Scottish politics gets super interesting

Now that Nicola Sturgeon has resigned, the SNP are having a leadership contest, and the winner will defacto become First Minister of Scotland until the next Scottish Parliament elections.

The rules of the contest are quite tough: to be a candidate you need 100 nominations from at least 20 branches. This is to ensure geographic support for the candidates, to avoid a candidate with support from just one city like Glasgow.

There are three candidates so far:

• Ash Regan, who resigned from Sturgeon's cabinet in protest at the gender self-id bill, and as a consequence has a lot of enemies in the SNP.

• Humza Yousaf, the current health minister and previous author of the controversial Hate Crimes Bill. Also has enemies due to his temper (one SNP insider said he made Dominic Raab look like Bhudda).

• Kate Forbes, the current finance minister. She's only 32 but is competant. She belongs to the Calvinist Free Church of Scotland.

On paper, Kate Forbes should easily win. In practice the Christian-baiting press has got to work.

All the interviews she's done so far have concentrated on asking her questions about religion. She's been candid, talking about how she believes children should be raised within a marriage and how she has doubts about gay marriage.

It's worth pointing out that Yousaf holds the same views due to his religion, but journalists are too squeamish to ask him. And regardless of the religious views of Forbes and Yousaf, both have said they'll keep their religion out of politics. And even if they didn't, the Scottish Parliament is devolved and has restricted powers. If they over-reached, Westminster would wield Section 35.

Still, it's all come as a shock to the left-wing voters the SNP stole from Labour.

Nicola Sturgeon was a gifted politician who had pulled off a magic trick: she convinced them that the SNP was "more left-wing than Labour", and was only governing in a centrist manner "because of Westminster's restrictions". Independence, she hinted, would enable them to build a left-wing utopia.

The leadership contest has made scales drop from people's eyes. The SNP it turns out, is a traditional nationalist party. It's rooted in Scotland's calvinist capitalist traditions. It's not just conservative, it's more conservative than the Tories (who've always been a middling muddle-through party). An independent Scotland would move right, both through economic necessity and inclination.