A DISMAL LEGACY OF FAILURE

She utterly squandered the opportunity to change Scotland – and the lives of people who dearly needed change. She didn’t just fail, she failed them. Her going hasn’t left a vacuum. Nicola Sturgeon WAS the vacuum

AS Nicola sturgeon slowly fades from the limelight, valiant efforts are being made to manufacture a legacy for her. This is no mean feat. scarcely has there been a First Minister so indolent on the issues that matter or so lacking in accomplishments to define her era.

Of course, sturgeon does have a legacy. It is a legacy of abject failure, hopeless incompetence and the debris of a political tornado that tore through a party and a country, demolishing what others had spent decades building up.

The early years of sturgeon’s premiership were defined, on paper at least, by a single overarching theme: education. specifically, the education afforded those from poorer backgrounds. This was a theme sturgeon herself identified. she used her first Programme for Government speech, in November 2014, to pledge that her administration would make it ‘a priority’ to ‘improve the educational outcomes of pupils in the most disadvantaged areas of scotland’.

In May 2016, as Holyrood reappointed her First Minister, sturgeon said ‘closing the attainment gap in education’ would be ‘the defining mission of a scottish Government that is led by me’. The following month, she specified that her government would ‘substantially eliminate the gap over the next ten years’.

Five years later, an Audit scotland report concluded that the gap ‘remains wide’ and progress in closing it had been ‘limited’.

Covid was a major disruption in recent years but the scottish Government’s attempts to lay all the blame there are dispelled by the figures. The gap was 7.8 per cent in 2021, at the height of the pandemic, but doubled to 15 per cent the following year, when exams had substantially returned to normal.

Among pupils in s3, the gap between performance by well-off and deprived pupils is higher now in every category – reading, writing, listening, literacy and numeracy – than it was pre-Covid. Ministers have now dropped the 2026 target, with Education secretary shirley-Anne somerville rebranding it ‘a long-term project’.

When sturgeon entered government in 2007, it was not only as Deputy First Minister but as health secretary, tasked with improving delivery. A signal effort in this direction was the Treatment Time Guarantee (TTG).

Enshrined in legislation, it is ‘a legal requirement’ that, once an inpatient’s treatment is agreed, ‘the patient must receive that treatment within 12 weeks’. There is no minimum target: the standard is to be met 100 per cent of the time. At present, it is being met just 57 per cent of the time.

THE TTG is not the only target to have suffered under sturgeon. The scottish Government says 95 per cent of Accident & Emergency patients should be seen within four hours. Weekly data began being published in February 2015, three months into sturgeon’s premiership, and showed the target being met for 86 per cent of patients. Today, it is just 69 per cent.

The 62-day cancer standard states that 95 per cent of patients must wait no longer than 62 days from urgent referral to beginning treatment. That target has not been met in a single quarter of a single year in sturgeon’s tenure. Currently, no health board in scotland is complying with this standard and nationally the achievement rate is only 75 per cent.

The sNP Government is also missing its targets on child and adolescent mental health, adult mental health and outpatient treatment. More than half of patients wait longer than six weeks for radiology tests while almost two-thirds wait longer for endoscopies.

The impact of the sturgeon years is being felt across the NHs. As health secretary, she cut student nursing places.

Today, there are more than 4,000 vacant nursing posts in the health service. According to BMA scotland, 14 per cent of consultant roles are unfilled, enough to staff an entire hospital. One-third of GP practices in scotland is short at least one doctor.

In her farewell interviews, stur geon has cited the pandemic as the most important challenge she faced in government. Yet, despite the spin, her handling of the crisis was marked by error, inefficiency, incompetence and poor judgment.

Hospitals were forced to use outof-date respirators and expired face masks. A 2016 pandemic preparedness exercise, silver swan, warned of staff shortages and insufficient PPE supplies.

sturgeon failed to introduce routine testing of care home staff until after 1,600 deaths had occurred in residential settings.

Untested and even Covid-positive patients were transferred from hospitals to care facilities. Ministers also failed to inform the public of an early outbreak at an international conference in Edinburgh.

sturgeon was one of several ministers rapped by statistics chiefs for their use of official figures, including the First Minister’s unsupported claim that the virus was five times less prevalent in scotland than in England. Her management of the pandemic was even rebuked by the courts, with Lord Braid ruling her blanket closure of places of worship unlawful.

One of the nadirs of sturgeon’s reign was the forcing through Holyrood, in a series of late-night sessions, of the Gender Recognition Reform (GRR) Bill. Throughout the lengthy but far from thorough process of introducing the legislation, it was clear ministers had made up their minds and engagement with critics and concerned groups, where this even took place, was purely perfunctory.

If the First Minister had been prepared to listen, especially to women’s rights groups, a lot of rancour and division could have been avoided.

Instead, she pressed ahead. The GRR Bill banished doctors from the gender recognition process and replaced medical evidence with subjective assertions by applicants. The minimum age for sex was lowered from 18 to 16. Legal experts pointed out that the Bill could wreak havoc with UK law. It was little wonder, then, when scottish secretary Alister Jack used his powers under the scotland Act to block the Bill and protect reserved law.

STURGEON was not only scathing of Jack, whom she accused of undermining democracy, but stridently ad hominem towards opponents of the Bill, some of whom she labelled ‘transphobic’ as well as ‘deeply misogynist, often homophobic, possibly some of them racist as well’. It was an extraordinary outburst that demeaned the office of First Minister and revealed the vitriolic partisan behind the media-crafted facade.

