“I detest the Tories and everything they stand for.”
With her succinct statement, said in a BBC interview on Sunday, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has caused a right old stooshie. Poor, sensitive Tories.
Nadhim Zahawi has labelled Sturgeon’s comments as “dangerous”. Ruth Davidson said it was a “rhetoric-raising strategy”.
What about the rest of us? A quick scan of Twitter, and most people seem to agree with the FM’s sentiments. Quite a few English people are asking if they can move north. My pals over at Into Creative and 1 of 100 have swiftly designed a T-shirt, with all profits going to foodbanks.
People admire Nicola Sturgeon’s directness, and the fact that she is – refreshingly – not wriggling out of it after the fact. We like straight talking. We need more of this wholehearted honesty, and less of the faux pearl-clutching.
On that note, I would argue that no party has done more to stir up hatred than the Tories. They demonise single mothers, benefits claimants, refugees and trade unionists, to name a few.
Plenty of us have a social conscience and a long memory, the poll tax being just one example. Friends went to jail for those protests. Now we are back in the zone of jailing people for protests, with draconian criminalisation as standard.
We hear hostile rhetoric daily
The previous Tory leader, Boris Johnson, compared Muslim women to “bank robbers” and “letterboxes”, and black people as “picaninnies”. The current home secretary, Suella Braverman, says it’s her “dream” to see asylum seekers being put on a plane to Rwanda.
The rhetoric we hear day in and day out is downright hostile. If it’s OK for the government to be openly discriminatory, what does that mean for your local racist, homophobic bully? Government is meant to set an example. Unfortunately, the example we see is rotten to the core.
‘I would love to be having a front page of The Telegraph with a plane taking off to Rwanda. That’s my dream. That’s my obsession’ Home Secretary Suella Braverman pic.twitter.com/BxuEoR1lrU
— Phantom Power (@PhantomPower14) October 4, 2022
Nicola Sturgeon has been widely criticised by those on the right of the political spectrum. Apparently, if you respond to Tory vitriol and state-sanctioned cruelty by saying you detest their policies, you are showing a “nastier side” and “dividing the country”.
Our latest prime minister, Liz Truss, won’t give nurses a pay rise, and plans to strip public spending by demolishing the NHS and cutting welfare benefits for the poorest and most vulnerable in society.
Now, I’m a single parent, watching my gas meter eat up the pounds, listening to my children talk about their future – jobs, study, housing – with trepidation
One of my kids asked what I was writing about today. Detesting the Tories, I said. That won’t be hard, she replied.
I’ve lived a lifetime hating everything the Tories stand for. I grew up in the west of Scotland in the 1980s and 1990s. Not only do I remember the poll tax, I also remember the miners’ strike. I remember communities being left behind as pits and shipyards closed, being replaced with deprivation and pessimism. Now, I’m a single parent, watching my gas meter eat up the pounds, listening to my children talk about their future – jobs, study, housing – with trepidation.
First minister is telling it how it is
I’m not a member of the SNP and I don’t agree with many of their policies, but I love the fact that Nicola Sturgeon, a fellow west coast of Scotland woman, has refused to apologise for telling it how it is. “Right now, and for much of my life, [the Tories] have done real damage to people,” she said.
As we watch our amazing, beloved National Health Service being systematically dismantled by the Conservative Party, we can look back at the founder of the NHS, Nye Bevan, who also caused a stooshie for calling the Tories “lower than vermin”. He was right then, and Sturgeon is right now.
I detest the Tory beliefs and choices that deliberately push more people into soul-destroying, life-threatening poverty. The impact of these policies will reverberate for decades, in public health and education, and in the absence of hope that becomes engrained when communities are mistreated like this.
Tories are scared of Nicola Sturgeon’s dream
The way I see it, the media storm about Nicola Sturgeon’s words is fabricated – both a nonsense and a distraction. Her language isn’t dangerous.
What’s really “dangerous” is the prospect of a new Scottish independence referendum, as the Westminster elite are petrified at the prospect of a thriving, independent Scotland – a landscape in which policies can be designed to support, not hinder, people, and basic dignities can be restored.
"My dream is that we live in a world where those fleeing violence and oppression are shown compassion, not shown the door and bundled onto planes like unwanted cargo."
Nicola Sturgeon slates Suella Braverman's fantasy of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda. pic.twitter.com/0Bf3MExCQJ
— PoliticsJOE (@PoliticsJOE_UK) October 10, 2022
As Nicola Sturgeon said, in response to the home secretary’s appalling rhetoric: “My dream is very different. My dream is that we live in a world where those fleeing violence and oppression are shown compassion and treated like human beings – not shown the door and bundled onto planes like unwanted cargo.”
That’s a dream most of us share, and it’s the kind of world that the majority of us want to live in.
Donna McLean is originally from Ayrshire and is a mum of twins, writer and activist
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