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The National
2 days ago
- Politics
- The National
Nicola Sturgeon's memoir gives plenty of insight but isn't very frank
If her memoir does not always live up to that title, it does flesh out the details about what we already know of a woman facing some of the most demanding challenges of post-war Scotland. The early pages expand on an already well-documented childhood in Dreghorn in Ayrshire. We already know Sturgeon as a socially awkward child obsessed with reading. It's always been a paradox, also referenced here, that she can appear comfortable addressing crowds of thousands but struggle with dinner-table chit-chat. READ MORE: Inside the row between Scottish press and Nicola Sturgeon's team at book launch Here, she delves more deeply into the fear of failure, which pushed her to work tirelessly and which would later manifest in a severe case of impostor syndrome. The more she achieved, the more keenly she felt the likelihood of everything collapsing. It was politics which helped her face down a crippling lack of confidence, or to be more precise, the SNP. Frankly begins with its author about to knock on the door of her local SNP candidate, Kay Ullrich to offer her services as a volunteer. It was a life-changing moment, and the pages that follow tell in sometimes excruciating detail the minutiae of local SNP campaigning in a way that underlines the tensions inherent in the transition from a small, fringe party driven by a bunch of close (some might say exclusive) friends to a mass-membership, election-winning machine. Frankly's depiction of 2014's referendum is seen entirely through the SNP prism. None of the many grassroots organisations which sprang up throughout the campaign get a mention. Yes Scotland is dismissed in a couple of paragraphs. After the referendum result, the focus switches entirely to the SNP's election prospects. That may not be too surprising in a memoir written by the woman who led the SNP for almost 10 years. It's nevertheless depressing to realise how little thought was given to the Yes movement as the dull conformity of party politics reasserted its dominance. As the editor of the Sunday Herald, the only Scottish newspaper to support Yes in the referendum, my experience of the Yes campaign as a joyful explosion of democratic engagement chimes with Frankly's description, but there was activism which spread beyond party politics in a way largely ignored here. By the time Frankly reaches the referendum, it has given increasing prominence to Alex Salmond, with whom Sturgeon famously formed one of the most successful partnerships ever seen in Scottish politics. There's not much new insight into that relationship, which is understandable given its disintegration later. Sturgeon strains to rise above the bitterness to give her former mentor the necessary praise – 'The impact he had earlier in life was overwhelmingly positive' etc etc – but portrays a spikier-than-expected account of the challenges of working with him even in the good days. His failure to read all of the SNP's independence White Paper in 2013 is given as one example of his sometimes shaky grasp of detail and limited attention span, and his promise to do so on board a flight to China is described as unlikely to 'survive contact with the first glass of in-flight champagne'. The portrayal of the destruction of their relationship after Salmond came under investigations for alleged sexual offences (he was later acquitted) is necessarily one-sided but Sturgeon was surely right to insist that the behaviour he admitted to, while not breaking the law, should end his political career and to challenge his depiction of himself as a victim of a conspiracy. READ MORE: JK Rowling compares Nicola Sturgeon to Donald Trump and Bella Swan She is on less solid ground with her 'speculation' that Salmond himself was responsible for the leak of the allegations against him to the Daily Record. She admits there is no evidence for such a suggestion and it did not serve her case to include it here. There's an honesty to the way Sturgeon admits in Frankly to a number of mistakes as First Minister. There is sometimes, though, a tendency to downplay their consequences, which undermines their 'frankness'. There is, however, good insight into the thinking behind her most controversial decisions. As a supporter of her stance on trans rights, I think she may have gone a little far by regretting not 'hitting the pause button', but a proper deep-dive into that issue would require an article – and maybe even a book – by itself. The passages on her exhaustion during COVID-19, the heartbreak and guilt brought on by her miscarriage and the impact of her arrest during the police investigation into SNP finances are among the most powerfully written in the book. National readers will particularly focus on the progress – or lack of it – on achieving independence. I still see the wisdom of Sturgeon's caution on calling a second referendum which would lack international recognition and which might be lost. I'm less convinced about the explanation here for seeking the Supreme Court's ruling on whether the Scottish Government could call a referendum independent of Westminster. Frankly suggests its main purpose was to shut up independence supporters' calls for Holyrood to do so. That impression is backed up by the absence of any plan to respond to the Supreme Court's eventual decision that the power did indeed lie with Westminster. There can be little doubt that running out of new ideas on how to move the dial on independence played its part in Sturgeon's decision to quit. Quite how she went from having 'plenty in the tank' at the beginning of 2023 to resigning just weeks later is glossed over by simply saying 'I'm not sure when the impetus to leave finally eclipsed any desire to stay'. Frankly makes clear the huge impact on its author of the police investigation into SNP finances. She describes the day of her arrest as the worst of her life. The ongoing investigation legally limits what she can say, but there is obviously a justified resentment over how long this probe has been going on. I suspect she will have more to say on this later. For now, Nicola Sturgeon is seeking a quieter, less dramatic life out of the spotlight. Frankly ends on an upbeat note. She is, she says, a stronger, more resilient woman, with a clearer appreciation of what and who makes her happy. She says she may not be done with politics forever. It's not yet clear if politics is done with her.
