Scotland

Gordon Brown’s plan to save the Union won’t wash

Back in 2006, when he was close to executing his masterplan to chase Tony Blair out of Downing Street, Gordon Brown sought to address something that worried many voters: his Scottishness. ‘My wife is from Middle England, so I can relate to it,’ he pronounced, as if Middle England were a town somewhere off the M40. In fact, though Sarah Brown was born in Buckinghamshire, she spent most of her early childhood in Tanzania and her family moved to North London when she was seven. By mistaking a term denoting the provincial English psyche for a geographical area, Brown merely demonstrated that he was indeed all at sea. He has

Boris can’t just say no to Nicola

By May, the acute phase of the Covid crisis should be over. But the elections scheduled for that month threaten to throw the government into a fresh crisis. Nicola Sturgeon looks set to lead the Scottish National Party to a majority in the Holyrood elections. Given that the SNP manifesto will commit the party to a second independence referendum, she will claim this victory as a mandate for holding one. But no legal referendum can take place without Westminster’s consent, which will be refused. As Covid recedes into the distance, a fresh justification will be needed for saying no But, as I argue in the Times today, the danger is that

Sturgeon advisor: independent Scotland would have handled Covid better

Scottish nationalists put a lot of stock in the mystical powers of independence, but this is a new one to Mr S: independence would apparently have improved Scotland’s response to Covid-19. At least according to Devi Sridhar, professor of global public health at Edinburgh University and member of the Scottish government’s Covid-19 advisory group. Interviewed on Holyrood magazine’s podcast, she was asked whether a separate Scotland would have made different decisions on the pandemic. ‘Yes, definitely,’ she reportedly replied. According to Holyrood, the academic added that ‘we could have hopefully been more like a Norway or a Denmark’ and said ‘if you look at the charts and the devolved nations,

Richard Leonard’s successor has an unenviable task ahead

Seventh time lucky? Richard Leonard, who has resigned this afternoon, was the sixth Scottish Labour leader since the SNP elbowed the party out of power in 2007. His tenure was the second-longest since devolution began, mostly because Labour is in such bad nick north of the border that no one else wants the job. The Yorkshire-born Scot secured the leadership in 2017 in part by allowing the impression to get about that he was a Corbynista. In truth, he hails from the harder edge of the soft-left and in his three years at the helm of Scottish Labour he did not shift the party significantly to the left. He leaves

Why Reform UK’s Scotland launch was a flop

Scots may be getting vaccinated against Covid, but they already have the highest rate of immunity to the appeal of Nigel Farage to be found anywhere in the UK. So it was not a particular surprise that Farage today stayed away from the launch of the Scottish offshoot of his new entity, Reform UK. Instead it was left to party chairman Richard Tice to unveil the identity of the leader of Reform UK, Scotland. The sitting MSP Michelle Ballantyne, who stood unsuccessfully for the leadership of the Scottish Conservatives less than a year ago before going independent, has become the Scottish leader of Reform UK, without needing to win a single

Alex Salmond has declared war on Nicola Sturgeon

This is a big deal. The Times says it has had advanced sight of Alex Salmond’s evidence to a Scottish parliament inquiry on sexual harassment and it makes for uncomfortable reading for Nicola Sturgeon. The former SNP leader is allegedly accusing his one-time protege of misleading the Holyrood parliament and contravening the ministerial code. If true, that would be the end of Sturgeon’s premiership. The inquiry stems from a botched probe into sexual harassment allegations lodged against Salmond relating to his time as Scottish First Minister. Salmond denied the accusations and took the Scottish government to the Court of Session, Scotland’s highest civil court, where Lord Pentland ruled that the

The age of de-enlightenment

Depictions of Thomas Carlyle and David Hume in the Scottish Portrait Gallery will be altered to make it clear they were horrible racist bastards, apparently. All of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers are under review, including Adam Smith, who thought that people living beyond Europe were largely savage. I am not sure how they will alter the bust of Carlyle — perhaps chisel a swastika on his forehead? Carlyle was certainly rightish on many issues: you don’t get Friedrich Nietzsche in your fan club if you’re woke. But when I started reading the chap, back in the late 1970s, it was for the witty and sharp Sartor Resartus that I loved

