Interview
Change
Faith
S&U interviews
6 min read

"Nobody is neutral": Kate Forbes on her Christian faith and political future

Politician Kate Forbes knows how it feels when public life misunderstands a faith-led life. Robert Wright interviews her as she reflects on that experience and what next.

Robert is a journalist at the Financial Times.

 

A women stands beside in a corridor beside a large window through which a wing of a building and a distant hillside can be see,
Kate Forbes at Holyrood, the Scottish Parliament.

When Scotland’s then first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, unexpectedly announced her resignation in February, Kate Forbes was on maternity leave from her job as Scotland’s finance secretary. As such, Forbes, a committed Christian, had not made any public statements about politics in six months. 

Yet, reflecting on the campaign earlier this month, Forbes recalled how social and mainstream media were immediately “awash” with comments about why her religious convictions made her unfit to succeed Sturgeon. The controversy, much of it centred on Forbes’ membership of the small, theologically conservative Free Church of Scotland, continued throughout the subsequent election campaign. Most involved her stance on gay marriage and Scotland’s gender recognition legislation. 

Forbes discussed the campaign in an interview in her small office in the Scottish parliament building in Edinburgh – one of her first since the often fractious campaign. Forbes secured an unexpectedly strong 47.9 per cent of the vote after the elimination of the third-placed candidate, Ash Regan, and the redistribution of her second-preference votes. She now sits as a backbench Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) for Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch. Forbes rejected an offer from Humza Yousaf, the victor, the clear choice of the party establishment, of a cabinet job far more junior than her previous role. 

She started the discussion by challenging the idea – which she thought motivated some criticisms she faced - that atheists, agnostics and other non-believers were neutrals on questions of religious conviction. It was one of many points where Forbes used her experience to paint a picture of a public life where issues of faith and faithful people were increasingly marginalised and misunderstood. 

“Nobody is neutral. There’s this perception, which is flawed, that there are some people who are neutral and some people who have faith.” 

Everyone viewed the world through a philosophical framework, Forbes went on. It was critical to ensure people were not shut out of public debate on the basis of their philosophies, she said – just as it was important to avoid excluding people for their race, sex, sexual orientation or any of the other characteristics protected in law. 

Her comments explain the unusually frank approach that she took to matters of faith when asked during the campaign about her convictions – which she insists represent a “mainstream” Christian perspective on issues of personal morality. 

“I think that people of faith are under immense pressure to compromise or to change their views in the public spotlight. I think we have to logically and rationally walk through how we can both believe in a personal faith which calls us to be public witnesses to that faith and at the same time serve those with other faiths or no faith.” 

Forbes, now 33 and first elected in 2016, has said that she would have voted against gay marriage if she had been a Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) in 2014 when the Scottish parliament voted to introduce the measure. However, she has insisted that, with the provision now on the statute books, she will defend it. 

“By and large, I absolutely believe in… freedom of choice, freedom of belief and of expression. I don’t believe my views should be imposed on other people.” 

Forbes nevertheless argued that there were issues of conscience where politicians should be allowed to make choices free from the normal party-political considerations. Forbes was on maternity leave in December when the gender recognition legislation came before parliament. The SNP denied its MSPs a free vote on the measure – a decision with which Forbes disagreed. The vote split all the main parties in the parliament. 

Little of the commentary during the leadership election captured the nuances of her positions. 

“The vote on marriage in 2014 was deemed to be a vote of conscience. My party has always held that issues around abortion should be votes of conscience. So, I think it’s possible to both believe that you legislate on behalf of everyone and treat everyone equally and make space for some votes of conscience, which are a consequence of strongly held views and convictions.” 

Forbes added that “without a shadow of a doubt” MSPs should be given a free vote on one forthcoming piece of legislation - the Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill. The bill, likely to come before parliament in the next few months, would allow terminally ill people over the age of 16 to ask for help in dying. 

