Indeed, one of the last straws for the public was seeing her refuse to say, more than a dozen times, that a brutal double rapist who had initially been sent to a women’s prison was a man. Rather than admit her Gender Recognition Reform Bill’s self-ID provisions would compound that sort of threat to women’s rights and safety, she was tying herself in knots over pronouns.
During the progress of the bill there was almost Stalinist repression of internal dissent in the SNP, out-of-hand dismissal of all objections, and evasion and secrecy about detail.
Most of the Scottish media has been slow to call her out on this, her standard operating procedure. She tended to receive similarly scant scrutiny on other policies and even – for Scots, bafflingly – favourable press elsewhere.
She also faced the fact that the Scottish Conservatives were the only opposition party to hold her to account. Labour and the Lib-Dems were dismal at doing so.
They were both whipped to back the GRR Bill, but that wasn’t especially unusual. On most issues their policies have been either largely the same as hers or identical.
The next SNP leader and First Minister will have to deal with the fact that Scotland, under Nicola Sturgeon’s watch, has been polarised. Public discourse has been corroded. Public trust has been lost. Basic services – the NHS, policing, schools, road maintenance, refuse collection, you name it – have gone to rack and ruin. Life expectancy has fallen sharply. We still have, to our shame, by far the worst drug death levels in Europe.
In many areas, the incompetence would be laughable if it didn’t have such serious consequences. The bill for the construction of two ferries that have yet to sail five years after they were supposed to be in service is now approaching half a billion pounds.
Hundreds of millions more was spent on failed privatisations – such as ScotRail and Ferguson Marine – on loans that have already been written off, and on court cases that they were repeatedly warned were hopeless.
All sorts of things – notably a census that proved unfit for purpose – were botched because they diverged from the rest of the UK just for the sake of it.
And there’s more to come. The imminent Deposit Return Scheme, if it goes ahead as designed, will cost untold millions, and probably bankrupt thousands of companies. The SNP still plans to spend well over a billion setting up a National Care Service about which we don’t have even the most basic details.
All while Scotland has become the highest taxed part of the UK. Despite Scotland receiving the biggest block grant ever, and getting more public spending per head than other parts of the kingdom, we get less for it under the SNP.
It’s because these simple truths are now getting more of an airing and that, after Sturgeon’s years in office, people can see that the country is demonstrably worse in almost every respect, that the SNP may finally suffer at the polls.
Many expect Labour to be the beneficiaries. I disagree.
As I said, they have the problem that they are just as complicit as the Nationalists in the discredited GRR Bill. But they’ve fallen into line with them in most other areas too – including breaking their promise not to govern with them at council level.
Their policies, even when they claim a difference, are almost identical – Gordon Brown’s fresh plans for constitutional tinkering, if not as calamitous as independence, would have similarly divisive effects and distract just as much from the real priorities of most Scots.
And in practical, electoral terms, the contest in much of Scotland is between the Conservatives and the SNP. Labour’s support is – or rather, was, until a few years ago – almost entirely concentrated in the Central Belt. In the vast majority of those seats, they are miles behind the SNP.
Sturgeon’s mismanagement had a particularly devastating effect on rural Scotland, farming, fishing and the hugely important whisky industry – the UK’s single biggest food and drink export.
But it’s also been devastating for oil and gas and related industries in the North East, which support around 100,000 jobs directly and are crucial both to energy security and the wider economy.
Its immense resources and skilled workforce should be part of any responsibly managed move to Net Zero, not abandoned.
But that’s true of many other areas where Scotland, with its extraordinary history of intellectual, economic and engineering success, deserves so much better. That record was largely forged since we have been part of the United Kingdom and a clear majority of Scots, having rejected the SNP’s obsessive pursuit of separatism, want that to continue.
The only party that has robustly backed that stance and provided strong opposition during the disastrous years of SNP rule is the Scottish Conservatives. I firmly believe only we can provide the real alternative Scotland needs so badly.
Douglas Ross is the Leader of the Scottish Conservative Party, the MP for Moray, and an MSP for the Highlands and Islands region.
Nicola Sturgeon’s departure as First Minister – though it will be several weeks before she actually goes – has been hailed by many commentators as a boost to unionism. I prefer to view it in a slightly different way: namely, that continued support for the Union did for her.
Her record is that she failed completely to move the dial towards independence from the decisive “once in a generation” (in her words) referendum result of 2014, despite giving it her full attention to the neglect of all other issues.
There is certainly reason to be optimistic about the Union, but not because Sturgeon presented some uniquely capable challenge to it. Her resignation has led to a lot of commentary listing the problems her successor will have to deal with. It’s a shame we never heard more of this while she was in office, because it’s not a short list.
