Orcadian Column, 24 April 2025
Easter recess offered a chance to spend time at home interspersed with some customary island hopping. First up, a busy day in Sanday, including a surgery, meetings with the local business forum and Development Trust, and rounded off at the Men’s Shed in Kettletoft, where my arrival prompted Jimmy Walls’ drystone dyking ‘protégés’ to down tools and cheerily pick up their coffee mugs and teacakes instead.
The following day saw me head to Papay, notching another Guinness World record on the short flight over from Westray. Having spent the last 18 years making regular trips to Papay, it’s always struck me as a community that punches well above its weight. Indeed, if you could bottle what Papay has and sell it you would both make a fortune and do the buyer an enormous favour.
My visit last Wednesday miraculously coincided with the weekly coffee morning in St Ann’s, which was packed, as usual. Like the games afternoons at the same venue, or events held regularly in the wonderfully refurbished Kelp Store or community hostel, these occasions help bring people together, both locals and visitors alike. That is crucial to the vitality of a small island.
To cap it all, Papay will make their debut in the Parish Cup next month when they take on the mighty Sanday. For an island of around 85 people this is an astonishing achievement and one causing great justifiable excitement locally. Particular credit goes to 20 year old, Aidan Hourston who has been the driving force behind Papay entering the competition. The first leg in Sanday on 4th May should be a very special occasion, and I know that no-one in the home dressing-room will make the mistake of underestimating their opponents.
Before all that excitement, however, I will be in Edinburgh this week as parliament returns after the Easter break. One of the first items of business will be a ministerial statement, responding to last week’s landmark Supreme Court ruling that the legal definition of a woman in the 2010 Equality Act should be based on biological sex. Tuesday’s statement is likely to be an initial indication of the Scottish Government’s intentions, as the First Minister has already made clear that the implications of this potentially far-reaching judgment will require more considered reflection on the part of governments and parliaments north and south of the border.
Lord Hodge, in reading out the decision reached unanimously by the Supreme Court judges, discouraged it being read as a ‘triumph for one group in society over another’. Nevertheless, it is clear from the immediate reaction and since that women’s campaigners feel vindicated while many within the trans community have spoken of their fear and uncertainty. The Supreme Court judgement is unambiguous, though, and must be respected, unlike what we see at present in the United States where certain politicians seem happy to pick and choose what judicial rulings they accept or ignore.
Even so, politicians have a role and a responsibility to try to bring clarity to what this will mean in practice overall, but in particular for a trans community which Lord Hodge described as “vulnerable and often harassed” and who “struggle against discrimination and prejudice as they seek to live their lives with dignity”. Achieving such an outcome will be challenging given the nature of the debate thus far and the passions aroused, perhaps inevitably, when such fundamental questions are at stake. However this plays out, it’s hard to avoid the depressing conclusion that life for those in the trans community in this country is more difficult now than it was before recent attempts were made to improve things.
Finally, on a more positive note, I’m looking forward to welcoming Jamie Greene MSP into the Scottish Liberal Democrat parliamentary group this week. Jamie has been a good friend since he was first elected as a West of Scotland Conservative MSP back in 2016. Intuitively liberal, he’s felt increasingly uncomfortable in a Conservative party moving inexorably to the populist right. His ‘arrival’ also gives Scottish Liberal Democrats a seat on the Bureau, thereby removing the SNP government’s majority on the body that decides parliamentary business each week. That should make things interesting!