Snp

AN: Nicola Sturgeon the SNP has governed Scotland for ten years, so can we start by agreeing that the performance of Scottish public services is the responsibility of you and the SNP government? NS: I take responsibility for the performance of our public services, although Scotland’s overall budget of course is determined by decisions taken at Westminster and our budget has been reduced over the years since the Conservatives have been in office. AN: Let’s start then with Alex Salmond’s former head of policy Alex Bell, this is what he’s had to say. ‘The evidence shows that we, the SNP, haven’t closed the poverty gap, redistributed wealth, improved education of

That the Tories would enjoy this general election campaign and Labour would spend it alternating between abject misery and total panic was a given from the moment Theresa May announced she wanted to go to the polls. More of a surprise has been how uncomfortable the Liberal Democrats have looked so far. Tim Farron has spent far too much time defending and then apparently recanting various unpopular beliefs. The party is averaging nine per cent in the polls. One analysis suggests they could end up with fewer than the nine seats they currently hold. What’s going wrong? Aside from Farron’s awkward media encounters over his religious beliefs, the party may

I am afraid that whenever a politician asks to be judged on their record, it is sensible to assume this reflects a confidence they won’t be. At the very least such promises are hostages to future headlines. Take, for instance, Nicola Sturgeon’s boast that education  – and specifically closing the gap between the best and worst schools in Scotland – is her top priority. Judge me on this, she said. Well, OK.  Today the SNP government published the results of the latest Scottish Survey of Literacy and Numeracy and, as has become annually predictable, they make for depressing reading. While standards of reading have remained relatively constant amongst both primary and

Well, then. It turns out that the revival of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist party is a real thing. Last year, the party won 31 seats at the Scottish parliament elections, supplanting Labour as the second force in Scottish politics. This week, it became the second largest party in local government across Scotland. The Tories are a party reborn, the beneficiaries of an increasingly polarised political landscape. It may be ironic that Ruth Davidson’s party benefits from the SNP’s dominance but there you have it. Caveats apply, of course. The voting system used in Scottish council elections helps the Tories. The single transferable vote is a very different beast to

When launching the Scottish National Party’s election campaign, Nicola Sturgeon said the word ‘Tory’ 20 times in 20 minutes. For much of her political lifetime, it has been used by the SNP as the dirtiest word in Scottish politics. Nationalists have long liked to portray the Conservatives as the successors to Edward Longshanks: an occupying army with little affinity for the people they were trying to govern. But things are changing fast in Scotland. Amid the other political dramas of the past few months, the revival of Tory support north of the border has gone relatively unnoticed. They had only one MP after the last election, but a poll this

Well, golly, Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the SNP and First Minister of Scotland, says this general election has nothing to do with the arguments for or against Scottish independence.  In one sense, this is correct in as much as independence is not the question on the ballot. But in another, deeper, more genuine sense, everyone knows Sturgeon is pulling your leg here. The election is a proxy referendum on the question of whether there should, at some point in the next couple of years, be another independence referendum. Everyone in Scotland, including SNP supporters, knows this. Even so, as the Tories have noted, this is a familiar SNP argument. In

At the time of their 1997 wipeout, the Scottish Tories were at least hated. When I was reporting from the Scottish Parliament some 14 years later, things were even worse: there was curiosity, even pity, for Tory supporters. One Tory MSP told me the party should rename itself “the effing Tories” because that’s what they had become known as. Voting Conservative was no longer seen as a giant evil, more a harmless perversion – like cross-dressing (or cricket). Then Ruth Davidson came along, then Jeremy Corbyn, then the SNP with its obsession with referenda – and now, everything has changed. The above graph shows the latest voting intention in Scotland, with the Tories soaring

Although a government statement on the labour market statistics for Scotland doesn’t on the surface sound like the juiciest news release of the day, today’s has proved rather revealing. With unemployment in Scotland down by 15,000 in the period December 2016 to February 2017, the Scottish unemployment rate has fallen to 4.5 per cent — below the rate of 4.7 per cent for the whole of the UK. You might expect the Scotland Office press release to trumpet this good news but instead it turns its guns on the SNP — pointing to the fact that the Scots employment rate decreased by 0.1 percentage points over the quarter to 73.4 per cent. The

Alex Salmond – Theresa May ‘will crumble’ over Scottish referendum Despite Parliament having retired this week, the political debate rages on. Alex Salmond appeared on the Andrew Marr show to offer his take on the circumstances of a second referendum on Scottish independence. He remained defiant that it would still take place despite Theresa May’s statement that ‘now is not the time’. ‘The Theresa May line… “Now is not the time” is not going to stand. Back in the day I remember David Cameron telling me there wasn’t going to be a Scottish referendum, but that didn’t last against the democratic wishes of the Scottish people and the Scottish Parliament

Ever since the (fast depleting) SNP 56 descended on Parliament in 2015, they have been frequently criticised for failing to grasp Westminster etiquette. There have been a number of incidents — from Angus MacNeil chewing gum in the Chamber to the SNP clapping en masse. Today was no exception. During PMQs, the Speaker had to intervene after Joanna Cherry, the MP for Edinburgh South West, heckled the Prime Minister a bit too vigorously: ‘Miss Cherry. This is very unseemly heckling. You are a distinguished QC, you wouldn’t behave like that in the Scottish courts — you’d be chucked out!’ With Phil Boswell going on to receive a ticking off for heckling, it seems the SNP

It’s important to keep an ear out for the rhetoric of Britain’s remaining Remain parties, because they are changing, too. Having announced plans for a second Scottish referendum entirely because of Brexit, Nicola Sturgeon is now incredibly cagey about whether her independent nation would even be part of the EU, or perhaps more like Norway. The same is true of the Lib Dems. Last weekend, Tim Farron managed to give a whole speech to his party’s spring conference railing against only a ‘hard Brexit’ and thus never quite saying whether a Lib Dem government (humour me) would leave the EU or not. These people need to get off the fence. Mind

Tottenham MP David Lammy has been writing in the Evening Standard about how it makes sense now for London to become a ‘city-state’, following Brexit: Over the course of the next two years as the reality of Brexit begins to bite, the economic, social and political cleavages between London and other parts of the country will become more pronounced. London’s status as a de facto city-state will become clearer and the arguments for a London city-state to forge a more independent path will become stronger. I’ve argued before that there is an increasingly strong case for London leaving the union because the aspirations of Londoners and the people of England

Tim Farron’s fearsome foursome: May, Le Pen, Trump, Putin What can Tim Farron, leader of the Liberal Democrats, do to get attention? He had an idea  for the party’s conference in York today: suggest that the world is in the grip of a fearsome foursome: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Marine Le Pen… and Theresa May. He claimed that have the same traits in common: being “aggressive, nationalistic, anti-Nato, anti-EU. It is the post-war internationalist consensus unravelling in real time. Winston Churchill’s vision for a world that achieves peace through trade, common values and shared endeavour evaporating before our eyes.” Clegg: Bring on the election. The Lib Dems couldn’t do any worse BBC1’s Sunday

The great achievement of the Scottish Nationalists is to persuade people outside the borders of their own nation — including the London-based media — to equate them with the Scottish people. Obviously, they are their chief elected representatives just now, but the result of the referendum on Scottish independence quite clearly showed that the equation is false. So when Nicola Sturgeon says there has to be another referendum because of Brexit, the equation should be much more firmly challenged. There is no moral reason why the result of a declaredly UK-wide referendum should require another vote in part of the kingdom (next, UDI for London?). Nor is there a constitutional