Many moons ago, I wrote that Jacinda Ardern, Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron were the Hermione, Harry and Ron of globalism. Why Is It, When Something Happens, It Is Always You Three? I pondered whom would be the first of the three to be expelled, as it were. Well, we know the answer to that one, of course.
So, who’s next? It was not, in fact, any other of the “Golden Trio”, but another Hogwarts student with an analog in contemporary left-wing politics — Pansy Parkinson.
A crony of school villain Draco Malfoy, Pansy Parkinson is described as sadistic, mean-spirited, and petty, as well as “pug-faced”. A description eerily similar to Theodore Dalrymple’s description of another left-wing politician as having a face with “all the charm and good humor of reinforced concrete”.
Who was he talking about, and what does she have to do with Jacinda Ardern’s sudden downfall?
When New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern resigned last month saying she had “nothing left in the tank”, Nicola Sturgeon moved quickly to emphasise that she had “plenty in the tank” and would lead Scotland to independence. Less than a month later, both leaders have gone.
And in both lands, there was much rejoicing.
But, if Sturgeon had, as she claimed, “plenty in the tank”, why has she so suddenly resigned?
The legacy media would have us believe that it is all due to “online misogyny” — a pathetic, threadbare excuse, even less convincing than in Ardern’s case.
In reality, once the fog of Covid had cleared, Sturgeon, like Ardern, was exposed for what she is: a radical socialist with an extremist agenda that sent voters away in droves.
Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s wacky transgender wokery was not the only reason for her abrupt political downfall after almost nine years in power. There were others, too, that The Times concluded on Thursday contributed to her ill-starred story of “hubris, misjudgment and failure, from whose inevitable ending she could not escape”. But it was her mindless preoccupation with faddish radicalism that was the last straw and delivered a lesson that politicians across the world, including in Australia, would do well to heed.
That would include not just Chippy, but Luxon, and the rest of National, as well. As the Victorian election showed, no matter how on the nose a radical socialist government is, if the opposition forgets that they’re supposed to be conservative instead of chasing, yipping and barking, after the green-left pack, they’re giving voters not a single reason to have confidence in them. Offering up a politically clueless, deeply unappealing leadership alternative only compounds the issue.
As far as many voters are concerned, better the clowns you know.
As for Sturgeon, her radicalism went beyond the sort of misogynist poovery that has seen male rapists set loose in women’s prison, simply by virtue of putting on a dress and some lippy and calling themselves “Loretta”.
Ms Sturgeon was on the nose politically after losing a Supreme Court battle she had banked on to force through a fresh referendum on Scotland’s independence in defiance of the UK government at Westminster. Polls showed support for independence was in decline. So was backing for her and her Scottish National Party.
But it was the obsession with far-left social engineering that really hashed voters’ haggises.
But it was Ms Sturgeon who did herself in when she led her government into embarking on a disastrous set of reforms to transgender legislation that divided her party, alienated much of the Scottish electorate, and left her in the grotesque position of defending a rapist’s claim to womanhood and with it a place in a women’s prison. In what was a dopey bid to elevate perceptions of herself as a progressive, populist politician whose attributes would prove irresistible to the youth vote, she produced the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill that made it easier for transgender people to legally identify themselves – without so much as a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria – as being of a different gender. That meant people of 16 and older could change their gender simply by proclaiming they had done so. Sensibly, the UK government in London acted swiftly to annul Ms Sturgeon’s bill.
The Australian
The same lesson applies to everything from climate cultism to co-governance.
Unless National give the left enough rope to hang themselves, while quietly providing a clear and sensible alternative, all they’ll be doing is making a noose for their own necks.