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NICOLA STURGEON SAID Boris Johnson has been the only Prime Minister she has worked with who was “a disgrace to the office”.
Speaking at a panel event at the Edinburgh Fringe on Saturday afternoon, hosted by broadcaster Ayesha Hazarika, Sturgeon called the Prime Minister a “disgrace”.
Sturgeon said the idea that parties were taking place during the Covid-19 pandemic “blew her mind.”
“The idea that this could have happened while the rest of country was going through the horrors of it really blows my mind,” she told audience members.
“Parties themselves are bad enough, but it was the lying, frankly, and the constant attempt to shift the goalposts and the narrative.
“He was a disgrace, let’s be honest.”
Four prime ministers have been in Downing Street since Sturgeon took office in 2014 and she joked to audience members she never thought she would “look back fondly” on Theresa May as prime minister.
“At the beginning of Covid, I thought, it would be far better to have Theresa May – she always knew her stuff. She knew her brief,” Sturgeon said.
She joked that May was a “better dancer than I am”.
The First Minister called for more diversity in politics and praised Scottish Labour for having diverse leaders.
She added: “Here’s a sentence you’ll never hear me utter before: to be fair to Labour in Scotland, they’ve already had a woman leader and they’ve currently got a Muslim leader so UK Labour really has to get its act together on diversity.”
When asked who she would prefer to see as prime minister, Sturgeon shrugged and laughed and said none of them will win an election in Scotland.
She said: “It’s not really about that. They will never win an election in Scotland. What do Margaret Thatcher, John Major, David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson all have in common? They have never won an election in Scotland.”
She branded the choices facing voters in England as “terrible” and accused Labour leader Keir Starmer of being “a pale imitation of the Tories”.
Sturgeon also addressed comments made by Tory leadership contender Liz Truss who said she should be “ignored”.
She said: “I am the democratically elected First Minister and you can only be in that position if a significant amount of people vote for you.
“When she said I should be ignored, what a lot of people in Scotland hear is the democratic votes and choices of people in Scotland should be ignored.
“I don’t think that’s appropriate.
“People in Scotland are getting increasingly tired of being ignored by Tory prime ministers.”
Responding to Truss’s remarks she was an attention seeker, Sturgeon told audience members you had to be a bit of an attention seeker as a politician to get your policies noticed.
Sturgeon also hit out at former leader of the Scottish Conservatives Ruth Davidson for entering the House of Lords.
She said: “Ruth decided to retire from politics but then it transpired she wasn’t really intending to retire from politics, she just wanted to continue without scrutiny and the tedious bit of having to put yourself forward for election.
“So all of the good bits of politics without the tough bit of getting elected. I don’t think that’s a particularly good thing to do.”
Sturgeon took questions from some audience members who asked her if it was possible to have a “good-natured debate” about independence.
“Of course it’s possible to have a good natured, civilised debate about independence but that requires all of us involved in that,” she said.
“The only appropriate way to decide matters we disagree on is through democracy.”
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This opinion piece is a little disingenuous in leading with “China is going carbon neutral” which is an alleged aspiration for 2060, rather than the present reality, that it is that now and up until 2030 they are intending to reach peak emmisions, in other words pump ever more emmisions into the atmosphere, up to the maximum they can produce.
It’s a little like an alcoholic claiming to be going sober, while in reality intending to not only continue drinking, but to increase their intake of alcohol to as much as they can possibly drink for the next twenty years…..
I think the US has way more than just carbon neutral targets to think of when it comes to China. That seems like the smallest issue when compared to the human rights issues, aggressive territorial expansion and lest we forget the initial Covid cover up that made the world as bleak as it is today.
But you know what? Great. If the worlds biggest polluter thinks it can get a handle of things in 40 years, then that’s one less thing the world needs to be concerned about. They disproportionately pollute the world by land (the dams to influence countries downstream), sea (200 million cubic tonnes of waste was dumped from them into the water in 2018) and air (28% of global emissions) and this needs to stop.
@Paul Cunningham: let’s not forget that they produce all that waste and CO2 making things we buy. We have outsourced manufacturing pollution to China so we can pretend to be cleaner.
@Ivan Connolly: your right added to that is greed by the west of the wealthy % 70 years ago Ireland had a few manufacturers now considerably less the same with Europe
@Paul Cunningham: Until China became the power it is now , the U.S. as the major industrialised nation on earth had no problem in being the worst polluter in the world. As for territorial expansion think you would want to look at the U.S. interference in South America and the Middle East. The fact that China is near matching the industrial might of the U.S. has America rattled..The fact the U.S. backed the wrong horse and lost China still rankles them.
