Salmond

What a year! First Fianna Fail in Ireland, now Labour in Scotland. If only all elections were this entertaining and satisfying. At long last the anti-Labour vote was organised properly. Indeed, the SNP have won a lop-sided victory of the type Labour have been accustomed to winning in Scotland, taking more than 70% of the constituency seats on 45% of the vote. This included a victory in Edinburgh South achieved with fewer than 30% of the votes. First Past the Post for the win, eh? Labour spent much of the night complaining that there was a ball and the Liberal Democrats ran away with it and gave it to the

The Scotsman’s endorsement of the SNP and the Scottish Conservatives is so thoroughly, even startlingly, sensible it could almost have been written by me*. [T]here is no other credible candidate for First Minister beyond Mr Salmond. Despite his party’s apparently staunch commitment to statism, we also know the SNP leader is passionate about the role of business and free enterprise in generating jobs and growth for Scotland, within or outwith the Union. In that, he and many of his colleagues – finance secretary John Swinney is one – share the beliefs of the Tories, and we feel there may be common ground between them. SCOTLAND needs a strong First Minister

Since Donald Trump and the Birthers are everywhere today, I wonder if Alex Salmond winces at the memory of being described by Trump as “an amazing man”? I hope so. For Salmond’s role in the saga of Trump’s plans to build a golf course and, just as importantly, hundreds of “villas” on one of the more spectacular pieces of Aberdeenshire coastline was not one of the SNP ministry’s finer moments. To recap, Aberdeenshire council rejected Trump’s application to build two golf courses, a hotel and his houses on the Menie Estate (pictured above). The Scottish government, as it is wont* to do, called in the application and to precisely no-one’s

Severin Carrell reports that tomorrow’s edition of the Sun will endorse Alex Salmond and the SNP. This should not surprise anyone. I suspect most of the Scottish press will support, albeit with significant qualifications, the Nationalists. The most significant of those qualifications is that this is a Holyrood election, not a Westminster one. Endorsing the SNP does not require anyone to support independence it’s merely making the best of a poor job and recognising that the Nats are a more attractive choice than Labour. The press is prepared to back Salmond but only because independence is not on the immediate or even medium-term agenda. If it were the Nats would

Scotland on Sunday publishes a thumper of a poll today that suggests the SNP is on course to defeat Labour and remain the largest party at Holyrood. In fact, John Curtice’s calculations have the Nats taking 55 seats to Labour’s 49. The Tories, meanwhile, slip to 14 while the Lib Dems suffer a catastrophe and would be left with just six MSPs, just ahead of the Greens with five seats. Should this poll be accurate and should the election – which is still 18 fun-stuffed days away – produce a result of this sort then happy days indeed. By which I mean, of course, not-as-desperate-as-they-might-have-been-days. Kenny Farquharson lays it on

Crivvens, the idea of an SNP-Labour coalition refuses to die. Here’s Iain Macwhirter in the Herald: The rule seems to be that, in Scottish politics it’s easier to work constructively with parties you don’t agree with than with parties you do. Labour and the SNP now agree – independence aside – on most of the big issues, such as NHS privatisation, comprehensive education, free university tuition, more powers for Holyrood. But unfortunately they hate the sight of each other. Could they ever bury their differences? Most polls suggest that this is the coalition partnership Scots would most like to see. A grand coalition, perhaps, against the Tory cuts. Scotland’s two

I’m fonder of wacky political hypotheticals than the next fellow but even I draw the line at Sunder Katwala’s assertion that some people can see a path towards a Labour-SNP coalition in Edinburgh. This is splendidly creative but also, alas, untethered to reality. The party leaders – apart from the Green’s Patrick Harvie who has been excluded, perhaps unfairly – gather for their first debate tonight. You can, my friends, watch the drama here. You will notice that Labour-SNP relations are chilly. There is not the slightest reason to suppose that either party would have any interest in governing in partnership with the other. Who is going to tell Iain

