Nicola Sturgeon won eight elections at both Holyrood and Westminster. Regrettably, at the UKGE of 2017 she campaigned on a slogan that a vote for the SNP was not a vote for independence. At that election her party lost 21 seats and over 500,000 independence supporters stayed at home. That was a huge red flag that so many of us missed!
It was so different from the promise of November 2014 when Alex Salmond handed her the golden keys to Scottish independence. He had presided over the best seven years of Scottish governance since 1707. She inherited from Alex the victory of 2015 and 56 out of 59 seats.
12,000 independence supporters crammed into the SECC in November 2014 for her ‘coronation,’ All that day believed they were welcoming the first FM of the soon to be independent Scotland. Now it seems she truly believed they came to see her in her own right. That day the cult of Sturgeon was born, and the decline of the independence movement began.
The party had grown from around 50,000 members to a massive 125,000 SNP members, with a very healthy balance sheet and huge donations dropping into their bank every day. Scotland and its people were ready, willing and able to take its independence. We waited, and we waited, and we waited, and she did nothing.
There is a great example of a similar failure to act that also caused a huge delay to an eventual outcome. It too was caused by appalling leadership.
During the Second World War the Allies landed an army on the beaches of Anzio. Operation Shingle was an Allied amphibious operation launched on January 22, 1944. It was conceived to break the Cassino stalemate by landing Allied forces behind enemy positions at the coastal sites of Anzio and Nettuno. The idea was that the landings would draw Wehrmacht units away from Monte Cassino, forcing a breakthrough to open the way to Rome.
The plan was simple: Churchill wanted a fast surprise attack behind enemy lines in Italy to capture Rome. He wanted the wildcat.
The mistake: US General Lucas landed on the beach, but he did not push inland right away. He stopped to build up safety walls.
The result: Lucas stayed still for too long. This gave the German army time to surround the beach and trap the Allied soldiers in a bloody stalemate. Churchill felt stuck with a helpless, flopping whale.
Churchill famously said, “I had hoped we were hurling a wildcat into the shore, but all we got was a stranded whale.”
A great analogy for Sturgeon becoming SNP leader and the de facto head of the independence movement. We all expected a swift and successful campaign to free our nation from our parasitical imperial coloniser, England. Instead, we got obfuscation, delay, deflections, denial, promises of next year, next time, next election. Just like General Lucas, Sturgeon proved herself to be a useless commander. Churchill was able to remove Lucas; sadly, the independence movement was stuck with Sturgeon for 9 years.
Now we in the independence movement are surrounded by unionists and at present we have a stalemate. At Anzio, General Lucas was replaced by Major General Lucian Truscott who was successful; he adopted a more aggressive strategy and successfully broke out of the German beachead liberating Rome, on June 4th, 1944.
Unfortunately, we replaced the incompetent Sturgeon, with the equally incompetent Yousaf and then replaced him with the equally incapable Swinney. We need a ‘Mac’Truscott to bring some aggression and leadership to our independence struggle! We are metaphorically stuck on the ‘independence beach.’
Saving England from Brexit. Promoting gender nonsense. Playing Chief Mammy at Covid. Trying to imprison her mentor. Banishing rivals, anything but do the one job she was supposed to do: get Scottish independence.
Many lifelong SNP members and supporters like myself became disenchanted with her failure to move the cause on from the 2014 referendum. I had first joined the party in 1968 while still at school. Even for me, by January 2020,and her infamous speech of capitulation on the day of Brexit was the final straw. I realised that day and during that speech she was a charlatan.
Worse was to come when she tried to falsely imprison the great man on trumped-up charges of sexual impropriety. She, along with other senior SNP members including her embezzling husband, ably supported by British civil servants, invented stories and lied their way to a humiliating defeat in the courts, not once but three times.
At a Court of Session hearing in Edinburgh, Judge Lord Pentland said the decisions were “unlawful in respect that they were procedurally unfair and that they were tainted with apparent bias”.
Helping her in all of this and since was the ever- loyal John Swinney. He and others colluded and connived not just continue to discredit Alex Salmond; their biggest moves were to protect Nicola Sturgeon from any criticism or blame. John’s famous redacting pen has hidden so many lies of Sturgeon and her cabal.
Fortunately, justice is coming and neither Swinney nor Sturgeon and many others, will evade their comeuppance.
Through all these intervening elections, hardcore independence supporters like myself became more and more frustrated and disillusioned by Sturgeon’s refusal to put a cogent independence plan in place. Everything was aligned from the moment we had 56 out of 59 MPs and England voted for Brexit. Yet, she would not, and did not advance our cause even under the most favourable conditions.
The infamous Isla Bryson was not the sole cause of Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation, but it created intense political pressure and added to a mounting series of controversies that contributed to her departure in February 2023.
Firstly Humza, then Swinney kept deflecting any blame or criticism of Sturgeon over the Salmond case, the lack of movement on independence, the disaster that is GRRB, or the decline of SNP memberships or votes. They even kept her pet project of gender nonsense front and centre.
Her husband also agreed to a guilty plea with the Crown, provided they dropped any mention of all the female products and goods purchased with embezzled money. Again, John Swinney always deflected any reference to her when questioned about the missing funds.
Yet this week how does Sturgeon repay that absolute loyalty from her ex-colleagues? She does what she has always done: she threw John and her former party under the bus to try and sell more copies of her book! She wrote a new foreword criticising the SNP and traducing them while boldly praising the Scottish Greens, calling their election performance a “triumph” and criticizing the SNP for lacking vision and environmental courage.
This is a woman who has betrayed everyone and everything she has ever encountered; her mentor, her colleagues, her party and, worst of all, her nation of birth and millions of ordinary Scots that trusted her to take us to independence.
She now lives in London and long may she remain there. She has destroyed the uniqueness of the SNP and our movement. She has done more damage to our cause than Thatcher or any other unionist has managed.
I just wonder how many of her cult-like followers will still worship her and think of her in positive terms. One day there will be statues throughout Scotland to those that have fought tirelessly for our freedom. There will be dozens of statues and streets named after Salmond and Margo and Winnie and many others. I doubt there will ever be a Sturgeon, Swinney or Yousaf statue or street.
This was the main topic of this week’s podcast for my panel of Eva Comrie, Terry Howson and, Phil Boswell.