The Shirley Bassey of Bute House
Hey big spender, spend a little time on something other than independence.
Never let it be said that Nicola Sturgeon isn’t a courageous politician.
While others shirk the big calls and choose the path of least resistance, the First Minister can always be relied upon to take a stand, raise her voice and tell people exactly what they want to hear.
Her Programme for Government pumped out more goodies than Santa’s elves on double overtime. There would be money for the police and the fire service, money for education and childcare, money for digital devices for schoolchildren and to extend the Scottish Child Payment. She (re)announced £1 billion in extra cash for the NHS and £3.5 billion to build more homes, as well as £325 million to rejuvenate town centres. There would be a pilot of a four-day working week and a steering group set up to drive around the question of a universal basic income until Holyrood had the powers to introduce one.
Her rattling off of big-money promises recalled the exuberant generosity of Oprah Winfrey doling out giveaways to her studio audience. ‘You get a billion! You get a billion! Everybody gets a billion!’ The difference is, America’s chat show queen can afford to splash the cash. Where exactly was Sturgeon getting all the money from? Maybe she got all six numbers plus the bonus ball last Saturday night but this is the head of a government that announced three weeks ago that its deficit had ballooned to £36 billion.
Of course, the Shirley Bassey of Bute House can play the big spender because her every promise is underwritten by the UK Treasury. Thank goodness she’s not cynical enough to pledge all this investment then pivot to her separatist script without acknowledging a deficit big enough to merit its own place on the Sunday Times Rich List.
This was where her grassroots got the soft soap treatment. Scotland, it seems, will be free by 2023, with an independence referendum to be held by the end of that year. The Scottish Government would ‘now restart work on the detailed prospectus’ for that vote, which will largely involve buying up every calculator in the country and hoping no one can do big sums in their head.
‘Our democratic mandate to allow people to decide the country’s future is beyond question,’ she intoned. True enough. There’s no question involved. Just the word ‘No’ and the dial tone after Boris hangs up.
Exciting news for followers of Holyrood’s growing global footprint, though. Sturgeon would be opening ‘Scottish Government bases’ in Copenhagen and Warsaw. Of course, she’ll have to travel to them by rickshaw or Greta Thunberg will say mean things about her again.
This wasn’t the only international flourish in the First Minister’s remarks. She warned of the threat to women ‘in some parts of the world’ from ‘lawmakers intent on taking away basic freedoms and removing the rights of women to control our own bodies’. This was presumably a dig at the new abortion law in Texas, though it was a little rich coming from someone who doesn’t believe there are such things as women’s bodies.
Speaking of which, she confirmed that a Gender Recognition Reform Bill would be introduced in the first year of the parliament, legislation that would remove medical experts and place self-identification at the centre of the gender change process.
Sturgeon acknowledged that ‘some have sincerely held concerns about this legislation’, then proceeded to lecture them on why their concerns were wrongheaded. The Bill would not ‘remove any of the legal protections that women currently have’, one of the great red herrings of this whole debate. It’s not legal protections that are being redefined but women themselves.
Douglas Ross had been at the Smarties because he was bouncing around like the Duracell bunny, though he still refuses to move his neck or look up while speaking. I have a theory that he is one of those men who is innately uncomfortable in a suit, which would explain why he always looks like a PE teacher going for his first bank loan.
But his performance yesterday was one of his liveliest, and spicier than a Nando’s with extra peri-peri sauce. Karate-chopping his hands for emphasis, he lamented: ‘In a statement that is 27 pages long, it takes till just the fourth paragraph for Nicola Sturgeon to mention independence.’ (Fact check: it was the fifth.)
On the Nationalists’ centralising ways, he quipped: ‘This SNP government want to entrust councils with little more than bin collection, though looking at the state of Glasgow at the moment I’m not sure Susan Aitken would be able to deal with even that.’
Zing. I have to admit, he’s growing on me. There was even a nifty bit of nostalgia when Sturgeon kept trying to intervene on him. ‘When I’m standing, you have to sit,’ he deadpanned.
‘Ooooh,’ hissed the SNP peanut gallery.
Whether it was an intentional homage, it recalled Ruth Davidson’s instruction to Sturgeon to ‘sit down’ during a particularly testy debate in 2017. If nothing else, this new parliament should provide some decent entertainment.
Originally published in the Scottish Daily Mail on September 8, 2021.