What Scotland Doing?
How far the mighty have fallen. Nicola Sturgeon was the First Minister of Scotland for eight years before she fell from power. Popular, her politics seemed populist — until she put a rapist in a women’s prison, and then the Scots found out, and everything went to shite.
“Well, we have to get all these Pride-plus wankers out of these jobs, and put in real people, not puppets,” one Scottish man-on-the-street told a news reporter recently. Calling for “real family people” to acknowledge the reality of human sex differences, he averred that public toilets are a bigger priority for Holyrood.
“We need toilets!” he said. “People need a shite.” The clip went viral. Indeed, Scotland has had enough of the “Pride-plus” gender shite. Public opinion swirls with great force, but the process of flushing this turd remains unfinished, somehow.
To be sure, Sturgeon has bigger, more immediate problems now that she is no longer the Scottish National Party leader.
Her husband, Peter Murrell, was the subject of an arrest and search warrant in April. It appears that the Crown Office (essentially the British Department of Justice) waited until after the recent SNP leadership election to approve the warrant. The implication here is that Sturgeon will be embroiled in a very real criminal scandal for some time, at the very least, because the potential charges are about graft, not politics.
And like any political exile, Sturgeon is spinning her own history as it gets reevaluated by the political press.
In 1637 Edinburgh resident Jenny Geddes threw a stool at a minister because she hated the king’s shite prayer book. She sparked the English Civil Wars. Sooner or later, the insane ritual demands of the gender cult were bound to annoy the Scots, who are a free-thinking, free-spirited bunch. It was just a matter of time.
“Nicola Sturgeon has denied the SNP is in crisis as the party was forced to admit that more than 40 per cent of its members have quit and her self-ID gender reforms were blamed for a recent mass exodus,” the Telegraph reported in March.
“In an astonishing decline, the total is believed to have dropped by more than 10,000 in this year alone as Ms Sturgeon became embroiled in a toxic political scandal over her self-ID gender reforms.” Hashtag #GRRexit.
As Simon Johnson explained, Sturgeon and spouse resisted acknowledging there was a problem at all, nothing to see here, until she resigned to avoid taking questions about the rapist that her government had placed in a prison for women:
The SNP was forced to disclose the membership fall after two of the three leadership candidates wrote to Peter Murrell, Ms Sturgeon's husband and the party's chief executive, challenging him to release the figures.
Kate Forbes and Ash Regan demanded the disclosure after their previous calls for the information were met with silence.
Speaking after the number was finally released, Ms Regan said there had been a "significant reduction" since October last year and blamed the "fiasco" over Ms Sturgeon's Gender Recognition Reform (GRR) Bill.
The former Community Safety Minister, who quit over the legislation, argued the membership drop "must have been what quickened the out-going First Minister's resignation”.
What, if anything, this has to do with the criminal investigation is unclear. But it reflects how Sturgeon hammered “gender self-ID” through the Scottish Parliament even while her own membership was quitting in protest. She bet everything on a Gender Recognition Reform gamble — and lost it all. Her party inherits this legacy of deeply divisive politicking in support of a narrow ideological crusade: the “Pride-plus wankers.”
Sturgeon would like to pretend she has some other legacy. Euan McColm writes in The Spectator that Sturgeon complaining about partisan polarization is “like an arsonist explaining that while, yes, they may have petrol-bombed that Pizza Hut, they hadn’t expected the place to burn down.” Feeling burned, former SNP grassroots are now speaking openly about things they could not say for eight years under Sturgeon. “For the first time in a decade the Scottish Government isn’t really in a position to punish people for being critical,” concludes child advocate Robin McAlpine, who saw Sturgeon’s style of “reform.”
“I suspect people are therefore catching up with their criticism now. There is so, so much to criticise.”
Humza Yousaf, the winner of that post-Sturgeon party leadership election, has assumed her leadership style of intimidation and obscuration, according to his critics.
