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Lisa Cameron MP has quit the SNP to join the Conservative party, just days before the SNP holds its party conference in Aberdeen. What does this say about the state of the Scottish National Party under Humza Yousaf? James Heale talks to Isabel Hardman and Lucy Dunn. Produced by Max Jeffery and Cindy Yu.
Is First Minister Humza Yousaf at risk of sacrificing crucial SNP votes by refusing to ditch his party’s coalition with the Greens? That’s what a growing number of nationalist politicians are worried about. This week, the Bute House Agreement (a framework between the two parties that allows them to govern together) came under criticism from the SNP’s own politicians – and the party is as divided as ever over what to do about them. The party’s relationship with the Greens needs to be examined, SNP backbenchers believe – and Fergus Ewing and Kate Forbes have gone so far as to call for a party member vote on the Bute House
Even in her absence, Nicola Sturgeon dominated Iain Dale’s discussion with Alex Salmond and David Davis at the Edinburgh festival. Dale invited them both to comment on George Galloway’s suggestion that Sturgeon is ‘Mrs Thatcher in a kilt.’ Salmond flatly rejected this caricature. (Evidently he knows that criticising her in public will do him no favours.) Davis also dismissed the comparison. ‘Mrs Thatcher’s favourite pastime was arguing with people. Nicola wasn’t like that,’ he said, recalling the meetings he held with her during his term as Brexit secretary. ‘Nicola was very passive, very difficult to engage with. She adopted the image of a stern, domineering woman – which a lot
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A by-election is on the cards for Rutherglen and Hamilton West, after former SNP MP Margaret Ferrier was recalled by her constituents. She’d flouted lockdown rules in 2020, taking a train from London to Scotland despite testing positive for Covid. Given that Labour will need to make gains in Scotland in order to win the next election, this by-election has become a bellwether for the party. Cindy Yu talks to Katy Balls and Lucy Dunn about what to expect. Produced by Cindy Yu.
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
Scottish Nationalists are putting a brave face on the latest opinion poll showing Scottish Labour apparently winning the race for Westminster. The Times/Panelbase survey suggests that Labour is on course to return 26 Scottish seats at the next general election against the SNP’s 21. The nationalist are currently the third largest party in Westminster with 48 MPs, so this would be a shocking reversal of fortune. The survey was conducted between 12 and 15 June – just after Nicola Sturgeon had been arrested and released under Operation Branchform – the police investigation into irregularities in party funds and fundraising. Ach, it’s not as bad as it looks, say the Nats.
The arrest of Nicola Sturgeon by police investigating allegations of fraud within the SNP was hardly unexpected. After all, her husband – the party’s former chief executive, Peter Murrell – and the SNP’s past treasurer, Colin Beattie MSP, have already spent time helping officers with their enquiries. It was only a matter of time until the cops got to Sturgeon. Nonetheless, the shock of news – broken in a tweet from Police Scotland at 2.29pm on Sunday afternoon – that she was in custody as a suspect was undiminished. Until her surprise resignation as SNP leader – and, thus, first minister of Scotland – in February, Sturgeon was widely considered
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
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Nicola Sturgeon’s husband, Peter Murrell, has been arrested today in connection with an investigation into the SNP’s finances. James Heale talks to Fraser Nelson and Conservative Home editor Paul Goodman on the episode. They also discuss Trump’s arrest and ask whether Suella Braverman might need a new seat. Produced by Cindy Yu.
