The SNP's Sick Social Experiment

What is it with Nicola Sturgeon and vulnerable people? First she transferred elderly people out of hospitals and into care homes without testing them for Covid, thereby infecting numerous care home residents with the virus, some fatally. Now it transpires that, under her watch, male offenders have been transferred into women's prisons. Some are still in women's prisons although not the double rapist who has caused the First Minister to admit that transwomen are not women in certain circumstances ...

Just over a week ago Calton was sure that the demise of Sturgeon would be at the hands of angry older women. Now it looks like it has all but been achieved by a man in a blonde wig.

One could give Sturgeon the benefit of the doubt over the care home Covid disaster, however it has now become clear that men in women's prisons was deliberate, planned policy. The Scottish Trans Alliance, one of the Scottish Government's pet charities which is bankrolled by the Scottish taxpayer, deliberately targeted prisons as a means of persuading other public bodies to follow its radical trans agenda. Their reasoning was that, if putting transwomen into women's prisons could be shown to work, the rest of their trans-inclusive policies could be rolled out into society. The SNP government fell for this argument hook, line and sinker, with the result that female offenders became guinea pigs in a sick social experiment which Calton does not doubt was approved by Nicola Sturgeon. (A policy was introduced by the SNP Government under Alex Salmond in 2014 of accommodating transgender prisoners according to their chosen gender. Nicola Sturgeon has continued it.)

The death of elderly residents in care homes was carelessness. The traumatising of vulnerable female prisoners is deliberate and the blame lies with the First Minister of the government which introduced the policy of housing men in women's jails and the First Minister who has continued her predecessor's policy. In Calton's opinion, Nicola Sturgeon should not only resign but be charged with dereliction of duty - the duty to care for the most vulnerable in society.

White Horse Syndrome

Calton has read numerous comments recently which say that Nicola Sturgeon is only using trans people to pick a fight with Westminster. Now, Calton has no doubt that Sturgeon relishes any excuse for a barney, and indeed could probably start a fight in an empty room, but he isn't convinced that she's being quite so cynical over the trans issue. If you read her comments, watch her video plea to trans people leaving the SNP, listen to her on TV, she really does seem to believe in the trans cause. She definitely seems to believe that transwomen are women and are also the most stigmatised minority in Scotland today. In short, she has been captured by trans ideology. There may be personal reasons behind this but there may also be another reason - white horse syndrome.

With her dreams of leading Scotland into independence, Boudicca-style, disappearing into the distance once again, Nicola may be seeing herself, in an appropriate gender role-reversal, as a knight on a white charger, rescuing transwomen in distress and decapitating, or at least silencing, a few Terfs along the way. Never mind that, instead of killing dragons, she's let loose a couple of the monsters called Misogyny and Violence in Scotland. Or that, instead of tilting her lance at Westminster, she's taken aim instead at Scottish women. It's her legacy that's at stake, not independence or the good of the Scottish people.

Fortunately it looks like the anger of older Scottish women may well drag her off her high horse.

A View from the Terf

Calton attended the demonstration outside the Scottish Parliament organised by the Glasgow Cabbie a couple of days ago to protest against Nicola Sturgeon in general and her sordid sex education and the Gender Recognition Reform Bill in particular. It was very well attended, unlike the counter-protest, with a variety of protesters from different backgrounds there. Calton has invited one of them to do a guest post:

"I am a sixty-something Scotswoman. When I was wee, girls became nurses when they grew up and boys became doctors. By the time I left high school I had acceptances from three Scottish universities to study medicine. I decided to study maths and physics instead and was one of a growing number of young women to do so. In the 80s engineering was the last bastion of male-only studies at university. So I became a software engineer upon graduating, working for a large electronics company in Scotland. I had to put up with manspreading, mansplaining and pornographic pictures everywhere I looked. I was never paid as much as men doing the same job, which affects my pension today. It was a really sexist, misogynistic environment but it was nothing compared to the misogyny I see today coming from the Scottish Parliament, under a female First Minister, and I never felt unsafe in the ladies toilets!

