Downfall: How Class Contradictions Ended Sturgeon’s Dismal Rule

David Jamieson writes:

Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland and leader of the SNP, has announced her resignation. The shock this delivers to the national political scene is immense, and will have ramifications for years to come.

Sturgeon’s ascent to the peak of Scottish politics in 2014 was driven by the energies of that years’ independence movement, which swept aside Scottish Labour hegemony and blandished her government with anti-establishment credentials. These carried her to five successive Scottish and UK General Election victories. For eight years she has been Caesar of Scottish politics, peerless within her own party and facing little meaningful opposition from parliamentary benches.

Already, admirers and hangers-on in Scotland’s stuffy public scene are eulogising a modernising, compassionate and progressive leader. But Sturgeon represents, above all, the stifling of the democratic energies which secured her in power. Exit, after months of mounting difficulties, threatens the complacency of Scottish institutions at a time of hardship for millions, as the economy shrinks and working class incomes tumble.

Why is she going now? Controversies, both in her party and in the country, were rapidly mounting against her.

Independence

Much of the enduring strength of the SNP (in power since 2007) derives from popular attraction to the independence cause. The movement which emerged between 2012 and 2014 for Scottish independence, consequent upon the 2011 Scottish election victory of Sturgeon’s mentor Alex Salmond, recast politics as a struggle for national rights and a democratic alternative against a conservative dominated Westminster.

The 2014 referendum, which the independence campaign lost by 45% Yes to 55% No, was part of the wave of ‘populist’ shocks that struck political establishments around the world. Defeat proved a boon for the SNP, which experienced a surge in members and voters, clearing a path for the dramatic ascent of Sturgeon to power.

But even at her peak in late 2014, Sturgeon’s deep ambiguity to the independence movement was on show. She organised the unveiling of her leadership to take place in the Glasgow Hydro – a 14,000 seat stadium right next door, and on the very same day as, a pre-planned 3000 strong Radical Independence Conference. This sent a signal: there was to be no challenge to her leadership, especially from the left of the independence movement.

The years between 2016 and the Covid pandemic saw dozens of major demonstrations all over Scotland, many in the tens of thousands, demanding the right to self-determination against an intransigent Westminster. Sturgeon attended not one. She ignored protests outside the door of her official residence in Edinburgh but did fly to London to take part in the British establishment ‘People’s Vote’ movement to overturn the 2016 Brexit referendum.

This choice of street movements says much about Sturgeon’s political profile. Generally hostile to real popular mobilisations, she has always signalled fidelity to the foreign capital that dominates the Scottish economy, and to the EU, US, Nato and the British state as guardians of the international order.

For years, independence was taken out the hat at election times and waved before an increasingly frustrated party and voting base. As demoralisation and schism set-in, Sturgeon would increasingly centralise her party, right down to its atomic core – herself and her husband, party chief executive Peter Murrell. Party conferences were increasingly managed to restrain democracy. Popular initiative was ignored or denounced, critics smeared by a patronage network extending from the Scottish government into the media, arts and NGO sector. Loyal politicians jumped on transatlantic anti-Russia sentiment after the election of Donald Trump, and warned of Russian meddling in Scottish affairs, and specifically in the independence movement.

The strategy of harvesting votes and money from the independence movement whilst simultaneously repressing its development speaks to the class contradictions on which Sturgeon’s power rested. She needed both a popular base, and good terms with national and transnational power brokers, to maintain office. For years, the projection of frustrated anti-establishment feeling onto Sturgeon’s increasingly illusory struggle with Westminster created stability in Scottish politics. But in recent months, this contradiction had begun to erode Sturgeon’s grip on power.

Plans for a Scottish-organised referendum were rebuffed by the UK Supreme Court late in 2022. A forthcoming emergency conference to debate Sturgeon’s plan for a ‘de facto’ referendum, which would see the SNP stand on an independence ticket without manifesto at the next General Election, looked set to break the long-standing tradition of stage-managed conferences with predetermined outcomes.

Sturgeon’s case for independence has been haemorrhaging credibility for years. It too has been infected by the class contradictions of Sturgeon’s project, becoming a muddle of mutually contradictory policies, tying Scotland to the institutions of transnational capitalism and threatening to denude any independent state of sovereignty. The business lobbyists she put in charge of the blueprint for independence mandated ‘Sterlingisation’ – continued use of the pound through the Bank of England, without access to monetary powers. This jarred with the SNP policy of automatic EU membership upon independence. The anti-establishment messaging of the independence movement in 2014 has been culled; in its place a conservatism which satisfies few parts of the actual establishment

Murky finances

The party was also starving of funds. The SNP faces, again, a class problem when it comes to financing its election campaigns and routine work. It is neither an old-school social democratic party with access to union support, nor a traditional centre right outfit with many large business donors. The modern party is a product of a populist wave, and these small donors became its main financial resource. This necessitated the strategy of diminishing returns by milking independence sentiment.

