Scotland

It’s a day that ends in ‘y’, which means more chaos for the beleaguered SNP. Now it transpires that Scotland’s Crown Office has finally received Peter Murrell’s charge sheet – after he was charged with embezzlement from the SNP over a month ago. The husband of former SNP leader and first minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon was taken into police custody for the second time on 18 April as part of the police probe into SNP finances. Shortly after the police force announced that it had charged the former SNP chief, it emerged that Murrell had also resigned his party membership. His wife, Nicola Sturgeon, and the SNP’s former treasurer Colin Beattie were

There is a weary inevitability about Scotland’s First Minister, John Swinney, promising to ‘eradicate child poverty’ as his ‘single most important objective’. We’ve been here before. Both Humza Yousaf and Nicola Sturgeon promised to do exactly the same. Indeed, those of us with long memories recall the Scottish Labour minister, Wendy Alexander, vowing in 1999 at the dawn of devolution that ‘the Scottish parliament will abolish child poverty’. It hasn’t: exactly the same proportion of children, a quarter, are in poverty today as was the case 25 years ago. No amount of sophistry can obscure the reality that Scotland is treated more generously in public spending than much of the rest of the UK

Scottish government-backed quango Creative Scotland is back in the limelight over its porn project controversy. As Mr S wrote in March, the director of a hardcore pornographic performance, ‘Rein’, managed to secure £85,000 of taxpayers’ cash for her rather, um, explicit work. Now it can be revealed that, despite officials denying full knowledge of the show’s contents before this point, Creative Scotland was in fact aware of the show’s plans to include ‘non-simulated sex acts’ a year before signing off on the hefty sum. Just when you think events in Scotland can’t get any madder… Even the progressive SNP government is rather agog at the whole thing While quango bosses

As the edifice of gender identity ideology continues to crumble, along comes another example of an institution not only captured but utterly distorted by this regressive and harmful theory. Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC) has lost an employment tribunal case brought by a former staff member whose work life was made a living hell because she thought rape victims should be told whether the support worker assigned to them was male or female. Roz Adams was employed as a counselling support worker between 2021 and 2023, when she resigned after having been put through a gruelling disciplinary process over her belief in biological sex. In a scathing judgment issued today,

Twenty-five years have passed since the opening of the Scottish parliament and the issue of just how well devolution is working is a rather awkward one for the current SNP-led government. This week, both the Scottish Conservative and Scottish Labour parties have made entirely clear that reform is needed. Labour believes that Scottish mayors might be the answer; some Conservatives want a complete overhaul of the way laws are scrutinised. The question is: would either solution work? The fact that the SNP broke the Scottish parliament is hardly new. It became clear in 2014, during a meeting of Holyrood’s European and External Affairs Committee. An expert witness, law professor Adam

The SNP’s Dear Leader never manages to stay out of the spotlight for long. Nicola Sturgeon is back on the speech circuit, this time appearing at Edinburgh University to bestow her wisdom upon some unfortunate souls. In her time away from the Holyrood frontbenches — during which she has spoken only a handful of times in the Chamber — it appears Sturgeon has been busy rewriting history. For at last night’s event, the Queen of Nats claimed that politics has changed since she resigned from the top job. Now, she claims, controversial policies ‘descend into the most vicious, toxic rammy, with bad faith arguments all over the place’. Er, has

If you thought the Scottish Greens couldn’t get any battier, then strap in. Patrick Harvie’s barmy army has ramped up its baffling stance on gender politics and is now expelling party members for declaring that ‘sex is a biological reality’. There really are no words… The eco-zealots have turned on their own membership after a handful of activist members signed the ‘Scottish Green Declaration for Women’s Sex-Based Rights’ in a protest against the party’s position on gender issues. The unofficial declaration asserts that sex is a ‘biological reality’, women have a right to maintain sex-based protections as in the Equality Act, lesbians are same-sex attracted and ‘women and girls have

After nearly 17 years in office the Scottish government has finally accepted the truth: it is incompetent. It has declared a National Housing Emergency – effectively a vote of no confidence in itself. ‘Honest’ First Minister John Swinney has thrown up his hands and said: it’s a fair cop, in anticipation of the Scottish parliament passing a Labour motion to the same effect this afternoon. The ‘emergency’ doesn’t actually commit the Scottish government to doing anything specific, but it is clearly an unprecedented admission of failure. The ‘emergency’ doesn’t actually commit the Scottish government to doing anything Perhaps Honest John should now declare a health emergency, since NHS waiting lists