In the last three decades of the 20th century women's rights were improving. There was still a gender pay gap and some way to go but we felt we were making progress. We had our first female Prime Minister, pornography gradually disappeared from the workplace and women were no longer told they could only do certain jobs. Now we are going backwards fast under a female First Minister who claims to be a "feminist to her fingertips" but doesn't seem to know the meaning of the word. Young boys are being taught at school that porn is fine - go ahead and have fun with it. Young girls are being admitted to hospital with serious anal injuries after experimenting with a type of sex promoted in school sex education which I hadn't even heard of at their age. A primary school teacher caught two kids trying to have sex in the gender neutral toilets after sex education. This isn't progress and it's damaging kids, girls in particular.

I never used to think of myself as a feminist but I do now - a TERF and proud of it. Nicola Sturgeon doesn't know what a man is but I do and they shouldn't be in women's prisons, women's refuges, women's toilets or any other space reserved for WOMEN. That's why I attended Glasgow Cabbie's demonstration - to say SHAME ON STURGEON and ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.

WOMEN WON'T WHEESHT - for the sake of the children."

Nationalism - The Same Everywhere

It is quite something when Scotland's First Minister and the leader of the Scottish National Party condemns the leader of Russia for violating the territorial integrity of Ukraine, given that she is constantly agitating for the destruction of the territorial integrity of the United Kingdom. Certainly Putin's means should be condemned and Calton has no hestitation in doing so but is an aggressor from outwith the borders necessarily worse than one from within? As long as she continues to eschew violence Sturgeon has the moral superiority over Putin but in other ways they are very similar.

Both of them are harking back to an earlier period in the histories of their countries and wish to return to it. Putin wants to revive the Russian Empire and Sturgeon wants Scotland to be independent again. (Independent and bankrupt, just like it was in 1707.) Both of them have an enemy which they are fixated on - NATO and Westminster. They surround themselves with yes-men and don't like criticism. They seem to think they are above the law. And both of them are very reluctant to give up the reins of power.

'Nationalist' seems to be a dirty word with SNP members these days but a nationalist is what Nicola Sturgeon is - by her own admission on many SNP conference video clips. So is Vladimir Putin which just goes to show that nationalism is the same the world over.

Shot Down in Flames

 Calton has never seen a newly elected government so beleagured by bad press right from the get-go as the current Scottish Government. Usually there is a honeymoon period but that seems to have been cancelled, just like many other wedding plans and honeymoon trips over the last two years. Sturgeon moved quickly to bolster her position by bringing in the Greens after being denied a majority yet again but it doesn't seem to have helped her popularity, or her temper. Regular watchers of First Minister's Questions will have noticed that, lacking real answers to the opposition questions, she plays the man, not the ball, particularly where Douglas Ross is concerned. The Tory Leader is youthful looking, leading Sturgeon to mock him for being infantile. Such ad hominem attacks are not very smart coming from a woman of a certain age who looks like Maw Broon and sounds like a fishwife but intelligence is not one of the First Minister's strengths. For proof of that one only has to listen to the recording of her speaking on the topic of doors and ventilation at today's FMQs: "If a door is hung in such as way that it is inhibiting the natural flow of air, then one of the options the local authority should have is to rectify that." (She means by chopping bits off the door rather than opening it.) Having been chased up this particular tree by Ross's "absurd" line of questioning, Sturgeon refused to come down, rather like the cat in Trumpton. Unfortunately the real life Fire Brigade has refused to come to her rescue, choosing instead to pour fuel on the flames of the controversy by raising issues of fire safety. If only those pesky firefighters were as compliant as Police Scotland ...

Envy is a Terrible Thing

Seeing photos this week of David Davis and Alex Salmond together in happier times reminded Calton of something we seem to have lost, in Scotland at any rate. Gone are the days when politicians of opposing parties knocked seven bells out of each other in the House and then met for a pint afterwards. Gone is respect and admiration and, in some instances, genuine friendship between political opponents. Gone is agreeing to disagree. Instead we have Nicola Sturgeon who quite clearly hates, loathes and despises the leaders of the other parties. There is no mutual respect or friendship there, which is why the lift sketch featuring Sturgeon and Davidson was so cringe-worthy. During an election debate Sturgeon didn't hesitate to drop Dugdale in it by revealing a private conversation on national TV. Political advantage trumps personal loyalty and general decency every time with Nicola. She doesn't even bother trying to conceal her dislike of Willie Rennie even although the two of them share common ground on the EU.

