Empress unveils her new clothes on trip to the US
IDON’T know if Nicola Sturgeon bakes. I would not like to speculate about her talents juggling on a unicycle. But this week’s trip to the United States confirmed the First Minister’s deep belief in bread and circuses. It was a fraud. In fact, it was worse. It was a state-sponsored deception. Proof that she thinks that Scots are too poor and too stupid to see through her.
I have no problem with the First Minister going for a week’s holiday to California and New York.
Spending all that time watching Scotland’s schools decline, the sick not being treated in our hospitals and the economy teeter on recession must take its toll. She deserves a break.
But she took the opportunity this week not to have a private holiday but to try to deceive the people of Scotland and portray herself and our country as something it is not.
Let’s first examine the formula. Go to California, sign a deal on climate change with the Governor, speak at Stanford University and visit a few hi-tech companies.
Groundbreaking? No, it almost exactly replicates a visit her predecessor Alex Salmond made in 2012.
Doubtless we all remember the agreement he made with Governor Jerry Brown back then and are reaping the benefits. Perhaps not.
This was not an exercise in advancing Scotland but an attempt to develop Miss Sturgeon’s view of herself as Scotland’s empress.
She does not know how to run our education system, our NHS or run the economy, but like a child putting on a white coat and a plastic stethoscope playing doctors and nurses, she seems to think that if she tries on the trappings of leadership we will believe she is genuinely a leader.
In this, she enlisted the aid of the state broadcaster, BBC Scotland.
Now I don’t believe that Pacific Quay is a hotbed of Nationalist propagandists. I think that they are browbeaten. Tired. With some notable exceptions, the spirit of independent-minded journalism has been drained from them and they are now anaemic.
So night after night they strove to give our First Minister the semblance of equivalence with a real international leader. It was like passing off Subbuteo as the World Cup.
Deals were announced – the richest being £6.3 million, roughly a quarter of what it would cost you to buy Celtic’s centre forward. The fact that these deals had been concluded previously by Scottish Enterprise, that Scottish taxpayers had contributed substantially to them and that Miss Sturgeon had nothing to do with them, was not to be reported.
Trump-like, we were supposed to believe that Nicola Sturgeon is a ‘dealmaker’. Tell that to the Chinese. But the fraud deepened. Our First Minister was in the United States of America but did not see the President.
‘Was this a snub?’ she was breathlessly asked by the state broadcaster. No, she said, her focus was elsewhere and besides, Mr Trump was hosting the President of China.
THE desperate attempt to try to persuade the people of Scotland that she has equivalence to President Xi Jinping got even more laughable. She is not a head of state. She is not even a head of government. She leads a devolved administration. There is no equivalence.
She graciously conceded she was prepared to see President Trump if he visited Scotland even though she disagrees with him and that – she said: ‘No doubt he’s got disagreements with me.’
Despite the evidence, I like to think that there are things which prick Donald Trump’s conscience and keep him up at night. I doubt Nicola Sturgeon is one of those thoughts which butterflies through his brain. I would be surprised if he remembers her name.
As Mr Trump planned the missile attack on the Syrian airfield, Miss Sturgeon was in a committee room in the United Nations pledging £1.2 million of Scots taxpayers’ money over four years to train women in ‘conflict resolution’.
This took tokenism to a new level. Nicola Sturgeon, striving to impose on her own divided country a referendum we don’t want, tried to lecture the world on ‘conflict resolution’.
If self-awareness was a crime, there wouldn’t be enough evidence to arrest our First Minister, let alone convict her.
I am no fashion guru but I don’t like the empress’s new clothes. I don’t like the look it portrays.
The key to Home Rule is in the title. Miss Sturgeon has proved herself incapable of doing that. Scotland’s problems appear unfathomable to her, so when the going gets tough, she gets on a jet plane.
To see her pretending to be a world leader by going to watch Scottish ballet dancers in New York is an insult to our nation.
Whatever constitutional path we choose, pretending that Scotland or its political leader has equivalence with the United States, or China, or the rest of the UK, is a dangerous deception.
Watching our First Minister sneak a backstage ‘selfie’ with Hillary Clinton is humiliating on a national scale. She looks less an international stateswoman and more a self obsessed tourist.
Nicola Sturgeon should ditch the selfies and take a good look at herself. The people of Scotland are taking a good look at her – and increasingly we don’t like what we see.