The sudden demise of Nicola Sturgeon's political career has been a matter of celebration for many Scots, one long overdue, but the sad reality is that the country she leaves behind her and her near-decade of incompetent misrule will take a generation to recover.
There are few areas of Scottish life, whether civil society, business and commerce, or even plain common sense, that have escaped the corrosive effects of the toxic blend of nationalism, separatism and sheer nastiness that flourished within the SNP under Sturgeon.
In his Telegraph article, below, Simon Heffer sets out just how all-pervading the damage done to Scotland by 16 years of SNP misrule is. In many ways it is a deeply depressing overview: how are we to undo such far-reaching harm? But it also offers hope: Scotland has a tremendous capacity for reinventing itself once it has lanced the boil, drawn out the poison and set it's sights on the kind of future that Adam Smith once articulated so well.
Before we can return to a path of common sense and the kind of everyday family values that used to be the bedrock of Scottish society, we must return our public services to their core mission: serving ordinary people, sensibly, well, and affordably. In his Spectator article Stuart Waiton offers one way to tackle that in the education domain. We can make our voices heard and we can start the fight to return Scottish education to the heights it once reached before the SNP took a wrecking ball to it and to the life chances of an entire generation.
Sturgeon's fall is not alas the end of SNP arrogance and extremism. It is however a chance to put behind us the worst leader in Scottish history and seek a better way forward. It is a sad truism that in the UK for every year of Socialist rule - Labour or SNP - it takes 2 or 3 years to clean up the mess, rebuild the economy and detoxify civil society. That task always falls to Conservative governments, and is never easy. In Scotland it will be a truly monumental task once the SNP is finally kicked out of power by an electorate desperate for hope of a better future.
The sooner we can start, the better.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/02/19/nicola-sturgeons-dreaml…
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/scottish-schools-have-become-places…