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The Alex Salmond inquiry is about far more than his allegations against Nicola Sturgeon and her government: it offers alarming insights into the extent and scope of political power in Scotland. In particular, the way in which the Crown Office, Scotland’s government prosecutors, pressured the devolved parliament into censoring Salmond’s evidence. It’s all the more worrying because the Lord Advocate, who runs the Crown Office, is a serving member of Sturgeon’s Cabinet. It was his turn to face that committee today. James Wolffe QC started by reminding them that they were dealing with someone above them. ‘The actions of the Crown are not within the remit of the committee’, he said in

It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up: just as Watergate exposed the workings of the Nixon White House the Salmond inquiry is giving the world a glimpse of how the SNP works in Edinburgh. And how the SNP-led committee investigating Nicola Sturgeon is shameless in its determination to rig the system. First, the committee tried not to publish Alex Salmond’s full evidence against Nicola Sturgeon citing legal reasons. That defence fell apart when The Spectator went to the High Court. Then, outrageously, the Crown Office (Scotland’s state prosecutors) told the committee to censor Salmond’s evidence. Leading to a question: what on earth was it playing at by interfering with parliament? Would the Crown Prosecution

When The Spectator went to High Court in Edinburgh to seek clarification over the Alex Salmond case, we did not act out of chumminess or a conviction that he was telling the truth. We are not natural allies of his. We are not sure if his explosive claims are correct, but we are sure that they should be scrutinised by a free press and free parliament.  Sturgeon’s allies were instead dealing with his allegations against her by seeking to stop Salmond’s full story ever being told. The SNP-led investigating committee had said it would not publish his submitted evidence – which, as they knew, would mean he would not appear in front of them. The pretext? That Salmond’s evidence somehow

As Alex Salmond finally testified before the Scottish parliament on Friday, it was clear that he was trying to walk quite a fine tightrope. On the one hand, the former first minister is alleging a conspiracy so vast that, if true, it would deeply discredit the central institutions of the devolved Scottish state. His claims put the reputations of the Scottish government, the Scottish parliament, and the Crown Office, not to mention the civil service and even the police, on the line. Yet he shrank from the implications of this. Right from the start, he sought to erect a firewall from the leadership of these institutions and the institutions themselves:

For most of the past year, Alex Salmond has been engaged in a vicious and high-profile war against his successor, Nicola Sturgeon, with Salmond suggesting that the Scottish establishment has conspired against him to keep him out of public life and have him jailed. Now it appears that Salmond has been waging war against a Scottish newspaper as well. Today the press regulator Ipso published details of a complaint made by Salmond against the Scotland on Sunday, sister paper to the Scotsman. Salmond had taken issue with an article published by the paper in April in the aftermath of his criminal trial – at which the former First Minister was

BBC Alba, Scotland’s Gaelic language channel, is not normally required viewing for the political classes. This week, however, Lib Dems across the country were seeking it out on Freeview. The channel last night aired a documentary on Charles Kennedy, the former Lib Dem leader who stood down in 2006 after acknowledging his struggle with alcoholism, which persisted until he died in 2015 at the age of 55. Three weeks before his death and after 32 years as MP for a Highland constituency – latterly called Ross, Cromarty and Skye – he was defeated in the 2015 General Election by Ian Blackford, now Westminster leader of the Scottish National Party and

For a party so devoted to trans rights, it seems strange that the SNP is less than forthcoming over its new definition of transphobia that their National Executive Committee adopted in recent days. The mind boggles over what they may be hiding. Despite the twin pressures of Brexit and Covid-19, not to mention a key Scottish election three months away and the ongoing Alex Salmond affair, it seems that the party is prioritising the gender debate. As a trans person, even I am getting exasperated by this relentless focus.  Let’s be clear: transphobic hate crime exists but it is nowhere near as commonplace as the transgender lobby would like us to

The Scottish Tories don’t mean to be the way they are. Sometimes they just can’t help it. They are being that way again over plans to let some prisoners vote in the forthcoming Scottish parliament elections. I am not convinced those elections should be going ahead at all in the middle of a pandemic but, if they are to, there are good reasons for prisoners to be enfranchised. The Tories intend to force a vote at Holyrood on Wednesday against allowing those serving custodial sentences of less than 12 months to participate in the May 6 election. MSPs voted last February to extend the franchise in order to comply with

It is now two years since Nicola Sturgeon accepted the need for a parliamentary inquiry into how, and why, her government’s investigation into Alex Salmond was so thoroughly tainted by apparent bias it was unlawful.   Ever since then, she has repeatedly promised that both she and her government will fully co-operate with the Holyrood committee — set up to investigate the Scottish government’s response to claims of sexual misconduct against her predecessor. Many hollow promises have been made in the still-short history of the Scottish parliament but few have been emptier than this.   It is necessary to insist upon what the committee is not investigating: it takes no view on

For anyone who assumes the SNP government’s secrecy and obstruction is limited to inquiries into itself and its past leaders, the fate of a major report into Scottish education is an instructive tale. Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), introduced in 2010, was the SNP’s grand idea for better learning in Scottish schools. Its ‘progressive’, ‘child-centred’ philosophy was contentious among teachers but was eagerly bought into by educationalists, educrats and teachers’ unions. Dissenters were generally caricatured as stuffy old reactionaries who wanted children bolted down in rows, facing a blackboard, as an authoritarian dominie catechised them in the rote memorising of formulae, dates and rules. Needless to say, the caricatures turned out

It’s hard to believe in these early weeks of 2021, when the country is grappling with an unprecedented national health and economic crisis, that anyone could contemplate willingly throwing into the mix a constitutional crisis. Issuing a clarion call to break apart, when it could not be clearer we need to pull together. Yet that appears to be the course on which the SNP Government in Edinburgh is set with its 11-point plan for independence. For the UK Government to reject a demand to hold any time soon another referendum on Scottish independence is not, as Nicola Sturgeon would have it, ‘a denial of democracy’; it’s plain common-sense and the