Scotland, the former premier Nicola Sturgeon arrested for the investigation into the funds to the independence party – time.news

2023-06-11 16:04:36

Of Louis Hippolytus

In April, her husband, Peter Sturgeon, former treasurer, was arrested, later released. The Scottish leader had surprisingly announced her resignation in February “for personal reasons”. The dream of secession from London has sunk

From our correspondent
LONDON — From altars to dust: Former Scottish Prime Minister Nicola Sturgeon has been arrested during a months-long investigation into the funding of her pro-independence party in power in Edinburgh. The turning point had been in the air for weeks, after in April her husband, party secretary, and her treasurer were arrested – and then released – for the same affair.

New light on resignation

The arrest casts a completely different light on the resignation last February of Nicola Sturgeon, who she had then tried to cover it up with presumed personal reasons: When the inquiry into party finances involved her husband, it had already become clear that she had stepped aside why he knew what was coming on the horizon. And now his arrest confirms everything. A loan of over 600 thousand pounds (approx 700 thousand euros) that would have been earmarked for a second independence referendum. But despite the fact that the consultation never took place, it emerged that less than £100,000 was left in the party’s coffers. When Sturgeon’s husband was arrested in April, she made headlines the confiscation of a luxury camper from over 100,000 pounds that was parked in the garden of the former prime minister’s mother-in-law and it is not known exactly how it was purchased.

Political failure

Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation in February had already been interpreted as a failure of his political line. You had led the independence movement into a dead end: after the Supreme Court’s refusal to authorize a new referendum on independence – after the one already lost in 2014 – you had run out of cartridges and your leadership had shown the rope. The straw that broke the camel’s back had been an attempt to introduce legislation that authorized sex reassignment on the basis of a simple self-declaration: a choice that had imploded in contact with reality, after an inveterate rapist who had declared himself a woman had been assigned to a women’s prison. The wave of opprobrium that followed had led to the premier stepping back: but now it is clear that there was much more behind it. And the loan scandal is the logical conclusion of a management of public affairs that had transformed the independence movement into a sort of party-statehandled in an opaque and personalistic manner.

The dream of independence has sunk

The push for Scotland’s secession from London, already in difficulty, is now thrown into complete disrepute: Nicola Sturgeon will go down in history as the woman who with her own hands scuttled the dream of Scottish independence.

June 11, 2023 (change June 11, 2023 | 17:27)

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