As an Englishman, I've been impressed with how mature and competent the Scottish leaders have seemed in comparison with their English counterparts; I don't know if it's a systemic or cultural thing (or just my imagination), but as a representative of that tendency I'm sad to see her go.
Sturgeon was competent at enforcing party unity and winning Scottish elections. But in terms of actually achieving things for Scotland, both her and the SNP have failed. It's a one issue party so in terms of independence:
- Support for independence is now lower than when she took the reigns. That by itself must count as failure on the SNP's own terms.
- Lost the "once in a generation" referendum and then refused to accept the result, campaigning for years for a second referendum she had already agreed wouldn't happen.
- Made zero progress on reducing subsidy dependency on England, creating the widespread impression that the SNP doesn't really want Scotland to be independent. Many other specific issues around independence also have been ignored despite the lack of answers being one of the issues causing their referendum loss.
- Done everything possible to piss off the neighbours across the border, like encouraging anti-English rhetoric that would be considered grotesquely racist if there was a skin color difference.
And in non-referendum areas:
- Poverty and poor health are worse in Scotland than England.
- She said she wanted to be judged on closing education gaps, but they didn't close.
- The economy is worse.
- Social policy is totally reactive. Under Sturgeon the SNP just tended to copy whatever England was doing but making it more extreme, without any obvious guiding principles. The gender self-ID fiasco is a good example of that. 2/3rds of voters are against it and Salmond says it's done more damage to the independence campaign than anything else (which says a lot about the strength of that campaign). She didn't think through the consequences and when faced with the reality of what it means in the Isla Bryson case, flailed around and couldn't articulate a coherent response. Total incompetence.
- Scotland has quietly developed a reputation for corruption and weak institutions, with problems you don't see elsewhere in the country.
The nasty Salmond/Sturgeon affair was one example, and her resignation is likely triggered by the police finally starting to investigate where £600,000 of donated money was apparently embezzled to. The way she "can't recall" that her husband lent over £100,000 to the SNP is another symptom of this sort of thing.
> - Lost the "once in a generation" referendum and then refused to accept the result, campaigning for years for a second referendum she had already agreed wouldn't happen.
Many voted no to remain in the EU, only to have the rug pulled out from under them anyway. That surely justifies a redo.
It's not relevant to the point I made though is it? She promised to respect the result for the long term and that was a bald-faced lie made for pure political advantage.
But to address your point: why? They knew when voting that there was likely to be a referendum on the EU in the future, the pressure for that had been building for years, and Scotland has its own eurosceptics that wanted to remain in the UK and also leave the EU.
Also, the idea of an "independence" movement that wants to immediately give up that independence to join another union seems like a contradiction. The SNP is the Scottish Nationalist Party but the EU hates nationalists, they routinely say things like this:
> 'Nationalism is like alcoholism: a short period of exaltation followed by a long period of headaches' - @TimmermansEU against nationalism.
If the SNP was a coherent party with a principled set of positions it would have needed to resolve this contradiction at some point, but like many other such contradictions they never did. It doesn't act like a nationalist party, it acts like a bog standard centre left party (hard left on id politics), with relatively little interest in any theory of nations.
It's like making a deal with someone that gives you promises (or in this case "vows") then afterwards turns around and negates then all and then completely changes the rules of the game (in this case Brexit).
Remember one big reason that people voted no for independence is that there wasn't full clarity whether Scotland could remain in the EU if they left Britain. They'd have to start a whole ascension process.
I've never been to Scotland but some friends live there and they really should have a second chance to escape.
> anti English rhetoric culminating in abuse, vandalism and physical assault are now common place in Scotland and happen daily (15 per day) according to Scottish police statistics.
My hobby horse is more representative voting systems and the one in place in Scotland encourages people to aim for broad suppport rather than be loved and hated by a minority.
To be honest, in comparison to the last 5 years of the Tory part, Sturgeon is quite competent.