That’s the question Jeff Breslin asks at Better Nation and, as a bonus, he gets the answer right too: Alex Salmond. In truth, it’s not a difficult question no matter how one approaches it. From a governance perspective the SNP have been modestly underwhelming. This still represents a major advance from the days of the Labour-Lib Dem coalition that preceded them. Nor is there any reason to hope for anything this time around from a Labour party actively hostile to anything that might even be mistaken for a fresh idea. On those grounds alone, a Labour minority ministry in Edinburgh is a dreary prospect. The Scottish elections in May are

There are precious few heroes in Ireland today and no gods either. But not all the losers are Irish either. Some are Scottish. Chief among them, Alex Salmond and the Scottish National Party. Not because an independent Scotland would necessarily have been destroyed by the financial tsunami that swept the globe (though, to put it mildly, it would have been “difficult” to cope and might well have required a humiliating begging-trip to London) but because an independent Scotland would have made some of the same mistakes and unfortunate assumptions that have helped cripple poor Hibernia. Europe, you see, was an important part of the SNP’s slow rise to power. At

The main sufferers of this admittedly rare condition are London-based Scots. Fraser, I’m afraid, seems to have come down with a case of SDS if this post is anything to go by. The murder of Linda Norgrove is a ghastly, horrid business that might, one would think, be considered sufficiently awful to be above or beyond politics. Apparently not. I see nothing wrong far less anything political in the First Minister issuing a statement about the murder of one of his compatriots in Afghanistan. Criticising Salmond for making cheap political capital out of such an awful business is itself a cheap journalistic shot.  Consider this: if Linda Norgrove had been

No, not that kind, the vote-winning kind. Despite the fact that the party itself has honoured or at least admired warrior queens (in the members’ estimation) such as Winnie Ewing, Margo MacDonald and even Nicola Sturgeon, the fact remains that women are much less likely to support the SNP than men and, furthermore, this gender gap causes the party some problems. As Lallands Peat Worrier reminded us: On the constituency ballot, 41% of the male electorate supported the SNP, compared to only 32% of women voters.  On the list, 35% of men voted for the SNP, but only 27% of women. That’s a significant gap. Jennifer Dempsie, a former Salmond

Here’s the text of the letter Alex Salmond has sent to Senator John Kerry, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. There’s nothing new here but it does state, clearly, the essential facts of the matter. Megrahi’s cancer is, again, to be regretted not least because it put an end to his appeal against his conviction and, thus, ended the prospects for a fresh review of what was, even if you think him guilty, a thoroughly unsatisfactory process. Dear Senator Kerry, I am writing to you about the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s recent interest in the release of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed AI-Megrahi, the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing.

A very interesting interview with Il Tartanissimo in the Times today in which Salmond accepts, quite candidly, that independence isn’t happening any time soon: “The centre of gravity in Scottish politics currently is clearly not independence,” he admitted. “You must campaign for what is good for Scotland as well as campaigning for independence.” A cynic – not that there are any of those around here – might argue that there’s a contradiction in that second sentence but, in this instance, a cynic would be unfair on Eck. It’s really quite rare to come across a politician being quite this candid about what is, after all, supposed to be his party’s

Whither Scotland? Well, apart from Labour regaining the two seats it lost in by-elections not a single seat changed hands north of the border. Indeed there was a swing to Labour and I suspect that Brown and Jim Murphy won votes when they warned that a vote for anyone else was a de facto vote for the Conservatives. Such is life and it’s remarkable how these ancient ghosts still retain the ability to spook the populace. So why should Cameron speak to Salmond? Well, because he should be able to get the SNP to at least abstain on a putative Tory budget. Cameron has already said that the Scottish government’s

Bad news for David Mundell. The Tories’ sole MP in Scotland (at the moment!) might think himself the obvious choice to be Scottish Secretary, should David Cameron form a government later this year but the party leader seems much less convinced of poor Mr Mundell’s merits, telling the Herald today: “You will have to wait and see what appointments are made if we win an election but, suffice it to say, David has done an excellent job.” So, Cameron’s looking for an alternative. And reasonably so. Mr Mundell is an inoffensive man and that’s not something you can say about all MPs, but few people, I think, truly think that