Most telling of all is the way in which the First Minister has not only dumped but tried to destroy her mentor Alex Salmond. Her reasons for doing this have never been very clear, especially if we are to believe that he was her friend, however the whole thing becomes more plausible if, in fact, the friendship was all on Salmond's side and Sturgeon was just using him as a stepping-stone to the top. A genuine friend would have been happy with his aquittal. Instead, Sturgeon keeps casting doubts on it even as she says she accepts it.

Nicola Sturgeon has lots of slavish followers but seems to have few friends, all of whom are in her own party. She is trying to rubbish the Westminster intervention by David Davis this week by characterising it as the "old boys club", knowing the friendship that exists between Davis and Salmond. Envy is a terrible thing. Sturgeon has also made a big mistake in trying to smear Davis. David Davis MP is a man of principle and a well-respected politician. Calling him "shifty" just makes her look bad, especially after her evasive answers to many of the questions put to her by the Parliamentary Committee recently. It was an ill-judged act of desperation from a woman who is losing the trust of the Scottish people. If recent polls are right and she fails to get a majority in May, she will have very few friends supporting her after the election and she will only have herself to blame.

The Turning Point

Nicola Sturgeon's political nous seems to have deserted her. Just a month ago she was heading for a majority in May and she's thrown it away. She can't even blame Alex Salmond because, although he has managed to put a smell on her which won't quite go away, the main reason voters are deserting her party in droves is her decision to promote trans rights over the rights of women. We are now in the ludicrous position in Scotland where a man walking down the street in women's clothes has more protection under the law than a woman, which provoked a twitter storm last night with a rash of tweets from former SNP voters now abandoning the party, and yet Sturgeon allowed the Justice Secretary to carry on with his Hate Crime Bill today without incorporating protection for women as advocated by Johann Lamont. Normally the First Minister is extremely sensitive to public reaction but, on this important, crucial topic, she ignored it. The delay to the vote on the bill was the ideal opportunity for the SNP to have a rethink overnight and they didn't take it. That is madness, eight weeks before an election.

Calton was already of the opinion that Nicola Sturgeon is not good for women and neither is her party, now being dubbed "New SNP". The passing of the Hate Crime Bill is now proving to be the turning point for others and support for the SNP is falling away. Calton won't shed any tears over that but he does wonder how Sturgeon could be so stupid? Perhaps Denise Findlay is right and Nicola just can't bear to lose. If that's the case, she'd better learn how to before May.

PS. And while we're on the subject of women, Ian Blackford's continued accusation that Joanna Cherry is not a "team player" (this time because she apparently asked why Patrick Grady wasn't sacked earlier from the SNP's front bench at Westminster over allegations of sexual harassment) just smacks of a man desperately casting around for a reason for demoting a competent woman who won't wheesht. Some are suggesting that Cherry should resign from the SNP and stand against Angus Robertson in Edinburgh Central. That would certainly make life interesting in Calton's constituency!

Mad and Bad

Since his last post, Calton has decided that Nicola Sturgeon is both mad and bad. She has also appointed herself judge and jury over her own behaviour which is a bit worrying. Correction - very worrying. After the First Minister's astonishingly unwise outburst on Wednesday in which she questioned the outcome of Alex Salmond's criminal trial, Calton was not the only one who was concerned. Jim Sillars wrote to the Permanent Secretary Leslie Evans complaining that Sturgeon had breached the ministerial code. Instead of receiving a reply from Evans, he got a zinger from Nicola which you can read here, along with Sillars' measured response. Extremely measured, given the provocation of Nicola's rude reply to his first missive, but quite rightly holding to the fact that she has broken the ministerial code and should self-refer to James Hamilton (again) since no-one else seems to be able to refer her. No wonder people are starting to talk about Scotland being a failed state or a banana republic without the bananas.

We have a First Minister who is increasingly out of control, using a Covid briefing to attack an opponent, making ill-judged comments about our judicial system and then firing off a reply to a letter that wasn't even addressed to her. She has issued dire warnings to any of her supporters caught reading Wings Over Scotland, presumably to stop them reading articles like this. She accuses her opponents of a scorched earth policy when that is precisely what she is doing to the SNP. Lastly, and most egregiously, she has accused Alex Salmond of not backing up his claims with evidence when she knows full well that he is prevented from doing so for legal reasons. That's not just mad - that's bad, in Calton's opinion.

