Joanna Cherry sacked from SNP frontbench at Westminster
Joanna Cherry #JoannaCherry
Joanna Cherry, one of Nicola Sturgeon’s fiercest internal critics, has been sacked from the Scottish National party’s frontbench at Westminster after a public feud with its former deputy leader last week.
Cherry, an advocate and queen’s counsel, announced on Twitter she had been sacked as the party’s spokesperson for home affairs, in a reshuffle of the SNP’s Commons frontbench, and immediately hit out at her Westminster colleagues and party leadership over its strategy on independence.
After implying she would continue criticising party leaders from her new position on the party’s ruling national executive, Cherry tweeted: “Westminster is increasingly irrelevant to Scotland’s constitutional future and the SNP would do well to radically rethink our strategy.”
She was elected to the national executive late last year as one of the most senior figures in a slate of SNP activists involved in the Common Weal group, many of them angry at Sturgeon’s cautious approach to staging a second referendum and critical of the first minister’s stance on transgender rights.
Cherry, a supporter of “gender critical” campaigners, also has close links to the Women’s Pledge grouping of SNP activists who won seats on the national executive and other party committees. They argue that the Scottish government’s measures to strengthen the rights and protections for trans people have eroded rights for women.
Cherry clashed last week with Kirsty Blackman, the SNP’s former deputy leader at Westminster, over the SNP’s policies on trans rights, in what many observers believe is a proxy war between supporters of Alex Salmond and Sturgeon loyalists.
It was not the first time they had disagreed on the subject on Twitter. Blackman, who quit as Commons deputy leader last year and is now an economy spokesperson, said on Twitter in December that trans people and their supporters were leaving the SNP because of Cherry’s behaviour and that of senior party figures, and said: “Things have moved on since the 80s.”
Cherry responded that she had done nothing to set back the rights of trans people. The MP, herself a lesbian, accused Blackman of breaching the SNP’s code of conduct with her tweet, adding: “I’ll ignore the ageism as I wouldn’t expect a privileged young straight woman to know what it was like for lesbians in the 80s.”
On Thursday night, Sturgeon broadcast a video on Twitter, in her role as SNP leader, insisting transphobia had no place in her party. She confirmed there had been a number of resignations from younger party members critical of the perception the Scottish government has been diluting pro-trans measures in recent legislation.
Cherry was blocked last year from standing against Angus Robertson – the SNP’s former Westminster leader and a Sturgeon loyalist – to be the party’s candidate in Edinburgh Central for this May’s Holyrood elections, after the party’s then national executive passed a new rule.
In a move widely seen as an attack on Cherry, it became a requirement for a sitting MP standing for Holyrood to post a £10,000 bond to cover the costs of a byelection in their vacated Westminster seat. The party also introduced a policy banning MPs sitting simultaneously as MSPs. Cherry said the bond was unaffordable, and did not stand for nomination.
Internal conflict in the SNP has become far more intense after Salmond’s allegations that officials close to Sturgeon tried to orchestrate government and police investigations into sexual misconduct allegations against him.
Officials working for Sturgeon and for her husband, Peter Murrell, the chief executive of the SNP, have been accused by Salmond of secretly conspiring on WhatsApp to push one potential witness against him into testifying – allegations Sturgeon has dismissed as unfounded.
Murrell has denied on oath there was any such conspiracy, but on Monday evening refused a request to testify again before the Holyrood committee investigating the Scottish government’s botched investigation into two claims of sexual harassment against Salmond.
Salmond has been invited to give evidence in person to the Holyrood committee on 7 February, with Sturgeon scheduled to appear the following week, hearings likely to have a critical bearing on the SNP’s May election campaign.
Cherry was a prominent figure in the court battles in 2019 against the UK government’s Brexit policies, and particularly its failure to consult MPs, joining in the cross-party legal challenges orchestrated by Jolyon Maugham’s Good Law Project.