@Donal Desmond: we get it dude you hate America ffs the funny thing is your probably American and if you are I can gurrentee 100% that you are democrat
So is the issue that the USA doesn’t offer any “climate ambitions”? Because their actual climate results are quite impressive. In the last 15 yrs they’ve seen the largest drop in emissions of any nation on earth, just slightly below the reduction seen for the whole EU. Meanwhile China and India have seen unprecedented rise in theirs. While the USA dismantles coal plants, these other nations build them. It’s all fine for China to claim it will reach some imaginary target in 40 yrs (including 10 more yrs of record breaking growth) but I have more confidence in nations that show results. Trump may be a dud with regards to climate change but his nation isn’t. And fortunately, unlike Xi, Trump isn’t a dictator and therefore states that don’t agree with his laissez faire approach to the environment are free to pursue a different path. And some of those states are enormous. If we broke the USA into 50 countries then California, if it was a country, would still be the 4th largest economy in the world, just behind Germany. And like Germany, California is a global leader in green policies and changes. I get that some people prefer it when nations make popular climate promises (without any actual plan or political will to see through to fruition) but I prefer results and I think many within the USA has done this.
“introduction of a robust state security law in Hong Kong.”
The introduction of a police state you mean.
Quite a few euphemisms used in this article.
He mentions the economic miracle from 1978 but no mention of the millions murdered before 1978 during the ‘Great Leap Forward’.
It’s sad that so many on the left, due to their hatred for Trump, are now extolling the ‘virtues’ of the Chinese police state and it’s one party dictatorship.
China is the worst human rights abuser and the biggest polluter on earth bar none.
@Will: You realize the miracle or 1978 involved the wet outsourcing all of its manufacturing emissions to China.
How about china go eating bats neutral first and we’ll go from there…
@Darren Byrne: i d i o t
China has nearly 250 gigawatts (GW) of coal-fired power now under development, more than the entire coal power capacity of the United States
@Owen: When you’re the workshop of the world that tends to happen. 18,000 kms of high speed rail built between 2008 and 2020
The Journal heard Joe Biden say it on last debate so must be true
Trump declaring to open back up the coal mines and let the good times role back to his numpty supporters.china has the resources and man power to completely dominate the electric vehicle market.something Europe Russia and America will struggle with
@snotser: go see your Doctor ASAP tell him you have Trump Derangement Syndrome TDS for short.. best of luck in your recovery
Anyone bashing American while defending China have to be paid to do so.
Per head of population the US is probably still the worlds largest polluter. If the Chinese do go renewable they will be such a big player that they will dictate the terms of trade on use of fossil fuels by other nations. We will all be forced to end fossil fuel use quickly. The chinese will be more secure as they will no longer depend on foreign energy supply imports (oil.) This is why Ireland should go for green energy now – its cheaper, its produced locally, doesn’t require taxpayer subsidies of about 300 million euros a year to oil companies and its use will, along with similar policies worldwide, give our children a fighting chance of handing on a habitable planet to our grandchildren.
Per head of population the US is still the worlds largest polluter. If the Chinese do go renewable they will be such a big player that they will dictate the terms of trade on use of fossil fuels by other nations. We will all be forced to end fossil fuel use quickly. The chinese will be more secure as they will no longer depend on foreign energy supply imports (oil.) This is why Ireland should go for green energy now – its cheaper, its produced locally, doesn’t require taxpayer subsidies of 300 million euros a year to foreign oil companies and its use will, along with similar policies worldwide, give our children a fighting chance of handing on a habitable planet to our grandchildren and avoid human extinction.
Per head of population the US is probably still the worlds largest polluter. If the Chinese do go renewable they will be such a big player that they will dictate the terms of trade on use of fossil fuels by other nations. We will all be forced to end fossil fuel use quickly. The chinese will be more secure as they will no longer depend on foreign energy supply imports (oil.) This is why Ireland should go for green energy now – its cheaper, its produced locally, doesn’t require taxpayer subsidies of 300 million euros a year to foreign oil companies and its use will, along with similar policies worldwide, give our children a fighting chance of handing on a habitable planet to our grandchildren and avoid human extinction.
But there’s no votes in carbon neutral. In America is a moot point.
One true utterance from Trump has been that wind and solar power are just scams. Every KW they generate has to be backed up by something else. Follow the money. Who are the big, big pushers of renewables.? Answer, the big fossil fuel corporates. They know they will have us all over the metaphorical oil barrel, for filling in the big gaps.
There is only one power source that has any chance of saving us from run away climate catastrophe and that is a mass move into Gen 4 nuclear. www. bene.ie
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