Scottish National Pyromaniac

Calton is not sure whether the almost light-hearted bravado of Nicola Sturgeon's performance on today's briefing indicates total confidence that she is untouchable or the start of a descent into madness. Or both. It certainly made the case for the BBC pulling the daily Nicola show all the more imperative. She used it today to attack Alex Salmond in a way which, to Calton's non-legally trained mind, might be actionable when she stated that "Alex Salmond is innocent of criminality, that doesn’t mean the behaviour they claimed of didn’t happen." ('They' being the alphabet women.) For the First Minister to stray into such dangerous territory, and for her to even answer questions on the Alex Salmond affair in the Covid briefing, was very unwise.

Another worrying indication of Nicola Sturgeon's increasing isolation and failure to grasp reality is the account of the SNP NEC meeting at the weekend which Sturgeon attended via zoom. According to Iain Lawson, she spent a lot of time on dire threats for anyone caught sharing Wings Over Scotland and pushed through a definition of transphobia which will exclude women like Joanna Cherry and Joan McAlpine from the party. Neither of those actions will help heal the divisions in her party - quite the opposite. The SNP leader is behaving like a pyromaniac in a straw-filled barn. Needless to say, her diktat re Wings has been pointedly ignored by Chris McEleny and Angus McNeil who have both posted articles on Wings since the NEC meeting.

Sturgeon is keen to stick to May 6th for the election so it seems absolutely crazy for her to be purging her party with less than 3 months to go. The SNP is haemorrhaging members, there's no money in the bank and Salmond's accusations are now making front page news. Even the London-based MSM has finally realised there's a problem in Scotland. She's presumably hoping that she can capitalise on the false impression that she's handling Covid well (or at least not as badly as Boris) with an early election, however the backlash to her route out of lockdown rather gives the lie to that idea.

If Nicola Sturgeon wasn't in charge of the country at such a crucial time it wouldn't matter that she appears to be losing the plot and is spending more time dealing with Alex Salmond than Covid. Unfortunately it does matter and it also matters that there doesn't seem to be anyone within the SNP with the experience and gravitas to have a word in her shell, as happened with Margaret Thatcher. So it looks like we will have the unedifying spectacle of a desperately damaged First Minister clinging on to power unless or until she is voted out. Hopefully that will be sooner rather than later.

Birds of a Feather

The last few days have seen a tectonic shift in Scottish politics which has resulted in an interesting realignment. Instead of the SNP and the Greens on one side, with a supporting cast which included Wings over Scotland, versus all those who wanted to stay in the UK on the other side,  we now have the SNP split down the middle with one half teaming up with Wings, who now has a number of pro-UK people sharing his articles, and the other half desperately trying to distance themselves from Wings and support their beleaguered leader Nicola Sturgeon. And if you are still managing to follow Calton here, well done! It's not been easy to keep up with the shifting allegiances lately. Indeed some poor SNP supporters just don't know who is the goodie and who is the baddie now.

It may seem very complicated but, at heart, it's very simple. Birds of a feather flock together and so, on one side, we have those for whom truth transcends, and on the other, those for whom independence transcends. That's why unionists like Calton have been tweeting posts from pro-independence blogger Stuart Campbell recently. That's why "wheesht for indy" has become a thing. That's why SNP members are finally breaking ranks and speaking out, in spite of the infamous SNP gagging rule. The trigger has been the inquiry into the handling of complaints against Alex Salmond but the rumblings have been going on beneath the surface for some time now. Calton expects a full-scale eruption next week when Salmond finally testifies to the parliamentary inquiry.

The Words Matter Even More

Nicola Sturgeon continues to use the phrase "I do not consider that I have misled Parliament" (or "broken the ministerial code"), a fact which Calton has already highlighted. At first hearing it seems a strange turn of words to use but, on further consideration it becomes apparent that, by using this particular phrase, the beleaguered First Minister is leaving the door open to someone else considering that she HAS misled Parliament, the most obvious person to do so being James Hamilton, who is currently looking into the matter and who will hopefully report by the end of the month. Having paved the way by her choice of words, and her refusal to say whether or not she would resign if she was found to have broken the code, she can then employ the tactic of 'my truth vs your truth' - 'I consider that I have not broken the code, you consider that I have'. Who is to say who is right in this post-truth, through-the-looking-glass world which is Scotland 2021?