The only proper scandal I remember is the Salmond case, and then in terms of being incompetent the only thing which is undisputable is how badly she has handled the Scottish drug policy/crisis.
Ironically, I was always very impressed with Salmond as well, he seemed to be on a different level, wit and intelligence wise to his English colleagues. It all obviously got a bit grimy with him and Sturgeon at the end, so I didn't mention it.
There has also been the recent trans policy heat (not to say she is on the wrong side, I have no idea) and the finance debacle that Private Eye has been tracking.
So yes, they are hardly pure, but just seem generally more professional and trustworthy.
Ha, well I did have the misfortune the other day to stumble on to a piece in The National and was depressed at the blatant anti-Englishness, especially in the toxic comments, which would have been condemned as racism with any other target or in any other mainstream publication.
As an occassional reader of Scottish discussions as well, the double standards are striking.
Compared to those discussions and their anti-English tenor, "the unmentionable" Tommy Robinson was a positively mild and mellow-tempered critic of Islam.
I get why Ukrainians hate Russians; but there is nowhere near as much real blood between the English and the Scots. There shouldn't be that much hate, unless deliberately stoked.
You don't remember any except the salmond case because the left wing media treat the SNP very softly. There were lots of scandals during her time, e.g. the ferries disaster, the current gender self id / rapist case, the missing 660k, her regular faked inability to recall critical facts when questioned about things, breaking her own mask mandate, threatening to prosecute MSPs if they spoke against Sturgeon, the attempt to take complete power over from the Scottish Parliament via a pandemic law etc.
The prison issue wasn't the only straw but I believe it was the last one.
It wasn't just that her government tried to put a male rapist in a female prison, after ignoring years of warnings that self-id would cause this to happen.
It was that when questioned, she repeatedly demonstrated that she was either unable or unwilling to grasp the logic of the situation and address the mistake with integrity. Instead she continued trying to square the circle.
I agree that women have seemed relatively impressive at the top when they have stuck compared to their male counterparts; again, I don't know if that is coincidental, or representative of something we should learn from.
Theresa May is certainly the exception on that list. She's widely regarded (next to Liz Truss) as one of the most ineffectual Prime Ministers of the last fifty years.
As terrible as May was, it does seem that a lot of the derision toward her is rooted in either scapegoating (from the Conservative side) or - more commonly - misogyny (from all sides).
She certainly was not competent, and did a lot of damage, but she doesn't compare to the incompetence of either her predecessor or successor. It's also worth noting that she was handed a poison chalice: the Brexit mandate, which she had been opposed to during the original referendum, and subsequently blamed for every predictable misstep in implementation (mostly by Johnson, who had shied away from the leadership role in the immediate wake of the referendum, despite being an instigator).
Either way you look at it, she was saddled with a lot of blame for problems that predated her office.
I think the disdain for her was less misogyny (the ghost of Margaret Thatcher still excites the conservatives in a way only directly comparable to the Republican worship of Regan) and more her utter unlikability.
A politician can be unlikable and effective, or likeable and ineffective. Once in a very great while they combine efficacy and electability. But to combine such utter ineffectuality with a total lack of charisma is to ensure destain.
But I agree, she didn't create the environment that led to Brexit like Cameron, nor did she help push it through like Johnson. Whatever her legacy, it's as nothing next to theirs.
Merkel made very serious strategic mistakes that have cost Germany and Europe a lot and are still costing a lot. Russia, energy policy, open door policy on immigrants (which has played a part in precipitating Brexit), she got pretty much every important, strategic issue wrong.
Was Merkel responsible for the movement of refugees within europe? I don't think it is that simple. The structure of power within Germany is also such that she simply was not able to allow or disallow the moevement of refugees into Germany...
