How much will the trans rights row really damage the SNP cause?
It can hardly be denied that Sturgeon made a colossal misjudgement when she chose to promote self-ID for trans people. She perhaps imagined that she could follow in the footsteps of Canada’s Justin Trudeau and New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern by making Scotland a beacon of progressivism, in deliberate contrast to the staid conservatism of our larger neighbour to the south.
The whole piece is worth reading because it was a colossal misjudgement, even by modern political standards.
Failing to anticipate that the Scottish Secretary, Alister Jack, would invoke – for the first time in the history of devolution – a section of the Scotland Act preventing a Holyrood Bill receiving Royal Assent, was the First Minister’s first mistake. She was wrong-footed and that has happened only rarely in her eight-year tenure in Bute House.
Her second mistake was in failing to read the room.
Yes she failed to read the room, but it's more than that. Sturgeon seems to have assumed that aligning herself with Justin Trudeau and Jacinda Ardern was enough, that the media would be on her side. Stridently progressive was thought to be the way, but it wasn't.
It can hardly be denied that Sturgeon made a colossal misjudgement when she chose to promote self-ID for trans people. She perhaps imagined that she could follow in the footsteps of Canada’s Justin Trudeau and New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern by making Scotland a beacon of progressivism, in deliberate contrast to the staid conservatism of our larger neighbour to the south.
The whole piece is worth reading because it was a colossal misjudgement, even by modern political standards.
Failing to anticipate that the Scottish Secretary, Alister Jack, would invoke – for the first time in the history of devolution – a section of the Scotland Act preventing a Holyrood Bill receiving Royal Assent, was the First Minister’s first mistake. She was wrong-footed and that has happened only rarely in her eight-year tenure in Bute House.
Her second mistake was in failing to read the room.
Yes she failed to read the room, but it's more than that. Sturgeon seems to have assumed that aligning herself with Justin Trudeau and Jacinda Ardern was enough, that the media would be on her side. Stridently progressive was thought to be the way, but it wasn't.
As if Sturgeon did not realise that the trans issue had reached a stage where she would have to answer some obvious but unanswerable questions. The implication of Keir Starmer's feeble handling of the same issue was a clue she seems to have missed too. Yet a huge number of people could have told her what the problem was well before it all fell apart for her.
4 comments:
I saw a photo of her recently. She looked old and ill. Indeed, I wondered for a moment whether she was a trannie herself. But apparently she isn't. Her old classmates in Secondary School knew her as "seaweed", it is alleged, because even the tide wouldn't take her out.
dearieme - I chortled at "seaweed". I wonder if something like that explains what she is now.
She has definitely been playing a long game in insisting that Scotland is more progressive than the English. When the issue south of the border was restricting immigration (actually, it still is!) she insisted that Afghani car-washers and Romanian pick-pockets would help kick-start the newly-independent economy.
But the trans issue probably looked a good bet because the worst that can be said of prop-forward lay-deez is that they are ridiculous; and anyone saying that just gives the Nats more ammunition to appear caring and progressive. Until, that is, the reality of the sex-changing criminal appears. For ever after, Sturgeon is on the horns of a dilemma, and can't win that one. I suspect she will have to look for a new issue.
Sam - she will have to look for a new issue. She must have looked at the trans issue rather superficially if she didn't spot the prison inmate minefield much earlier.
In that respect it's interesting, because her initial trans strategy must have been adopted after superficial examination or it was fed to her as a poisoned chalice by someone who knew she wouldn't look at it closely enough.
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