The National
6 days ago
- Politics
- The National
Wholly political campaign for independence is a terrible idea
This week, I want to argue that a wholly political campaign is a terrible idea. Most shifts in public opinion are not led either by politicians or resulting from a political process. Yet still we're stuck with the idea that until politicians either create a mass shift in public sentiment themselves or they secure some sort of referendum process, the rest of us just need to wait. This has sidetracked us into another daft debate about whether politicians should be cautious (to not scare off the wavering voter) or bold (to energise the public). It stops us from asking whether they're the right messengers in the first place. READ MORE: Seamus Logan: We need new bold independence strategy instead of focusing on the past They're not. An Ipsos poll from December 2023 gets to the point. It lists more than 30 professions and asked the public who they trust most. Politicians came bottom with fewer than one in 10 people saying they trust what a politician says. By contrast, nurses, pilots, librarians, engineers, doctors, teachers and professors are all trusted by more than three out of four people. We're sending out our least effective message carriers and refusing to deploy our most effective advocates. Wavering voters trust civic voices much more than political ones. Politics is a crucial part of this process – political parties are partners in a civic campaign, not least because we all have to be on the same page and follow the same strategy. But having politicians front and centre is not our most effective formation. This is why, of all the acts of self-harm the independence movement has inflicted over the past decade, none has been more destructive or more counterproductive than the closing down of Yes Scotland as a cross-and-no-party means of communicating to the public. There are many other problems with the politics-only model. If you accept the 'we must have strong support' argument then success or failure rests on the next 10% of the population that gets us from 50% to 60%. Hardly any of that group of people have ever voted SNP. The SNP have never achieved 50% of the votes cast in a General Election in their existence. Why are we targeting our key voters with a political party they have serially refused to support? On top of that, there is one thing worse than a politician to send out to win over voters, and that is a politician from a party which has been in power for an extended period of time. You cannot disentangle those politicians from the track record of their government. A politician may well want to talk to a voter about independence, but the voter may well want to talk about schools, or hospital waiting lists, or ferries. Plus, there is always a good electoral reason for a political party to not promote independence. Remember when, in 2019, the SNP clearly decided that 'stopping Brexit' was a bigger vote winner than arguing for independence? That will always happen. Once again, this isn't an anti-SNP thing. There are very, very few instances of single parties getting majority support in multi-party parliamentary elections, any party would have a built-in self-interest in not promoting independence at some point or other, and it's not that the SNP's politicians are uniquely unpopular, it's that they are just normally unpopular. There is virtually no civic movement left. We don't have prominent leaders in their professions or communities who regularly act as public advocates of independence. The power-hoarding of the politicians has resulted in the long, slow death of the 2014 coalition. It will need to be rebuilt from scratch. We're stuck because we've been saying twe won't convert the public to independence until after someone gives us a referendum and that we're going to get that by making independence a politicians-only zone. Both pillars of this argument are false, yet those have been the sole terms of debate for a decade now. We have explored every avenue of how to skip the consent-building phase and jump to the legislative process stage through party politics and we've not found a way to do it – because there isn't a way to do it. It means we didn't do an autopsy on the 2014 defeat because it wasn't politically expedient – so we've learned nothing. It means we haven't examined the views of voters – so we don't know our audience. It means we haven't communicated to voters in a meaningful or consistent way – so all they've heard is politicians on the BBC. In these two articles, I have not set out my strategy for Scottish independence – you can find that in detail in my book. Sorted. Sadly, we're still pretty far from a credible discussion of strategy. I fear we will waste another year until after the Scottish election. Because frankly, if we're really in a phase where a political party polling at about 30% demands a vote of over 50% as a condition for progress, we're not a serious proposition. It didn't work when the SNP were at their peak and it certainly won't work now. This is all maddening. There is compelling evidence that our target voters are increasingly ready to listen to a fresh pitch on independence. If so, the timescale for getting from 50% to 60% support is not long. Then, if we had 60% of public support, lots and lots of possible avenues to independence open up, with a referendum only being one of them. So what are we going to do? One more shot at finding a loophole in the rules that will let us escape the UK without winning over the public? Two more shots? Or something different? We'll have to choose soon.