“Matters of life and death are hugely important, hugely personal but have big public implications. You might think that’s a tension. But I have always been able to accommodate that tension.” 

There had never been any suggestion that Forbes’ faith led her to exclude any group from receiving funds when she was finance secretary, she added. 

“Of course, it did inform my care and concern for those in poverty, for those who are under-represented in society, for those who need more help than others,” she said. 

As her office filled with the noise of children enjoying their lunch break at the neighbouring Royal Mile Primary School, Forbes mostly sounded relaxed when talking about the leadership campaign. But she insisted she had felt subject to disproportionate scrutiny, particularly pointing to a leadership debate staged by Channel 4 which included a segment on “faith in politics”. 

“If you watch that clip, it’s basically the interrogation of Kate Forbes. There are very few questions put to the other candidates.” 

The imbalance, she said, rested on the false assumption that Yousaf, a practising Muslim, and Regan, who has no religion, took essentially neutral positions on faith questions. She said, however, that she had won support from many people of faith because of her willingness to speak openly. 

“I can remember one imam saying to me, ‘It’s given us hope to see you being true and authentic to your faith even when it’s difficult’,” Forbes recalled. 

Forbes, who grew up partly in India where her parents were missionaries, recalled how living through the Gujarat earthquake of 2001, when she was 10, helped to bring her to her own faith. The earthquake is estimated to have killed between around 14,000 and 20,000 people. 

“It was coming face to face with the realities of life and the realities of death that I started my own faith journey,”

Forbes became noticeably more animated when talking about the nature of her personal faith than at other times, when she sounded far more guarded. 

Her faith was not “a hobby like knitting or playing the guitar”, she added. 

“It’s a truth that compels me to be loving and caring and be willing to sacrifice my own life.”

For the moment, however, the questions facing Forbes are more humdrum. Forbes gave her interview before Yousaf warned MSPs to back Sturgeon, the former first minister, following her arrest in June on suspicion of fraud in an inquiry over the SNP’s finances. Sturgeon, who was released without charge, has vigorously denied any wrongdoing. 

Peter Murrell, Sturgeon’s husband, the former SNP chief executive, the first person arrested, and Colin Beattie, the party’s former treasurer, have also been released without charge. Both also deny any wrongdoing. 

Forbes accepted the arrests had been a “huge shock”. 

“I said after the second arrest… that integrity should characterise everything we do – and not just the substance of integrity but the perception.”

She also accepted there were limits to the areas where faith could guide her thinking. 

She declined to say whether Jesus would prefer Scotland to be independent or remain part of the union. 

“There’s no 11th commandment that decrees whether or not Scotland should in the union. I think what [God] cares about really is the values by which we live. So, you’re going to get no answer from me on that.” 

She sounded still less certain, meanwhile, about where her future career path would lead. 

She would continue as an MSP “for the foreseeable future”, she said. 

But she went on: “The honest answer is that I don’t know what to do next.” 

She had previously said it was “highly, highly unlikely” she would ever stand to be leader again, she added. 

“I still hold to that position,” she said, adding that she had family and constituency commitments. 

She added, nevertheless, that a sense of sacrificial calling was “ingrained” in her by her parents’ decision to leave Scotland in their 20s to serve a marginalised, impoverished community in India. 

“I wait to see, really, what I can and should do next.”

Review
Books
Change
Politics
4 min read

Russia’s waiting reformation

Putin’s world is not the only take on Russia.

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

Graffiti on a wall, spells out in Russian character the name Navalny.
Anti-Putin pro-Navalny graffiti, Saint Petersburg.
Dor Shabashewitz via Wikimedia Commons.

When I presented the book I Love Russia by Elena Kostyuchenko for purchase at the counter, my only thought was for what the bookseller would think.  Was I a Putin sympathiser and apologist for the war in Ukraine?  It says a lot about how we have unconsciously embraced Putin’s world as the only take on Russia.  There is an indigenous saying that Russia is not Moscow and Moscow is not Russia.  By the same token, Putin is not Russia, however much he would like us to think this; it is naïve and prejudiced of us to allow the largest country in the world to be defined by its dictator. 

