The national

Given the Scottish political establishment’s misty-eyed myth-making about Scottish nationalism — it’s civic! Joyous! Inclusive! — Mr Steerpike admires the commitment of the grassroots to saying the quiet part out loud. The National has published a missive on its letters page this morning that calls for the English to be banned from owning land in an independent Scotland. The correspondent, replying to an article about transparency in land ownership, writes: Foreign nationals should be banned from buying large areas of the Scottish lands and countryside. We must be about the only country in Europe where this is allowed. I would seriously consider adding buyers from England to this list in

Something is rotten in the state of Scotland. No, not the creaking CalMac ferry fleet but rather the health of free speech in the birthplace of the Enlightenment. The warning signs have been there for years now, what with the Hate Crime Act, the Scottish government’s efforts to evade Holyrood scrutiny and the SNP’s own intolerance for any kind of internal party dissent. But now a minor episode at a leading university perhaps best illustrates the sorry state of the right to dissent in Nicola Sturgeon’s Scotland. Students at the University of St Andrews last week published a short satirical article in their magazine the Saint, making fun of relations between London and Edinburgh. Titled ‘Och Aye