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Really sorry Nicola but you failed on the big issue, Independence, big time.
Quite interesting. 2020 was kind of darkness at noon. All 3 agree there was no stopping the momentum to a referendum. But Covid struck, Johnson bluntly said no, and NS admits she didn’t have the daring to press the advantage that another politician, say Alex Salmond, might have had.
A frank admission of inadequacy. From then on she appeared to have burned out completely and had some kind of personal collapse, leaving one imposter behind for another, less believable, one.
She also said that taking that gamble wouldn’t have changed anything.
Yes indeed! What she then actually did changed everything very much for the worse. By handing the issue over to the whims of the UK Supreme Court she gifted London vastly more power over Scotland than it had before.
Her pretty-much-unilateral decision killed off Dewar’s vision of the development of Holyrood, and further centralised power in the hands of ‘muscular’ London governments. It left the independence movement stranded ‘for a generation’ (at least). That is world-class incompetence.
High time the ‘independence movement’ got off its collective bahookie instead of indulging in ‘what might have been’ girning.
How much of an independence movement is left? I listen to the Lesley Riddoch podcast weekly , she seems to be quite involved with some of the older folk still part of the former yes movement, listening to her and her co presenter in particular they seem to be contemptuous of anyone in the SNP other than Joanna Cherry, Kate Forbes, Fergus Ewing, Michelle Thomson etc etc. If their positions are representative of what’s left of the yes movement, it’s going nowhere because young people won’t stage behind their vision of Scotland. I have a lot of time for the work of folk like Lesley Riddoch but it’s also obvious the gender issue has played away at her – all making the case for a Scandinavian style Scotland which doesn’t fall the trope that being anti trans is being pro women. It’s all broken up now and I don’t think it’ll be easy to get it back together.
If you were at all honest you would have to acknowledge the role of the pandemic in the ‘burn out’ and not only in the SNP.
How i wish she was still First Minister. Nice to see people with opposing views giving each other the space to say exactly what they mean. Good to see Nicola being relaxed and eloquent. What a loss to public life.
She brought it on herself, by failing to create a firewall between Bute House and SNP HQ at Gordon Lamb House, ie, by allowing her husband to run the SNP while she ran the country…
You need that space, that distance, for what you might call “plausible deniability” when something goes wrong at HQ and Police Scotland start looking into SNP finances…hardly the first time and certainly not the last that a political party’s finances will be probed by the cops…
The prospect of a squad car pulling up outside Bute House was to be avoided at all costs and so she went before it could happen, sending the independence movement spiralling into a leadership contest no one was ready for, and ultimately into the safe but ultimately futile hands of John Swinney.
That can only be described as sending the movement backwards I think? I mean, we’re meant to be on our way to independence and it’s like Groundhog Day.
I agree Sturgeon’s exit is a loss to the SNP. She is a talented communicator and ordinary, everyday Scots who don’t follow politicis much believe her and relate to her, especially women. She also has a sense of humour and in general, seems grounded in reality…
But, like all these media people with the gift of the gab, the whole thing is like water off a duck’s back to her…
Let’s say, I’m wrong, let’s say, she left because she felt like a change in her life…
Well, that’s even worse. Serious politicians don’t do that, unless for health reasons. They don’t resign mid-term, half way through, on a whim.
My view is, with a more democratic, adult and collaborative approach to leadership, Nicola Sturgeon would still be in post and about to win a third term…
As it is, she allowed herself to be boxed into a tricky situation there was no other way out of once the police became involved…
In short, Sturgeon is as gifted at communicating and selling the message as she is atrociously bad on strategy and politics in the more banal use of that term…
Strategy? None whatsoever, kinda like: we’re going to have another referendum, no we’re not, oh yes, yes we are, are we? No, maybe, but now is not time, ok, I agree, we’ll wait, but also ask the Supreme Court judges what they think just in case?
To even describe that outright shambles as a strategy puts too much of a strain on that word of the English language…
She was just making it up as she went along…
But it’s one of the problems of our time, the undemocratic, autocratic way parties like the SNP under Sturgeon and Labour under Starmer are run. No dissidence allowed. The slightest sign of incomformity and you’re out.
We’re meant to live in a democracy, where people habitually disagree with each other, which is of its essence. Yet, the way the main parties are run show that, rather than a democracy, politics takes place in a kind of hypertrophied media sphere where the essence of democracy is left behind.
If you’re not on message with your party, then you become the story and the carefully selected topic of the day gets lost in the newscycle…
It’s a terrible way to do politics…. surely, there must be some alternative?
True, and this was inherited from New Labour.
Hi Bella
Not just Labour, Alistair Campbell himself!!!