In 2017, something called Ref.scot appeared. It presented itself as a campaigning hub for an independence referendum campaign. Close inspection found it to be an SNP venture. It gathered data and funds from independence supporters, before abruptly shutting down months later.

With members leaving and local branches dying, desperation for funds grew. In 2019 another funding and data-mining campaign was launched, again on the false pretence of an independence campaign. This time, the deception was even more callous. The new website was called ‘Yes’ – an obvious attempt to stoke nostalgia for 2014. Though the small print informed the careful reader that this too was an SNP front (“you are donating to a political party”) everything about the website was designed to give the impression that it was the resurrection of the 2014, cross-party Yes campaign, a huge decentralised movement with great emotional resonance for tens of thousands of people.

Some £600,000 was raised between these two cynical ventures. The monies disappeared into the SNP cashflow, and up to £500,000 remains unaccounted for to this day.

After complaints from members of the public, a Police Scotland investigation began. With no solution to the party’s money problems in sight, Murrell – Sturgeon’s husband and the leading officer of the SNP – made a personal loan of £107,000. Sturgeon denies any knowledge of when this loan was made, and two days before the press conference announcing her departure, reports speculated that the police investigation had spread to Murrell’s loan. Sturgeon adamantly refused to answer questions on party finances as she left the podium.

Domestic Policy

With the prospect of an independence referendum rapidly diminishing, the appalling failures of Sturgeon’s time in office are becoming harder to obscure. The policy record of her government is a scene of desolation: local authorities starved of funds, public services in meltdown, workers on strike against falling pay, a country for sale to international monopolies.

As head of a devolved national parliament, Sturgeon struggled with shrinking budgets from Westminster. But she made little effort to challenge the parameters of her power. Unjust taxes dating to the Tory John Major government of the 1990s went unreformed, despite frequent promises to introduce a progressive alternative. Radical policies were often announced, then quietly abandoned or dramatically downscaled. A National Energy Company, that could have aided many Scots through spiking energy prices, was ditched. A National Care Service turns out to be another boon to private corporations. A National Investment Bank, specifically envisaged by campaigners as something that could buck the market domination of devolved structures, has gone the same way. Even a bottle and can recycling scheme has come acroper.

A spring 2022 budget from Sturgeon’s finance minister, Kate Forbes, declared war on the public sector – threatening to significantly shrink its overall size, and massacre between 30-40,000 jobs. Pay cuts quickly followed, leading Sturgeon into conflict with teachers and low-paid local government workers.

The deputisation of the Scottish Greens into a co-operation government from 2021 was a cosmetic procedure to cover for a fire-sale of Scottish national assets to multinational corporations, that culminated in the obscene auction of leases to develop Scottish sea beds to British Petroleum, Shell, and a host of other giants, ostensibly to develop offshore wind power. The ScotWind project offered these ten year leases at knock-down prices, and with little in return for local communities or industries. It was an object lessons in the economic vassalage to which Sturgeon has helped reduce the country.

The SNP in danger

The professional and managerial class voters Sturgeon courted through these conservative policies, and by embracing an ultra pro-EU and pro-Nato attitude, have proved fair weather friends. She leaves office with her own approval ratings dipping, and with support for independence on the slide.

Her ultra-centralised leadership style means she has no clear successor. Indeed, the country appears to have little idea who her key ministers and the candidates for future first minister even are. A Times poll places ‘don’t know’ ahead of the pack with a massive 69%, with austerity enthusiast Forbes a distant second with 7%, and another figure on the right of the party, Angus Robertson, on 5%.

Schisms in the party have been widening in recent months. Late in 2022, Stephen Flynn MP displaced Sturgeon’s placemen in the party’s Westminster parliamentary group. In Edinburgh, a record number of MSPs rebelled against Sturgeon’s Gender Recognition Reforms. Recent weeks have seen the party leadership continue to be dogged by the controversy, which has bedded into party ranks, the wider independence movement and Scottish society. The UK Government has blocked the reforms, alleging a breach of devolution rules. Sturgeon quitting now means she flees the gauntlets thrown down by the UK Government and the Supreme Court.

This is, then, a disorderly route. Sturgeon is nothing if not a methodical and calculating politician – skills which have served her well for years. Her sudden abandonment of composure, and with it any real succession plan or care for legacy, implies that some convergence of events has compelled her to jump now. Coming days may cast light on exactly what has happened. For now, those in Scotland who desire independence from a faltering British state must regroup and reflect on the disasters of the SNP leadership./ All those determined to halt the miserable decline of Scottish society, must repudiate the myth of her enlightened leadership. Sturgeon presided over this decline and worked to undermine the mass movement that rose to resist it. This is how she must be remembered.

