BMScotland: Looks Like the SNP are Wanting a Showdown with the Westminster Government

Looks Like the SNP are Wanting a Showdown with the Westminster Government

Good Start to 2023 Nicola Sturgeon!

**** BM Scotland held back on this article until we saw how the Conservative government would react to the new SNP led legislation.

The Gender Reform bill for Scotland is providing a useful mechanism for the SNP to challenge the Westminster government and push Scottish Independence into the forefront (again).

Predictably First Minister Sturgeon is angrily denouncing the Westminster government's blocking of the Gender Reform bill, but BM Scotland suspects that privately the SNP are delighted because it provides a political confrontation where Scottish Independence can be used as an excuse for challenging Whitehall. This of course ignores that fact that the right of the British government to over rule Holyrood based legislation was written into the original devolution rules that Holyrood accepted in the first place.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was manipulated into a no-win situation by the Scottish government because if Westminster let Holyrood push the Gender Reform bill into law, then there would be serious legal outcomes for the rest of the UK. But if Sunak blocked the Holyrood approved bill, , as they have now done, it puts Westminster on a collision course with the Scottish government and tactically that suits the SNP. No doubt that the Scottish Greens are hoping to ride in on the SNP's coat-tails too.

Meanwhile there are nurses and ambulance strikes in NHS Scotland, strikes in Scotland's schools as teachers stage strikes and walkouts over pay. But the SNP want to focus on Westminster blocking the 'democratic will of the Scottish people'.

Get ready for weeks of political grandstanding by Sturgeon and the SNP.

Although the Scottish Greens, the Scottish Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats at Holyrood support the Gender Reform bill, it is the SNP pushing the agenda - but a good percentage of ordinary Scots do not want this gender based 'woke' legislation to become law.