Nicola Sturgeon to resign as Scotland's first minister
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
The only proper scandal I remember is the Salmond case, and then in terms of being incompetent the only thing which is undisputable is how badly she has handled the Scottish drug policy/crisis.
There has also been the recent trans policy heat (not to say she is on the wrong side, I have no idea) and the finance debacle that Private Eye has been tracking.
So yes, they are hardly pure, but just seem generally more professional and trustworthy.
Compared to those discussions and their anti-English tenor, "the unmentionable" Tommy Robinson was a positively mild and mellow-tempered critic of Islam.
I get why Ukrainians hate Russians; but there is nowhere near as much real blood between the English and the Scots. There shouldn't be that much hate, unless deliberately stoked.
It's a hybrid first past the post and propertional system. Not perfect, but what voting system is?
None: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...
- Support for independence is now lower than when she took the reigns. That by itself must count as failure on the SNP's own terms.
- Lost the "once in a generation" referendum and then refused to accept the result, campaigning for years for a second referendum she had already agreed wouldn't happen.
- Made zero progress on reducing subsidy dependency on England, creating the widespread impression that the SNP doesn't really want Scotland to be independent. Many other specific issues around independence also have been ignored despite the lack of answers being one of the issues causing their referendum loss.
- Done everything possible to piss off the neighbours across the border, like encouraging anti-English rhetoric that would be considered grotesquely racist if there was a skin color difference.
And in non-referendum areas:
- Poverty and poor health are worse in Scotland than England.
- She said she wanted to be judged on closing education gaps, but they didn't close.
- The economy is worse.
- Social policy is totally reactive. Under Sturgeon the SNP just tended to copy whatever England was doing but making it more extreme, without any obvious guiding principles. The gender self-ID fiasco is a good example of that. 2/3rds of voters are against it and Salmond says it's done more damage to the independence campaign than anything else (which says a lot about the strength of that campaign). She didn't think through the consequences and when faced with the reality of what it means in the Isla Bryson case, flailed around and couldn't articulate a coherent response. Total incompetence.
- Scotland has quietly developed a reputation for corruption and weak institutions, with problems you don't see elsewhere in the country.
The nasty Salmond/Sturgeon affair was one example, and her resignation is likely triggered by the police finally starting to investigate where £600,000 of donated money was apparently embezzled to. The way she "can't recall" that her husband lent over £100,000 to the SNP is another symptom of this sort of thing.
Many voted no to remain in the EU, only to have the rug pulled out from under them anyway. That surely justifies a redo.
But to address your point: why? They knew when voting that there was likely to be a referendum on the EU in the future, the pressure for that had been building for years, and Scotland has its own eurosceptics that wanted to remain in the UK and also leave the EU.
Also, the idea of an "independence" movement that wants to immediately give up that independence to join another union seems like a contradiction. The SNP is the Scottish Nationalist Party but the EU hates nationalists, they routinely say things like this:
https://twitter.com/EU_Commission/status/900356981461884928
> 'Nationalism is like alcoholism: a short period of exaltation followed by a long period of headaches' - @TimmermansEU against nationalism.
If the SNP was a coherent party with a principled set of positions it would have needed to resolve this contradiction at some point, but like many other such contradictions they never did. It doesn't act like a nationalist party, it acts like a bog standard centre left party (hard left on id politics), with relatively little interest in any theory of nations.
Remember one big reason that people voted no for independence is that there wasn't full clarity whether Scotland could remain in the EU if they left Britain. They'd have to start a whole ascension process.
I've never been to Scotland but some friends live there and they really should have a second chance to escape.
https://medium.com/@johnkelly_17973/anti-english-rhetoric-am...
Pay attention to the part about police reports:
> anti English rhetoric culminating in abuse, vandalism and physical assault are now common place in Scotland and happen daily (15 per day) according to Scottish police statistics.
It wasn't just that her government tried to put a male rapist in a female prison, after ignoring years of warnings that self-id would cause this to happen.
It was that when questioned, she repeatedly demonstrated that she was either unable or unwilling to grasp the logic of the situation and address the mistake with integrity. Instead she continued trying to square the circle.
She certainly was not competent, and did a lot of damage, but she doesn't compare to the incompetence of either her predecessor or successor. It's also worth noting that she was handed a poison chalice: the Brexit mandate, which she had been opposed to during the original referendum, and subsequently blamed for every predictable misstep in implementation (mostly by Johnson, who had shied away from the leadership role in the immediate wake of the referendum, despite being an instigator).
Either way you look at it, she was saddled with a lot of blame for problems that predated her office.
A politician can be unlikable and effective, or likeable and ineffective. Once in a very great while they combine efficacy and electability. But to combine such utter ineffectuality with a total lack of charisma is to ensure destain.
But I agree, she didn't create the environment that led to Brexit like Cameron, nor did she help push it through like Johnson. Whatever her legacy, it's as nothing next to theirs.
In terms of energy it's more ambiguous, certainly the move away from nuclear was short term a bad call. Long term that's a big discussion involving externalities like decommissioning. More topically, the energy crisis last Winter wasn't a result of Russian brinkmanship but the American destruction of Nord Stream. Hard to blame Merkel for not having anticipated the war.
I presume you're seeing gender when you say "motives" & otherwise ignoring any actual substance of these leaderships?
I'm genuinely struggling to think of any male leaders I would add to the list - Hollande is a contender but there's a lot of issues there. Open to any suggestions for the list...
Thatcher (& Reagan) are rightly recognised today as being responsible for untold suffering. Even the UK Conservative party (Hague) have since spoken out against her approach.
She didn't "rescue" the UK from anything, unless when you say "UK" you exclusively mean "UK shareholders". Her policies caused skyrocketing unemployment & poverty, the only positives anyone has cited were macroeconomic & even Blair thought those changes resulted from societal shifts rather than from Thatcher's political interventions.
The environment was reactively hostile - the hostilities more than justified.
Very true. Too many. I did say "most", which doesn't mean "universally". Thankfully the (far too large) set of fans in the UK don't represent any kind of global majority.
> The UK finished the 80s in a drastically better position than at the start in terms of poverty and employment
This... isn't remotely true.
Poverty went from 13% before Thatcher to over 22% after. You acknowledge unemployment skyrocketed, but the reduction at the end of her term was minor - overall rate finished much higher than before she was in office.
> The USSR also had low unemployment, but that doesn't mean they had a good economy.
Bringing the USSR in here is a strawman because any rebuttal from me can come across as being in support of the USSR, of I'm not - I strongly believe the stats here are not representative of reality. But Soviets aside, the fact you don't think people having income is inherently "good" but instead prioritise something abstract called "the economy" says a lot about your priorities.
Can I ask what exactly is "good" about a "good economy" if more people are in poverty?