Euan McColm is a newspaper columnist and political commentator.
GLASGOW — It came, by any standard, as a bolt from the blue.
When Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, on Wednesday announced her resignation, she sent shockwaves through the U.K. political establishment.
Here, after all, is the most successful politician of her generation, who has led the SNP to election success after election success. Under Sturgeon, the nationalists maintain an iron grip on the Scottish parliament. Meanwhile, she has all but eviscerated her Unionist opponents in Scotland in three successive U.K. general elections.
Still aged just 52, Sturgeon seemed set to have many future successes to celebrate before stepping away from the front line.
But dig down into the detail and things are not as straightforward as they might seem. In fact, for all her many triumphs, Sturgeon — through a series of poor judgment calls — is the architect of her own downfall. She jumped before she was pushed.
Promises, promises
In recent months, rows over reform of the Gender Recognition Act, designed to make it easier for people to change their recorded sex, and a plan to treat the next U.K. general election as what Sturgeon called “a de facto referendum” have seriously damaged her. Stock in Sturgeon has fallen, fewer are buying.
Before getting into these recent problems, it’s worth looking back to the early days of her leadership. Some of Sturgeon’s errors go back a long way.
In the aftermath of defeat for the Yes campaign in 2014, Sturgeon succeeded her mentor Alex Salmond as first minister — and made her first big mistake.
As membership of the SNP soared — from 25,000 to more than 130,000 — she decided not to be fully frank with these enthusiastic new supporters. Rather than explaining that winning the opportunity to stage a second referendum would be incredibly difficult, she led her followers to believe the prize was within grasp. One more heave, lads, was the message.
Then came a series of developments — the election of a majority Conservative government at Westminster in 2015, victory for the Brexit campaign in the following year’s referendum on membership of the European Union (while the majority of Scots backed remain), the installation of Prime Minister Boris Johnson in 2019 — each of which Sturgeon declared would tip support for independence. Each failed to produce the insurmountable lead that was promised. Instead, a majority of Scots stubbornly refused to do as the first minister said they would.
Sturgeon’s insistence that a second independence referendum was just a rush and a push away was further undermined by the rather prosaic matter of the law of the land. The first minister could promise referendums every day of the week and twice on Sundays but the power to run a question on the constitution lies firmly in Westminster.
Inevitably, after years of being marched halfway up the hill and then back down again, SNP members and other pro-independence Scots began to grow impatient. Where, they wanted to know, was this second referendum Sturgeon kept talking about?
And so, last year, the first minister announced her intention to hold an independence referendum in October 2023. She asked the U.K. Supreme Court to confirm that she could legally do so.
Unsurprisingly, the court told her she could not.
After describing this ruling as evidence Scottish democracy was being denied, Sturgeon declared her intention to treat the next U.K. general election as a de facto referendum. If a majority of Scots backed pro-independence parties — the SNP, the Scottish Greens, and Alex Salmond’s Alba — she would take this as an instruction to begin secession talks with the prime minister of the day.
This raw meat was gobbled up by the first minister’s more enthusiastic activists but political colleagues saw problems.
It was not, they told Sturgeon, in the power of any single politician to define the terms of a referendum. A recent paper produced by the MP Stewart McDonald — for years devotedly loyal to the SNP leader — sums up the problems of the de facto referendum plan: if, by some miraculous stroke, pro-independence parties won the majority of the public vote, the U.K. government would insist there had been no legitimate referendum; on the other hand, if the pro-independence parties came up short, London’s response would be that Sturgeon had had her second referendum and had lost for a second time. Sturgeon’s plan offered two versions of defeat for the nationalist movement.
McDonald’s paper is due to be discussed next month at a special conference of the SNP, called by Sturgeon to finesse her referendum strategy. It is not now clear whether that meeting will go ahead.
From bad to worse
Sturgeon’s handling of the matter of reform of the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) added to her woes.
A bill that would allow those wishing to change their legal sex through a simple process of self-identification passed with the support of members of all parties in the Scottish parliament last December. It was blocked, last month, by Secretary of State for Scotland Alister Jack on the grounds it would negatively impact the U.K.-wide Equality Act, which allows for the provision of single-sex spaces.
Sturgeon declared this a “full-frontal assault” on devolution and promised a legal battle in defense of Scotland’s democracy.
The first minister was already on shaky ground — a majority of Scots opposed reform of the GRA — when the case of Isla Bryson hit the headlines. Before identifying as a woman, Bryson — as Adam Graham — had committed two rapes.
By the time the case came to court, Bryson had begun to transition and, on conviction, was sent to Cornton Vale women’s prison.
Scottish Prison Service policy had run ahead of the law and self-ID was accepted when it came to placing convicts in the appropriate prison. As scandal erupted, Sturgeon intervened and Bryson was sent to a male facility.
Over the following days, the first minister repeatedly undermined the very foundation of her self-ID law — that people are the sex they say they are — by refusing to say whether she considered Bryson a man or a woman.
Opponents of GRA reform, who had raised concerns the legislation might be open to abuse by predatory men, had previously been told by Sturgeon their fears were “not valid.” Now she appeared to believe Bryson was not genuinely trans.
It was a mess which — as a poll recently published in Holyrood magazine showed — undermined support for both the first minister and the cause of independence.
Once the SNP’s greatest asset, Sturgeon had become a liability. Her party — by dint of the fact that the minority of Scots who back independence tend to support the SNP — is on course to win the next Holyrood election but she has failed to advance the nationalist cause.
As one colleague said: “She used to understand that to win a majority in favor of independence, you have to move cautiously. The people we need to win over are small c conservatives. There’s no unionist voters out there thinking ‘you know, I’d back independence if only they’d put rapists in women’s prisons.’”
From student activist in the days when nationalism was a fringe interest to the longest-serving first minister in the history of the Scottish parliament, Nicola Sturgeon has enjoyed an extraordinary career.
But her poor judgment has finally caught up with her. She is entirely to blame for her own political demise.