SNP vs Celtic: Why their Covid showdown matters

Football and politics seldom mix well and especially not when it comes to Scotland’s Old Firm. Yet the SNP government in Edinburgh has got itself into a war of words with Celtic FC after the club’s squad flew out to Dubai for a training camp. Asked about the Parkhead side’s decision on BBC Radio Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon’s deputy John Swinney said: I don’t think it’s a particularly great example to set. When we are asking members of the public to take on very, very significant restrictions on the way in which they live their lives, I think we have all got to demonstrate leadership on this particular question. Scotland’s lockdown

Nicola Sturgeon orders another lockdown in Scotland

Nicola Sturgeon called it ‘not the New Year statement I wanted to give’. The SNP leader addressed the Scottish parliament earlier this afternoon to confirm reports of a new, March-style lockdown across mainland Scotland. It came as 1,905 positive cases were recorded yesterday, though this is likely to be a significant under-calculation as most registry services are closed on Sunday. The positivity rate now stands at 15 per cent, up from 10.1 per cent on New Year’s Eve, and since Christmas there have been 289 deaths recorded in relation to Covid. Against this backdrop, Sturgeon’s government is taking Scotland into the most severe lockdown since the outset of the pandemic.

The shrewd calculation behind Sturgeon’s Brexit u-turn

As political journeys go, it’s akin to Jeremy Corbyn quitting his allotment to grow marrows on an Israeli settlement. Nicola Sturgeon, a lifelong pro-European since June 24, 2016, has decreed that the SNP will vote against the free trade pact agreed by the UK and the EU. This is quite the turnaround. Sturgeon has previously said ‘a no-deal Brexit is a catastrophic idea’, warned of ‘the dire economic consequences of a no-deal Brexit’, described ‘the nightmare scenario of a no-deal Brexit’ and urged the UK Government ‘not to countenance in any way a no-deal Brexit’. She personally claimed that no-deal ‘could push 130,000 people in Scotland into poverty’ and touted

Is the SNP’s Brexit strategy paying off?

Ursula von der Leyen quoted TS Eliot’s poem ‘Little Gidding’ in her press conference today: ‘What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end, is to make a beginning.’ The free trade deal between the UK and the EU marks beginnings (new arrangements on commerce, fishing and security cooperation) and ends (the single market, free movement, Erasmus), but what we can’t yet be sure of is which category Scottish independence falls into. We might glean the answer from the 2,000-page agreement when the text is published but it is more likely that the question will remain open for some time. In the orthodox reading –

The subversion of history education in Scotland

No school subject lends itself more readily to political manipulation and propaganda than history. This is especially the case in Scotland, where the purpose of history education has changed beyond recognition since the SNP came to power. The subject is no longer about encouraging critical enquiry and dispassionate analysis; it is there to guide the socialisation of children into Scottish society. This involves an emphasis on identity and empathy, with Scots cast as perpetual victims. In the past, it was undoubtedly wrong that little Scottish history was taught in Scottish schools. Instead, there was a depressing emphasis on the world wars and Nazi Germany. Now, the balance has swung the

Japan has the answer to Scotland’s drugs crisis

As a Scot, I found the news that my country had registered, by some distance, the most drug-related deaths in Europe last year profoundly depressing. But my sprits sank even lower when I saw the reaction. Rather than provoking a genuine debate about how to tackle this crisis, the dismal statistics merely set off yet another round of the Holyrood vs Westminster blame game. There were wearily predictable calls for more money, more treatment programmes, more ‘consumption rooms’, more methadone, and even, for those under the illusion that it isn’t virtually the de facto situation anyway, legalisation. It seems to be accepted as a fact now that a significant number

Scotland’s drug problem is a national scandal

You have seen the chart and it is grim. A list of European countries ranked by annual drugs deaths, with Scotland at the top and a long red bar beside it. Scotland recorded 1,264 deaths from drug misuse in 2019, more than twice the number of HIV-related deaths in Somalia and more than double the death toll from terrorism in Iraq in the same year. Two-thirds of deaths were among Scots aged 35 to 54 but there was also an increase among the 15-to-24 demographic. More than 90 per cent involved multiple-drug cocktails, with ‘Street Valium’ cited in two-thirds of cases. The fake benzodiazepines can be bought for 50p a

Why does Ian Blackford get a free pass at PMQs?

