The Scottish Parliamentary election in May 2021 saw more people of colour candidates than any previous Scottish election. It led tothe election of the highest proportion of people of colour in the Parliament’s 22-year history (n=6, 4.5%), including the first women of colour MSPs: the SNP’s Kaukab Stewart in Glasgow Kelvin, and the Conservative’s Pam Gosal on the West Scotland list. It was also the first election since voting rights in Scottish elections were extended to all those over 16 with leave to remain in Scotland, including people with refugee status. Although these stories were fairly widely covered, this blog outlines enduring limitations in the way women of colour were represented.
The only two candidates of colour to appear with any regularity in the run up to the election were Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar and the SNP’s Humza Yousaf. This is not unexpected, given both the dominance of men in election news and the overall emphasis on party leaders, but it still surprised us that Stewart appeared only once (in a tweet) in the six pre-election days in our sample. On election day, Gosal was the subject of a story in the Daily Mail (6th May, p.7). Headlined “Tory candidate reveals she was told: Go back to your own country”, the article focused on Gosal’s family background and presented her aspirations in very generic terms (“boosting diversity in Parliament”, “inspire young women in years to come”). Whilst critical of the racism Gosal experienced, this replicated the racists’ focus on Gosal’s origins.
Notably, there were no stories in our sample which discussed what Stewart or Gosal stood for politically.
Of course, our sample does not encompass the entire campaign period. To get a better sense of that, we asked Kaukab Stewart about her media experience during the election. Stewart confirmed that, despite having a very active media team, outside of what she called “headline day” it had been difficult to secure media coverage. In contrast, her candidacy generated international interest, with news outlets in France, Denmark, Germany and the USA reaching out. This article in Le Monde was the kind of “balanced” coverage Stewart had hoped to see in the Scottish media: situating her personal story in relation to her political views on the constitutional question, equality and education.
In Scotland, however, it was only Stewart’s and Gosal’s wins which were the story. The best reporting of this kind not only noted the historic nature of their election but put this in a broader context. For instance, a multimedia package[i] on BBC Scotland webpage included a video fronted by Pass the Mic founder Talat Yaqoob featuring Stewart and Gosal alongside other women of colour candidates: Aisha Mir (Scottish Liberal Democrats), Deena Tissera (Scottish Labour) and Nadia Kanyange (Scottish Greens). All spoke of their experiences as women of colour candidates, discussing the lack of role models, bias in selection processes, implicit and explicit racism. This allowed for a discussion of racism in Scotland, outside of party politics.
At the same time, in the context of a Parliamentary election, that none of these women appeared in our media sample to talk about their party’s policies is striking. And only Kanyange was used as a source in a non-election story: an article in the Sunday National on the Home Office’s immigration raids (2nd May p.3). SNP candidate Roza Salih was quoted in the same story.
Apart from Stewart and Gosal, Salih was the woman-of-colour candidate appearing most frequently in our sample. This was largely because Salih was pictured with First Minister Nicola Sturgeon on election day. The fact that Salih is herself a former refugee, standing in the first election in which refugees could vote, was mentioned in a number of articles. However, the refugee voters interviewed, and the activists supporting them, were exclusively male.[ii] This mirrors the tendency we noted in our first monitoring study for communities of colour to be represented by the men within them.
Salih was also the subject of a short article in the Daily Mail (4th May, p.5), highlighting her opposition to the monarchy. This was a rare example of a woman of colour’s political views being presented. Yet Salih was not quoted and her position was presented as an extreme, anti-family one, roundly rejected by the article’s only source, Conservative candidate Annie Wells. Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh (Alba), one of the few other women-of-colour candidates to be featured in more than one article, was also presented as holding extreme or fringe views.[iii] Like Stewart and Gosal, we learned nothing of Fatima Joji’s (SNP) political views, though she also appeared in a photograph with Sturgeon in the Scottish Sun (6th May, pp. 6&7; also web edition).