Elena Kostyuchenko, and Alexei Navalny in his posthumously published book Patriot, belong in different generations to Putin and inhabit another moral universe.  Navalny has done more than anyone to call out the epic levels of corruption and dark cynicism of the Putin era.  This is a Mafia state, as Luke Harding observes.  Navalny believes there are twenty people who rule in Russia, with staggering levels of visible and hidden wealth, and a further one thousand who eat from their trough.  The rest of the country includes those who are duped by state media, those who don’t want to know or keep their heads down or don’t care, and those who testify to the truth.   

This latter cohort shows remarkable courage, because they are being silenced, one by one, through prison or murder.  Navalny died in prison after previously being poisoned in Siberia; Kostyuchenko was poisoned while in Germany and has been targeted for assassination elsewhere.  Before them lies a sobering roll call of journalists and politicians like Anna Politkovskaya, Boris Nemtsov and Igor Domnikov whose murders are clearly attributable to what they have said about the crimes of Putin and his associates. 

Elena Kostyuchenko’s journalism takes her to Russia’s abandoned people and places.  Derelict and decaying hospitals where the young, the addicted and the dispossessed gather; the mothers of Beslan who are beaten up and persecuted because they want the truth about that fateful siege; psychiatric hospitals with no resources or patient care; landscapes depleted by corrupt extractive industries.  She is inspired by the fearless reportage of Politkovskaya and her writing bears the imprint of Svetlana Alexievich, with its gift for listening and attention to the wonderful ordinariness of human life.  Her walk down the dark parade of Russia’s casualties is a tribute to the finest traditions of journalism, which carry the echo of the voice of Christ in their attention to those who lose out in this world. 

In prison, Alexei Navalny learned the Sermon on the Mount by heart; his conversion from the routine atheism of his Soviet upbringing being triggered by the birth of his and Yulia’s first child, Dasha.  He is wry, sardonic, stubborn, implacable – displaying an other-worldly willpower.  It is hard to compute the courage it took to return to Russia after being poisoned with Novichok, knowing it would surely lead to imprisonment, mistreatment and death: 

One day I made the decision not to be afraid.  I weighed everything up, understood where I stand – and let it go. 

Of the pain inflicted on him in prison for speaking the truth about Putin’s Russia, he says: 

I have decided that this is my own pared-down version of suffering for the faith, a moment of suffering for being a believer.  Happily it does not entail being dismembered, stoned to death, or having the lions set on me. 

And yet the totality of his life was not far short of this.  He skates over much of the abuse, but references being woken every hour of every night for a personal roll call.  When other prisoners were primed to shout at Navalny for long periods from close range, it is deeply moving to visualise him shouting back and not backing down.  Over time, his bespoke prison regime became steadily more abusive and isolating, directed in his view from the Kremlin. 

There is absurdity at the heart of the system and he confronts those responsible for it, rather than meekly submitting to it.  In the late Soviet era, criminal law was so comprehensively drafted that anyone could be picked up for an infringement if this was politically expedient.  In Putin’s Russia, we have returned to the Stalinist period where offences are simply made up in a dark Wonderland.  It is rule by law, not of law. 

The editor of Novaya Gazeta, Dmitry Muratov, uses a particular metaphor.  He says that Putin and his Kremlin officials act like priests who mediate a believer’s relationship with God.  They have become intermediaries for how Russians are supposed to experience their country, telling them what to think and feel about it.  If so, then Russia is ready for a new reformation, where people claim their own organic relationship with a nation that means so much to them.  There are already enough martyrs for this new reformation while Putin continues to speak power to truth.  Those of us who care about its people and its future do not need Putin’s malign priesthood to interpret Russian life.  There is a different Russia, waiting to be discovered.      

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