First Minister Nicola Sturgeon speaking during a press conference at Bute House in Edinburgh where she has announced that she will stand down as First Minister of Scotland after eight years. (Jane Barlow/PA)
(Picture: PA Wire)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 - in a debate over Brexit, for example - social media floods with wails of despair from English social democrats. Some wonder why they can’t have a politician like her, others suggest the SNP should stand candidates south of the border, some ever declare their intention to move to Scotland.
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 that she’s to 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 two major issues have collided with Sturgeon’s ambition, in recent months, making 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. Should a majority of voters back pro-independence parties such as the SNP, the Scottish Greens, and Alba (the current vanity project of former First Minister Alex Salmond), Sturgeon would take this as a green light to open secession talks with the Prime Minister.
To say this plan has gone down badly with SNP politicians would be quite the understatement. Critics within her party’s ranks 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. In the unlikely event of pro-independence parties winning the majority of votes, the UK government would not recognise the result as a green light for independence whereas, if the nationalists fell short, the Prime Minister would declare the Sturgeon had had her second referendum and failed. The First Minister had set her party on a course where the only outcome was a loss.
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. That legislation is currently blocked by the UK Government on the basis that it would negatively impact on the Equality Act, which allows for the provision of single-sex spaces.
The case of Isla Bryson — who, as Adam Graham, raped two women — has destroyed the First Minister’s argument that people are who they say they are. 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”.
Polls show more than two thirds of Scots oppose reform of the GRA. As one SNP politician told me “there are no persuadable unionist voters out there who think ‘you know, I’d vote for independence if only they’d put rapists in women’s prisons’.”
Nicola 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 judgement calls.
Those mistakes have finally caught up with her.
