What did Scots do to deserve Sturgeon and Salmond?
It’s one of life’s most piquant pleasures to watch a spite-fight between two people one loathes equally – no matter what the result, it’s win/win. I frequently hugged myself in sheer glee at the sight of Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Salmond – surely the first time the word “glee” has been used with reference to this joyless pair – wriggling on the hook of Holyrood justice recently.
The best Punch and Judy show in town, it seems all set to continue with this week’s glad tidings of Alex Salmond’s new political party Alba. (Apparently the Gaelic name for Scotland, but it sounds quite like a sweetener – ironic when one considers the sour situation which created it.)
Before the knockabout, I’d never really thought much about Sturgeon. She seemed just the price the Scots had to pay for all those gorgeous beaches and deep fried Mars Bars; a nonconformist with a regrettable penchant for conformism, so much about the process rather than the passion of politics that it’s somewhat surreal to hear that she was once a hot-blooded youngster who joined the Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament.
One of the joys of Tracy Ullman’s portrayal of her as a megalomaniac whose desire for Scottish independence was just a front for a bid for world domination was the fact that she seems so very prosaic. Her state of permanent disapproval – especially compared with the sheer lovability of her bête noire Ruth Davidson – led me to coin the phrase The Scold War. The only time she has seemed truly human was when she was caught on camera celebrating Jo Swinson losing her seat in the last election.
If someone tries to present themselves as efficient to the point of being a pocket calculator with a pixie cut, it’s hard then to accept that they may have struggled to keep track of all those long-gone incidents.
Sturgeon’s doomed bid to appear human was also given a tryout last year when, in an audacious attempt to seem vulnerable, she attempted to complain that Boris Johnson’s alleged comparison of her to Wee Jimmy Krankie was an example of misogyny.
Quite frankly, if I was Wee Jimmy Krankie, and had spent my life bringing a smile to people’s faces, I would complain about being compared to the killjoy Sturgeon. It’s far from a laugh a minute up there in loch-land; most strikingly, the number of drug-related deaths last year was the highest since records began – higher per capita than those reported for all the EU countries and approximately three and a half times that of the rest of the UK.
The Ullman sketch which saw Sturgeon and her evil sidekick Mhairi Black kidnapping and torturing JK Rowling until she tells her “seven billion” Twitter followers that she now backs independence is only funny until one sits back and realises that it is uncomfortably close to the truth. In SNP Scotland, free speech and free opinions are an increasingly expendable commodity – and not just on independence.
Take the Hate Crime Bill, recently passed by Holyrood. What this pernicious legislation – opposed by both the Catholic Church and the National Secular Society because of the appalling restrictions on free speech it entails – threatens to do is create a Gilead of the glens, where suppression of free thought is dealt with from behind the wokescreen and where disagreement can be equated with hatred. It is sad when this happens to any country but to see it happen to a country with as bold a history of intellectual rigour as Scotland is tragic.
Cleared of breaking the ministerial code, Sturgeon is wounded but has survived to bring her oxymoronic desire to break away from one union only to become a tiny cog in another, far larger, union to the electorate in May, though it seems likely that Salmond may well take a chunk out of her.
What did the poor Scots do to deserve these two going at it hammer and tongs until May? This brave and beautiful country deserves better. B But in the meantime, those of us s south of the border may well concur with the words of the commentator Dennis Kavanagh: “Scottish politics hasn’t been this much fun since M Macbeth.”