Sturgeon will get an easy ride from the Parliamentary Committee investigating the botched handling of the Salmond case when she appears in front of it next week, thanks to her fan-girl Fabiani. If necessary the whole avian and animal kingdom will be summoned to aid in deflecting questions from Murdo Fraser, Alex Cole-Hamilton and Jackie Baillie. Possibly even flora too - 'Oh look - a snowdrop' - if things really start looking difficult. The coup-de-grace will be the post-truth argument. Nicola is right because she is right. Anyone who disagrees is wrong. Even in the face of utterly damning evidence she will not resign. This is where we have got to and it stinks.

Those who voted for this woman and who continue to support her should hang their heads in shame. Truth matters far more than independence or party loyalty.

A Waste of Time

Today's party political broadcast daily briefing by Nicola Sturgeon was a complete waste of time. All she did was tell us that she is going to tell us the stuff we really want to know in the Scottish Parliament tomorrow afternoon. The only real substance to her presentation was the daily figures on cases, deaths and vaccinations which are repeated anyway by broadcasters, sometimes even before the briefing is over. Since today is Monday, the one figure Calton suspects we pay most attention to, the number of deaths, is inaccurate. Given all this, what was the point? OK it gets Sturgeon's wee face on the telly once more but it also gives the lie to her saying that she is 100% focused on defeating Covid. There is no way that she can be even 50% focused on that when she spends so much time preparing for each briefing, preparing suitable answers for the questions she is likely to be asked after it, travelling from Glasgow to Edinburgh, giving the briefing, being unpleasant to any journalist who dares ask an awkward question, even although she's prepared for just that eventuality, and then travelling back to Glasgow. Even a very perfunctory cost-benefit analysis would show that this just isn't either efficient or good value for money.

We don't need a briefing every day. The daily numbers can be given out in a press release. We only need to hear from the First Minister when something significant changes. That way, she really can give her full attention to improving Scotland's vaccine rollout so that it catches up with England, instead of just talking about it.

Independence Transcended

Back in October Calton wrote about how independence transcended everything for Nicola Sturgeon. It looks like he was wrong. Sturgeon seems to have cynically used the fact that independence transcends everything for other people to cover up a stitch-up of her predecessor Alex Salmond because what really transcends everything for her is power. Once she had it, she wanted to keep it.

According to Craig Murray's sworn evidence on the Salmond affair, Alex Salmond "said that he believed that Nicola was banking on his loyalty to the SNP and to the Independence movement, thinking that he would not split the party by revealing what or who was behind the allegations against him." In other words, she thought she could smear him with impunity because he wouldn't do anything to hurt 'the cause'. If that is true, she was wrong. Salmond may be out for revenge, and, if so, who could blame him? But he also, more importantly, wants the truth to come out and so do many others, Calton included. This has not made the former SNP leader popular with some in the SNP who still think that 'the cause' is more important than the truth. He is supposed to fall on his sword, or at least wheesht, for independence. Thankfully he has declined to do so, because, when truth becomes secondary to a cause and the end justifies the means, we are all in big trouble.

The Salmond Inquiry has already done, and will continue to do, damage to the SNP but that is not the fault of Alex Salmond. It is the fault of the current SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon for whom it seems power transcends independence. It is hard to read all the evidence now in the public domain, much of which can be seen on Wings over Scotland, and not come to the conclusion that Sturgeon conspired against Salmond with several of her team and is now desperately trying to cover it up. If independence really was the most important thing to her, she would resign because she is damaging 'the cause'. The fact she is still doubling down and clinging on tells us all we need to know.

The Words Matter

Nicola Sturgeon has said "I do not consider that I misled parliament, but that is for others to judge." Interesting phrase. Why didn't she just say "I did not mislead parliament" or "I did not lie to parliament"? Perhaps because such bare faced lies are beyond even her? Very few of us can lie effectively. Instead, we tend to deflect, obfuscate, confuse or conflate. Note how the rebuttals of the charges of lying, which Alex Salmond has placed at Sturgeon's door, introduce the idea of a conspiracy, only to rubbish it. Who mentioned conspiracy? This is typical deflection. The point at issue is - has Scotland's First Minister lied to the Scottish Parliament, yes or no?

