Go woke, go broke? From The Spectator (UK):
Why Nicola Sturgeon resigned By Iain Macwhirter In an emotional press conference this morning, Nicola Sturgeon said she no longer had the energy to give ‘100 per cent’ to the job of Scottish First Minister. Sturgeon insisted that she could have ‘led the party to independence’, but that her personality was now becoming a liability. ‘Fixed opinions about me are becoming a barrier to reasoned debate,’ she said. Sturgeon appealed for politics to become ‘less polarised’ and more consensual. However, she didn’t appear to accept that her own policies might have contributed to that polarisation. Yet, allowing 16-year-olds to change legal sex on demand, with no medical intervention, could hardly be described as non-controversial. This legislation is now opposed by two thirds of Scottish voters. Critics might say that the ‘irrationality’ she complains about in public discourse has been largely of her own making. According to her bitter rival and predecessor, Alex Salmond, now leader of the breakaway Alba party, the GRR Bill has fatally damaged the cause of independence, to which Sturgeon said she had ‘dedicated her adult life’. Sturgeon said she could have carried on for ‘some months’, but had decided she did not have the stamina to persevere with her other headline policy: turning the next general election into a ‘de facto’ referendum. Sceptics will see Sturgeon’s dramatic fall from grace as a consequence of her own policy failures rather than the unreason of her political opponents. She said in 2015 that she wanted to be ‘judged on her ability to close the attainment gap in education’. Yet the divergence in educational performance between children born in different social classes remains wide. The National Health Service in Scotland is ‘broken’, according to the BMA chair Dr Iain Kennedy. Homelessness is at record levels. |
