Sturgeon’s swipe at Scottish voters

There was a lot more rubbish than usual at the Edinburgh festivals this August. With refuse workers out on strike, the debris piled high in the Scottish capital and other cities, much to the dismay of visiting tourists. But one attendee who remains clearly undaunted is Nicola ‘friend of the stars’ Sturgeon, who last night returned to make her fifth appearance at Edinburgh’s festivals to interview pro-independence actor Brian Cox.

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And it wasn’t just the local bins overflowing with garbage, as Sturgeon and Cox shared in an orgy of congratulatory nationalist self-love. ‘I just don’t give a fuck any more,’ he declared. ‘I can’t wait to reach that stage,’ she replied. ‘Nicola, you’ll reach that stage,’ he retorted. ‘I get closer to it every day!’ she joked. Ho ho ho. ‘My country has to be free,’ roared Cox. ‘Anybody who comes here sees the difference between the north and the south.’ Well, quite: in London it’s the media stars who ask the questions and the politicians who answer them.

The revealing exchange though came when Cox bemoaned the ‘conditioning’ which meant Scotland doesn’t have the ‘confidence’ for Scexit. Sturgeon asked whether Cox, who has opted to live in America, ‘living outside of Scotland, seeing it from the outside, that allows you to see that more clearly than people living here can’; comments which sound, in the words of one commentator, like a hint of irritation from the First Minister about the people of Scotland not having the same view on the issue as a man living on the other side of the Atlantic.

Perhaps the reason why celebrity Scots like Cox, Sean Connery and Ewan McGregor embrace independence from abroad is that they don’t actually have to experience the reality of life in Nicola Sturgeon’s refuse-strewn, strike-addled country…