What Calton finds even more egregious is the way in which Nicola and her followers are framing the Salmond/Sturgeon war as an attack on a poor, innocent woman by an awful man. This is nonsense and dangerous nonsense at that. By inappropriately appropriating female victimhood in a situation where the female is the First Minister of Scotland and the supposed victimiser is a political has-been, Sturgeon and her female supporters, like Kirsty Blackman, are doing women in general a huge disservice. There are many situations where women are bullied and harassed by mysogynistic men and, when this happens, it needs to be called out by both men and women, but this is not one of them and to suggest it is, prejudices genuine cases of sexism and mysogyny.

Calton has already blogged about how the SNP is not good for women. Neither is Nicola Sturgeon.

Is Nicola Sturgeon good for the SNP?

In times gone by, Queen of the SNP Nicola Sturgeon could have expected standing ovations and lots of opportunities for selfies and self-promotion at the SNP's annual conference. Not this year. 2020 continued its mean girls reputation by serving up to the First Minister a platter of hostile media interviews, a critical front-page article by an SNP MP in The Times and her name trending on twitter for all the wrong reasons. Andrew Marr, in an interview which is unlikely to be forgotten even by a woman who seems to have made forgetfulness a habit recently, told her that "there is a gap between how you present yourself, which you do very well, and what is actually going on in Scotland". One of the most important manifestations of this gap is the way in which Sturgeon has managed to make everyone think that she's done a good job of leading the SNP. So let's look at that.

Nicola Sturgeon inherited a party with a majority in Holyrood, which had been achieved by her predecessor Alex Salmond in 2011 after he successfully ran a minority administration from 2007-2011. Sturgeon lost that majority in 2016 and now presides over another minority government which is not doing nearly as well as the first one. Granted, the number of SNP MPs at Westminster has increased since she took over, however the stunning 2015 result was mainly due to a backlash against the 2014 referendum result and would have happened regardless of who was leader of the party. The SNP lost a lot of MPs in 2017 and has still not got back to the 2015 high water mark in spite of an improved performance in 2019. A similar thing has happened with party membership which increased dramatically in 2014-5 but has recently fallen back again.

Under the leadership of Sturgeon and her husband Peter Murrell the SNP introduced rules banning criticism of the leadership or any party member or policy. This gave them an iron grip on the party which could only last for so long and is now spectacularly breaking down over the issue of transgender rights. Joanna Cherry has publicly criticised Sturgeon's control as being unhealthy for the party while simultaneously asking that the rule banning criticism be used to protect her from the torrent of abuse she has been receiving from party members. Nicola's response to this today has been rather lukewarm. Calton is not surprised - you only get la Sturgeon's support if you agree with her anti-feminist policies.

Finally, on the real acid test of an SNP leader, Nicola Sturgeon has failed spectacularly because, although she's been promising another independence referendum since the Brexit vote of 2016, she has failed to deliver one and shows no sign of doing so any time soon, regardless of what (vague) promises she has given this weekend. She is also failing when it comes to governing Scotland well (which Salmond did from 2007-2011) and building support for independence. It's not enough to have a referendum - the SNP members want to win it and that is in no way guaranteed at the moment. The settled 60% in favour of independence which Nicola very sensibly wanted to see before calling indyref2 has never materialised. Support has been 55% at most. 

Nicola Sturgeon is very good at presenting herself. She's managed to fool at least some people into thinking that she's handled the Covid crisis well, although the facts say otherwise. However she is not good at managing her party or governing the country or persuading No voters to change to Yes. Self-promotion is all she's good at. Nicola is no Boudicca - but will the rank and file in the SNP realise that before it's too late? Hopefully not.

Cherchez La Femme

The more the sorry Salmond affair drags on, the more Calton becomes convinced that the former First Minister was right - there was a conspiracy against him instigated by his successor. You don't have to look far in this whodunnit to find the femme fatale. Nicola Sturgeon had both the means (his admittedly poor behaviour) and the motive (his declared intention to return to Scottish politics) to stick the knife into Alex Salmond and #metoo gave her the ideal opportunity. She has rubbished any suggestion of conspiracy, saying that she has nothing to hide and would cooperate fully with the current inquiry however court action has been raised to prevent publication of part of a conversation between Sturgeon and a senior civil servant about Salmond. The Scottish Government has also failed to meet a deadline to provide its legal advice to the inquiry and is treating a parliamentary vote on the same with contempt.

