In 1989 when I was working for Punch, I visited Bucharest a few days after the fall of Nicolae Ceaușescu in December 1989 and it was wonderful. People were celebrating in the streets, almost as if it was VE Day. A great weight had been lifted from their shoulders – the hated Marxist control system had finally been vanquished – and people were free to think and say what they liked. I imagine the atmosphere in Scotland in the next few days will be remarkably similar.
The proximate cause of Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation was her mishandling of the Isla Bryson debacle. Whenever gender critical feminists draw attention to the risk that convicted male rapists will end up being housed in women’s prisons if self-ID is made easier, trans rights activists accuse them of the ‘straw man’ fallacy. But Isla Bryson was the straw man come to life and Sturgeon has been on the back foot since the moment he appeared, bereft of her usual political gifts. She and her advisors must have concluded there was no coming back from this and she had to go for the good of the cause.
Taking one step back, it seems like a case of ‘Get woke, go broke’, since something like this was bound to happen to discredit the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which Sturgeon had gone all-in on. The Scottish people just aren’t ready to embrace a policy of gender self-ID and all its ramifications, and may never be. Even if Isla Bryson hadn’t popped up at exactly the wrong moment, it was only a matter of time before there was another, similar scandal. An elderly Muslim lady on a Scottish hospital ward waking up to see a naked man in the next-door bed. A Scottish female track star being denied a medal because she’s pipped to the post by a man. A male domestic abuser turning up at a Glaswegian women’s refuge and demanding entry. This is progressive overreach, arrogantly shoving a woke policy down the throats of the public and not realising how much opposition there’s going to be because you never leave your ideological bubble.
Taking another step back, I like to think Sturgeon is going for the same reason Jacinda Ardern went – because she realised no leader can hope to get re-elected after embracing the disastrous zero-Covid policy. It’s clear now that Scotland’s draconian non-pharmaceutical interventions designed to stop the spread of COVID-19 were a catastrophic failure, imposing a massive cost without any benefits. And those costs continue to accumulate, with drug and alcohol addiction soaring, educational attainment plummeting, hospitals bursting at the seams, and the economy in the doldrums. It was ever thus in SNP-run Scotland, but Sturgeon’s hopeless mismanagement of the pandemic, always trying to out-Ceaușescu Boris, has made everything worse. She leaves behind a country in crisis, worse in virtually every respect after her nine years as First Minister. Even more catastrophic from her point of view, there’s now less public support for independence than there was when she took office – and I imagine it was that, more than anything else, that did for her.
I wonder if her successor will ditch the Gender Recognition Reform Bill? Or at least press pause, so it can be more widely consulted about? Under Sturgeon, the SNP’s ideology became a cocktail of ethnonationalism and hard Left identity politics – a horribly toxic brew. Among other things, it saddled her with an unmanageable coalition. White working class voters, who make up a lot of the SNP’s support, were never going to enthusiastically embrace self-ID. The SNP bucked the global trend – which I wrote about here – of Left-of-centre parties shedding electoral support as they become captured by social justice warriors. The reason? If you try to please your middle class liberal activists at the expense of your traditional working class base, you’re not going to win elections. I expect that rule, which the SNP has hitherto proved an exception to, will apply to the SNP at the next General Election.
Sturgeon’s fate should serve as a warning to Keir Starmer, who has also embraced the woke agenda. If he still can’t answer the question, “Can a woman have a penis?” by the time the next election comes around, I doubt he’ll win an overall majority.
Nicola Sturgeon was one of the West’s most authoritarian leaders, an enemy of free speech and someone who had no qualms about turning her country into a temporary dictatorship during the pandemic. Thank God she’s going. Let’s hope all the other Western leaders who have made the same mistakes over the last three years follow her lead and resign before they’re rejected by their electorates, starting with Justin Trudeau.
Stop Press: Brilliant tweet from Julia Hartley-Brewer.
Stop Press 2: Guido has an amusing round-up of comments from so-called political experts who strongly advised against Rishi Sunak weaponising section 35 to try to block the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, claiming it would play into Sturgeon’s hands. Turns out, Rishi got this one right.
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I’m glad you’ve closed down London Calling. Because your interlocutor has gradually transformed from a reasonable right wing dandy into some species of cultic fruitcake, complete with thin skin, it became impossible to sustain discussion. In the first place he responded with peevish insults to the first suggestion of disagreement; and worse, his “theories”, for want of a better word, boil down to a childish belief in a tribe of all powerful bogeymen. I stopped listening months ago for just this reason. Not only did JD reject the perfectly obvious point that there will never be a single explanation for all things; not only did he dismiss the role that accident plays in life, he wouldn’t even accept the perfectly proper point that in “woke” we are dealing with a tide of intellectual fashion among the whole educated class. No, for him it was bogeymen. At this point I have just heard the typically moderate and generous Young-point that JD is not mad, he’s just evangelical. Well, that sort of Christianity verges on madness in any case, does it not? Anglican, Catholic and Orthodox faith allows for science and reason – free-floating, late-comer’s amateur Protestantism amounts to a belief in UFOs and the Loch Ness Monster. It also explains his appalling sympathy for Islam – among the deadliest enemies freedom has ever had. Finally, to Mr Dixon, no it is not an insult to be called an ethnic nationalist. Ethnic nationalism is there in the belief systems of Churchill and de Gaulle and is wholly distinct from the beliefs of their famous German antagonist.