That was obscured for a long while by the SNP’s electoral success and her series of increasingly implausible ploys for trying to bring the independence issue back. When even her own party woke up to the absurdity of her last gasp option of a so-called “de facto referendum”, and were about to ditch it, the game was up.
She was certainly formidable when it came to winning elections and presentation, particularly in the eyes of those who didn’t have direct, daily experience of the disastrous effects of her government.
Those of us who did found that mystifying, as we did claims that she was a good debater. In First Minister’s Questions, she was quick, but with hectoring, deflection and downright abuse – she very seldom answered a direct question or engaged in argument.
Indeed, one of the last straws for the public was seeing her refuse to say, more than a dozen times, that a brutal double rapist who had initially been sent to a women’s prison was a man. Rather than admit her Gender Recognition Reform Bill’s self-ID provisions would compound that sort of threat to women’s rights and safety, she was tying herself in knots over pronouns.
During the progress of the bill there was almost Stalinist repression of internal dissent in the SNP, out-of-hand dismissal of all objections, and evasion and secrecy about detail.
Most of the Scottish media has been slow to call her out on this, her standard operating procedure. She tended to receive similarly scant scrutiny on other policies and even – for Scots, bafflingly – favourable press elsewhere.
She also faced the fact that the Scottish Conservatives were the only opposition party to hold her to account. Labour and the Lib-Dems were dismal at doing so.
They were both whipped to back the GRR Bill, but that wasn’t especially unusual. On most issues their policies have been either largely the same as hers or identical.
The next SNP leader and First Minister will have to deal with the fact that Scotland, under Nicola Sturgeon’s watch, has been polarised. Public discourse has been corroded. Public trust has been lost. Basic services – the NHS, policing, schools, road maintenance, refuse collection, you name it – have gone to rack and ruin. Life expectancy has fallen sharply. We still have, to our shame, by far the worst drug death levels in Europe.
In many areas, the incompetence would be laughable if it didn’t have such serious consequences. The bill for the construction of two ferries that have yet to sail five years after they were supposed to be in service is now approaching half a billion pounds.
Hundreds of millions more was spent on failed privatisations – such as ScotRail and Ferguson Marine – on loans that have already been written off, and on court cases that they were repeatedly warned were hopeless.
All sorts of things – notably a census that proved unfit for purpose – were botched because they diverged from the rest of the UK just for the sake of it.
And there’s more to come. The imminent Deposit Return Scheme, if it goes ahead as designed, will cost untold millions, and probably bankrupt thousands of companies. The SNP still plans to spend well over a billion setting up a National Care Service about which we don’t have even the most basic details.
All while Scotland has become the highest taxed part of the UK. Despite Scotland receiving the biggest block grant ever, and getting more public spending per head than other parts of the kingdom, we get less for it under the SNP.
It’s because these simple truths are now getting more of an airing and that, after Sturgeon’s years in office, people can see that the country is demonstrably worse in almost every respect, that the SNP may finally suffer at the polls.
Many expect Labour to be the beneficiaries. I disagree.
As I said, they have the problem that they are just as complicit as the Nationalists in the discredited GRR Bill. But they’ve fallen into line with them in most other areas too – including breaking their promise not to govern with them at council level.
Their policies, even when they claim a difference, are almost identical – Gordon Brown’s fresh plans for constitutional tinkering, if not as calamitous as independence, would have similarly divisive effects and distract just as much from the real priorities of most Scots.
And in practical, electoral terms, the contest in much of Scotland is between the Conservatives and the SNP. Labour’s support is – or rather, was, until a few years ago – almost entirely concentrated in the Central Belt. In the vast majority of those seats, they are miles behind the SNP.
Sturgeon’s mismanagement had a particularly devastating effect on rural Scotland, farming, fishing and the hugely important whisky industry – the UK’s single biggest food and drink export.
But it’s also been devastating for oil and gas and related industries in the North East, which support around 100,000 jobs directly and are crucial both to energy security and the wider economy.
Its immense resources and skilled workforce should be part of any responsibly managed move to Net Zero, not abandoned.
But that’s true of many other areas where Scotland, with its extraordinary history of intellectual, economic and engineering success, deserves so much better. That record was largely forged since we have been part of the United Kingdom and a clear majority of Scots, having rejected the SNP’s obsessive pursuit of separatism, want that to continue.
The only party that has robustly backed that stance and provided strong opposition during the disastrous years of SNP rule is the Scottish Conservatives. I firmly believe only we can provide the real alternative Scotland needs so badly.