What really stinks about this whole thing is the way in which senior women in the SNP and the Scottish Government seem to have been happy to put up with Salmond's behaviour when it suited them, in the run-up to the 2014 independence referendum for example, but then cynically used the #metoo movement as a vehicle to prevent Salmond making a come-back. That is not the action of committed feminists. Women suffer daily from the actions of sleazy guys in positions of power and are entitled to have their complaints treated with respect and investigated properly, not used in some internecine party war, which, in Calton's opinion, seems to have happened in this case.

Alex Salmond won a court case against the Scottish Government over their handling of the complaints against him and he was aquitted of all criminal wrongdoing at his trial. He is now out for revenge against his successor. Nicola Sturgeon has said that perhaps he is angry with her because she refused to collude with him in covering up his behaviour. Calton wonders if perhaps Alex had good reason to expect collusion from Nicola based on her previous attitude to his actions and was disappointed to find that her attitude had changed. Or perhaps his anger stems from being put through months of hell and a court case. Hopefully we will find out when the man himself appears in front of the Holyrood committee. Calton doesn't hold out much hope of the committee getting anything out of the First Minister, except a plea for our sympathy as a wronged woman.

Is the SNP Good for Women?

 Calton was prompted to write this post after seeing that one hopeful SNP candidate was not approved by the party because of her views on transgender issues and another was asked who would look after her children if she was elected. Both were women. Now, one would think that, with a female leader who claims to be a feminist, the SNP would be a positive environment for women, supportive of their rights and encouraging of their aims. Not so. In her race to be seen as the most woke leader in the western world, Nicola Sturgeon has abandoned her sex. Let's have a look at the evidence.

She claims that her plans to make it easy for men to self-identify as women do not clash with her feminism, however many feminists would disagree. They think, and Calton agrees, that the radical trans ideaology which Sturgeon is pursuing not only threatens women's safe spaces but threatens the very definition of a woman and all the hard-won rights which go with it. The Scottish Government's Gender Reform Act (GRA) may be on the back burner for now but, make no mistake, it will be back with a vengeance if the SNP get a majority in Holyrood next year. The fact that the First Minister has twice invited best friend and minister responsible for the GRA Shirley-Anne Somerville onto her daily briefing in the last fortnight confirms this. It also demonstrates that if you support the GRA, you get the support of the leader of the SNP in your battle to be reselected. If you don't support the GRA, forget it. (Somerville is being targeted by the #dontvotewoke campaign as she tries to hang on to Dunfermline and West Fife.)

Joanna Cherry is another woman who has questioned the party's policy on transgender issues. She wanted to stand for Edinburgh Central next year but the SNP NEC changed the rules, effectively preventing her from doing so. Much has been made of the Salmond/Sturgeon divisions within the SNP but the real faultline is the woke/non-woke one, which has spawned the #dontvotewoke hashtag on twitter, referring to the current selection contests for SNP candidates. It is well known that Stuart Campbell is no fan of Nicola's however his comments on the candidate selection process are still worth reading. Further evidence that the SNP leader is not good for women is the emergence of the SNP Women's Pledge, which would not be needed if Sturgeon truly supported women. They are supporting non-woke candidates.

Calton could say more on issues such as the child-care question posed to a female candidate, how Alex Salmond's sleazy, but not illegal, behaviour was overlooked by senior women in the SNP in order not to damage the cause of independence and how the SNP have shown a complete lack of trust in women's ability to bring up their own children without government intervention (the named persons and smacking legislation) but this post is already long enough. Perhaps another day ...

Policy-making on the High Heel

 If Calton had to pick one thing which demonstrates that Nicola Sturgeon is making it up as she goes along, it would be Thursday's announcement that masks should be worn in work canteens as of Friday but masks in corridors don't need to be worn until Monday. This is not just policy-making on the high heel, it's stupidity on stilts. If masks were required in canteens two days ago, except when eating, why the delay in requiring masks in corridors, which are usually more enclosed than a canteen? It's no surprise that a large part of the population now has no clue what they are supposed to be doing to avoid the spread of Covid. The clear messaging which the First Minister prided herself on has descended into a fog of stupid rules in spite of her continued daily appearances on our TV screens, thanks to the craven BBC.