The Syrian migrant crisis was deliberately created by Putin to damage the European project. So... No. What Merkel did was morally necessary. Brexit was the culmination of literally decades of Tory 'Eurosceptic' scare mongering. I grew up listening to it daily on every British news programme. Topped off by a very British style of xenophobia that has feared the 'influx' of 'foreigners' since at least the time of Enoch Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' speech. The British working class and lower middle class, especially outside of London, have been crushed economically since the Winter of Discontent. They've been taught to blame outsiders for their economic precarity. The same narrative is now repeating in Ireland. It's just as untrue there...
In terms of energy it's more ambiguous, certainly the move away from nuclear was short term a bad call. Long term that's a big discussion involving externalities like decommissioning. More topically, the energy crisis last Winter wasn't a result of Russian brinkmanship but the American destruction of Nord Stream. Hard to blame Merkel for not having anticipated the war.
I wouldn't include May (see my reply to a sibling comment), but otherwise the only other person that seems slightly odd in that list is Merkel for being a christian conservative, but - even as a leftist - she's still one of the only one leaders I can think of that I would actually respect the integrity of (individual political stances aside). So the list seems relatively sound.
I presume you're seeing gender when you say "motives" & otherwise ignoring any actual substance of these leaderships?
I'm genuinely struggling to think of any male leaders I would add to the list - Hollande is a contender but there's a lot of issues there. Open to any suggestions for the list...
Margaret Thatcher? I personally don't agree with all her ideas, but she has rescued the UK out of the mess they were in in the early '80s, and she managed to do it in an extremely hostile environment.
If you're having a discussion with people who like Sturgeon & Ardern, who have some issues with Merkel & May, raising one of the most hated women in recent history seems an unusual take.
Thatcher (& Reagan) are rightly recognised today as being responsible for untold suffering. Even the UK Conservative party (Hague) have since spoken out against her approach.
She didn't "rescue" the UK from anything, unless when you say "UK" you exclusively mean "UK shareholders". Her policies caused skyrocketing unemployment & poverty, the only positives anyone has cited were macroeconomic & even Blair thought those changes resulted from societal shifts rather than from Thatcher's political interventions.
The environment was reactively hostile - the hostilities more than justified.
That's nonsense, there are lots of people in the UK who rate Thatcher as one of the best PMs ever. The UK finished the 80s in a drastically better position than at the start in terms of poverty and employment, the latter of which only skyrocketed at the start of her first term because the previous government was socialist, and had been manipulating the economy to prioritize people putting in jobs even if those jobs were useless. The USSR also had low unemployment, but that doesn't mean they had a good economy.
> there are lots of people in the UK who rate Thatcher
Very true. Too many. I did say "most", which doesn't mean "universally". Thankfully the (far too large) set of fans in the UK don't represent any kind of global majority.
> The UK finished the 80s in a drastically better position than at the start in terms of poverty and employment
This... isn't remotely true.
Poverty went from 13% before Thatcher to over 22% after. You acknowledge unemployment skyrocketed, but the reduction at the end of her term was minor - overall rate finished much higher than before she was in office.
> The USSR also had low unemployment, but that doesn't mean they had a good economy.
Bringing the USSR in here is a strawman because any rebuttal from me can come across as being in support of the USSR, of I'm not - I strongly believe the stats here are not representative of reality. But Soviets aside, the fact you don't think people having income is inherently "good" but instead prioritise something abstract called "the economy" says a lot about your priorities.
Can I ask what exactly is "good" about a "good economy" if more people are in poverty?
I personally think that she laid the groundwork for some of the problems we're seeing today. She 'sold the family silver' which creates short-term gains, but in the end you've damaged long-term foundations of the economy: housing, industrial capability, investment in infrastructure etc.
Despite the conservative party publicly acknowledging the errors of her ways in the late 90s, she had already moved the UK overton window far enough to pave the way for New Labour. I doubt Brexit would've been possible without two right-wing parties dominating the political sphere. Even Old-Labour-Corbyn's resistance to "take sides" post-referendum says so much about how much public perception of the political spectrum had shifted in the UK.
