Anas Sarwar should apologise to women

Scottish Labour are performing something of a Wile E. Coyote-style U-turn on their stance on gender — attempting frantically to turn back after having charged off the cliff edge. In light of nurse Sandie Peggie’s highly publicised employment tribunal against NHS Fife, instigated after she was suspended for objecting to a trans-identifying male doctor being in the women’s changing room, the writing is on the wall for the irreconcilability of so-called “trans rights” and women’s legal entitlement to single-sex spaces. Of course, for women’s rights campaigners the writing has been on the wall for close to a decade — maybe more. Thanks to Peggie though, the proverbial writing is now the same size as the Hollywood Sign, visible enough that politicians who determinedly ignored reality are finally backtracking properly.

Anas Sarwar, the leader of Scottish Labour, not only voted for the disastrous Gender Recognition Reform bill himself in 2022 but whipped his party to do the same. When he was recently asked if he owed an apology to the women, including those in his own party, who warned him clearly about the havoc it would wreak on public bodies and single-sex policy, Sarwar replied:

We had amendments on those very issues which the SNP government refused to support … It’s important to stress that what is happening right now in NHS Fife is organisational capture and the Scottish government, the SNP, the First Minister, the Health Minister, have to step in to make sure we are respecting single-sex-spaces based on biological sex and we respecting the law and the Equality Act.

This is rather a lot of words for “Yes, I do owe an apology. I am very sorry.” The SNP refusing to implement Labour’s (pretty weak) amendments meant that the principled thing for Sarwar to have done would have been to vote against the bill. He whipped his party knowing it wasn’t fit for purpose, but he wrongly calculated that it was the safer thing to do in the eyes of the public. This is otherwise known as cowardice, and in a world where politicians maintained any illusion of being willing to do what is right even if it’s the less easy option, would elicit a sincere apology.

Had Sarwar deigned to say the S-word, what a precedent this would set. Not just when it comes to the mistakes made on gender ideology in law but simply for professionalism and a desire to regain trust from the public, who have only become more and more disillusioned with our political representatives. It would rekindle hope that maybe the art of the apology is not completely lost, which it sadly seems to be.

Of course, in Britain we say and hear the word “sorry” all the time. We say it to strangers we bump into on the street regardless of whether it was our fault or not, we preface late emails with it. I said it to someone in a coffee shop the other day because the barista served me first even though I’d been waiting longer for my Latte than them. The impulsive, self-deprecating British-minor-inconvenience-sorry doesn’t count. It’s the humble acknowledgement of wrongdoing and willingness to learn from it that are vanishing.

Part of the problem is that in recent years when politicians (and public figures generally) have issued apologies, they reek of disingenuousness. The most egregious example is probably Boris Johnson’s apology for breaking lockdown rules during the COVID pandemic, which took four months to arrive after the scandal broke and was delivered with a performance that made Ryan O’Neal’s notoriously bad acting in Tough Guys Don’t Dance look authentic. Either that, or politicians blurt them out for inconsequential but offensive indiscretions. The ministers involved in the now-dismissed Labour MP Andrew Gwynne’s WhatsApp “banter”, for instance, have scrabbled to express their regret, lest they get sacked from their posts as well.

The social power of the apology has been undermined because we’ve forgotten the function of shame

Which leads onto another cultural deterrent for remorse — how unforgiving we as a society have become. It’s not just that the court of social media and online comment sections is vicious and puritanical, it makes it impossible for anything to blow over quickly. The first rule of surviving cancel culture is “Don’t apologise” as time and time again, it’s been proven to leak blood into the water. One can almost be forgiven for thinking: what’s the point? You say your piece as carefully as possible, disable the comments on X and the vitriol and opinion pieces attacking you continue regardless. They’re only apologising because they had to! Authenticity or owning up to self-serving motivations can cost you just as much. During the online feeding frenzy around allegedly predatory men during the #MeToo movement, Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock (who sadly died of cancer last year) effectively turned himself in as having committed sexual misconduct multiple times in his career. “I am not some innocent bystander, I am also a part of the problem,” he wrote in a blog post, an approach that contrasted with a lot of men who played down, ignored or denied allegations against them. It earned Spurlock no mercy — quite the opposite.

The social power of the apology has been undermined because we’ve forgotten the function of shame or, to be more accurate, we’ve forgotten that it serves two purposes. Making the (alleged) wrongdoer feel bad about themselves, we excel at that excessively now. The alleviation of shame and how that strengthens a person’s bond with their community — that’s nowhere to be found. Fat-shaming, slut-shaming, kink-shaming … shame has entirely negative connotations now. In the godforsaken world of Instagram therapy, you’ll find countless testimonies from people talking about the trauma they carry for being “shamed” by their parents. Yet shame in its true form is vital for a child’s development. The love that a child who has knowingly misbehaved receives from his or her parents after they say sorry affirms that doing a bad thing doesn’t make you a bad person and that forgiveness is the reward for humility. Not a lesson the adult world reflects now, I concede. 

Yet, I’m naive enough to believe in doing the right thing for the sake of it. If Sarwar had issued an emphatic apology for his cowardice over the GRR, there are many people who would refuse to accept it — very rudely. Horrific harm has been done and can’t be undone. But enough people would appreciate his setting an example that would hopefully catch on and inspire other politicians to put their hands up and get on with rectifying their massive error in judgement. As it stands, many seem determined to draw out their excruciating backpeddling act as long as possible.

Perhaps it’s the Catholic in me that makes me more accustomed to the idea of contrition as not just a virtue but inherently positive and cathartic. Manners separate us from most non-human animals. They define our humanity in a big way. It would be refreshing to see more political leaders who enforce humility as a strength, not an implicit weakness. Pride, lest we forget, is one of the seven deadly sins for good reason. In eschewing the chance for repentance, Sarwar failed the most basic of decency tests.