Scotland has been locked down harder and for longer than England thanks to Sturgeon's fear and it has resulted in no real difference in infections north and south of the border, and yet she continues with her MacBoris approach - simply putting a kilt on what the Prime Minister does. He is not getting it right and neither is she. Lockdowns only work when they are in operation. When they are lifted, the virus continues its merry way. If the NHS is in danger of being overwhelmed a temporary lockdown will help. Otherwise it's just ruining the economy, putting people out of work and causing excess deaths through cancer etc for sweet nothing. We are not preventing Covid deaths with the current strategy - we are simply delaying them and causing other deaths in the meantime.

We need to stop kidding ourselves on that we can control this virus and we need to stop looking to a vaccine as a magic bullet. We can't afford to keep paying workers who can't work and businesses who can't open due to government edicts and so the edicts need to stop. We should switch our attention instead to protecting the vulnerable as much as we can while learning to accept that opportunistic infections kill the elderly and vulnerable - always have, always will. If we don't, we will end up with millions unemployed, isolated, lonely, sick and dying from diseases which were preventable, unlike Covid.

Independence transcends ...

Nicola Sturgeon was being more than a little disingenous today when she admitted to a limited amount of politicisation of her daily "Covid" briefings on the basis that she's only human. In fact she has regularly used the platform to denigrate the Westminster Government and favourably compare Scotland with England, which would maybe not be political if she was a member of any other party but, as the leader of the SNP, this is highly political. It has also been highly effective as the latest opinion polls on support for independence demonstrate. Hence the reason that Nationalists have been howling with rage over the BBC's announcement that they would no longer automatically screen the daily briefings on TV. Sturgeon has been wise enough to distance herself from the criticism but her deputy John Swinney no doubt spoke for her when he voiced his concern over the BBC's decision.

The problem, as Calton sees it, is that those who don't want to see the UK broken up and Scotland plunged into poverty still seem to ascribe some basic moral decency to Sturgeon. They don't realise that when she said "independence transcends" she meant that it transcends EVERYTHING. Not just economics but morals, decency, honesty, integrity. Everything. Nicola Sturgeon would let your Granny die of Covid in a care home if it furthered the cause of Scottish independence ... except she's already tried that and it didn't work. She has no sense of shame and no decency. If she seems to be doing a mea culpa it's only to avoid admitting even bigger failures. This is what Nationalism does to you. It causes women to cover up for sex pests in case it damages 'the cause' and it causes other women to knife them in the back in case they damage 'the cause'. Nothing matters but independence and while Nicola may not have been "enjoying" Covid, she has used the higher profile it has given her to drive a wedge between Scotland and England and increase support for the only thing she really cares about. 

It's time to take the blinkers and the gloves off if we are to defeat the poison of Nationalism in Scotland. No more Mr Nice Guy.

The Smell of Pee

Back in April Calton wrote that Nicola Sturgeon reeked of exceptionalism. Now she stinks of urine - the pee some care home residents had to lie in due to the Scottish Government's mismanagement of the Covid crisis and care homes. Whenever someone dares to raise this issue with the First Minister, she complains that they are trying to make out that she did it deliberately. She plaintively protests that she did her best at the time and that, if mistakes were made, (note the 'if'), they will be examined at some future inquiry. She deeply regrets every death and, really, it's her we should be feeling sorry for because those nasty journalists and opposition politicians are trying to make her out to be a murderess.

No Nicola, the charge is not murder - it's manslaughter. Not intentional, pre-meditated killing but killing through incompetence. At the height of the pandemic you and your hopeless Health Secretary Jeanne Freeman shifted lots of vulnerable elderly patients from hospitals to care homes without testing them while at the same time lots of care home workers were having to stay at home for 14 days. You created a situation where an increase in residents coincided with a decrease in staff numbers and you did nothing to mitigate this. That is incompetence. The results of what you were doing were forseeable - you did not forsee them. The situation was exacerbated by a blanket directive (now deleted) that care home residents should not be moved to hospital if they got Covid.

Sturgeon's hands are not stained with blood - it's pee and no amount of washing will take away the smell.