a successful fixture over the last 20 years.

The row also strains his argument that the party he leads is “socially democratic” or “centre left” – how many members of such movements in Scandinavia would attempt to argue that gay marriage undermined the very fabric of their respective societies?

Part of the problem is Alex Salmond’s own handling of such issues, avoiding pronouncements on social and moral issues because by their very nature they divide opinion.

When the row over Section 28 (or Section 2a in Scotland) broke more than a decade ago, the SNP leader refused to take a strong line; likewise today he has neither condemned remarks made by one of his own MSPs nor stood up to increasingly strident attacks from the Catholic Church in Scotland.

In order to demonstrate a liberal outlook, and indeed justify his socially democratic credentials, Salmond needs to do precisely that.

But then the First Minister is not inclined to blow apart carefully cultivated relationships, especially when they are politically useful; thus his response to the Bishop of Paisley’s tirade was not to condemn, but to invite him for coffee and, one assumes, supply the standard charm offensive.

Thus it falls to the Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie to defend same-sex marriage from a genuinely liberal standpoint, repeatedly urging the First Minister not to cave in to pressure from the Catholic Church.

This row is the SNP’s Section 28 moment, and it is proving just as unmanageable.

Salmond may come to wish he had followed his own prior form on such issues and left well alone.

• David Torrance’s updated biography of the First Minister, Salmond – Against the Odds, is published by Birlinn later this month.