Smear or swoon. Attitudes to Nicola Sturgeon lurch between the two. The few days since the #leadersdebate on ITV have seen her vilified as a secret Tory supporter (good for a second referendum with a positive outcome this time, supposedly) and “the most dangerous woman” in UK politics.
More often, she has been showered with praise amounting to virtual hagiography. As Matthew Engel put it in the FT: that debate was “the We Agree With Nicola show” or, more viciously, “Agree with Nicola – or else.”
The public appears to crave iconic political leaders and, these days, it’s often women who play that role. In Germany, the chancellor, ‘Mutti’ Merkel, an obscure player in the East German peace movement 25 years ago, has an unerring sense for comforting the nation in its bewildered pain (as in the recent plane crash) and, even her opponents agree, will cruise to a fourth term in 2017 if she decides to run.
In France, Marine Le Pen, seeking to rebrand the obnoxious Front National as “neither right nor left”, presents herself as a modern Marianne capable of ending national depression and restoring sovereign glory; she is likely on current polling to get into the run-off presidential election in 2017 and poll much better than her father 15 years earlier. Both win uncritical adulation at their party rallies.
Sturgeon is now being acclaimed as “Queen of Scots” (Sunday Times) and Scotland’s first rock star politician who can attract 12,000 to the O2 in Glasgow and full Hamden Park (capacity 52,063) twice over. Brushing aside the prior claims of Merkel/Le Pen, Andrew Wilson gushed: “In Nicola Sturgeon the SNP have a new leader leading a new government more ready for the modern era than any other in Europe.”.
Gillian Bowditch enthused: “She would not be seen dead eating a bacon sandwich but gave the impression that she could devour Miliband, Nick Clegg and David Cameron for breakfast” and “Sturgeon has integrity in spades and while she is chatty in private, she has avoided the errors often made by new leaders.” (On verra on that last bit). Iain Macwhirter, a doyen of Scottish political commentators, waxed lyrical: “Sturgeon is no token woman, still less a stand-in. She is establishing herself as one of the most powerful voices on the British left, able to articulate a coherent social democratic vision on education, immigration, the NHS and austerity.”
Get a grip, guys. First Minister for 137 days only, Sturgeon has hardly changed the face of Scotland. Nor did her predecessor in eight years of power succeed in ending austerity, poverty, inequality…Indeed, there has been little or no redistribution of wealth or income. And it’s obviously far too soon to know what may or may not come in the months and years ahead. Simply being “anti-austerity” with a “modest” spending plan that depends on others to implement it doesn’t cut it.
What’s more, the claims on “modernity” and “coherent social democratic vision” simply don’t stand up to any fair-minded scrutiny. The European left has palpably been incapable – so far – of reinventing social democracy in the past eight years since the financial crisis began or, indeed, in the past quarter of a century since the end of communism. Would that it had! The critique of neoliberalism has been sustained, savage, accurate, but we have yet to see an alternative vision of the role of the state, including in the taming of markets or empowering citizens or overcoming inequality. It’s work in progress. As Syriza is painfully discovering in Greece.
Sturgeon is a first-rate politician, a class act. But even she wouldn’t pretend she’s been seriously tested in office. Indeed, what distinguishes her from Alex Salmond is her awareness of the pitfalls of hubris. And, it seems, she’s wary of the fickle, fair-weather media. Earlier this year, Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek economics professor who has seriously tried to re-articulate social democracy, was feted as a new rock-star finance minister taking on the orthodox EU Establishment. Well, he still is taking it on. But he’s more sober now. We should take a draft of sober realism too.
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