Sturgeon: Johnson should resign, says she nearly resigned
In an interview with Sky Sturgeon says that she had considered quitting her job last year whilst she was being investigated for breaching the ministerial code. She said that the position of First minister like that of Prime Minister was a privilege not something to be taken for granted and where you are found to have broken the standards required of the job, you have to be willing to step aside.
My own personal experience this time last year – I was being accused in a completely different context, of having breached the ministerial code. I should say I was found by an independent adviser, and in an independent report, not to have breached the ministerial code. But when that was ongoing, I had within myself to ask myself some serious questions and I had came to the conclusion in my mind, that had I been deemed to have breached the ministerial code – I didn’t think I had – but if an independent person had said I had, then in the interest of the office I hold and in the interest of the country, I at that point would have resigned.I’m sure it would have been really difficult and I’m glad that didn’t come to pass. But these responsibilities are heavy responsibilities, and they require all of us in these offices to contemplate things that perhaps others might think is difficult to imagine.
She also says Boris Johnson should resign.
I think if Boris Johnson has decency and integrity, however difficult it may be, he will reach the conclusion that the time is right for him to step aside.
‘I feel a responsibility to talk about menopause’
In an interview with The Shift podcast, Sturgeon says she is ambivalent about discussing the menopause in public:
We talk about the menopause much more, and I’m very conscious of being a woman with a profile and a platform, a fair degree of influence, so I feel a responsibility – given that I’m at that age – to talk about it myself. And yet even talking about it like this, I am so far out of my comfort zone, in terms of the intensely personal nature of it. That tells me no matter how far we’ve come in this discussion, we still have a long way to go that somebody like me still feels kind of uncomfortable with it. ven though there is more information available than there has ever been before, there’s still a massive amount of guesswork about it. We’re still all feeling our way through it.
Asked how she might deal with a hot flush during a work meeting:
I would like to think I would be open about it. If you look around the world, there’s not been that many women leaders … I guess Angela Merkel must have gone through when she was in office, Hillary Clinton … so if you’ve got that platform, then I would like to think I would use that positively, but I’m also a human. So I’ve got windows open in the depth of winter, my poor husband is shivering. I’ve thought to myself: what if that happens when I’m on my feet in parliament in the middle of first minister’s questions? What would I do? That could happen any time. I’m not sure I will know the answer to that question until it happens. Maybe male opposition leaders should be thinking about what I will do, as well
She says that she has already had a conversation with her doctor about taking hormone replacement therapy.
‘I often think the world would be a much better place if it were ruled by women’
Sturgeon, speaking on The Shift podcast, says the world would be a “better place” if it were ruled by women and that females are still forced to work “twice as hard” as men to be taken “even half as seriously”.
I went through periods in life – and still go through periods in life now – where that sense of [ambition] is challenged and I doubt it more. I have spoken to a lot of women who feel this, friends and other women who would articulate exactly the same thing here…You really have to work so much harder to prove yourself so much more, to be taken probably half as seriously – particularly in the profession I’m in – as your average man. It can be tiresome are wearisome that we still have to do that but I’ve come to the conclusion in my life that it’s actually quite a good thing. Because you end up being better [than the men], because you work a lot harder and you have to really go so much further to prove yourself and be taken seriously. I have to be careful that doesn’t sound like an argument for women always having to struggle more to be taken seriously, because it shouldn’t be like that…But when you see women, and I’m not talking about myself here I’m talking about other women in senior positions: by and large, they’re better than their equivalent man and, more often than not, they’ve had to push themselves a lot harder to get to where they are. I often think the world would be a much better place if it were ruled by women.
Scotland Tonight: How do we learn to live with Covid?
Sturgeon is interviewed on Scotland Tonight, where she suggests the Scottish Government was planning for a long-term shift away from extensive curbs.
Sometimes when you hear people talk about learning to live with Covid, what seems to be suggested is that one morning we’ll wake up and not have to worry about it anymore, and not have to do anything to try to contain and control it. That’s not what I mean when I say ‘learning to live with it’. Instead, we will have to ask ourselves what adaptations to pre-pandemic life – face coverings, for example – might be required in the longer-term to enable us to live with it with far fewer protective measures.
I would say that, but for the protective measures we introduced before Christmas and but for the very responsible behaviour of the public, I think we would be in an even more challenging situation right now…Some of our projections pre-Christmas have not quite come to pass because we’ve managed to mitigate to some extent what the Omicron wave would otherwise have presented for us.
“How do we learn to live with covid? That’s [a question] the Scottish Government is thinking very carefully about”
In the First Minister’s first interview of the year, she talks about the current covid restrictions.
Watch the full interview at 10.40pm on #scotnight pic.twitter.com/80jIPDum1G
— ScotlandTonight (@ScotlandTonight) January 10, 2022
Leitch doubts effectiveness of Sturgeon lockdown
Leitch confirms that Sturgeon’s stringent lockdown measures, which have financially affected Scottish football clubs and nightclubs, have made no difference to the spread of Covid. Scottish football is losing £2 million per week in lost revenue whilst Scotland maintains a similar level of infection to England.
If you want to do the comparison, Northern Ireland’s number is much higher than ours. Wales is higher. England and Scotland is very similar. We were lower than them, now they’re catching up a little bit.
Despite this, he maintains it is correct to continue in a similar manner on the basis that the weekly figures are just a snapshot and that in the longer term, Scotland will begin to see the benefits.
Should we still be protecting the public from these case rates if they are just going to go anyway? I think ‘yes’ is the answer to that. I think the protections reduce the size of the wave and potentially also elongate the wave to allow more people to get vaccinated and spread the hospitalisations and intensive care cases out over a longer period.