IS THIS THE END OF THE ROAD FOR STURGEON?
The pandemic gifted her unprecedented power over our lives – and drew a veil over her party’s dismal record in government. But there are signs Scotland is finally tiring of the First Minister’s arrogance...
AT the end of last month, Nicola Sturgeon recalled the Scottish parliament. The decision to do so implied the need for an urgent response to a national crisis. But as Miss Sturgeon took to her familiar podium to issue her usual solemn instructions to people at home and to field questions virtually from MSPs, it became apparent that no new decisions were forthcoming, that no vote was required, and that no new substantial information was going to be imparted.
A casual observer might be forgiven for asking what on earth was the point? In 2020, the First Minister noted that when it came to the political arts she believed in ‘show not tell’: that if you want to succeed in winning people over, it’s better achieved by doing not saying.
Shorn of any actual substance, it seemed the main purpose of the event was simply to drive home the message that while others might be taking the week off, she was still hard at work, still at her post, still in charge – lest we mere mortals should temporarily forget the fact.
Theatres and cinemas may be closed, but the First Ministerial performance act goes on.
It is now nearly two years since Miss Sturgeon assumed this role in Scottish public life, following the arrival of Covid. No other leader in any other nation has been so omnipresent in their own country during the pandemic.
At its peak last year, Miss Sturgeon’s press conferences were the closest thing Scotland had to a daily national service, providing reassurance and clarity. They soon grew a momentum of their own.
With Boris Johnson notable for his frequent absences, Miss Sturgeon used her daily conferences to burnish her leadership credentials.
In case we didn’t get the message, in last year’s election campaign, she signed off a poster featuring a picture of an empty First Ministerial podium, embossed with the slogan Protect our NHS. Scots who had spent the year setting their clocks by her appearances were invited to contemplate the prospect that, were they not to vote SNP, Scotland might have to confront Covid without their quasi-presidential leader. A thumping victory ensued.
NINE months on, and as she enters a potentially pivotal year for the SNP, the First Minister’s aim is clear. Miss Sturgeon is not going to return to the ranks of mere politicians.
As the end of last year showed, while the virus may gradually loosen its control over our lives in 2022, the First Minister shows no intention of doing likewise.
In complete control of the political agenda, with no challengers within her own party, and with her personal ratings still high, she intends to use this commanding position to the fullest advantage.
Sometime over the course of the next year she will launch the SNP’s latest plan for independence. With the confidence that comes from such dominance, Miss Sturgeon will seek to persuade Scots to follow her once again.
The aim is not only to control the nation’s habits during a pandemic. As it seeks to find a path to independence, her party is also seeking to control and determine the nation’s self-image more generally.
Are people going to swallow it? Or have they had enough of the Sturgeon steamroller?
To understand the approach of the SNP Government, and its quest to persuade Scots to break up the United Kingdom, it’s necessary to grasp the political alchemy of the ideology that Miss Sturgeon has created, something SNP insiders call Civic Nationalism.
Over the past decade, three significant popular political movements have been created in Britain: the 2016 campaign to Leave the EU which led to the 2019 Tory election victory, the 2015-2019 Corbyn Project, and the 2017-19 People’s Vote campaign.
Each of these forces were dismissed initially as the domain of loonies and fruitcakes.
But each mobilised and energised millions at the ballot box and in the streets. In Civic Nationalism, Miss Sturgeon has rhetorically fused the most popular aspects of each.
From Vote Leave, the SNP has taken a fundamental ‘us versus them’ approach to politics, and provided a solution of ‘more control for us’.
Replace ‘Westminster’ with ‘Brussels’ and there is little difference between Miss Sturgeon’s speech on independence and those of Michael Gove or Mr Johnson on Brexit in 2016.
From the Corbyn Project, the SNP has taken the virtuous rhetoric of the progressive Left. It points out the gross unfairness that seems inherent in modern capitalism – the 25 per cent of Scottish children who live in poverty, the accumulation of wealth and power among distant elites – and offers a hammer with which to smash the system.
And in pointing out the problems in her well-worn serious tone and empathetic body language, Miss Sturgeon is seen to be a morally good person who cares about helping the right people in the right way.
As a result an independent Scotland is now being offered as a solution to pretty much every great progressive cause – from global climate change to the more local issue of Europe’s highest drugs death rate.
And from the continuity Remain campaigns that flourished so vigorously in 2017-19, the SNP has taken moderation, a belief in government, and a devotion to the cause of Internationalism.
THIS is crucial to Miss Sturgeon’s success with Scotland’s chattering classes that are the bulwark of her personal support. Nothing would scare these particular horses more than actually using the powers she has to redistribute wealth in the way her Corbynite rhetoric suggests she wants to – other than perhaps being honest
about independent Scotland’s currency, border, and military.
But Miss Sturgeon glides over these matters, using the language of Remain to woo middle class liberals with talk of ‘progressive internationalism’, a ‘well-being economy’, and obligatory concern for the environment.
There is little seriousness here: and so after 14 years in power – with public services still unreformed and the economy in purgatory between the filthy lucre of oil and the promised land of the Green Industrial Revolution – there is precious little in the SNP’s record to suggest it would be is capable of driving through the kind of difficult, controversial decisions an independent Scotland would need to make.
