The SNP’s Dear Leader never manages to stay out of the spotlight for long. Nicola Sturgeon is back on the speech circuit, this time appearing at Edinburgh University to bestow her wisdom upon some unfortunate souls. In her time away from the Holyrood frontbenches — during which she has spoken only a handful of times in the Chamber — it appears Sturgeon has been busy rewriting history. For at last night’s event, the Queen of Nats claimed that politics has changed since she resigned from the top job. Now, she claims, controversial policies ‘descend into the most vicious, toxic rammy, with bad faith arguments all over the place’. Er, has she forgotten the last 17 years of SNP rule?
The former first minister is no stranger to fantasyland, but Sturgeon’s newfound lack of self-awareness is rather staggering. The SNP veteran was the leader who introduced controversial gender legislation to Holyrood, who said she ‘detests the Tories’ and, of course, who was a key part of an indyref campaign that tore the nation in two. Famously none of the debates surrounding these events ever became vicious or toxic, of course…
On Thursday night, the former first minister harped back to her glory days, lamenting how things aren’t quite so rosy now she’s no longer in power. ‘I was the minister who took through [minimum unit pricing]. I don’t think that would get through and on the statue book today,’ she told her audience. Mr S would remind readers that minimum unit pricing has managed to do, er, nothing for the numbers of people dying every year from alcohol-specific deaths in Scotland. Since MUP was introduced in 2018, alcohol mortality figures have risen from 1,136 a year to 1,276 in 2022. It’s not something to boast about…
The nonsensical Nat continued:
I’m not even convinced equal marriage, certainly not without a much more toxic debate, would get there today. A lot of it comes back to…how do we fix that underlying problem of we’ve just lost our way in how to debate things rationally and properly?
Sturgeon’s self-indulgent spiel didn’t stop there. The former FM then went on to criticise the power hoarding tendencies of central government:
On the question about local democracy, if I’m being blunt, I think it is fair to say that there’s been too much of centralisation and maybe not enough devolution of power downwards to local authorities.
How curious. The Queen of Nats is well known, of course, for having established a tight-knit inner circle outside of which she shared relatively little. But admit to her own mistakes she did not.
This isn’t the first time the former SNP leader has criticised the polarisation of politics, however. In her first speech in the Chamber after she resigned, Sturgeon lectured her colleagues about the dire state of today's political discourse — albeit with a tiny smidgen more self-awareness than in last night’s spiel.
Is this what we should come to expect from bygone nationalist leaders? What’ll be next, hapless Humza Yousaf lamenting the rise of ineffectual, incompetent continuity candidates? Watch this space…
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