Toxic? Sturgeon’s Bute House tenure was an eight-year journey into the dark heart of politics

SOMEWHERE between the resignation podium and the lecture circuit, former political leaders usually acquire a pair of rose-tinted glasses. Going by her latest comments, it seems like Nicola Sturgeon picked up a particularly strong prescription. In a Q&A with Lord Wallace, former deputy first minister, Sturgeon lamented how ‘toxic’ politics had become.

Any controversial proposal, she said, was bound to ‘descend into the most vicious, toxic rammy, with bad faith arguments all over the place’. For good measure, she added: ‘I’m not even convinced equal marriage, certainly not without a much more toxic debate, would get there today.’ She added that ‘we’ve just lost our way in how to debate things rationally and properly’.

Before we go any further, cast another glance over those last five words. They capture the arrogant, entitled, insular worldview of the political class. Those who disagree are not only irrational but debating improperly. Debating properly means agreeing with them.

Pious

But that is not the chief problem with Sturgeon’s pious patter. Same-sex marriage wouldn’t pass the Scottish parliament in 2024? Eighteen MSPs voted against the Marriage and Civil Partnership Bill in 2014. I’ve tried to think of every MSP who might oppose similar legislation today and I couldn’t break into double figures.

Scotland has become markedly more liberal about homosexuality in my lifetime. (I was born just five years after decriminalisation.) The notion that this progress has reversed in the past ten years is unsupported by the evidence.

What Sturgeon is getting at has nothing to do with sexuality and everything to do with gender identity ideology. People are heartily sick of the latter and, thanks to the Cass Report, are pushing back against the regressive political movement behind it. Sturgeon would rather conflate gender critics with homophobes than address their criticisms because those criticisms are damning of her policy preferences and priorities, not least the Gender Recognition Reform (GRR) Bill.

Some might suggest that this rhetorical tactic only contributes to a polarised and toxic political culture. But, then, that’s nothing new for Sturgeon.

She has already described opponents of GRR in these terms: ‘There are people who have opposed this Bill that cloak themselves in women’s rights to make it acceptable. But just as they are transphobic you’ll also find they are deeply misogynist, often homophobic, possibly some of them racist as well.’

Transphobic. Misogynist. Homophobic. Racist. That is how Sturgeon spoke about her political opponents, which on gender self-identification included the vast majority of the Scottish public.

Not as reasonable people with a sincere difference of opinion. No, as intolerant bigots motivated by prejudice.

Again, it might be said that no one contributed to the poisonous tenor of the gender law reform debate quite as pungently as the First Minister who introduced a radical policy on a contentious issue, openly sided with a particular lobby, and refused to engage with reasoned and well-informed critiques.

Gender is not the only area where Sturgeon stoked division. In the matter of independence, she was the dividerin-chief. It was Sturgeon who characterised opposition to a second referendum as ‘democracy denial’. Sturgeon who falsely claimed there was a ‘threat to the NHS here in Scotland from Westminster’s privatisation agenda’ if Scots voted No in 2014.

Sturgeon, doing her best Nigel Farage impression, who said: ‘An added benefit of being independent is that we will no longer have to put up with being treated like something on the sole of Westminster’s shoe.’

When the European Commission failed to play ball on EU membership for an independent Scotland, it was Sturgeon who stooped to threatening the residency status of European citizens, saying: ‘There are 160,000 EU nationals from other states living in Scotland... if Scotland was outside Europe, they’d lose the right to stay here.’

What senior politicians say matters because people listen. And, sometimes, they act. During the pandemic, Sturgeon claimed that ‘prevalence of the virus in Scotland, right now, is five times lower than it is in England’.

She was later rebuked by the Office for Statistics Regulation, which observed: ‘The sources used to underpin this claim have been difficult to identify.’ By that point, it was too late for corrections. The day after Sturgeon’s comments, a group of people in mock hazmat suits filmed themselves on the Border, with a ‘Keep Scotland Covid Free’ banner, shouting ‘plague carrier’ at motorists entering from England.

These may have been overly excited randoms but in the toxic culture Sturgeon presided over, ugly political rhetoric was in evidence at the very top.

Her constitution secretary Mike Russell once listed the names of Scottish Tory MPs who voted for Theresa May’s Brexit deal and branded them a ‘Ragman Roll’, a term used to describe the 13th century Scottish gentry who betrayed Scotland by swearing allegiance to Edward I. Asked about it at First Minister’s Questions by the then Scottish Tory leader, Sturgeon said: ‘I am genuinely struggling to believe that Jackson Carlaw has come here to talk about a Twitter hashtag.’

Her environment secretary Roseanna Cunningham branded Ruth Davidson ‘Scotland’s 21st century Toom Tabard’. ‘Toom tabard’, or ‘empty coat’, was a common pejorative for John Balliol, a 13th century Scottish king reviled as a vassal of the English crown.

Polarised

When Tory politician John Lamont tweeted about attending a Burns Night event, Sturgeon’s energy minister Paul Wheelhouse replied: ‘Burns was a proud Scot every day of the year… not just once a year. Unfortunately you’re more likely to have a political epitaph of being one of a modern day “Parcel of Rogues in a nation”, for selling out Scotland’s right to choose to stay in the EU.’

Frankly, any Unionist politician who didn’t get called a traitor on Sturgeon’s watch wasn’t trying hard enough.

Nicola Sturgeon is right. Scottish politics has become more polarised. Debates are conducted in a spirit of bitterness and contempt rather than respect. Ideas are embraced or dismissed not on their merits but according to the person proposing them and whether that person is ‘on the right side of history’, which is to say on the same side as the political establishment.

Anyone wishing to involve themselves in politics today had better develop a thick skin quickly, for they will be embarking on a world of harshness, enmity, sneering, smugness and disdain for different ways of thinking.

Many have contributed to this air of nastiness but few as fulsomely as Nicola Sturgeon. Her tenure in Bute House was an eight-year sojourn in the dark heart of the politics of division.

Of course, our politics is toxic. It was injected some years ago with a particularly poisonous toxin: Nicola Sturgeon.