Toxic effect of the 2014 referendum is still felt today - Sue Webber

SNP deputy leader Keith BrownSNP deputy leader Keith Brown
SNP deputy leader Keith Brown
Much has been written and said this week about the impact of the independence referendum ten years on and, like the campaign itself, opinion is sharply divided.

But what staggers me is how anyone directly involved can fail to recognise just how toxic the whole thing became and how the effect is still being felt today, particularly the SNP’s deputy leader Keith Brown who this week even denied the issue was divisive at all.

Maybe in Mr Brown’s parallel universe Scotland beat Spain in the final of the European Championship, the same day Andy Murray won Wimbledon and The Open golf a week later.

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At least his old boss Nicola Sturgeon could bring herself to acknowledge the threat so many No voters felt that something cherished was about to be taken away, but not so First Minister John Swinney, who told independence supporters it had left an “overwhelmingly positive legacy” for Scotland.

Not preaching to a roomful of the converted, he’d toned down the rhetoric by the time he was speaking to the Scottish Parliament on Wednesday afternoon, and try as hard as I might, I struggle to see the upsides from ten years in which every single disaster for which the SNP has been responsible, and there’s a lot to choose from, was blamed on the United Kingdom.

As amply illustrated by his speech, it’s a decade in which the SNP, and their erstwhile Green partners, has not missed an opportunity to assert a bogus moral superiority based entirely on national boundaries.

There is no better example of how this urge to demonstrate preening self-righteousness can descend into vicious conflict than the furious row over the Gender Recognition Reform (GRR) Bill, an assault on hard-won women’s rights which sucked Labour and the Lib Dems into denying physical reality. Disgracefully, it took the placing of a rapist in a women’s prison to expose the collective madness of prioritising gender ideology over women’s safety.

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There can be no doubt that without the policy’s aggressive promotion by Nicola Sturgeon – remember she claimed GRR critics were using the issue to “cloak” their transphobia, misogyny and racism – it would not have become a witch-hunt and one of the darkest episodes in 25 years of devolution.

It allowed people like Mridul Wadhwa, now thankfully the ex-CEO of the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC), to claim rape victims who did not want to be counselled by a biological man were prejudiced, and to preside over the persecution of a worker for simply asking about a counsellor’s gender on a victim’s behalf.

It led the Rape Crisis Scotland CEO Sandy Brindley, who allowed Wadhwa – a man without a gender recognition certificate – to run the Edinburgh centre and to defend him as “one of the most passionate and compassionate woman (sic) I have had the privilege of working with,” as the worker’s victimisation came to light.

Ms Brindley is ultimately accountable for what happened at the ERCC, which a scathing independent report found “did not put survivors first” and on Tuesday in Holyrood I called for her resignation because to her shame she had not already done the decent thing. But then perhaps denial of reality and responsibility is the real legacy of ten years of government by blinkered ideology.

Sue Webber is a Scottish Conservative Lothian MSP

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