Sturgeon’s exit: does SNP leader leave Scotland a better place?

Engaging, eloquent, politically nuanced: the “great irony” of Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation speech last week was that it underlined all the qualities that her supporters will be sad to lose, said Paul Waugh in The i newsaper.

From the “self-deprecating joke” that her critics would “cope with the news just fine” to her admission that she regretted not managing to bring more “rationality” to the public discourse, Scotland’s First Minister “proved once more than she has been one of the most skilful communicators of recent British political history”.

A formidable campaigner, she powered the SNP to a series of victories in the Scottish Parliament and at Westminster too. But what was striking was how popular she was outside Scotland. In the run-up to the general election in 2015, she was so impressive in a TV debate that some viewers asked “Why can’t I vote SNP in England”; and during the Covid pandemic, her daily press conferences – straightforward, empathetic, soothing – were in “marked contrast to the boosterist bombast and evasion” of Boris Johnson’s performances.

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‘Few dispute her star quality’

“There are few on either side of the debate who dispute Sturgeon’s star quality”, or her political talent, said Chris Deerin in The New Statesman. She so dominated Scottish public life, it was hard to imagine a time without her. And her skills were not merely presentational: there were some notable successes, including the way she subtly steered Scotland away from “the Anglo-Saxon neoliberal model and towards a Nordic social democratic one” by, for instance, introducing the Scottish child payment, which has done much to help families most in need, and making the Scottish income tax system “marginally more progressive than Westminster’s”.

And yet, a star that once shone brightly had been flickering, said Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer. It wasn’t just the burnout that she mentioned in her speech; there was also a political meltdown that she was less keen to discuss, caused by her administration being engulfed in crises. These ranged from “swelling” anger about the state of Scotland’s public services to the “costly fiasco” over ferry contracts; and the serious matter of a police investigation into the SNP’s finances, a “murky affair” that involves her husband, Peter Murrell. Then there was the unpopularity of her Gender Recognition Reform Bill, and the “incendiary controversy” over a double rapist being held in a women’s prison.

She said that it wasn’t these “short-term pressures” that had caused her to buckle, and I believed her. But only because I suspect her “core” reason for resigning was that she had realised that her strategy for independence – the cause to which she had devoted her entire political life – had run out of road. After the Supreme Court blocked her route to a second referendum, she’d declared that the SNP would treat the next election as a de facto referendum, said Ayesha Hazarika in The i Paper. In the midst of a cost-of-living crisis, this seemed “indulgent” at best; and even her supporters struggled to say how it would work in practice. Would the manifesto be one line long? Would the SNP have nothing to say about NHS waiting lists, Scotland’s struggling education system, or climate change? “It sounded desperate.”

‘Polariser-in-chief’

It could have been so different, said Brian Wilson in The Spectator. When Sturgeon came to office, she promised that talk of a second referendum would be off the agenda until there was evidence of 60% support for independence. Instead she’d demonstrate competence in government, to boost confidence in the notion. But for a politician as “combative” as her, this “long-haul strategy” was never going to fly. Even before the Brexit vote galvanised the nationalist movement, she’d started provoking rows with the hated Tory government in London, and entrenching divisions in Scottish society. It seemed that everything she did or said was based on calculations about their likely impact on the constitution. Had the SNP presented “evidence of competence as a radical, reforming government in deed as well as word”, that might have been more acceptable. But the opposite was the case, “as has been shown by the steady flow of depressing statistics on educational attainment, the NHS, drug deaths, poverty gaps and all the rest of it”.

“If Scottish politics is a mean and often ugly game”, it is partly because Sturgeon – “the polariser-in-chief” – helped to make it that way, with her us-against-them strategies, said Alex Massie in The Times. And to what end? The SNP’s central conundrum, that it has enough support to win elections, but not to win referendums, has not been solved. Scotland is stuck with its broad 50:50 split. To shift the dial, the party, under its next leader, must supply a clear blueprint for how an independent Scotland would function. That will require “patience, fresh thinking and honesty”, not the divisive “vibe” politics that were Sturgeon’s speciality.