SCOTLAND'S INQUISITIVE LADY
Sturgeon is akin to Krylov's Inquisitive Man. He couldn’t see the elephant, and now outgoing Nicola Sturgeon claims the same amid an SNP leadership race fiasco
IN 1814 the poet and fabulist Ivan Krylov penned a famous fable ‘The Inquisitive Man’. It tells of a man who goes to a museum and notices all sorts of tiny things, but consistently fails to notice a lumbering great elephant. The phrase quickly became proverbial, with the legendary Fyodor Dostoevsky in his novel Demons writing "Belinsky was just like Krylov's Inquisitive Man, who didn't notice the elephant in the museum...."
The metaphorical idiom “elephant in the room” has since become instantly recognisable in English parlance. The Sociology Professor of Rutgers University Eviatar Zerubavel explains in his book ‘The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life’ that he grew up surrounded by “open secrets”. He was referring to was the combination of structural mechanisms which enforce silence and denial between groups and within hierarchies; such as etiquette being a soft form of taboo making which enforces a collective silencing. But also he writes about the socialisation we receive as kids which teach us to practice rehearsed indifference and learning to ignore.
Ignoring the elephant
It is with all of this in mind that I turn to outgoing First Minister Nicola Sturgeon. She has taken to the airwaves to insist she has “100 per cent confidence” in the unfolding leadership battle. Adding “growing pains for any organisation can be painful but they are important”, Ms Sturgeon insisted there was no crisis unfolding inside the governing party of Scotland. She is doing her very own tribute-act to Krylov’s Inquisitive Man apparently…
Some of us are left scratching our heads at how the current situation can be described as “growing pains”. Reporting first in the Mail on Sunday (later picked up elsewhere) reveals the SNP has haemorrhaged 50,000 members since 2019. Further, all candidates to replace Ms Sturgeon are now casting doubt over the transparency of the election process to replace her. None of this smacks of healthy growing pains. Quite the reverse, when still serving and ex-cabinet ministers are insisting they can’t trust their own party to run an election without a fix being in something is seriously amiss.
This is incredibly dangerous territory for the governing party to find itself. But there are few signs the current crisis is even reaching key figures in the leadership bunker.
Ms Sturgeon has doubled down on her insistence there is absolutely nothing to see here by claiming “I don’t understand what the specific nature of the concerns are”.
Currently all three candidates to replace her in the top job are being denied basic information. I cannot understate enough how incredibly unusual it is when the candidates vying to lead a political party are not even be told how many people are entitled to vote. And all in a process being overseen by a party whose Chief Executive is the husband of the outgoing leader. Surely even Ms Sturgeon can understand why the candidates might wish to be provided basic information, such as how many people are entitled to participate and vote in the election process? But no, our very own Inquisitive Lady continues to miss the elephant.
Even the most politically disengaged can see where the concerns are arising from. This isn’t rocket science folks.
Strangely enough SNP Chief Executive Peter Murrell has not always been so reluctant to speak publicly about how many members the party has. If we look back at 2014 we discover near hourly updates by Mr Murrell, gleefully proclaiming a rush of new members
Given his past actions, it becomes strange to learn Mr Murrell has insisted to being unable to tell the candidates how many party members there are, without National Executive Committee (NEC) permission. Perhaps in 2014 Mr Murrell was receiving hourly permission slips to tweet out the numbers, or maybe he as Chief Executive can - well - just tell folk?
Even the President of the SNP has taken to twitter to publicly back revealing the number of members permitted to vote. So the refusal to do so from SNP HQ has been simply incredible.
The backdrop of why this has all blown up into being such a big issue comes amid serious claims of impropriety. Growing suspicions have been given nourishment following revelations in the Mail, which reported ex-members voting while also being asked to resume paying membership fees to help keep the finances “ticking over”. This alone raises legitimate concerns as to the transparency, integrity and robustness of the election process which is deciding who will be Scotland’s next First Minister.
I have written elsewhere exploring the growing issue of SNP finances, which hang over everything to such an extent that all candidates have now pledged publicly to ‘open the books’ should they succeed Ms Sturgeon, even outgoing leadership favourite Humza Yousaf. Although Mr Yousaf is suitably mercurial that it isn’t hard to doubt the sincerity of this continuity candidate’s pledges in this area. Mind you, he insists he knows nothing about the party finances.
But thus far, Ms Sturgeon doesn’t accept there is any crisis. She continues to insist she is unable to understand what the candidates concerns are to replace her.
Although it is a blessed relief to learn the SNP leadership has finally come clean about the haemorrhaging of members. Only thing now is to figure out why ex-members have been permitted to vote…
Unsustainable
In Hebrew the words for ‘silence’ and ‘paralysis’ are derived from the same root word, which to me makes perfect sense. Perhaps those charged with running the SNP could do with reflecting on it. But the continuing refusal to even acknowledge why the candidates in the election have concerns screams of wilful blindness.
Either way, Ms Sturgeon’s insistence that she cannot see what the concerns Ms Forbes, Mr Yousaf and Ms Regan have is perfectly akin to Krylov's Inquisitive Man. He couldn’t see the elephant, and now outgoing Nicola Sturgeon claims the same.
Elephant? What elephant?
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