Nicola ‘splurging’ Sturgeon, a woman more profligate with other people’s money (a lot of it mine as I live in England) has decided that it is, after all, time to make some cuts. That might seem like good news, except that she intends to cut the money that is being used to tackle Scotland’s immense and serious problems with drugs and alcohol. Thus, the funding to tackle this problem is being cut by £1million.
To listen to ‘Old Nicola’ you could be forgiven for thinking that Walter Scott’s ‘Land of brown heath and shaggy wood’, from his famous poem Breathes there a non-binary person, was a socialist utopia where all are welcome. Unemployed immigrants are welcome, although presumably none of them want to go there as, in addition to freezing to death, they will most probably remain unemployed; unemployment in Scotland is at its highest since 2015. Scotland is determined to become an international hub for gender self-identification among young people, a matter which is not up for debate and on which she has even taken on the United Nations (good luck with joining them after you declare independence, Nicola).
However, amidst all these wonderful and liberating developments the number of drug related deaths among women has been steadily increasing. So bad is the problem that more than 1000 babies a year enter the world as fully fledged drug addicts due to the high levels of drug abuse amongst women. Scotland has the highest level of alcohol-specific deaths in the UK at 22.4 deaths per 100,000 people. While Nicola and her cronies are busy creating a multicultural and transgender friendly paradise of non-hate, it appears that some people, women in particular, need hefty doses of ‘mother’s little helpers’ and other substances just to get through the day.
Meantime, following the only sensible decision that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has taken—to block the SNP’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill—Nicola is limbering up for a fight in the courts to see that Scotland gets its own way. How much will that cost? And, in any case, what are Sturgeon’s real motives?
A recent article in Country Squire Magazine by Sturgeon biographer Ian Mitchell provides some insight. As many suspected, this is all about picking a fight with the Westminster government. As Mitchell says she: ‘put forward a measure which she must have known was going to be knocked back by the United Kingdom government’. This, it appears, is Nicola’s stock-in-trade; she entered politics full of hatred—initially for Margaret Thatcher (how original!)—she ‘started on the negative and has continued on the negative’ and, according to Mitchell: ‘Goading the British government is all part of the “sublimated hatred” strategy which most nationalists use to lever themselves into power.’
Sturgeon is adept at using issues for her own political ends. Describing her, interestingly as ‘mannish’ in her early days Ian McWhirter of The Herald explained how she had initially been at the forefront of women’s issues while at university but makes little mention of them now. Unless, of course, you are a man who self identifies as a woman. In fact, everything about the transgender legislation she is currently trying to push through smacks of a disdain for women and especially their safety in ‘women’s spaces’. At the forefront of the protests against the legislation have been women, including gay women, on the issue of safety; but Sturgeon simply dismisses them. It’s time Scotland dismissed Sturgeon.
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