But it works. The alchemy performed by Miss Sturgeon is to have taken the sharp edges of these three movements, sanded them down, and thereby made them palatable to a majority of Scots.
She is no Scottish Viktor Orban, Jeremy Corbyn, or Tony Blair. Instead, what Scotland is being presented with is internationalist progressive virtue politics fused with the belief that government knows best and the prioritisation of the nation and its sovereignty.
Out of it emerges a saccharine tale of Scottish exceptionalism. We Scots, the First Minister insists in her speeches, are ‘outward looking’ and ‘welcoming’.
Scotland is a country that ‘celebrates diversity’.
Pointing south, she notes acidly that Mr Johnson’s Government is none of those things. Ergo, she concludes, our more virtuous national character is best freed from the shackles of a remote and unfamiliar Union to go about chumming up progressively with our soulmates in Denmark, Norway and Sweden.
From the flour of progressive values the SNP creates a full nationalist loaf – and the insistent certainty that government should dominate to the point of suffocation in pursuit of the ‘right’ cause.
Covid gave all governments across the world huge powers to determine our daily existence. Having had the door opened, and boosted by her personal popularity, the Civic Nationalist government of Nicola Sturgeon is preparing to keep the pedal down.
We can expect any number of hyper-progressive initiatives such as those on gender recognition, hate speech, and ‘wellbeing’ being pushed through, all in aid of the greater cause.
It is a simple step from there to advance the case that these diverging choices to those taken in England show how we are two nations moving apart, inevitably primed for separation.
IN essence, we are being told there is only one way to be Scottish. It was captured recently in a bizarre VisitScotland video in which a young (presumably well remunerated) Scottish actress claimed to speak for the nation by asserting that people north of the Border are united in their hippy-Scandi appreciation of flowers, air, and kindness to our fellow man and woman.
It can be found in the way in which Miss Sturgeon talks of returning to the European Union as a good internationalist country, no matter the international dislocation that a break-up with Britain would involve.
And it was reflected in her shortsighted decision, not long after Cop26, to turn her back on the North Sea industry in favour of the progressive values of her Scottish Green Party colleagues in the Scottish Government.
The picture this paints is attractive to many, of course. Which nation does not want to be told it is exceptionally nice? The First Minister knows also that, given her stratospheric standing, many like hearing it from her.
With more than 70 per cent of younger voters now supporting independence, it is bearing fruit. It is why Miss Sturgeon declared in an interview with the Financial Times that given the demographics of support for independence she has ‘got time on my side’.
But as we head into 2022, the pitfalls in her Civic Nationalist project are beginning to show.
For one, it doesn’t bear scrutiny to the evidence. Polls by the thinktank Our Scottish Future have shown that the values and priorities held by Scots are remarkably similar to those of people in England and Wales.
Far from leaning towards the progressive end of the scale culturally, average voters in Scotland tip towards a socially conservative mindset. On the touchstone issue of immigration, for example, Scots,
Going nowhere: Nicola Sturgeon’s independence drive is now falling apart
English and Welsh are more likely to support the idea of closed borders than they are the SNP’s vision of open border policy that welcomes in the rest of the world.
No matter how well Miss Sturgeon seeks to sell her vision, it will prove hard to find support among people who simply don’t recognise it. Even within her own party, the row over transgender rights, and how they conflict with the rights of women, has already exposed deep tensions that the First Minister has yet to resolve.
BUT the biggest problem of all for Miss Sturgeon is the hard evidence of Scotland under the SNP. The alchemy might work rhetorically, but in government it is a confused mess.
From a fall in life expectancies, to a rise in health inequalities between the richest and poorest, to an NHS which – according to the retiring head of the British Medical Association – was in crisis mode long before coronavirus struck – it is hard to claim the mantle of virtuous progressivism when this is the record you leave behind.
Similarly, it’s possible to hear the low grumbling of more economically-minded independence supporters, such as former rural economy minister Fergus Ewing, who wonder where the plan for wealth creation has gone.
And from this low grumbling it is impossible to mistake the distinct cawing of Miss Sturgeon’s longest-serving colleagues in the nationalist movement who are increasingly concerned about when the promise of Scottish independence might actually become the reality.
Increasingly Miss Sturgeon looks like somebody desperately trying to paper over the cracks, eagerly seeking out diversions and distractions in the hope her Government’s performance won’t be noticed.
A year ahead in which the Covid pandemic may finally retreat from our minds could be a tough one for a First Minister assailed by problems everywhere she looks.
Spurred on by a national crisis which has given her a rock solid and personal bond with many voters, as well as a platform with which to drown out already weakened opposition voices, who is to say that she won’t carry all before her too in 2022?
Perhaps – but pride comes before a fall and in recent weeks the unmistakable aroma of hubris has been evident in the air around the First Minister.
This is not a leader who lacks confidence. But these days, that self-belief appears to be tipping ever more frequently towards high-handedness, condescension and arrogance.
It’s not easy right now to see somebody else bringing down Miss Sturgeon as she strides confidently into the New Year. It is, however, possible to imagine her doing that job herself.