Independence is the sNP’s raison d’être. However, sturgeon has failed to move the dial forward. As party leader, she has excelled at rhetoric but been severely wanting when it comes to following through. some Nationalists see this as inexcusable – and rightly so.

sturgeon has benefited from overwhelming public support at the ballot box, an unpopular and badly handled Brexit, chaos and dysfunction at Westminster and a pandemic that put her in every living room in scotland, day in and day out. Despite all his, she was unable to establish a consistent majority for Yes or even to convince the UK Government to permit another referendum.

Instead of spending the eight years since the 2014 referendum revamping the case for separation, sturgeon has mostly pandered to her own grassroots. Pandered, but little else. It is beginning to dawn on sNP members that she had a golden opportunity and blew it.

Now independence could be off the agenda for some time. No Nationalist leader has ever enjoyed a chance like sturgeon got and it is hard to imagine any of her predecessors wasting it as she did.

The public was afforded another peek behind the scenes when the Alex salmond inquiry pitted the First Minister against her one-time mentor in politics.

she claimed to have been unaware of allegations against the former First Minister but came in for heavy criticism for her decision to hold a fateful meeting with him with no civil servants present.

IN competing evidence sessions before a Holyrood committee, sturgeon and salmond rubbished each other’s story and revealed just how irrecoverable their once inseparable relationship had become. salmond was acquitted of all criminal charges against him and won a judicial review against a scottish Government investigation into him, which the court determined to be ‘tainted by apparent bias’.

As for sturgeon, while one inquiry exonerated her of breaking the ministerial code, another concluded she had misled MsPs. It was perhaps the most dramatic, if least edifying, episode in a quarter-century of the scottish parliament.

Although the split between salmond and sturgeon saw the former leave to found his own party, Alba, sturgeon retained her iron grip over the sNP.

That began to slip as it became clearer she either could not or would not deliver independence. This, coupled with anger over the GRR Bill, began to destabilise sturgeon’s position.

Discontent grew over the spending of £667,000 raised from supporters for an independence fighting fund, something now under police investigation.

There was the supreme Court slapdown that found Holyrood did not have the right to hold a unilateral referendum on independence.

Then there was the resignation of Ash Regan and the accompanying backbench rebellion over gender law reform.

A further blow came when frustrated MPs at Westminster ousted her ally Ian Blackford as sNP leader in the House of Commons and replaced him with the independent-minded stephen Flynn.

The final nail, however, was likely Isla Bryson, the double rapist initially placed in a women’s prison, and sturgeon’s inability to say whether she considered the convict a man or a woman. It highlighted just how far sturgeon had travelled down the gender ideology rabbit hole and struck the public as bizarre and shocking.

Yet stepping down only exacerbated problems inside the sNP. The leadership contest has proved fractious, with candidates attacking each other and the party’s record in government. Events

came to a head last week, when SNP chief executive – and Mr Sturgeon – Peter Murrell was forced to publicise membership numbers that were down by a third in a year. Thereafter, he was forced out the door amid a transparency row.

The SNP has been in power for almost 16 years but Nicola Sturgeon leaves it in a weaker, more divided state than it has been in decades.

Sturgeon’s apparent lack of interest in fiscal and economic matters is reflected in her attitude towards public finances.

Perhaps the most egregious example of this has been the ferries debacle. Two vessels commissioned to serve the islands are still incomplete even as the cost has more than tripled, including nationalising the Ferguson Marine shipyard and paying out bonuses to managers.

In the case of one of the boats, the Glen Sannox, it is now six years since Sturgeon took part in a fake launch event, complete with painted-on windows.

Earlier this month, Auditor General Stephen Boyle concluded: ‘Despite substantial sums of public money being invested, there is still no certainty over how much the ferries will cost, when they will be ready or whether the shipyard has a viable future.’

Eight wasted years proved a human tragedy for some of the most vulnerable people in Scotland. On Sturgeon’s watch, drugs deaths doubled and Scotland earned a sobriquet it will not soon shake off: the drugs death capital of Europe. It was an entirely predictable – and entirely preventable – outcome after the SNP cut funding for drug and alcohol support services.

After failing to gain traction in education and health, the First Minister eventually pivoted to climate change. Once again, however, rhetoric has been more forthcoming than action. In the past 14 years, the SNP Government has failed to meet seven of its 11 statutory targets on reducing greenhouse emissions.

The Climate Change Committee warns there are ‘glaring gaps in the Scottish Government’s climate plan’ and contends they ‘do not see evidence of sufficient action’.

Plans for transport decarbonisation are ‘falling behind other parts of the UK’, policies on decarbonising buildings are ‘wholly inadequate’ and progress on cutting emissions has ‘largely stalled’.

BUT she won elections. That is what her apologists say. It is what they will continue to say. It is all they can say. Winning elections is essential to obtaining power but it is not sufficient. You have to do something with the power.

In this sense, Sturgeon’s electoral victories only damn her more. She commanded unprecedented levels of public support, smashed swingometers right and left, and upturned generations of Scottish electoral history.

And for what? A gender Bill that will never become law? An independence referendum that will never come? The syrupy praise of establishment commentators whose blandishments will be swept away by the unforgiving tides of history?

What a sad, sorry tale the Sturgeon story turned out to be. A woman with so much power and no clue what to do with it.

A leader who squandered an opportunity to change a country, to change the lives of people who dearly needed change. She didn’t just fail, she failed them.

When long-serving premiers depart from office, they leave behind a vacuum. Sturgeon’s premiership was the vacuum. No transformational reforms. No fundamental reassessments. No ground was broken, only promises. When Sturgeon leaves Bute House, her policy legacy will be that of someone who was barely there at all.