Sturgeon’s toxic politics can’t be allowed to contaminate the rest of the UK

Back in 2014 in the run-up to the referendum on Scottish independence, I was astonished at the level of furious misery among my friends. They were up in the night aching with anxiety over the possible breakup of the Union, genuinely upset at the prospect of an England that didn’t work in tandem with its northern neighbour.

It wasn’t to be the last time Scotland, under the SNP, would make Brits cry. Or, more accurately, cry out in pain and worry. Just take a look at Nicola Sturgeon’s Bill on gender self-ID. In direct conflict with the Equality Act, which protects the sex-based rights of women, Sturgeon’s brainchild allows anyone who “lives” as the opposite sex for just six months to be able to self-ID as that sex, get a certificate from the Scottish government, and access the relevant sex-segregated spaces in Scotland. It is not clear what “living” as a sex entails. What is clear is that it’s a requirement that, in the absence of the medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria that Sturgeon has done away with, can never be proved one way or the other. It could very well be a case of showing receipts for the purchase of women’s knickers.

Rocket science is not required to see why this is an absolute horror of a law: one both rooted in plain falsehoods as well as a direct assault on women and girls, who now run a substantially increased risk of encountering sexually predatory men with certificates saying they are women flashing their bits, and much worse, in changing rooms, refuges, prisons and so on. Sturgeon has put a large group – women and girls – at risk to suit the perceived rights of a small minority.

It would be one thing if we in England could rest assured that what goes on in Scotland stays in Scotland. But as all too many people know too well – not least my friends sobbing over the prospect of Scottish independence – what goes on in Scotland may well not stay in Scotland.

Thus Sturgeon’s Bill is also a threat to the whole of the UK. A Policy Exchange report last week argued that if Royal Assent is not blocked, this law would force schools in England to accept boys holding Scottish gender certificates that say they are girls, since the self-ID law applies to anyone over 16.

Nicola Sturgeon’s dearest wish, her animating force, seems to be to bring the whole of the UK down with her as she pushes her extreme views on gender, the environment and Leftist nationalism. That her Scotland is posing increasingly nasty – relentless – risks to Britain as a whole is perhaps no surprise. This is a woman who has stated: “Thatcher was the motivation for my entire political career. I hated everything she stood for.”

Margaret Thatcher stood for, among other things, modernising Britain, fighting our enemies abroad, bringing crime rates down, European economic partnership, wealth creation, a booming economy, dynamism, free school places to gifted students, and giving millions of council house tenants the chance to get on the housing ladder. Worrying things for a UK leader to “hate”.

Even if the Scots tolerate – indeed vote for – the SNP’s wrecking-ball politics, we in the rest of the island should worry about being contaminated by them. For Scottish politics is toxic: one bad and dangerous idea after another.

On global affairs, Sturgeon, a former CND campaigner, is downright dangerous: she wants Trident, anchored in Scottish waters, gone. On the environment she is relentless: as part of her green, anti-capitalist anti-Thatcherite crusade she is intent on destroying the North Sea oil and gas industry. Not only is this economically ruinous, but it comes at a time when UK reserves have never been as important as they are now, when we need to break away from dependency on Russian imports. As well as making our existential risk greater, in light of Putin’s aggression and, possibly in the not too distant future, Chinese warmongering too, Sturgeon’s plan to speed up the end of the North Sea oil and gas industry means vast wastage, with millions of barrels left in the ground and thousands of people left without jobs.

But, according to a draft energy strategy, dredging for North Sea oil and gas is “not compatible with climate ambitions”. The SNP has chosen to overlook the fact that a rather considerable 79 per cent of Scottish energy comes from oil and gas; scrapping its dependence on fossil fuels is not feasible in the short, or even medium, term. No matter. Scotland, Ms Sturgeon proclaims, will simply make the switch to renewable energy sources and those fresh out of work will experience a “just transition” to the newly green industry. It won’t shock anyone to discover that research by the SNP itself found that most oil and gas workers had never heard of a “just transition”, a term of the purest dystopian mumbo jumbo.

The UK Government in Westminster has the chance, with the disastrous gender Bill, to show it will not allow the First Minister of Scotland, bent on destruction, to achieve it. If Scotland’s toxicity isn’t contained, we will all soon be paying an unaffordable price for one woman’s ideological obsessions.