Also Known As None Other Than / Yours Truly Himself
PD: Talk all you like about men’s mental health, just don’t mention the illegal war in Iraq…
Yes, the contradictions are staggering
Political parties occupy just one dimension of the political process. There are others, including social movements, and cultural spaces. These might be at least as important – perhaps more so.
She is remarkably good at self-publicity. I guess that being an MSP doesn’t take up much of her time. So she can thouroghly concentrate on self-promotion to media of her choice and promoting herself by writing a door-stopper autobiography. Very me-centric.
i think there are too many people had, and still have it in for Nicola. She was very popular not just with women , but minority groups, she seemed like a friend who would defend our rights, and her vision of an independent inclusive Scotland chimed with exactly why we need to be free from Westminster. I do not blame her for not pressing ahead with a second referendum when Covid was upon us.
I am sure you are right about her having time for minorities, but I think that her leadership strategy was seriously flawed.
If you keep things to a husband and wife team and a cotterie of aides, I’m afraid that is guaranteed to create resentment within the SNP upper echelons. Which is what happened, at least to some extent.
The SNP is not the Labour Party. It’s the political party of a national movement. It ought to be broad based. Sturgeon ought to have remembered the old mafia line about keeping your friends close, but your enemies closer.
With a 20% or even 30% lead in the polls, Sturgeon could have allowed for a Kenny Macskill, she could have afforded a cabinet where there was a bit of dissent. Instead, she went the other way, full on Stalinist mode…
Which is why I keep coming back to her realtionship with Murrell. Who was leading and who was following whom? We don’t know.
I think Gerry Hassan is right when he says we need a whole new start…. but it might take another generation to get back to such a position of total ascendancy as the SNP had in about 2015, 2016…
Maybe her closeness with Peter Murrell was because some of the others were so untrustworthy. Maybe also she wanted rid of the male patriarchy, and to give others a chance? I would not blame her, or read into it stalinism.
What I am suggesting, Andrew, to spell it out, is that it was a man who nobody had voted for, Peter Murrell, working in the shadows, with next to no accountability, who was responsible for at least some of the very bad decisions that Sturgeon took, and in any case, for opting for a top-down, no nonsense, uncollegial (to put it mildly) form of government which, and I insist on this point, is totally inappropriate for a national independence party….
I come to this conclusion because Nicola seems by temperament anything but autocratic, quite the opposite, and Murrell’s job as CEO was to manage the party…
Is there anything more patriarchal and undemocratic than a guy in the backshop no one voted for using his charismatic wife to run a whole independence movement and quite possibly to some extent the country?
All kinds of lofty statements were made when Holyrood opened about how we were going to do things differently to London. What we got with the Sturgeon – Murrell pairing was the most democratically deficient government in the last 100 years in these isles…
Thatcher was more democratic arguably ,and certainly allowed for more dissent…
This is all charred toast. I suspect that we have learned all we can from it. ‘Time to move on.
I dont think so, G, I think we dont know too many things still, and the Murrell case is still to come to court after all, and Salmond’s supporters are also still very much on the warpath… it’s not over..
When I think of Peter Murrell, I think of a man in the shadows, in the penumbra, a little bit like Marlon Brando at the end of APOCALYPSE NOW in that cave in the depths of the jungle as he explains to Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) that thing about a snail moving along the edge of a razor blade, (befote Willard carries out his otders to terminate, with extreme prejudice, his command)…
You need to stop thinking about Peter Murrell…
You mean, the shadow of Murrell…
None of us should have to be thinking of any of this…
Everybody knows, in any line of work, that it is always a mistake to mix the personal and the professional…
What do Sturgeon and Murrell do?
Precisely that…
‘Move on, nothing to see here’ never really works. It festers until it destroys. Too many bad things that remain unexplained happened under NS’s watch for them to be swept under the carpet. The secrecy and lies (some of which are so blatant), have been extremely damaging and seeing her promoting her book which attempts to absolve herself from anything serious at all, is simply fuelling the fire, media interview after interview. How does that help anyone to ‘move on’? It does quite the opposite. She should clearly have kept quiet for a number of years yet but she did not, why is that? It certainly was not to help the independence cause or Scotland in general.
At one point NS says that when support and urgency for independence reach a critical point then the constitutional roadblocks against it will give way. I think that she is absolutely right about this. The question then is, how do we build that support and that urgency. I don’t think the SNP, or any one political party, though they are part of the answer, can be the whole answer. It has to come from an extra-parliamentary source – a mixture of movement politics and cultural zeitgeist. There is no instruction manual about how to go about achieving this: it will emerge from an interaction of circumstance and societal mobilisation. But what we must absolutely not do is close down possibilities, endlessly complain about the SNP, the Greens or whoever else, or give up on those organisations still campaigning for independence in an outward-focused way (like Believe in Scotland) or seeking to develop links with other campaigns (like RIC). We just do not know from what seeds tomorrow’s independence movement will grow.