The National
24-04-2025
- Politics
- The National
New Scottish Green leaders can make or break the independence cause
But this impending new beginning has inspired some thinking about where this chapter began – without doubt, the Yes campaign of 2012-2014 – and how that can inform where we go next. Over the past couple of weeks, I've re-read Catch-2014, a retrospective on the referendum by journalist Jack Foster. In it, the failings of 2014 are laid bare. Far from the common retellings of the Yes campaign's greatest mistakes – lack of currency plan, poor relationships with the business community, or the need for 'unity' above all else – Foster's provides a much more practical account of where we went wrong, and what must change once the chance comes again. These errors are numerous, and cover issues with all parties involved. But to me, one stands out above all else: the misconception that persists even today, that any group other than the working class, and largely forgotten, communities of Scotland got us to within a whisker of independence. READ MORE: Patrick Harvie: I would have quit as Scottish Greens leader sooner It was not Yes Scotland, their hoards of SNP cash, centralised messaging, and managerial approach to the campaign. It was not the few big business leaders who trumped for the Yes side. It was the grassroots – many of whom engaged with the more radical elements of the movement, and many again who have fallen away from electoral politics in recent years – that built the momentum that got Yes to 45%. Why though, does this matter? In the short term, it may not. Labour are doing as good a job as anyone at once and for all dispelling the myth that any UK Government can be the progressive antidote to the Westminster establishment. But over the next few years, and if polling continues to tick upwards in favour of Scotland becoming an independent nation, we may find ourselves in a position of returning to full-on campaign mode – and we need to be ready. What that means is that we cannot repeat the mistakes of the past – and any campaign in favour of independence must reinvigorate the lost activists who have almost entirely drifted away from frontline politics in the years following 2014. John Swinney waves to the SNP conference after his speech (Image: PA) That will not be done by the SNP. As an electoral machine, the SNP are unmatched in modern Scotland in their success. But their near two decades in government at Holyrood leave them unable to claim the anti-establishment ground they once would have. That will not be done by a formal Yes campaign – 2014 showed that the gradualist, small-c conservative appeal would only get us so far. To reinvigorate the thousands of ordinary people who – led in 2014 by the Radical Independence Campaign, among others – knocked on doors in the nooks and crannies of Scotland taken for granted, or otherwise entirely ignored, a group offering leadership and a tangible link to communities must step forward. With some work, this could be done by the Scottish Greens, and that makes this summer's co-leadership elections even more important than they already are. In the lead-up to September 2014, the Scottish Greens played a larger part in public debate than they ever had before. READ MORE: 'Important milestone' as SNP launch new disability benefit across Scotland Other than the SNP, they were the biggest party of independence, and they had a centre-left platform that didn't entirely align with the corporatism of Yes Scotland. Come the next referendum, we will undoubtedly again play a massive part. But that part we play will in large part be down to who leads us, their anti-establishment credentials, and their ability to win the trust of working-class voters – something, traditionally, Greens have (at best) struggled with. Those who want an independent Scotland should already be thinking about the politicians they want at the forefront of that campaign, and who they speak to. The sad reality is that there is no alternative left-wing party with a credible offering to the electorate – so it falls to Scottish Greens to step up, and by extension, our leaders. Unfortunately, Holyrood itself can feel a world away from the housing schemes, isolated villages, and other communities that have been hit hardest by decades of austerity. Indeed, some of that austerity is the fault of Holyrood itself, with our own party complicit in this. In any future referendum, the Scottish Greens cannot expect to win the trust of working-class communities if we are led by those who were instrumental in cutting council budgets, decimating colleges, and even extracting wealth from Scotland by selling off our country's assets. READ MORE: SNP lose control of Scottish council as Tories and Labour join coalition We must learn from the failings of 2014. We must step up where there no longer exists an alternative radical group to convince the public that another Scotland is possible. We must make that case ourselves. To do that credibly, and to further the cause of independence itself, our next leaders must be rooted in communities. They must have a track record of standing up for those worst-affected by austerity from both Westminster and Holyrood. They must be willing to win the trust of working-class Scots in a way we have too often failed to do in the past. Most importantly, their politics must be radical. A progressive veneer when it suits us will not be enough – ordinary Scots will see through it. The grassroots must be where our power comes from, not imposed from Holyrood, making us no different from the Westminster establishment from which we are so desperate to be free. If another campaign comes about in the coming years, we must give Scotland the best possible chance of winning its independence. But to win over those needed to do so, we need socialists unashamed in using Scottish autonomy as a tool to break from the hegemony of the uber-rich and powerful. Without making that case, we stand no chance of getting the groups we need to win any future referendum out onto the streets. When Scottish Greens vote this summer for its next set of co-leaders, it won't just be the future of our party on the ballot. It will be the future of Scotland – and it's up to us to choose wisely.
