When we are surrounded by a lot of bad news, we tend to forget the good news. A piece at Spiked.com, reminds us that over the last few years a number of intensely disliked political tyrants have resigned before their time was up. Scotland's SNP's Humza Yousaf, who gave Scotland a ridiculous hate crime law, has recently resigned. He had an approval rating of - 47, which is so bad, I don't know how this is possible; doesn't his mum like him? Just before him was the resignation of Leo Varadkar, Irish Taoiseach. And before him that New Zealand Labour World Economic Forum socialist feminist, who name escapes my fading memory, but whose face will haunt even my nightmares forever.
True, these resignations are good things, but unfortunately the players are simply replaced and there are plenty more where they come from. We need to replace them by our own people, obviously enough.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/05/03/the-toppling-of-the-woke-authoritarians/
"If you – like me – loathe authoritarian, faux-progressive scolds, it's actually been a good few years. I know it might not seem like it, with the 'Queers for Palestine' contingent currently running riot on American university campuses, but hear me out. Across the Anglosphere, one politician after another, beloved by the media but increasingly disliked by the public, have exited the stage, often jumping before they were pushed.
This week, we bid farewell to the SNP's Humza Yousaf, whose year-and-a-bit-long premiership in Scotland produced more scandals and disparaging nicknames – Humza Useless, Humza the Hapless, etc – than it did any positive legacy. In the end, he proved himself to be as illiberal as he was inept. His flagship policy, the Orwellian, broad-sweeping Hate Crime Act, alarmed voters and sparked a tsunami of spurious complaints, many of them about Yousaf himself. We can only hope it will now collapse under the weight of its own absurdity. (One thing's for sure, voters are furious about it: only one in five Scots wants the Hate Crime Act to stay.)
Then, Humza managed to accidentally collapse his own government. He was apparently surprised to learn that his decision last week to suddenly terminate his party's coalition agreement with the Scottish Greens – following some internal friction over trans and environmental issues – left the Greens angry and unwilling to prop up his minority government. As his short reign ends, Yousaf has at least managed the incredible feat of being even more unpopular than the leaders of the widely disliked Tories and the crackpot Greens, with an approval rating of -47. Yousaf – who was crowned first minister by SNP members and never gained a mandate from the people – was in negative numbers for all of this tenure.
Only in March, democrats were also toasting the demise of another despised, virtue-signalling leader who owed his position to elite politicking rather than democracy. Namely, Leo Varadkar. He became Irish taoiseach in 2017, after Fine Gael made him party leader. Even then, he had to rely on his support within the parliamentary party – in Fine Gael's leadership-election process, the politicians are given much more weight than the members – given the membership voted two-to-one for his opponent. When Varadkar led his party to the polls in 2020, Fine Gael actually lost seats. Only by getting into bed with Fianna Fáil, his party's supposed bitter rival, was Varadkar able to cling on to power.
Like Yousaf, Varadkar was a visionless leader who came to see superficial 'social justice' as his route to a legacy. While nominally on the centre-right economically, he was credited by international media with 'Ireland's transformation into a secular progressive state'. He clearly warmed to this image of himself, even if the Irish people did not. 'We have made the country a more equal and more modern place', he said in his resignation speech (my emphasis), 'when it comes to the rights of children, the LGBT community, equality for women and their bodily autonomy'. This notion that Varadkar's Ireland – like Yousaf's Scotland – needed to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century, that voters and their values desperately needed a politically correct makeover, gave the semblance of substance to his otherwise hollow premiership.
Ireland's historic 2018 referendum, in which 66 per cent voted to overturn one of the Western world's strictest abortion bans, was indeed a seismic blow for freedom. But Varadkar can hardly take credit for the decades of grassroots campaigning that got it over the line. His fingerprints were, however, all over the 'family' and 'care' referendums earlier this year, which produced two historic, humiliating defeats. Varadkar utterly failed to convince the people that this campaign to change the wording of the Irish constitution – to update the meaning of 'family' and to remove references to women's role in the home – was anything other than an exercise in elite moral preening. He even insisted on holding the vote on International Women's Day, just to heighten the sense of moral blackmail, even though doing so meant radically shortening the time the pro-amendments campaign had to prepare. The 'family' and 'care' amendments were rejected by 67 and 74 per cent of voters respectively. Varadkar tried to limp on, noting all major parties had backed the amendments. But this ballot-box revolt left his authority in tatters. He resigned two weeks later.
When Varadkar wasn't talking down to voters, he was trying to censor them. Before he resigned, he had been toiling to pass Ireland's own insanely draconian hate-speech bill, aimed at expanding restrictions on 'incitement to hatred' and adding gender to the list of 'protected characteristics', opening the door to criminalising people for refusing to bow to the trans cult. To Scots, this may sound familiar. Indeed, it was as if Varadkar and Yousaf were competing to be the most censorious. Where Scotland's Hate Crime Act criminalises even private conversations in your own home (removing the so-called dwelling defence), Ireland's proposed legislation would criminalise mere 'possession' of offensive material, including memes. From your phone's camera roll to the family dinner table, no area of life is now safe, it seems, from the state censors. Having sailed through the Dáil in April 2023, the bill is now stuck in the upper house, after an almighty backlash from voters and civil libertarians. (Varadkar's successor, Simon Harris, says he intends to table amendments to assuage voters' concerns.)
Say what you will about Leo and Humza, at least they were occasionally – unintentionally – entertaining. Both were famously gaffe-prone. (Who could forget Yousaf's tumble from his knee scooter, or Varadkar's Monica Lewinsky joke in DC?) The same cannot be said for Nicola Sturgeon, the former Scottish first minister, Yousaf's mentor and the walking embodiment of the prickly puritanism and mad identitarianism of our age. She looked upon the masses as reactionary filth – she once smeared her opponents as 'transphobic… deeply misogynist, often homophobic, possibly some of them racist as well' – all while ushering in the most reactionary agenda Scotland has seen for decades. Her already hated 'gender self-ID' reforms collapsed in 2023, when the public realised they would mean putting rapists in women's prisons – which, by a grotesque quirk of fate, had become the 'progressive' position.