And Craig Murray writes:

Nicola Sturgeon is discarded, having served her purpose for the British Establishment once she obtained the UK Supreme Court judgement that Scotland could not hold a referendum on Independence. That fight was deliberately thrown by Sturgeon’s unionist Lord Advocate.

After almost nine years of leading Independence supporters into a whole series of blind alleys, with promise after promise broken to deliver a referendum, and mandate after mandate squandered, she appears to have shattered the Independence movement. Throughout this nine years, Sturgeon was sustained and promoted by the unionist media. She pretended she wanted Independence, and they pretended to attack her for it.

Meanwhile Sturgeon was given an extraordinarily easy ride over the real failings of her government. The achievements of Alex Salmond in building an extremely efficient reputation for the SNP’s ability to manage the business of government, were all knocked back. The collusion of the unionist media in hiding Sturgeon’s role in the attempt to frame Alex Salmond on false charges – a conspiracy orchestrated from her office and her husband’s office – showed the Sturgeon/Unionist axis in operation. Salmond of course was rightly perceived by the unionists as a much more genuine threat to the union. They had a joint interest with Sturgeon in putting him away.

The main cause of bad government performance was Sturgeon’s compulsion to sideline all people of real talent in the SNP, and surround herself only with the extremely mediocre, who would never challenge her. No leader genuinely concerned with the good of the country would ever appoint Shirley-Anne Somerville to be a minister. Scotland has slid down the international tables, in healthcare, in education, in substance abuse, in almost every important area. The ferries debacle has been a disaster for the island communities.

Much of this has been a result of the SNP gradualists walking into the devolution trap. Devolution forces the government in Holyrood to try to mitigate the effects of Tory policies, with resources constrained by Tory austerity and hands tied by neocon fiscal policy. Devolution is a dead end filled with poison gas. Sturgeon’s lack of urgency to escape from it was inexplicable.

Sturgeon’s place in history will be as the woman who saved the Union in its hour of maximum danger – the moment the UK left the European Union, against the will of the large majority of Scottish people expressed in a referendum. Having saved the Union then, Sturgeon went on to obtain the Supreme Court ruling against a referendum and subsequently shattered the Independence movement over identity politics.

She succeeded, by refusal to listen sympathetically to concerns of others, to unleash a wave of hatred towards trans people from those who had previously given the question not a moment of thought. The contrast is astonishing between her softly softly attitude to Scotland’s Independence, where doubters were to be gently persuaded over decades, and her drastic attitude to gender reform, where doubters were to be condemned as misogynists and racists.

Sturgeon was a great boon to the unionists. Whether as useful idiot or as traitor is something history will decide. My money is on the latter. But after the Supreme Court judgement, the UK Establishment did not need her any more. All that soft soap treatment disappeared. They started to seriously question her, on all points. There has been a huge change in press tone towards Sturgeon since the Supreme Court judgement. The UK establishment believe they no longer need her to hold back the Independence movement.

I suspect much more tellingly, the Establishment has also finally taken off the gloves over the missing £600,000, that was donated to to a “ring-fenced” fund to campaign in the Indyref2 that Sturgeon did not deliver. The money disappeared into the SNP’s accounts, and where it went is not clear. I could not understand why Sturgeon blatantly lied at the press conference last week, when asked by Tom Gordon of the Herald when she first knew that her husband had lent £107,000 to the SNP. She replied she could not recall, and sought to distance herself from the loan, saying he used “his resources”.

Now it is a strange marriage where the husband lends £107,000 without telling the wife. But it is not impossible. However, it is impossible that the leader of the SNP was not told that the party was lent £107,000. Whoever it was from, let alone her own husband. But I could see no reason that Peter Murrell should not lend the party the money. It was not illegal to do so and arguably a good thing to do. Why on earth would Nicola pretend she didn’t know?

This only started to make sense to me yesterday, when I learnt that Murrell made the loan the day after he was interviewed by the police about the missing £600,000. No wonder she wanted to distance herself from it, and the timing.

Numerous sources have reported in the last few days that Police Scotland have now been given the go ahead by the Crown Office to pursue a criminal case over the missing money. That seems the most likely explanation for the timing of her resignation today. The good news is that, if my sources are correct, the £600,000 question is going to make the coronation of the Angus Robertson family collective as devolutionist party leaders somewhat difficult.

So farewell, Nicola Sturgeon. You served the Union well. Now they don’t need you any more and you have been tossed away. They won’t get you that UN job either (all UN posts need to be agreed with the candidate’s member state). The Establishment is both ruthless and ungrateful. I suspect the protection over the Salmond affair will disappear too.

Nicola Sturgeon is ineligible for any position with the EU, of which she is not a citizen. Upon her conviction of either or both of the £600,000 fraud and the Alex Salmond framing, then let her be held to her own principles by being sent to a men’s prison.