The Speaker was busy at PMQs. He jumped in at the start and told Michael Fabricant, the orange-haired member for Lichfield, to stop rambling and get to the point. He admonished an SNP member for addressing the Prime Minister as ‘you.’ Convention dictates that ‘you’ in the Commons means the Speaker himself. ‘You keep saying ‘you’. I’m not responsible for any of this,’ Lindsay Hoyle said. And he jokingly called Boris, ‘Father Christmas,’ after a Tory suggested that the PM was like Santa for school kids. So there seemed to be a semblance of seasonal cheer in the chamber. And then Sir Keir Starmer stood up and read out a

When will the SNP get a grip on Scotland’s drugs death crisis?

For more than twenty years, Brian was left to rot on a methadone prescription. Month-after-month of opioid replacement therapy was the best course of action, his treatment team concluded, making no effort to definitively end his debilitating drug dependency. For Brian’s parents, watching their son slowly succumb to the steely grip of addiction, it was two decades of agony. Then, in 2018, a ‘top up’ hit of street Valium proved too much, and – as they put it – he was at last ‘released from his torture’. In Scotland – which has the worst recorded drug death rate in Europe – such stories are disturbingly common. But is the SNP

The Sturgeon paradox: the worse she does, the more popular she becomes

Before Covid-19, if you can remember such a time, this was supposed to be a difficult year for Nicola Sturgeon. Her party had been in power in Edinburgh since 2007 and, like all ministries of such antiquity, was beginning to look jaded. There was never any doubt that she would remain First Minister following next year’s Holyrood elections, but the prospect of her winning a majority seemed to be receding. Opposition parties believed that a relentless focus on the SNP’s record in office would be enough to clip Sturgeon’s wings. After 13 years, it was hard to point to many stunning successes: on the contrary, failures and scandals were accumulating.

Leaving the Union would harm Scotland more than Brexit

The Spectator recently ran a piece by Andrew Wilson, author of the SNP’s Sustainable Growth Commission, under the headline ‘Scotland can’t afford to remain part of the Union’. For those seeking any fresh insight into either the moral or economic case for breaking up the United Kingdom, it was thin gruel.  Instead of coherent arguments, we were offered bold and unsubstantiated assertions. We are asked to believe that the separatists’ position is ‘highly sophisticated’ and that because of Brexit, ‘staying in the Union is riskier than independence’. Any worries about the economic implications of leaving the UK single market, abandoning the Sterling currency union, losing the economic support offered by

We don’t want pandemic novels – we want gentle escapism

I’m often asked when I’ll write a pandemic novel. I’m not sure I’d ever be tempted, though the backdrop of Edinburgh’s deserted streets at the height of the (first) lockdown certainly provided food for the imagination. I dare say novels will arrive — some may even be good. But I find that fiction concerning momentous events usually benefits from the dust having settled. Only then can we begin to comprehend the human costs, stresses and implications, by which time there may also be an audience ready to relive the experience. In the near future, however, I foresee a hunger for escape to a gentler and more reasonable world. I’ve been

Should Scotland scrap the ‘not proven’ verdict?

Guilty or Not Guilty: for the majority of the English-speaking world these words are synonymous with the two verdicts at a trial. Not so in Scotland. Scotland prides herself on her idiosyncrasies – in food, drink, and inclement weather – and also in the form of a verdict unknown elsewhere: ‘not proven’. In Scotland, this third verdict has been used since the late 17th century as a form of acquittal, alongside ‘not guilty’. A stranger to this arcane tradition would be forgiven for assuming a legal distinction between these two verdicts. Perhaps a ‘not proven’ verdict opens up future avenues for the prosecution, or impacts the appeals process? It does