WeeklyWorker

20.03.2025
Back in 2007: when they were a team

Sturgeon no more

Talented, personable, politically astute and, in the end, a complete failure. Scott Evans looks at the rise and fall of Scotland’s former first minister

To the great surprise of essentially no-one, Nicola Sturgeon has announced she will be stepping down as an MSP at the May 2026 Holyrood elections. At age 52, it marks the end of her rise through Scottish nationalist politics spanning over 30 years. She was Scotland’s longest-serving first minister and the first woman to hold the position.1

Sturgeon’s fortunes peaked in 2015-16, after polling before the 2015 general election - which turned out to be very accurate - showed that the SNP was set to take almost every Westminster seat in Scotland. From then on until recently, there was only one, piddling Labour seat in all of Scotland. What is more, even many self-identified leftists found themselves rather enamoured by the political style and offerings of Nicola Sturgeon.2

The British shock jock, Piers Morgan, called her “the world’s most dangerous woman that few outside Britain have ever heard of”, on the basis of the rest of the UK losing the Scottish Armed Forces, the (imagined) potential sour Scotland-USA relations, and the questionable future of Trident. This was precisely one of the things which attracted some of the far left to this stuff: the illusory idea that Scottish independence might mean a significant weakening of the British state, and hence of US power in Europe. Left-liberals in particular fawned over her, while they were being driven blue (and yellow) in the face by the Brexit referendum; they wanted British nationalism to look more like the welfare-friendly civic nationalism the SNP appeared to be supporting.

It is very unlikely that she will exit the political arena entirely, because, for her entire life, beginning in her teenage years, she has been a political creature. Unsurprisingly for a working class3 woman growing up through the 70s and 80s in Scotland, her politics were an outgrowth of an anti-nuclear-weapons stance,4 of anti-Thatcherism - “Thatcher was the motivation for my entire political career. I hated everything she stood for” - and, of course, of Scottish nationalism.

Early backing

Sturgeon got early backing from prominent SNP member Kay Ullrich. In 1987 as a 16-year-old she approached Ullrich to help work on her election campaign. Later, when Sturgeon stood as a candidate for Glasgow Shettleston in 1992, Ullrich apparently remarked: “This lady here will be the first female leader of the SNP one day.”

In these early years she was also appearing on TV in youth political debates. Ex-SNP chief executive officer Peter Murrell, who she was together with from 2003 and was to become her husband from 2010 until this year (they are now divorcing), has said of that time that he remembered “being impressed by her political skills, even at that early stage”. At 17 she was on the national executive of the Young Scottish Nationalists.

Fast-forward through a number of unsuccessful election campaigns to 1997, when, during the Labour landslide a 27-year-old Nicola Sturgeon narrowly lost to Mohammad Sarwar (yes, father of current Scottish Labour leader, Anas), making it the only Scottish seat to swing away from Labour.

The current Scottish parliament was established in 1999, with those elected in that year referred to by the moniker, ‘99ers’. Sturgeon was one of these (elected on the regional list, having again failed to win outright), as were her allies, Shona Robison and Fiona Hyslop, both of whom will also be stepping down in 2026. Of the 25 MSPs who will be stepping down then, 18 are SNP, including former first minister and Sturgeon continuity figure Humza Yousaf.

The formal alliance between Sturgeon and previous leader Alex Salmond began in 2004, when they stood on a joint ticket for first and deputy first minister. Ten years and one large financial crash later, David Cameron’s independence referendum was held, with 45% voting ‘yes’ against 55% for ‘no’. The white paper Scotland’s future published in November 2013 had what David Torrance (who wrote a biography of Sturgeon after she secured the leadership) called “a curious mixture of 1980s leftwing rhetoric and orthodox neoliberal economics”.

However, things began to go wrong. The Salmond-Sturgeon alliance collapsed in very messy public fashion in 2021 amid sexual misconduct allegations at the height of #MeToo.5 Then Sturgeon’s political journey as first minister ended rather ignominiously two years ago amid the ‘triple crisis’: the end of any realistic SNP strategy, the party finances scandal (her ex-husband has since been charged with embezzlement), and the gender recognition furore.

What was Sturgeonism, if anything? What did it stand for as a positive programme? If we take some of its major promises - to close the educational attainment gap between rich and poor; to kick-start a Scottish National Care Service; to tackle the drug deaths crisis; and to achieve a legal route to independence after the ‘no’ vote won in 2014 - it has on all these counts been a miserable failure.

It is true that SNP policies have been better on various welfare measures than the legislation coming out of Westminster. The Scottish child payment, the 'baby box' of benefits for newborn children, the slightly more generous disability payments, free prescriptions (as in Wales), no tuition fees for first-time Scottish undergrads, and so on.6 All of these things are, of course, genuinely helpful to people, but in a wider, sinking neoliberal economy and decaying capitalism it is sticking-plaster stuff that simply will not hold. While it is often used as an excuse, it is nevertheless the case that Holyrood often has to function within somewhat narrow constraints set by legislation and funding coming from Westminster, and the policies of the major opposition parties in Holyrood. Labour and the Tories are mere extensions of their Westminster parties. As the saying goes, when Westminster sneezes, Holyrood catches a cold.

