Nicola Sturgeon is going nowhere. Some of her more excitable critics reckon the complete implosion of her policy on transgender prisoners could finish off her premiership. Not least since it comes just as she was planning a fightback against the UK government’s decision to block her Gender Recognition Reform (GRR) Bill. The SNP leader has been subjected to cringe-making TV interviews about whether she thinks rapists are women if they say so and awkward questions at Holyrood about placing male sex offenders in women’s prisons. She has been forced to U-turn repeatedly and has rushed out new regulations on transgender prisoners at odds with the self-identification principle at the heart of her GRR Bill.
But the events of the past seven days should not be assumed to doom Sturgeon’s leadership. Yes, she been proved comprehensively wrong in policy, strategy, and political instinct. She has shown herself to be a gullible fool taken in by crank gender ideology that has collided roughly with reality. She has revealed herself, this self-proclaimed feminist, to have scant regard for the interests and safety of women in prison, one of the most vulnerable groups in society. A politician with a dizzyingly, and unfathomably, high opinion of her own intellect has been shown up as clueless. Joanna Cherry and Joan McAlpine were right. For Women Scotland were right. Murray, Blackburn, and indeed Mackenzie were right. JK Rowling was right. Sturgeon was wrong.
Unfortunately, there are few penalties to pay for getting things wrong when you’re Nicola Sturgeon. She will not resign and she will not be compelled to. For one, there is no alternative leader waiting in the wings, or at least not one who could replicate her storming election victories. Even if there were, Sturgeon exercises an iron grip over the party, not just because the SNP is a top-down outfit but because Sturgeon’s husband is also the CEO of the SNP. Come for the queen and you come for her consort, too.
Scotland suffers from an incestuous political culture
Even now, Sturgeon’s party remains loyal. She is an election winner and, besides, anyone rocking the boat will face accusations of undermining the campaign for independence. The SNP is not like other parties: it is driven by a single goal and anything that doesn’t advance the goal threatens it. The incentives to ‘wheesht for indy’, as they say, are powerful indeed.
Another factor shoring up Sturgeon’s position is the quality of the alternative at Holyrood. Not only is there no rival First Minister on the opposition benches: Scottish Labour and the Scottish Liberal Democrats backed Sturgeon’s GRR Bill and are studiously avoiding the current trans prisoners row. The Scottish Tories are keeping up the pressure but, having allowed their MSPs a free vote on the Bill, their criticisms of the SNP must take into account the decision of three of their most prominent parliamentarians to vote for the legislation.
More fundamentally, Sturgeon’s ability to act with relative impunity is a reflection of Scotland’s broken political system, in particular the flawed devolution settlement and the faulty parliament it has created. One of the most thoughtful MSPs, the Highlander Donald Cameron, is bringing forward a private member’s Bill to reform Holyrood. While the details are still to be specified, confronting the Scottish parliament with its many inadequacies would be a bracing but very welcome exercise.
But tinkering – even learned tinkering – with the Holyrood set-up will not remedy what ails Scottish politics. That is a noxious draught of constitutionalism, group think, ideological capture, impulsive lawmaking, and substandard legislative scrutiny. Scotland suffers from an incestuous political culture in which policy is researched, lobbied for, drafted, legislated, reported on and analysed by people who all used to drink together down the student union. It is government of old uni mates, by old uni mates, for old uni mates.
The flaws of Scotland’s political system may sustain Sturgeon in power but they will not make her any less of a failure. She will go on calling the shots but she will go on calling them badly because although she is Scotland’s longest-serving First Minister, she is also its worst. She pledged to close the educational attainment gap; it is wide as ever. She introduced a legal guarantee on patient waiting times; it hasn’t been met in a single quarter of the 12 years since. She promised investment to tackle Scotland’s status as the drugs death capital of Europe; that status stubbornly remains and her government approved a £1m cut to alcohol and drugs funding as part of a cost-cutting exercise.
Whatever she touches, she wrecks and that’s never going to change. Nicola Sturgeon is going nowhere.
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