by Rob Marchant
As the SNP ship is seen to drift, perhaps inexorably, towards a disastrous new era with Humza Yousaf currently its most likely captain, we have to ask ourselves how they ended up here.
As John Rentoul rightly argued on Twitter last Friday, the party has been in decline for some time, of which Sturgeon’s exit is a symptom rather than a cause. One cannot help but think that more is likely to come out about their funding irregularities; but the trigger for the final dam-burst was clearly Sturgeon’s decision to die on the hill of gender self ID, a highly unpopular – not to mention fundamentally damaging to women’s rights, and unworkable – policy.
Rather than listening to Scottish voters, Sturgeon then decided to double down so hard, that she triggered the first-ever invocation of Section 35 the Scotland Act; that is, an overruling of the bill by Westminster.
Crying “an affront to democracy” when you simply do not like the law as it stands makes you look foolish; and one use of Section 35 in a quarter-century of devolved government is hardly evidence of heavy-handedness by Westminster, rather of checks and balances operating exactly as they were designed to.
The sum total of all this has not only undermined the SNP as a credible political force, but has almost certainly set the SNP’s touchstone, the cause of Scottish independence, back years if not decades.
But that is only the start of the SNP’s woes. For a start, think of the hand dealt to Sturgeon’s successor: the party’s electoral hegemony, despite its lacklustre record in government, has arguably been the result of poor competition to replace them. That is, it is largely the near-collapse of its erstwhile big rival, Labour, since the mid-2000s, which has allowed them to continue in power with such so little actually delivered. This is unlikely to change.
Next, now the benighted self ID policy has gone through to become law, there will undoubtedly be a consistent drip-drip-drip of media fallout from it; of a similarly shocking variety to the perfectly timed case of self-identified transgender rapist “Isla” Bryson, slated for a women’s prison despite the obvious bad faith of the man’s declaration as transgender.
