Scotland

Humza Yousaf is stepping down as first minister of Scotland. After feverish speculation over the weekend, Yousaf has announced this lunchtime in a press conference at Bute House that he intends to stand down from the role once an SNP leadership contest has taken place to find his successor. Acknowledging the events that had led up to this moment, Yousaf said he had ‘clearly underestimated the level of hurt’ that ending his party’s power-sharing agreement with the Greens caused the SNP’s minority partner. He said trust was ‘fundamental’. Yousaf went on to say that from his discussions over the weekend with figures in the Scottish Greens and Alba, he had

Scotland’s Hate Crime Act (HCA) has, by common agreement, been an unmitigated disaster. Less than a week old, there are already calls for it to be repealed – like the equally misconceived but more awfully named Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications (Scotland) Act 2012. The police are now clearly hesitant of arresting anyone for hate crime The police have been swamped with thousands of complaints, many vexatious, all of which they are pledged to investigate. JK Rowling has blown the doors off with her ‘arrest me’ tweets, but the First Minister, Humza Yousaf, attracted more hate crime complaints in the first two days than she did. SNP Ministers like Siobhan Brown have been ridiculed for misrepresenting their own

Home At the Labour party conference, cheerful in the hall but overshadowed by the war in Israel, Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, said that in government he would build 1.5 million homes and a host of ‘Labour new towns’. He wanted to spend £1.1 billion a year on higher overtime payments within NHS England to reduce waiting lists. A protestor poured glitter over him. Angela Rayner, the deputy leader, and Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, also said Labour would ‘rebuild Britain’. ‘Rachel Reeves is a serious economist,’ said Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England. Labour took Rutherglen and Hamilton West in a by-election that the Scottish

During her eight years as Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon perfected the art of false promises. She consistently told SNP supporters that a second independence referendum was within reach, but the truth was that she had no power to deliver one. All Sturgeon was able to do was lead her troops halfway up the hill before having to bring them back down again. ‘Continuity candidate’ Humza Yousaf, the SNP’s new leader, seems to think that this is a strategy worth copying. In a speech at the party’s independence convention in Dundee, Yousaf unveiled his new Indyref plan. His latest brainwave appears to be, on the face of it, a complete

When the political cabinet met on Tuesday, by-elections were on the agenda. The Prime Minister is facing four of them. David Warburton, suspended from the party last year over a sex and cocaine ‘sting’, is the latest to step down. On 20 July the Tories will try to defend his constituency of Somerton and Frome, Boris Johnson’s old seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip and Nigel Adams’s Selby and Ainsty. Despite announcing she was also quitting on social media, Nadine Dorries is taking her time to trigger a vote in Mid Bedfordshire – and the whips’ office is assuming that she may hang on all the way to the next

There was an air of inevitability about the arrest today of Nicola Sturgeon. The SNP had been braced for it. But that doesn’t make the sight of the former first minister of Scotland being taken into police custody any less extraordinary and, to many SNP observers, any more justified. Hadn’t her successor in Bute House, Humza Yousaf, said only recently that: ‘We are past the time of judging a woman on what happens to her husband’. Well, no one seems to have told Police Scotland. Ms Sturgeon’s arrest follows the taking into custody two months ago of her husband, the party’s chief executive, Peter Murrell. After being questioned by detectives, Sturgeon was released this evening without charge, in