Joyce McMillan: It would be brave to bet against Sturgeon's gamble

Nicola Sturgeon has taken a big gamble, but a calculated one, and if the wheel spins in her favour shell be a winner. Picture: Michael Gillen

We live in an age of hurricanes, and even of earthquakes; so perhaps we should not be surprised that the series of seismic shifts that have transformed Scotland’s political landscape in recent years still seems far from complete. The radical transformation of the Scottish Natonal Party’s fortunes over the last ten years - through the Scottish Parliament elections of 2007 and 2011, the historic independence referendum campaign, the emergence of Nicola Sturgeon as leader, and the party’s astonishing landslide victory in the UK general election of 2015 - is a story of deft positioning by the SNP combined with colossal failure on the part of Scotland’s once-dominant Labour Party, and a crash in the fortunes of the Liberal Democrats, after they went into coalition with the Conservatives at Westminster. And it was really only the arrival of Jeremy Corbyn as UK Labour leader, just two years ago this month, that began to threaten the SNP’s new dominant position on the Scottish centre-left, as some voters began to move back towards the Labour fold.

So now, just a hectic three years into her leadership of the SNP, Nicola Sturgeon appears in the Scottish Parliament to announce her latest programme for government - one substantial and ambitious enough to carry the SNP through to the next Scottish election in May 2021. To say that Tuesday’s speech was a bold one is perhaps an understatement. In a UK political landscape currently dominated by a British government which can barely agree its approach to next week’s Brexit negotiations, never mind articulate a vision for the next 15 years, the First Minister’s statement was greeted with something like wonder by some south of the Border, as she dealt like a rational adult with the serious issues facing the nation, from climate change, to structural poverty of the most profound and persistent kind.

This is not to say, of course, that everyone will agree with the FM’s approach; there will be yowling and howling from predictable quarters, particularly over any mention of possible tax rises. Yet at least Tuesday’s statement should at least put an end, for a while, to the always ridiculous allegation that Nicola Sturgeon is a politician obsessed with independence, who does not get on with the day job. Anyone who spends even five minutes watching the First Minister answering questions on policy knows that she has a grasp of detail - on health, education, the economy, and a whole range of other matters - that no UK politician of her generation can rival. And her speech on Tuesday was a tribute - perhaps, given the volatile state of things, the last and best we will hear - to her belief that if Scotland is ever to vote to become independent, it should do so not on a tide of nationalistic emotion of the kind currently shipwrecking Westminster politics, but on a rational hope that an independent Scotland offers a better and more sustainable future than the continuing UK.

Politics is not a game of fair play and just rewards, though; and the fact is that the programme for government announced on Tuesday also entails a very high level of political risk. Essentially, the First Minister is responding to the rise of Corbynism, and the recent revival of the Scottish Tories under Ruth Davidson, by tacking to the green centre-left, and clearly embracing a Nordic model for Scotland’s future; one where higher taxes fund a successful society with world-leading standards of protection for workers’ rights, public services and the environment.

In doing so, she is almost certainly waving a last goodbye to the old “tartan Tory” SNP heartlands in Perthshire and the north-east; and she is embracing a type of social-democratic politics which has no guaranteed immediate appeal to the wavering SNP-Labour swing voters of the Central Belt. She is now, in other words, leading a party made vulnerable by the lack of any geographical heartland; and if she is unlucky, could find herself in the centre-left of the political road, being run over both by the revitalised forces of anti-tax Scottish Toryism, and by the Corbyn left, energised by the off-chance of a left-wing government at Westminster.

There is, however - and fortunately for the SNP - very little limit to the capacity of Scotland’s two other main parties to damage their own electoral prospects. In the first place, the chaos of the Brexit process, and the ugly attitudes unleashed by it, offers a spectacle that can only inflict ever more damage on the idea of the UK as a nation with an attractive long-term future; and so long as Ruth Davidson’s Scottish Tories remain formally linked to the party in charge of the Brexit mess, they run the risk of a sudden avalanche of guilt by association, and of finding themselves once again on the margins of Scottish politics.

And then there is Scottish Labour, the party that was last week presented, by its outgoing leader Kezia Dugdale, with the opportunity to align itself with the Corbyn surge, and to exploit the full potential of this fascinating moment in Labour politics. Instead, though - at least until the grassroots party members have their say - it seems happy to endorse as front-runner Anas Sarwar, another Blairite politician, and one so profoundly unimpressive, on all fronts, that Nicola Sturgeon must be delighted at the prospect of facing him at Holyrood.

This is, in other words, a dangerous corner for the First Minister and her government, ten years after the SNP first took office; and the balance of electoral likelihood still suggests that the Scottish people will want to mete out the traditional punishment to the SNP some time in the next half-decade, and to let Ruth Davidson, or some Lab-Con Unionist coalition, have their Holyrood day. Yet just sometimes, political fortune does favour the brave, and the well-prepared. And as Britain’s Brexit tragedy unfolds on the Westminster and international stage, it would be a bold political gambler that would place heavy bets, even now, against Nicola Sturgeon’s chances of being the SNP politician who finally - thanks to the efforts of others, as much as of herself - leads her country out of the UK, and on to an entirely different future.