Tomorrow’s the day Nicola Sturgeon announces the details of how she intends to hold another referendum, but sadly for her what she’s calling her “route map” to independence will be unveiled at the same time as her party is stuck – again – on the B-roads and hairpin bends of a sexual scandal, by which I mean Patrick Grady. We could go over the details again if you like. But do we really need to? You know them by now.

More interesting is what the scandal and the response to it by the SNP tells us, first, about the party but also about ourselves and how we look at cases such as Grady’s. Grady is a nationalist and he’s also a gay man and, while those things shouldn’t logically have anything to do with each other, the way the scandal is playing out demonstrates that they actually do. In fact, it raises a question: how much have we really changed?

Let’s take the nationalist part first. You’ll have heard by now the secret recording of the meeting in which the SNP’s Westminster leader Ian Blackford urges his colleagues – to the sound of hear-hears – to give Grady support. The recording was subsequently leaked to, of all places, The Daily Mail, le grand ennemi, which tells us two things. First: the SNP will try to stay united for the sake of independence even through ugly scandals like this one, but second: the SNP isn’t as united as we think it is.

Now, let’s get into this a little bit deeper because I suspect there may be other reasons why Blackford and his colleagues were so willing to support Grady. Of course the whole affair has now been taken to another level by the Met Police announcing they are making further inquiries into the allegations and Grady stepping aside as an SNP MP to sit as an independent, but even before that, most of his colleagues were apparently quick to conclude that Grady deserved support. Why?

Some of the explanation, as I’ve said, lies with the primacy of independence, but we should also think about the way all of us tend to look at affairs of this kind, particularly if they involve gay men. You may have noticed this weekend that there were Pride marches in Glasgow and Edinburgh. A couple of Scottish football referees have also just come out as gay. And the Church of Scotland recently voted to allow ministers to conduct same-sex marriages. So on LGBT issues, things are hunky-dory right?

Well yes, in many ways they are, but let me also remind you of what happened when the scandal broke around the former SNP minister Derek Mackay who, you will recall, persistently contacted a 16-year-old boy – calling him cute, inviting him to dinner, and so on – before resigning as a minister. He also eventually stopped being an MP but only after the considerable comfort of continuing to take his salary and more cash for loss of office. All in all, it was a pretty nasty little affair.

However – just as there has been with Grady – when the Mackay scandal broke, there was a feeling among some in the SNP that it was a fuss over nothing and the party should move on. Some of the more loop-de-loo apologists even suggested Mackay had been a victim of a unionist honey trap; others hinted that the boy’s family were only interested in creating a scandal in the papers. But whatever the form of the excuse, the outcome is the same: Mackay, and now Grady, aren’t so bad really.

To understand where this kind of sentiment comes from, perhaps we could imagine for a minute if Mackay and Grady were heterosexual and the object of their attentions had been women – yes, there are some who would apparently forgive anything in the name of independence, but do we really think there would have been such a rapid attempt to move on? Do we think the SNP at Westminster would have felt quite so able to rally round if the young member of staff had been female? They are interesting questions and I think the answer to both is no.

The reason it’s no is, I think, because of some deep-down assumptions about gay men that have resisted 50 years of Pride marches, the passing of gay weddings in the Church of Scotland, and even gay men doing well in politics and the assumption is this: gay men are promiscuous, party-loving, good time guys who will always be up for it and will always have an eye for young men and that’s fine really. Give a gay a glass of wine and what do you expect? It’s what they’re like.

Except it’s not: there’s a range of behaviour among gay men just as there would be in any other sub-set of society and the assumption that there isn’t a range and, in some way, all gay men are the same not only affects how we look at scandals like Grady’s, it may also damage any attempt to look at gay sexual harassment in anything like the serious way in which we look at heterosexual harassment. Both involve many of the same issues and yet we appear much more willing to forgive, and even sympathise, with the perpetrator if he happens to be gay.

Quite how we fix this I don’t know because it involves some profound stereotypes and prejudices which, to be fair, can be just as persistent among gay people as they are among straight ones. But let me just say thanks to whoever it was who leaked that recording to The Daily Mail because it might help to bring about some change. Had we not known about Blackford’s remarks, the whole thing might have blown over by now: apology, couple of days suspension, job done. But instead it's serious and the SNP isn’t going to get away with its attempt to quickly move on.

My conclusion therefore would be that this is a good thing for all of us, including the SNP. Exposed in the Mail, we can now see for ourselves the party’s apparent attempt to offer wholehearted support to Grady and seemingly no support whatsoever to the young party worker and hopefully the SNP will learn from that and not do it again. I’m not saying they will – their track record is not good –I’m just saying they might.

 

As for the rest of us, we can also try to adjust our attitudes a bit. The question we should ask ourselves is whether we’ve changed and I’m afraid the SNP harassment scandal may be a sign that we haven’t. One of the greatest hurdles that the victims of harassment face is that most people still approach such cases with a bunch of prejudices about men, women, gay men, young women, and so on and prejudices get in the way of a good outcome. I think this may be what’s happened in the Grady case. And I hope that the way the case is playing out means it is less likely to happen again.

Our columns are a platform for writers to express their opinions. They do not necessarily represent the views of The Herald.