Tom Gordon observes in The Herald that Yousaf is “shredding the last of his party’s ten million membership cards” by insisting “there is nothing to hide” at SNP headquarters. Labour MPs decry a “culture of secrecy and cover-up at the heart of this dysfunctional and incompetent SNP government.” We might dismiss this all as mere political noise if not for the very real frustration with Yousaf over his continued defense of the GRR.
Scotland being part of the United Kingdom, a Crown court will decide the fate of the bill. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government opposes it. There are of course real conflicts with reality-based policymaking, such as the prison issue. Which, despite the best efforts of the SNP to pretend that such things would never ever happen, keeps right on happening.
Alex Massie writes in The Times of Scotland that “Scottish ministers have made fools of themselves attempting to escape the inevitable, and predicted, consequences of their own choices.”
The recent case of Andrew Miller is instructive. A Scottish butcher with poor Yelp reviews and a transgender “identity,” Miller kidnapped an 11 year-old girl and forced her to watch pornography until he fell asleep, whereupon she called police from his telephone.
Miller was a vocal supporter of both Sturgeon and the GRR but now he has disowned that transgender “identity” to be convicted as a man. While this does keep him out of the Cornton Vale women’s estate in Scotland, it also means that Miller can resume his “identity” upon release from prison some day.
And if the “Pride-plus wankers” have their way, Miller’s criminal record would effectively be expunged by a bit of paperwork.
Miller’s victim told the court that she only got into his car because she mistook him for a woman. Scottish MPs had, not kidding, denied this exact thing could ever, ever happen. Now they are beclowning themselves to pretend it means nothing. Susan Dalgety describes Deputy First Minister Shona Robison as “shifty” in The Scotsman:
She simply trotted out the defensive lines that she and her advisers have honed over the years. In Robison’s political bubble, to even suggest that there may be safeguarding issues if men, still in possession of their genitalia, are allowed to self-ID as female, is considered transphobic. And questioning the policy – which has been rolled out by stealth across the NHS, the Scottish Prison Service, in schools and in organisations such as Girlguiding Scotland – is tantamount to hateful bigotry.
“Is it any wonder that women across Scotland are filled with rage?” Dalgety asks. It was all predictable, it was all predicted, the predictors were shunned and their predictions ignored. Everything predictable is coming to pass as predicted. But no sensible conversation is possible, still, because the SNP is married to the Pride-plus wankers.
“The mantra of ‘no debate’ has given way to a period of no reflection.” Massie writes. “Perhaps this is because reflection might then require shame.” They are still not ashamed.
And should they be? After all, the people who are not down with the Pride-plus wankers have left the party, leaving the Pride-plus wankers with even more power inside the party. As pure political science goes, the Pride-plus wankers are the party constituency now, so the party ought to reflect their interests. There is no shame in a political party organization centering the interests of its constituency.
Elected on a platform of devolution and independence that ultimately stalled, Sturgeon needed new causes to maintain her own power and image. She made identity politics a party priority. Her autocratic style fit well with the totalizing ideology of “gender identity” and its enforcement mechanisms, such as ‘cancel culture.’ She built a constituency and it is as strong within the SNP as ever.
Scottish voters will eventually decide the fate of the SNP, but in the meantime, parliamentary government has not removed the party from power. This constitutional dilemma is the core problem with Scottish politics right now. People saw it coming. It is a fascinating political science experiment in which the party in power alienates some portion of its own adherents in order to purify itself. Like Bolsheviks, or schismatics, but with real-time data for historians. What a time to be alive.
Also fascinating: Americans who, having denied to me in the strongest terms that “gender self-ID” could possibly ever hurt the Democratic Party, that there was no evidence for a backlash to LGBTQAlphanumerical politics in the polling data, are still trying to tell right me right now that what is happening in Scotland has nothing to do at all with Pride-plus wanker backlash. They should maybe listen to the Scots, who are still trying to get this shite flushed.