The pictures of Sturgeon with Joji and Salih, alongside those of Sturgeon greeting the newly-elected Stewart, were clearly staged and politically strategic, cohering with the SNP leader’s focus on the potential of a socially-progressive Scotland. Indeed, Sturgeon was at the centre of many of the stories about racial in/equality which we coded: the day before the election, Sturgeon’s confrontation with racist candidate Jayden Fransen was widely reported, as was her statement against racism and in celebration of diversity in her constituency acceptance speech.
We do not want to downplay the significance of Sturgeon’s choices. It is no doubt significant that the First Minister used her platform to make explicitly anti-racist statements. But, as media stories, they are not uncomplicatedly positive. For instance, Sturgeon’s appearance with Stewart meant that many of the leading stories on this historic win centred a powerful white woman’s perspective. On May 9th, the Sunday Post carried a full front-page picture of Stewart, but the headline “Making history: Nicola Sturgeon hails Holyrood victory as she welcomes landmark MSP” made the First Minister’s response – rather than Stewart’s election – its focus. Notably, Stewart was not quoted on the front page, and we didn’t hear from her until a p.5 story which placed her along with Gosal, erasing any sense of their political differences (“First women of colour are elected to serve as MSPs”, 9th May, p.5). Similarly, in the Scottish Sun’s coverage, the significance of Gosal’s election was commented on by Ruth Davidson, not Gosal herself (9th May, p.3).
In our entire sample, we found only two stories – both from the BBC – which offered commentary from a woman of colour, other than Stewart and Gosal themselves, on this historic first. Both involved Pass the Mic and Women 50/50 founder Talat Yaqoob and one also included a woman of colour student offering her personal opinion (Reporting Scotland, 9th May). That a grand total of two women of colour were given the opportunity to comment on this story across the newspapers, web, twitter and television we monitored shocked even us.
In the context of our finding that women of colour were more often seen than heard from in Scottish news, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that women of colour candidates were used by the media for their symbolic value. We certainly do not want to downplay that symbolic value. As Stewart told us: “the coverage of my election has motivated many youngsters, they have been inspired by the story and feel like a door has opened for them”.
However, the story will remain only symbolic if Stewart, Gosal and other women of colour are not also shown as political actors. This is something Stewart is cognisant of. When approached for media comment on her swearing in as an MSP, she responded that she had “said all there was to be said” about her historic first, but was happy to “discuss politics, not just the human interest story”. No media outlets took her up on this.
Stewart also noted how the expertise and experience she had acquired through 30 years in teaching was trivialised. “I would get comments like, ‘I bet it’s really handy to have a primary teacher in the parliament to keep everyone in order’, ‘the children must be very proud of you,’ ‘are you sad to be leaving?’. But I wasn’t asked for my views on education policy, or plans for change.” In fact, in the three months since her historic election Stewart has been approached by the media for comment only twice, both in relation to constituency matters. These requests are, of course, entirely legitimate. However, the limited terms of engagement confirms Stewart’s sense that journalists “go to the same faces” on national stories.
So whilst Stewart’s and Gosal’s elections were widely heralded, Scottish news continues to lag behind Scottish public life in its representation of women in politics per se and women of colour in particular. The challenge now is to ensure that women like Stewart and Gosal are used as sources on a range of issues, not simply when the focus is on their experiences as women of colour. As Stewart put it, “we’re not one-hit wonders”.
Journalists and researchers clearly have an important role to play in this. So, too, do the press offices of the political parties.
As we are fond of saying, it is time to pass the mic.
[i] This made use of footage from BBC Scotland’s Disclosure programme “Breaking the Mould”, first broadcast on BBC One Scotland on 22nd March 2021.
[ii] This includes stories for Scottish Sun, STV and multiple stories in The National.
[iii] See “Alba candidate denies working for Russians” (Scotsman, 4th May, p.7) and “Women of Alba in rights support” (Sunday Mail, 2nd May, p.5).