Scotland

The Supreme Court judgment striking down a couple of Acts of the Scottish parliament has been greeted with typical outrage from the SNP. Nicola Sturgeon has been busy fulminating that she is now ‘unable to fully protect children’s rights’. But the First Minister shouldn’t be surprised by this legal defeat: there was little chance of it going any other way. In spite of Sturgeon’s fury, the two Acts in question were not actually very significant. The more high-profile one sought with much fanfare to incorporate into Scots law a treaty little-known to most of us outside the progressive establishment, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.  The other was aimed at incorporating

Gavin Barwell has made a good point, albeit inadvertently. Theresa May’s former chief of staff has a book out, imaginatively titled Chief of Staff, and in it he touches upon the question of Brexit and Scottish independence. Noting that Boris Johnson is unpopular north of the border, the now Baron Barwell of Croydon says: ‘The UK government is on strong ground arguing that it is not the right time for a second independence referendum — polls show Scottish voters want the immediate focus to be on recovery from the pandemic — but the democratic mandate for the question to be asked again at some point is clear.’ No. It. Is.

It can be a difficult task picking out the most incompetent minister in the Scottish government. There’s Sturgeon’s deputy John Swinney, the man who faced two votes of confidence in seven months. There’s Shona Robison, resurrected in May having been forced to resign in 2018 amid near-universal criticism of her management of the health brief. And of course there’s Transport minister Michael Matheson, a man with no discernible achievements to his name, now knee-deep in the ferries scandal. But of all the SNP’s top talent surely no man has blundered more regularly than Humza Yousaf. In the decade since his election to Holyrood he has established himself as the Forrest Gump

Certain questions are eternal and many of them are correspondingly dreary too. ‘How should Labour deal with the SNP?’ and ‘What can Labour offer the nationalists?’ are two of them. Since Labour requires a swing of heroic – or 1997 – proportions to win even a bare majority at the next election, you can understand why these questions will not disappear. Equally, if Labour cannot win a majority, it must dance with the parliament likely to be returned, not the parliament of its dreams. There is a problem here. What appears to make abundant sense viewed from London makes little sense viewed from Scotland. And vice versa. Any arrangement with

Susan Aitken, the worst thing to hit Glasgow since the Luftwaffe, might well be Britain’s most hapless council leader. The SNP leader of Glasgow City Council was challenged again on the city’s cleaning crisis during a BBC interview last night. Shown footage of graffiti at the Scottish Event Campus, soon to host the COP26 conference, Aitken blamed ‘a wee ned with a spray can’. It is not Aitken’s first gaffe over a city-wide waste and dumping epidemic. In a knuckle-gnawingly awkward TV grilling earlier this month, she insisted Glasgow’s streets weren’t ‘filthy’ and just needed ‘a spruce up’. Last month, Sir Keir Starmer visited and met with campaigners from the

On Saturday it was the seventh anniversary of the Scottish vote on independence – how time flies. That contest saw a decisive ten point majority against separation; not that you’d know it from the way Nicola Sturgeon conducts her affairs. The SNP First Minister succeeded Alex Salmond in the post just weeks after the plebiscite and has spent most of her time in office talking tough and delivering little on making Scexit a reality.   In many ways it’s a good thing the vote did not go the SNP’s way. There’s the whole 300 years of history shtick of course but as the calculations of the 2013 White Paper on independence make

It’s been a tough pandemic for all of us here in Britain. Lockdowns, supply shortages, over-zealous policemen and Matt Hancock’s gurning face – there’s been a shortage of joy these past 18 months. But now Mr S is delighted to discover there is light at the end of the tunnel: a forthcoming book bonanza by Covid experts – and Devi Sridhar – who have all somehow found time to pen books on the global crisis despite being proven wrong again and again. Below is Steerpike’s guide to all the titles which won’t be flying off the bookshelves in the forthcoming months…. First, we have the aforementioned Sridhar, who finally has a release

Scottish civil servants are to start work on a ‘detailed prospectus’ for independence so the Scottish government can hold another referendum ‘when the Covid crisis has passed’, Nicola Sturgeon announced earlier this month. The irony of this – coming just days before the Office for National Statistics reported that the percentage of Scots testing positive in a single week for Covid-19 equated to around one in 45 people – was lost on the First Minister. These things happen when you’re busy fighting to free your people from the tyranny of liberal democracy and free society in one of the richest places on earth. Deputy First Minister John Swinney subsequently went further when he promised a

American journalist Michael Kinsley once observed that in Washington DC a ‘gaffe’ should be understood as a moment in which a politician or public official inadvertently blurts out a truth it would have been better, and certainly wiser, to leave unsaid. By that standard Humza Yousaf, currently serving as health secretary in the Scottish government, is a mighty friend to journalists. Pondering the meaning and significance of what has become known as the Alex Salmond affair, Yousaf told the comedian Matt Forde that the conflict between Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon was ‘really upsetting because it could have done our cause a hell of a lot of damage – it still

‘Now, as I’ve hopefully made clear throughout all of my remarks, the North Sea will continue to produce oil for decades to come. It still contains up to 20 billion barrels of recoverable reserves. Our primary aim – and I want to underline and emphasis this – our primary aim is to maximise economic recovery of those reserves.’ The words are from a speech made in June 2017, a few months after the Paris Agreement that aimed to limit climate change came into effect. A speech by a pro-oil Conservative, or perhaps the head of an industry group working on behalf of the oil sector? No. They are, in fact,

For much of its 58-year long existence, the scientists who sat on the government’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) lived a life of happy obscurity. But now the poor men and women who make up its membership have been thrust into the limelight amid furious Whitehall rows over whether 12 to 15 year-olds should be given the Covid vaccine.  Members of Boris Johnson’s government are said to disagree with the JCVI’s rulings but have had their hands tied by the committee’s status as a statutory basis for giving advice in England and Wales – though intriguingly not Northern Ireland or Scotland. Judging by Nicola Sturgeon’s recent comments however, you would be forgiven for not