Education Secretary said her former boss was talking ‘nonsense’ as she defended John Swinney’s campaign
by Democrat reporter
Mairi McAllan has turned on Nicola Sturgeon and described the retired First Minister’s comments on the radio about the SNP’s election campaign as “nonsense”.
The Education Secretary is seen to represent the Sturgeonite wing of the party and worked as a special advisor to the former first minister before entering parliament.
While the SNP won May’s election, the party fell well short of its stated aim of a majority and lost hundreds of thousands of votes compared with 2021.
It has left John Swinney, Sturgeon’s former deputy, facing the task of navigating a minority administration through the next Holyrood term.
“It was a historic election result for the SNP, the largest ever gap, if I remember correctly, between us and those who came into second place, so I was really proud to stand in that election alongside John Swinney on a positive future for our country, on always standing up for Scotland.”
Sturgeon wrote that the SNP “rightly put Scottish independence centrally as an objective, but didn’t always bring alive the opportunities it offers for people in a tangible sense”.
Ms Sturgeon said there was a “lack of vision or big-picture thinking” from the SNP in the recent campaign.
While the Scottish Greens create an anti-UK majority at Holyrood, their failure to commit to a referendum in their manifesto means there is no pro-referendum majority. In addition, the vast majority of voters backed pro-UK parties, with the Greens taking advantage of the electoral system to win 15 MSPs and the SNP benefiting from a five-way split in the Unionist vote.
The SNP has been consistently rebuffed in its request to the UK Government for a referendum, with sections of the independence movement growing increasingly frustrated.