Nicola Sturgeon has quit as First Minister
(Picture: PA Media)FORGIVE me, politics-watchers of the capital, but you’ve been getting Nicola Sturgeon wrong for years.
Whenever Scotland’s First Minister appears on the United Kingdom stage, social media floods with wails of despair from English social democrats. People wonder why they can’t have a politician like her.
It’s easy to see why Sturgeon elicits such reactions. She is, after all, a very fine communicator. But many of us in the frozen north are rather less sentimental about the leader of the SNP, whose announcement yesterday that she will resign came as a huge surprise.
Under Sturgeon’s leadership, Scotland’s NHS is in a crisis every bit as parlous as England’s. Meanwhile, standards of literacy and numeracy in our schools are so poor that the Scottish Government removed results from international comparators. And a series of scandals — from new hospitals riddled with problems to a ferries contract that has soared in cost without a single boat being launched — have fatally undermined the SNP’s mantra that theirs is a new style of politics.
But recently two big issues have made her position increasingly untenable.
First, there was her announcement last year that she planned to treat the next UK general election as a “de facto” referendum on independence. To say this plan has gone down badly with SNP politicians would be quite the understatement. Critics within her party point out that it is simply not within the First Minister’s gift to order that a general election should be treated as a vote on the break-up of the Union.
The second issue that has inflicted huge damage on the Sturgeon brand is her plan to reform the Gender Recognition Act, allowing trans people to self-identify.
The case of Isla Bryson — who, as Adam Graham, raped two women — has destroyed the First Minister’s argument. She has repeatedly failed to answer the question of whether Bryson is a man or a woman, instead repeating the line “this individual is a rapist”.
Sturgeon’s resignation certainly came as a shock, but the brutal truth is that, although she may be a master of communication, her career is littered with bad judgment calls.
Those mistakes have finally caught up with her.
