Deluded Sturgeon can’t see the flames from fire she started

ALL political leaders live in a cocoon. Seated in the rear of their cars, served by thousands of civil servants, deprived even of getting a pint of milk at the local shop, they can easily lose touch with the reality around them.

This week, however, Nicola Sturgeon asked us to believe that during her 15 years of power, she didn’t so much live in a bubble as an entirely different planet. And I’m not sure I’m buying it.

Her claim to ignorance of the world around her emerged in an article for the Guardian newspaper. In it, she declared her sadness at the state of Scotland’s political culture. She accepted that, after a decade of constitutional division, we have become somewhat polarised.

Incredibly, the former First Minister then asked us to believe she is shocked at the whole thing.

It appears that, newly relieved of the burdens of office, Ms Sturgeon has decided to begin her second life as a prophet warning of the dangers of divisiveness.

As we speak, she wrote, the SNP was trying to put forward a pilot to remove juries from rape trials in an effort to increase convictions.

Judges, lawyers and politicians had immediately come out to say this was a bad idea – and all because of the sad polarisation of our political culture.

She had quit in February because she believed she could no longer find ‘the common ground necessary to advance difficult or controversial policy changes’.

Now it was time to ‘demonstrate that the descent into a polarised and therefore paralysed politics is not as inevitable as it seems’.

‘I live in hope,’ she concluded. It marks a return to the front line after a few weeks of prolonged silence – a break that may have had something to do with the blazing bin fire she set alight when she quit ahead of the police investigation into her party’s finances.

But this week’s Guardian piece at least tells us something: in the two months since she walked away from the top job in Scotland, she has yet to be blessed with the gift of self-awareness.

Ms Sturgeon clearly now appreciates what’s happened around her. She acknowledges the deep divisions in Scottish politics and she accepts these have left deep scars that have hindered progress. She just doesn’t seem to think it has had much to do with her.

Ruthless

The most powerful politician of this past decade, a leader who built up a ruthless political movement which has taken a vice-like grip on the nation’s institutions and political discourse, now seeks to claim that ‘by no stretch of the imagination was I the sole or even primary cause’ of our lasting divisions.

She was merely an ‘unwitting’ accomplice. Really?

The politicised attempts to find grievance with anything Westminster-based; the constant claim that Scotland’s problems were all the fault of the UK; the othering of opponents, especially on the Conservative side of the fence – it all felt pretty deliberate to me.

The delusion points to the biggest blind spot in the Sturgeonite movement: the startling lack of empathy for those who disagree with them.

As SNP politicians such as MSP Fergus Ewing and the MP Joanna Cherry have discovered, this includes people within the Nationalist movement who do not subscribe to the theological strictures chosen by the former First Minister and her acolytes.

Entirely certain that their ‘progressive’ agenda is the morally right path to pursue, those outside the tent have been simply dismissed as unworthy of attention. That this is done in the name of liberalism is, of course, the ultimate irony.

But let’s not quibble. Let’s instead take Ms Sturgeon at her word. She says it’s time for politicians to dump their ‘fixed and immovable’ mindset. She wants us to be less partisan in the way we think.

Well, that cuts both ways. For if that logic is to be applied to the judges, lawyers and politicians who oppose SNP policies, then I gently suggest it should also focus on people like Ms Sturgeon who support them – and continue to do so with blind adherence.

First up, perhaps she might accept it’s time to take a less ‘fixed and immovable’ position on the freebie culture created by her and her predecessor Alex Salmond in which hundreds of millions of pounds of public funds are spent to promote the Nationalists’ ‘progressive’ credentials.

Is it not time to liberate ourselves from the fixed and immovable view that free university tuition exemplifies our caring Scottish values?

Should we not examine the evidence that it denies hundreds of Scottish-based students the chance to get into a Scottish university?

Should a mature discussion not examine the increasing reliance our universities have on foreign students? Or shall we just continue to demonise anyone who dares to suggest a rethink?

Where else might Ms Sturgeon’s gaze fall?

What about looking at fixed and immovable policies that have run our NHS into the ground over the past 15 years, whereby serious problems which will lead to its imminent collapse are swept under the carpet because they are deemed too difficult to tackle?

Why not accept that parroting the line that ‘it’s worse in England’ isn’t a strategy for survival but a pathetic attempt to politicise the health and livelihoods of sick and unhealthy people?

Is this not just the kind of ‘difficult or controversial policy change’ that a brave politician might seek to advance?

And since she’s now on the backbenches, perhaps Ms Sturgeon might speak to some of her colleagues and question whether her party’s fixed and immovable support for the reckless policies of the Greens is the right way forward.

It’s not too late to support Scotland’s energy sector, which will be central to adapting to a more carbon-neutral future. Is it too much to hope that a more balanced policy is taken forward?

Perhaps the SNP might also wish to adopt a less fixed and immovable position on the role of the centre-Right in our politics. Disagree, fine. But perhaps Ms Sturgeon and her ilk might want to call out every now and then those of their supporters who regularly call for the expulsion from Scotland of centre-Right voters. That might be a step forward to depolarise matters.

Immovable

And finally, there’s the big one. Ever since she was a teenager, Ms Sturgeon has adopted a fixed and immovable position that Scotland should leave the United Kingdom.

More recently, she has insisted – rather rigidly, it must be said – that anyone quibbling about Scotland’s right to hold a second referendum on independence is a ‘democracy denier.’

Perhaps, from the backbenches, she might use her time to accept the complex nature of the UK, the mutual reliance we have on each other and acknowledge that a solution which pleases only 50.1 per cent of the population on our constitutional dilemma is never going to provide Scotland with the settlement it so badly needs.

I am not entirely holding my breath. However, as the First Minister might put it, I live in hope.