‘Now is not the time,’ successive Tory prime ministers told Nicola Sturgeon following her persistent calls for another independence referendum. It’s simply too soon after the last one, they said. In August, the Scottish secretary, Alister Jack, caused fury in nationalist circles after he stated there would need to be at least 60 per cent support for independence in opinion polls before the UK government would respond to further Section 30 referendum requests. Strange, then, that this Tory message appears to be exactly what the SNP leadership candidates were parroting in Tuesday night’s now infamous STV debate. So transfixed were commentators by the blue-on-blue attack lines – or perhaps ‘yellow-on-yellow’
The SNP leadership has turned into open civil war. Alex Salmond has shafted the frontrunner Humza Yousaf who tried to shaft Kate Forbes, who was, in turn, shafted by Nicola Sturgeon. No wonder long-suffering deputy First Minister, John Swinney, has resigned. Swinney’s departure came on the day Salmond torpedoed Yousaf, Sturgeon’s chosen successor, by claiming he had skipped Holyrood’s landmark gay marriage vote in 2014 due to ‘religious pressure’. Yousaf says his ‘recollection is different’, but his position is now untenable. His account is contradicted by the minister who was in charge of the 2014 equal marriage vote, Alex Neil, and now the then first minister, Salmond. It is all
Is Ash Regan the dark horse in the SNP leadership race? Kate Forbes and Humza Yousaf are the frontrunners, yet in a race full of surprises, Regan’s chances should not be ruled out. The 48-year-old MSP for Edinburgh Eastern resigned in protest over gender self ID. Now she has returned as the candidate for change from the Nicola Sturgeon era – but might her ties to another former SNP leader, Alex Salmond, prove to be her undoing? Regan is clear about what went wrong for the SNP under its outgoing leader: ‘Kids in the playground can see that there have been some issues in the SNP of late,’ she says
Bring back Nicola Sturgeon. The race to replace her as SNP leader and first minister has turned into the mother of all culture wars. Who would have thought that the party of independence would start tearing itself apart over a law on same sex marriage that was passed nearly a decade ago? The early front runner, Kate Forbes, provoked fury among ‘progressive’ SNP supporters on Twitter by saying she opposes gay marriage – something everyone who knows her knew perfectly well. She is an evangelical Christian for heaven’s sake, a member of the Free Church of Scotland. Of course she opposes gay marriage. That along with having children out of wedlock and working
Whenever a governing party changes leader midway through a parliament, it’s interesting to note what the main opposition makes of the contest. Specifically, which candidate they would be more comfortable to see win — and which they dread the most. So, as the SNP begins choosing Nicola Sturgeon’s replacement as party leader and first minister, I’ve been asking Scottish Tories what they think so far. Whomever the Scottish Nationalists pick will be staring down Douglas Ross every week at First Minister’s Questions, while the Scottish Tory leader will have to update his strategy and rhetoric for a post-Sturgeon era. So far there are two declared candidates. Health secretary and continuity
Scottish nationalists are shell-shocked after their leader did a bunk on Wednesday. And with good reason. Nicola Sturgeon left the SNP leaderless, directionless, failing on almost every policy front – from the NHS to bottle recycling – and with a legislative time bomb in the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which is due to go off just as their new leader is installed at the end of March. It will probably destroy the Scottish coalition well before then. Indeed, the 18-month-old union with the Scottish Greens, another of Sturgeon’s personal initiatives, is unlikely to last the week. Attempts by pro-GRR Bill loyalists to keep the finance secretary, Kate Forbes, out of the leadership
The first two candidates have declared in the race to succeed Nicola Sturgeon: Ash Regan and Humza Yousaf. The pair announced their intent in a front-page story for the Sunday Mail titled ‘Battle of the Bill: FM hopefuls go head-to-head on gender reform’. That focus reflects Regan’s major claim to fame as the only minister to resign over Sturgeon’s trans reforms back in October. In so doing, she became the first minister within the SNP to resign over government policy in 15 years. That is a testament to how united the party has been on most policy planks and suggests that the Gender Recognition Reform Bill will probably be one of the
The contest to replace Nicola Sturgeon really shouldn’t be a contest at all. The obvious successor is Kate Forbes, the Scottish finance secretary. She is young at 32 but she was even younger three years ago when she stepped in to deliver the Scottish budget just 12 hours after finance minister Derek Mackay was forced by scandal to resign. Her plaudit-winning performance showed her to be a woman of ability and nerve. If you want to keep evangelical zeal out of politics, Kate Forbes is the least of your worries These are not her only qualities. Forbes is Cambridge-educated and a disciplined media performer. She is a true believer in the cause
Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, has led a charmed life. Even her sternest critics agree that she is immensely talented, one of the UK’s most successful politicians, a master of detail and an effective communicator. She has been at the pinnacle of public life for two decades. But all things must pass. Nearly ten years after she took over as leader from Alex Salmond just about everything is going wrong at once. Hospital waiting lists lengthen, teacher strikes roll on, council service cuts deepen, the ambitious plan for a Social Care Commission has stalled. Across the board the SNP government appears to have made a right royal mess of just about every policy for which
The Ruth Davidson era is over. It has been three years since the now Baroness Davidson stood down as leader of the Scottish Tories, but the last decade of opposition politics has belonged to her. It was Davidson who parlayed opposition to independence into tactical support for the Scottish Conservatives, convincing a section of older, blue-collar Labour voters to lend her their vote to stop the SNP. In doing so, she took the Tories from third to second place at Holyrood and, in 2017, to their biggest win in a general election since the days of Margaret Thatcher. What she failed to do was make the Scottish Tories a viable
Despite its name, Gers Day is not an annual celebration of the Ibrox side that makes up one half of Glasgow’s notorious Old Firm. If only it were that uncontentious. In fact, Gers stands for ‘Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland’, the Scottish government’s yearly report on public finances. In a normal country, the publication of 76 pages of data tables and accountancy prose would go largely unremarked upon, so naturally in Scotland we have to turn it into another front in the independence wars. Because we really have nothing better to do. This year’s figures, like last year’s, reflect the unprecedented Treasury interventions during the Covid pandemic. However, they paint