Clearly there are at least twenty-six religious nuts who worship at the shrine of Little Jim and his fight against the all-powerful Bogeymen. They can’t seem to muster an argument between them. What a surprise!
Like all religious fruitcakes, anything that it is beyond his intellect to understand is ascribed to a god or gods.
This is true of religious fruitcakes but not true of the more rationally religious, for example Dr Johnson, who had little truck with efforts at “theodicy” and dismissed all certainty as to the particular intentions or interventions of God.
And he would certainly not have ascribed all our misfortunes to some ongoing cabal of human agents as it seems the “born again” James is happy to do.
Indeed, with his obsessive focus on particular individuals he is close to viewing them as supernatural powers; and worse, he sees them as involved in a conspiracy over centuries.
Here we meet the ultimate nonsense which mutters darkly about secret societies, Freemasons et al – really, little better than taking Dan Brown seriously. And this, I fear, is why he reacted in such a prickly fashion – or so I understand – to some phantom accusation of anti-Semitism, for that is the really nasty creature which lurks at the end of so many such “rabbit-holes” – and he knows it.
Happily, he is clearly resisting that particular temptation; but one wonders how long it will take to overcome his resistance? After all, a once rational individual now rejects opposition, ascribes every evil to a thousand year conspiracy, denies evolution, palaeontology, the routine precautions of due scepticism and in their place relies on childish, fairy-tale explanations with horrible antecedents and horrifying possibilities. In claiming to be down this “rabbit hole” he evinces a last, uncomfortable sense that he is losing touch with truth; is, perhaps, giving out a final distress signal in hopes that someone might rescue him.
This, ultimately, is why I stopped tuning in. He needs help.
I stopped listening to London Calling simply because the show notes told me in too great a detail who thought what about which topic, so there was no need to listen.
I continued listening to hear Toby calmly and logically dealing with the ever more extreme Delingpole outbursts. I quite like JD and although I tend to dismiss his theories, I found it interesting to listen to them.
Interesting? Surely it was embarrassing? Like listening in on a private session between shrink and fruitcake. As for liking the poor fruitcake, well – he was once likeable, in his downright, right-wing hedonist days. Now that he’s a particularly aggressive member of some sort of pensioners’ Christian Union, complete with American Bible-bashing, he must be quite ghastly to meet.
Like all religious fruitcakes, anything that it is beyond his intellect to understand is ascribed to a god or gods.
Richmond was the capital of the Southern states in the Civil War. The men North of Richmond are yankees and bankers etc
Anthony wasn’t saying he lived there – he’s in NC I think
Good listen and good restaurant dish!! I used to listen to London Calling from the beginning, so will miss friends trying to work stuff out but there was getting less discussion about what might be happening.
I feel more optimistic after listening thank you but I wonder if one of you could listen to JDs latest podcast with the nice Irish guy about covid but worrying if he is right !?
Tuning in next week !
The ad-lib of “Re-wolving the Guardian” was so good that you must make the film. Toby drooling over the Moonbot trans-wolf going through Owen Jones like butter shows Toby’s inner psychopath, the more sinister for his veneer of urbanity.
I might add that I walked my dogs for years among leafy NJ suburbs less than an hour from NYC, happily co-existing with occasional bears and coyotes. Coyotes are half-wolf in the Eastern US and the ones I saw looked as big as wolves. Picking ticks off the dogs was more trouble.
It is hardly surprising that the podcast failed. It is one thing to punctuate something compelling by advertisements but times have moved on and there is no pretending that things are normal anymore. Such a conceit runs contrary to evryone’s lived experience and so such a podcast just gets consigned to background noise like a dog barking in the back garden. I don’t give advice except to say that God hates a coward most of all.
La Proudman is a wank-stain on the fabric of humanity
I was thinking skid mark. Even a wankstain had a degree of potential at some point in its existence.
Sadly I have reached a point with several sets of friends with regard to views on issues like leaving the EU, Covid, Lockdowns, Masks, “Vaccines”, Net Zero, DIE (yes there are HR managers among my friends). With one group we have had to agree not to discuss political issues. Another group (predominantly career long public sector employees) I have let go because we cannot talk about anything much any more due to their deep immersion in their narrative, which is infuriating.
It’s nuclear Toby, just say new-clear, not Dubya’s mangled nu-cu-lar. And regarding the crazy plane lady Nick, you should probably watch this, it may be helpful:
https://youtu.be/pInk1rV2VEg
NEW PODCAST OUT FROM THE REAL NORMAL PODCAST!
We’re back on the airwaves talking about the ‘Bibby Stockholm’ and her massive hull…plus we’re picking the bones out of light fingered museum curators. We cover the awful story of Lucy Letby, whilst also chatting about the usual madness that swirls around the woke, namely Graham Linehan.
https://therealnormalpodcast.buzzsprout.com/1268768/13442825-ep-53-get-your-big-bibby-stockholm-s-out
PLUS SILLY SONGS you unfortunate proles!