JOHN Swinney has responded after Kate Forbes attended an event that has been described as the “anti-woke Davos”.
This year’s Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (Arc) – a London summit co-founded by right-wing professor Jordan Peterson – saw the likes of Nigel Farage and fellow Reform UK MPs Sarah Pochin and Danny Kruger in attendance.
Officials from the Trump administration also appeared and spoke at the conference, as well as far-right US actor-turned-political influencer Kevin Sorbo and Natasha Hausdorff, a director of UK Lawyers for Israel who has argued that illegal settlements do not breach international law.
European far-right attendees also included members of Germany’s AfD, Vlaams Belang from Belgium, Spain’s Vox, and the Netherlands’ Party for Freedom.
Christian evangelical political thinking was one of the main topics explored in the event and Scotland’s former deputy first minister, who stepped down at the last Holyrood election, spoke about her faith within the context of her political career.
But she has faced some criticism for choosing to attend the controversial hard-right conference.
Asked about this in Glasgow on Wednesday, Swinney said he "certainly wouldn’t” have attended.
"I certainly wouldn't speak at a conference like that because I'm going to have nothing to do with Reform,” he told journalists.
Forbes, a member of the Free Church of Scotland, told the audience at the conference last week that she had no regrets following the SNP's 2023 leadership contest.
During that contest, the former SNP minister fielded questions about her views on same-sex marriage, transgender rights, and children being born out of wedlock.
Following an interview in which she claimed she would have voted against same-sex marriage had she been an MSP at the time, many of her party colleagues withdrew support for her campaign. She ended up losing out to Humza Yousaf.
Speaking on the final day of the ARC conference, Forbes said: “The end result felt like a victory because during that period I thought: I have not given in when I could have.
"Therefore, I did lose the contest but I absolutely won the public support and that feels good."
Forbes also said “courage” was needed to stay true to her convictions and that people should attempt to ground their conscience in the "external truths that will outlast every single one of you across the grand sweep of history — the biblical concepts of freedom, liberty, human dignity, the worth of life, and flourishing for all".
She added: “It can be hard to understand that when you live in a society that is still largely shaped by biblical concepts and norms. But consider many of the authoritarian, regressive, oppressive regimes of death around the world — that's the alternative, because our freedoms are not inevitable or guaranteed.
“There is an umbilical cord between them and the Bible. Separate that, and I invite you to consider the alternative.”
