Scotland

It is no surprise that the Scottish Conservative manifesto launch was centred on independence. While Scotland’s Tories talk about the SNP’s obsession with the subject, they are a little less happy to mention their own preoccupation with separatism. It’s rather more awkward for the Scottish Conservative and Unionist party to admit that, without independence on the table, their role in Scotland becomes a little less clear. While they may rail against the topic, the Scottish Tories need the SNP – so they can put independence front and centre of their campaign to give them a bogeyman to pretend to fight Opening his party’s manifesto launch in Edinburgh with some light

The SNP may be in crisis, with police investigating the use of party funds and support from voters sliding, but the current General Election campaign obliges leader John Swinney to pretend everything in the garden continues to bloom. Launching the Nats’ manifesto in Edinburgh on Wednesday, the First Minister acted as if his scandal-scarred party was still the unstoppable force it once seemed to be. On 4 July, if Scots wanted independence, then a vote for the SNP was the way to achieve it, he said. Victory in a majority of Scottish seats would, said Swinney, mean a mandate for him to ’embark on negotiations with the UK government to

In a general election campaign that has oftentimes presented scenarios that feel like a fever dream, the surreal headlines keep coming. ‘Sir Keir Starmer agrees with Sir Tony Blair,’ we read this week, ‘that a man has a penis and a woman has a vagina’. Newspaper articles focused on two Labour leaders in simpatico and this is the outcome? ‘Tony’s right about that,’ Sir Keir said, in response to his colleague’s statement of fact: ‘He put it very well.’ That clattering noise is the sound of women’s eyebrows shooting from their heads to hit the ceiling; women who have said – and said repeatedly – this very thing, only to

Humza Yousaf is back with a bang. Now the embattled politician has taken to the Grauniad’s opinion pages to write a fiery piece on ‘anti-Muslim hatred’. In an explosive entry, the ex-SNP leader claims that Muslims across the continent are ‘fearful’ due to ‘growing popularity and mainstreaming of the far right’. ‘It is increasingly difficult to persuade fellow Muslims that Europe does not have a problem with our very existence,’ he notes. In 2024, almost half the world’s population will take part in elections. Many countries have already gone to the polls, and in a number of countries, particularly across Europe, the biggest gains have been made by those who

The SNP has dominated Scotland since 2015. In an election held just months after the independence referendum, the country turned almost entirely yellow – with the exception of just three seats. Subsequent national polls have resulted in nothing more than modest change. The question this time is whether the SNP’s hold over Scotland is about to break – and nowhere is this issue more pressing than in Scotland’s central belt. The bellwether constituency of East Renfrewshire is facing a unique three-horse race between Scotland’s main parties. But despite the abundance of choice on offer to constituents this time, there’s just one problem: they’ve fallen out of love with politics. ‘I

Uh oh. Back to Scotland where, for once, the chaos doesn’t concern the country’s biggest nationalist party. This time Alex Salmond’s pro-independence group, Alba, is in the spotlight over a rather public debacle with Scottish broadcasters STV. Salmond has taken issue with STV’s decision to move his party’s election broadcast slot from this Friday – the same day Scotland will play Germany in the Euros – to next week. The broadcaster changed the timings over concerns that the party would have an ‘unfair advantage’ if the screening went out before or after the game – to which Alba have responded by sending out a number of fiery press releases that

It is a measure of the extent of the SNP’s decline that nationalist activists have seized on a new Ipsos poll that shows the party is now neck and neck with Scottish Labour. After all, it was only 18 months ago that the same company suggested the SNP enjoyed the support of more than half of people in Scotland, with Anas Sarwar’s party languishing on 25 per cent. Two resignations, a campervan and several unpopular policies later, however, and the SNP is now regularly recorded as being behind Scottish Labour, in one recent poll by as much as 10 points. Hence the excitement in otherwise weary nationalist circles that they may

Another day, another drama. As general election campaign shenanigans continue, it now transpires that Robin Harper — the UK’s first ever Green parliamentarian and former leader of the Scottish Greens — has jumped ship to Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party. With just over three and a half weeks to go until polling day, the veteran politician has announced he is endorsing the Shadow Scotland Secretary, Ian Murray, in Edinburgh South. The writing was on the wall when the ex-Edinburgh MP revealed last week that Harper was helping as a ‘volunteer’ during his campaigning. Murray — who until last year’s Rutherglen by-election was the only Scottish Labour MP since 2019 —