Scotland

Perhaps it is time for Glasgow to become a Charter City: More than a third of people in Glasgow North East have no school qualifications. A table published by the University and College Union (UCU) showed 35.3% of those of working age left school without passing a single examination. The result gives the area the lowest rating in the UK. Every Edinburgh constituency was placed in the top third for educational achievement. Every constituency in Glasgow was below the British average. No matter how many allowances you make for Glasgow’s peculiar circumstances – post-industrialisation, redrawn city boundaries that exclude middle-class suburbs and so on – this is depressing stuff. If

Sorry Pete, but I don’t think there’s anything hugely ambiguous about the result from the Inverclyde by-election. This was a pretty solid victory for Labour and another reminder – if these things are needed – that Westminster and Holyrood elections are played by different rules. Labour and the SNP ran neck-and-neck in the gibberish spin stakes last night as some Labour hackettes, preposterously, tried to claim that the seat “was the SNP’s to lose”; for their part the nationalists tried to suggest they’d never been very interested in winning Inverclyde at all. More weapons-grade piffle. Then again, without this stuff how would anyone fill the weary hours of television before

Here’s a clue for politicians: when you’re asked if you’ve just criminalised the national anthem and all you can do is say “Er, maybe, it all kinda depends on the circumstances” the chances are you’ve produced a bill that tests even the patient, hard-to-exhaust, limits of parliamentary absurdity and you should probably put it through the shredder and start again. If, that is, you should even be legislating in these matters at all. We do things differently in Scotia New and Braw, don’t you know? So today the Scottish Parliament’s Justice Committee took evidence on the government’s planned and loopy and shameful and illiberal Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening

Speaking of a Scotland that is no more (or largely no more), here’s video of the Reverend Dr Donald McDonald addressing the crowd at the disbandment of the Cameronians in 1968. You don’t see stuff like this very often these days and I’m enough of a Tory to recognise that whle improvements bring many blessings they come at a price that’s paid in poignancy too. Perhaps one should not be too sentimental about these things, though the crowds who flocked to the National Theatre of Scotland’s production of Black Watch will recognise the pathos of these video clips. Nevertheless, the style or temper on magnificent display here has largely vanished.

Much of Alex Salmond’s speech on the occasion of his re-election as First Minister was entirely unobjectionable and some of it was even eloquent. A shame, then, that his peroration threw all that away: A change is coming, and the people are ready. They put ambition ahead of hesitation. The process is not about endings. It is about beginnings. Whatever changes take place in our constitution, we will remain close to our neighbours. We will continue to share a landmass, a language and a wealth of experience and history with the other peoples of these islands My dearest wish is to see the countries of Scotland and England stand together