Nicola Sturgeon was desperate to show how progressive Scotland is compared with backwards England – and always failed
SAY what you like about Nicola Sturgeon, she is not entirely devoid of self-awareness.
In her shock resignation speech today, she observed that, “for every person who loves me there is another who might not be quite so enthusiastic”.
She can say that again.
Sturgeon may have failed in her dream of bringing about Scottish independence — something which she says is present “in every fibre of my being”.
But her legacy is a great big wedge which she has attempted to drive between Scotland and England.
Whatever policy she advanced — on health, education, drugs, her “zero-Covid” policy, gender identity and many other things — it seemed to have an ulterior motive.
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She tried to make out that Scotland was being over-ruled, ignored or otherwise badly treated by the UK Government in Westminster.
She cultured clashes with Westminster and, over her plan to hold a second independence referendum, with the Supreme Court.
Running out of road
For much of her time in office she has fallen for the delusion that she and the SNP are Scotland, and that anyone who disagrees with her is therefore somehow anti-Scottish.
Yet independence had minority support in Scotland when she came to office, just after the 2014 referendum and, barring a very small number of polls, has remained so throughout her time as First Minister.
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Even if she had succeeded in securing a second referendum, the overwhelming likelihood is that she would have lost it.
A poll this week showed 56 per cent against an independent Scotland and 44 per cent in favour — almost exactly the same proportion as in the 2014 referendum.
No wonder she realised that her independence bid was running out of road.
Even her silly attempt to present the next General Election as a de facto referendum was doomed.
The SNP may hold a majority of Scottish Westminster seats, but the party has never won the popular vote.
The tragedy of Nicola Sturgeon is that she was so preoccupied with independence that she passed up the opportunity to attend to what should have been her big challenge: to govern Scotland well.
She was so determined to present Scotland as a “progressive” country at odds with backwards England that she failed to take notice of people who warned her that her gender recognition bill would put women at risk.
Then the inevitable happened — a male rapist suddenly decided that he was female and demanded to be sent to a women’s jail — something which Sturgeon at first supported in the teeth of strong opposition, not just from Westminster but among Scottish voters.
She tried to establish her progressive credentials, too, with a relaxed policy on illegal drugs.
And she cultivated another clash with the Home Office over “drug consumption rooms” where addicts (a word Sturgeon tried to ban on the grounds that it was causing stigma) could shoot-up in what the SNP called “safety”.
But her government’s shameful record on drugs is there for everyone to see — Scotland in 2020 had a death rate three times higher than any other European country.
Her green policy was designed to try to present her as an “enlightened” alternative to Westminster.
But it has ended in farce, with the SNP backtracking on a promise to dual the A9 from Perth to Inverness, using the bizarre excuse of war in Ukraine.
The same bodging accompanied Sturgeon’s award of a £97million contract to a failing Clydeside shipyard, Ferguson Marine, to build two ferries to run services to the Hebrides.
An Audit Scotland report last year was damning.
By that point the ferries were already four years late and their estimated cost had risen to £240million.
What’s more, the SNP nationalised the yard, forcing taxpayers to bear all the losses.
Then there was Sturgeon’s endless posturing on Covid.
In July 2020 she wanted the world to think that while Scotland had got the pandemic under control with a zero-Covid strategy, the country was being threatened by a rampant wave of infections south of the border.
Scotland, she claimed, was “not far away” from “total elimination of the virus”.
SNP activists even popped up on the border, trying to turn English visitors back.
Lowered standards
Yet it was all a mirage. A few weeks later it was Scotland suffering a bigger wave of infections.
Overall, the death rate in Scotland, at 304 per 100,000, is little different from that in England, at 320 per 100,000.
It was a similar story with Sturgeon’s “progressive” education reforms.
The SNP’s “Curriculum For Excellence” was supposed to narrow the gap between children of different economic backgrounds.
Instead, it lowered standards all round — by 2019, 40 per cent of children leaving primary school in the most deprived areas had not achieved basic literacy standards and a third had failed to meet basic standards in maths.
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Sturgeon’s departure gives the SNP a chance to reinvent itself — as a party serious about governing Scotland rather than a single-issue pressure group determined to bring about independence to the exclusion of other concerns.
Hopefully, it will seize the chance, finally accept the 2014 referendum result and get on with the business of running Scotland as a devolved administration within the United Kingdom.