Scottish Catholic Observer

Catholic MP Phillipa Whitford, who represents Central Ayrshire and is her party’s health spokesperson at Westminster, was speaking at a fringe event at the SNP party conference on ‘Christian Values in Tomorrow’s Scotland.’

“Churches and official hierarchy’s of churches are always a little bit cautious about meddling in politics,” she said. “I would say that shouldn’t be the case. In actual fact what most of us are talking about, people of faith or not, is very much a Scotland that Jesus would approve of.”

Ms Whitford, a consultant breast surgeon prior to entering parliament in 2015, said that ‘nine out of 11 of our local priests voted Yes’ in the 2014 referendum on Scottish Independence.

“Now they will not come out in the pulpit and say vote Yes, and it’s the same in the general election,” she said. “They don’t say vote SNP, but they do stand up and say things like ‘Trident is immoral,’—I’ll leave it for you to work out.”

She also said that Scottish Christians felt ‘so much under attack by strident secularists like Richard Dawkins they were afraid to speak about their beliefs’

“The opposite of intolerance is not secularism; it’s tolerance,” she said. “Everyone who has faith should be comfortable and free to practice that faith. A couple of thousand years ago if you spoke out you’d be thrown to the lions—all we face is someone being rude, or patronising, or not listening.”

The MP said that when she had spoken against the Assisted Dying Bill in parliament it had had a real impact.

“I spoke out against what was really an assisted suicide bill at the House of Commons,” she said. “And all I did was share my experience of walking with a lot of women to the end of life over many years, and said that as a doctor, death has never seemed a good treatment to me. And afterwards I’ve been spoken to by hundreds of MPs saying that I changed their mind. So this idea we can’t have an impact—we need to shake that off.”