Scotland

The SNP is having a very normal election: its first really normal one in a long time. It’s just short of a decade since the party nearly swept away all traces of other political parties in the 2015 election, leaving just three non-nationalist MPs in place. Many of the candidates who won back then are now in the fight of their lives to hold on.  In Scotland’s Central Belt, most seats are on what the candidates themselves describe as a ‘knife edge’. The various MRP polls are predicting Labour wins in many SNP constituencies, including my local ones of Livingston, currently held by Hannah Bardell, and Linlithgow and Bathgate, where

John Swinney and his colleagues continuously claim Scotland ‘rejoining’ the EU is possible, and that by voting SNP we can make it happen. In this general election the SNP manifesto commits to ‘an independent Scotland in the EU.’ This is a perfect example of the way a comforting lie becomes more popular than an unpleasant truth. Why deal with reality and its messy trade-offs when off-the-shelf utopia is available instead?  An independent Scotland in the EU is a myth for the simple reason that the act of separating from the UK would create a new Scottish state structurally prohibited from entering the EU, certainly within any reasonable timeframe. At the

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