Scotland

The Daily Record has reported that Humza Yousaf, currently the Scottish health secretary, will stand for election to succeed Nicola Sturgeon as leader of the SNP and First Minister of Scotland. The 37-year-old Sturgeon ally is said to believe he can unite the party and a source tells the paper he has ‘a lot of support from MPs and MSPs’.  If Yousaf did replace Sturgeon, it would be a landmark moment for Scotland Yousaf’s views on the constitution and gender identity are indistinguishable from Sturgeon’s and he can expect to be considered a continuity candidate. He is also a seasoned media performer, though no stranger to the occasional on-camera mishap. The Record says he will stress his ‘experience’ but that could go either way.

The contest to replace Nicola Sturgeon really shouldn’t be a contest at all. The obvious successor is Kate Forbes, the Scottish finance secretary. She is young at 32 but she was even younger three years ago when she stepped in to deliver the Scottish budget just 12 hours after finance minister Derek Mackay was forced by scandal to resign. Her plaudit-winning performance showed her to be a woman of ability and nerve.   If you want to keep evangelical zeal out of politics, Kate Forbes is the least of your worries These are not her only qualities. Forbes is Cambridge-educated and a disciplined media performer. She is a true believer in the cause of independence but a moderate in tone and temperament.

Nicola Sturgeon insisted last month she had 'plenty in the tank', but apparently the First Minister was already running on empty. Announcing her resignation this morning, Sturgeon said she finally decided to step down only yesterday at the funeral of a long-serving SNP activist. However she also made clear she had begun to realise over the past year she no longer had the energy to give '100 per cent' to the job. In an emotional press conference at Bute House in Edinburgh, Sturgeon insisted she could have 'led the party to independence'. But she conceded that her personality was becoming a liability: 'Fixed opinions about me are becoming a barrier to reasoned debate,' she said. It was time to hand over the reins to someone, she implied, with a lesser personality.

It is vanishingly rare for the SNP-supporting paper The National – a publication that makes Pravda look like the Washington Post – to place anything remotely critical of Nicola Sturgeon on its front page. Yet on Wednesday it warned that the Dear Leader’s ploy to turn the 2024 general election into a ‘de facto referendum’ could ‘Blow It For Indy’. It is right. The idea looks like being about as popular as placing rapists in a woman’s jail. The plan, unveiled by the First Minister in high dudgeon last November, after the Supreme Court rejected her bill to hold an ‘advisory’ referendum on independence, was to present Scottish voters with a one line manifesto before the next Westminster vote in or around 2024.

Received wisdom has it that Scotland’s embattled First Minister Nicola Sturgeon is considering her position. ‘She’s finished’ has become a mantra in political circles over the last few days. And not without justification: her absence from a key debate in Holyrood last week did suggest an announcement of some kind might be imminent; perhaps a white flag raised from Bute House.  But Sturgeon emerged from her bunker and was back in action at a press conference in Edinburgh yesterday, answering questions concerning her currently stymied Gender Recognition Reform (GRR) Bill and matters of almost equal awkwardness on SNP finances.

Watching Alex Salmond rail against Nicola Sturgeon for sidetracking the Scottish independence movement with gender identity ideology is both uncanny and oddly nostalgic. Salmond was Sturgeon’s mentor and is largely responsible for putting her in the post she now holds. For ten magical years between 2004 and 2014, they were the dream team of Scottish politics. Together they wrested control of Holyrood from Labour, lead a nationalist march through the institutions and civil society, and convinced 45 per cent of Scots to vote for secession. They made history and came damn near close to unmaking the United Kingdom.

Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, has led a charmed life. Even her sternest critics agree that she is immensely talented, one of the UK’s most successful politicians, a master of detail and an effective communicator. She has been at the pinnacle of public life for two decades. But all things must pass. Nearly ten years after she took over as leader from Alex Salmond just about everything is going wrong at once. Hospital waiting lists lengthen, teacher strikes roll on, council service cuts deepen, the ambitious plan for a Social Care Commission has stalled. Across the board the SNP government appears to have made a right royal mess of just about every policy for which it has responsibility.

It’s interesting, the way that laws and policy can change seemingly out of the blue. In April last year, following a massive outcry from feminists and others concerned about trivial matters such as the safety and wellbeing of incarcerated women, the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) released a press statement about changes to the policy on transgender prisoners, which was presumably in response to public disquiet about the creeping invasion of extreme transgender ideology into state agencies.   Prisons are full of women who have been sexually assaulted and raised in homes with domestic violence, sexual abuse and neglect. The current conviction rate for reported rapes is currently less than 1 per cent in England and Wales.

The safety of women in prisons cannot be allowed to plummet back down the news agenda after the latest Sturgeon saga is over. Not least because today has seen the publication of a report into one women’s prison in Gloucestershire that makes for troubling reading. HMP Eastwood Park, which holds 348 women, was the subject of an unannounced inspection in October last year. Staff from HM Inspectorate of Prisons made several findings that you’d expect: high levels of mental ill health; backgrounds of criminality, homelessness and substance abuse; and prison understaffing.  However, they found plenty more. There was ‘no central record or oversight of the number of women who had been segregated, the reasons why or for how long’.

The omnishambles playing out in Scottish politics makes one thing clear: Nicola Sturgeon has no clue what she is doing when it comes to trans rights. The First Minister's flagship Gender Recognition Reform Bill has hit the buffers. Now an 'urgent review' has been launched on an issue that hardly requires much common sense: that trans women should not be housed in women's prisons. In its wisdom, the Scottish government has tried to build law and policy on magical thinking – that a man can become a woman just because he says so. Sturgeon didn’t listen to the Equality and Human Rights Commission, nor did she listen to Reem Alsalem, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls.

Could the extraordinary scandal of transgender sex offenders being sent to women’s prisons come at any worse a time for Nicola Sturgeon? Only days after her flagship Gender Recognition Reform (GRR) Bill was stalled by Westminster’s government on the grounds that it might have an 'adverse impact' on women's safety, it emerged that women have already been endangered by the Scottish Prison Service (SPS). In their anticipation of this very legislation, Scottish prisons have been allowing male sex offenders to routinely self-identify as women for almost a decade. How was this allowed to happen? How did the First Minister not know until last week that rapists, such as Isla Bryson (formerly Adam Graham), were being housed in women’s prisons?