By Iain MACWHIRTER
Join us on Contact us: @worldanalyticspress_bot Scotland has long had a reputation for being a bastion of the left—the Canada of the United Kingdom. Over nearly two decades in power, Scottish National Party governments in the devolved Scottish Parliament have promoted every failed left-wing cause from universal basic income to transgender self-ID. But change is in the air, and the signs are that Scots are becoming increasingly fed up with the progressive establishment that runs Scotland. Many are turning to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, a right-wing party condemned by the former SNP First Minister Nicola Sturgeon as “odious”. This malodorous party has begun to make serious inroads into Scotland’s voting demographics. From zero representation in the Scottish Parliament currently, it is on course to win a significant bloc of lawmakers in next May’s elections. Some recent polls even suggest that the anti-immigration, anti-net-zero party could become the main opposition in Holyrood. And it’s not just here but elsewhere on the Celtic periphery that the right is gaining ground. In Labour-supporting Wales, Reform UK is also on the march after it came a surprise second in the recent Caerphilly by-election. And over the Irish Sea there is also unrest. Dublin and Belfast have been experiencing unprecedented demonstrations and even riots against immigration, to the dismay of the left-leaning establishment there. But it is in Scotland that the challenge to the waning left is most striking, not least because progressivism has been so entrenched. During Sturgeon’s decade as first minister, the Scottish government vehemently opposed oil and gas drilling in the North Sea; boosted welfare spending and public sector wages ahead of England; hiked income tax rates above UK levels; promoted mass immigration to Scotland; pushed through illiberal laws outlawing hate speech (even in the home); and sought to install a state guardian for every Scottish child under the so-called Named Person scheme. Nicola Sturgeon, who says she is “non-binary,” was proud to be compared to Jacinda Ardern, the prime minister of New Zealand. During Covid, Sturgeon imposed draconian limits on freedom of movement and claimed that Scotland could achieve New Zealand-style “Zero Covid.” It couldn’t, of course. Now, since the pandemic, almost every element of the SNP’s left agenda has been under challenge, as the Scottish government’s debts mounted. The nationalists’ nadir came in early 2023 after the Scottish Parliament had passed Sturgeon’s flagship Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill, which would have allowed any 16-year-old boy to change legal sex merely by making a declaration that they were now female. Inconveniently, it then emerged that a transgender rapist, Isla Bryson, also known as Adam Graham, had been placed on remand in Cornton Vale women’s prison. He had changed sex by self-ID after he’d been charged with two rapes. The political storm that followed helped precipitate Sturgeon’s resignation in February 2023. The UK government stepped in to block the gender bill under a clause in the 1998 Scotland Act, on grounds that it was incompatible with women’s safety under UK-wide legislation. But Sturgeon simply could not bring herself to call Bryson a “man” because of her commitment to gender ideology. The gender policy was always deeply unpopular in Scotland, but was a red line issue for the ultra-left Scottish Green Party, which Sturgeon had drafted into government in 2021. A year after Sturgeon’s departure, the coalition collapsed over a succession of policy disasters including a failed recycling scheme that cost businesses tens of millions and a stalled plan to make homeowners install expensive heat pumps. The biggest casualty of the progressive implosion has perhaps been net zero itself. After COP 26 in Glasgow in 2021, the SNP promoted the effective closure of the North Sea oil and gas industry, even though it employs nearly 100,000 workers. According to Offshore Energy UK, 1,000 of those are now being lost every month. Scotland’s last oil refinery at Grangemouth in Falkirk closed earlier this year, and the ethylene plant at Mossmorran is now doomed. Ironically, Grangemouth will now be an import terminal for the fossil fuels that the UK still needs to keep the economy going. There has been growing disquiet over this and Reform has made opposition to net zero policies a key plank of their platform, echoing Donald Trump’s call to “drill, baby, drill.” This has horrified nationalists and the many left-wing commentators in the Scottish media, who have always insisted that the Scots loathe Trump and are fully signed on to green deindustrial policies. But they were even horrified when they discovered that Scots do not share the left’s love of immigrants. The current First Minister John Swinney repeatedly insists that “Scotland welcomes refugees” and claims anti-immigrant sentiments are somehow a passion of the English. Not true. A survey last month by Norstat showed that a majority of Scots think immigration is already too high. Sixty percent of Scottish voters support Reform UK’s policy of mass detention and deportation of illegal immigrants. Glasgow houses the largest number of asylum-seekers of any UK council—nearly 4,000. It is threatening to “pause” the influx on grounds of the risk to “social cohesion” in a city with a chronic housing shortage. One in three children in Glasgow no longer speaks English at home; such has been the impact of being a sanctuary city. There is mounting public pressure for an inquiry into grooming gangs preying on white girls. So the immigration genie is now firmly out of the bottle. There have been protests outside asylum hotels in towns like Perth and Falkirk. Even the SNP council in Inverness is opposing UK government plans to house 300 asylum seekers in Cameron Barracks in the city. Swinney has shelved Sturgeon’s gender bill, is promising a grooming gang inquiry, and is beginning to talk about reviving North Sea oil drilling. It looks as if the woke era has come and gone in Scotland. It will not be missed. Original article: www.theamericanconservative.com