Is Sturgeon’s exit from the stage of frontline politics the end of an era? Yes, it is, symbolically speaking. But it is not the end of an era defined by her. Instead, it marks the end of the era of the SNP and Scottish nationalism defined by Alex Salmond, whose death we commented on at the end of last year.7 She was a much better fit for the more leftish SNP which Salmond had a large part in helping to create. Certainly, there would never have been a first minister Sturgeon without a first minister Salmond - she dropped her bid for the leadership in 2004 to stand for deputy leader under him. (She had been unlikely to win in any case). Of course, the real, long, drawn-out end of this era was made inevitable regardless of who did or did not lead it, with the one-two punch of ‘no’ from the Scottish population in 2014,8 as well as ‘no’ from the supreme court in 2022.9 Nothing is certain, but for the foreseeable future the SNP seems to have nowhere to go.

Break

It is unlikely that the SNP will ever again be anything more than a tightly media-managed centre-left to centre-right political party. The openly neoliberal and more socially conservative Kate Forbes, who came close to winning the leadership election that crowned Sturgeonite Humza Yousaf,10 is now deputy first minister. More and more than is already the case, they will follow in the footsteps of all parties after their inevitable capture by the influence of the bourgeoisie: on domestic policy, promise nothing good that is concrete, when it is not already a fait accompli, and promise not to do bad things that you have no need to do anyway; and, on foreign policy, bow before the feet of the suzerain USA.

In fact, this will be the fate of any actual left formation which does not take very seriously the need for independent organisation of the working class and independent working class media. That independence includes ensuring we will not be knocked off-balance by smear campaigns in the bourgeois press (as the Scottish Socialist Party was), and, besides having our own strong media, means inculcating in the membership an understanding of the fundamental corruption of the bourgeois press, regardless of how many good journalists orbit it. Trying to appear ‘respectable’ to bourgeois politicians and media, trying to make our candidates appear as ‘respectable’ and ‘electable’ as possible to them, is a losing game.

Alliances with state-loyalist formations or nationalists (or both!) make working class independence impossible. Socialists need to break from tailing nationalism, break from supporting nationalism. Socialism in one country is a deeply dangerous delusion, and neither would an independent Scotland ‘create space’ for more effective socialist agitation. That does not mean we support the corrupt UK constitutional regime (much of the rather quieter left around Labour disastrously clings to British unionism): we would urge comrades to take up the immediate demand for a federal republic with full national rights. And we do not obsess over unity of the ‘British working class’ - we stand for something much wider than that: a Communist Party of Europe with a CPGB as one part, eventually forming part of a Communist International.

Last year marked the 10-year anniversary of the independence referendum, and now the two major nationalist leaders of that period are yesterday’s news. It is a good time for the left to move on. But fully breaking from these left-nationalist errors will require an open accounting for the illusions the left has helped to spread about Scottish independence and an accounting for its de facto abandonment of the Marxist principle of political independence of the working class.

  1. I am sure our comrades in the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain, who seem to occupy the same building as her constituency office, will be sad to see her go.↩︎

  2. Of course, they still stood for a real ‘independent socialist Scotland’, whereas the SNP were speaking leftish, but stood for an ‘independent capitalist Scotland’; at least the latter has the merit of not being completely unreal.↩︎

  3. A ‘working class woman from North Ayrshire’ is how she is commonly described. As far as I can surmise, her mother was a dental nurse and her father an electrician. Like a lot of career politicians she studied law (at Glasgow University). For some this would make her middle class, with parents whose background was skilled working class.↩︎

  4. Since 1963 when the first Polaris nuclear missiles were placed at Faslane, a few miles from Glasgow, they have been frequently cited as forming a part of many people’s initial motivations for moving towards supporting independence.↩︎

  5. weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1337/unionist-wishful-thinking.↩︎

  6. The kind of things socialists use to justify tailing the left nationalists: eg, “A Scottish welfare state nationalism worthy of the name must, and still can, be worked towards within the scope of these class dynamics and the disability politics connected to them” (see scottishleftreview.scot/whither-welfare-state-nationalism).↩︎

  7. ‘Symbol of fatuity’ Weekly Worker October 17 2024: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1511/symbol-of-fatuity.↩︎

  8. A mix of ‘No, I don’t want an independent Scotland’ and ‘Yes, I would like an independent Scotland, but I don’t think it’s economically wise, so no’.↩︎

  9. commonslibrary.parliament.uk/supreme-court-judgment-on-scottish-independence-referendum.↩︎

  10. ‘A fruitless crown’ Weekly Worker March 23 2023: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1435/a-fruitless-crown.↩︎