Iain Macwhirter is a former BBC TV presenter and was political commentator for The Herald between 1999 and 2022. He is an author of Road to Referendum and Disunited Kingdom: How Westminster Won a Referendum but Lost Scotland.
The first thing to say is that Nicola Sturgeon has been cleared in an investigation into the SNP’s funding and finances, with no case to answer, scot-free. That may seem a statement of the bleedin’ obvious, but there are many in and out of the independence movement who do not and never will believe that
The departure of the former Scottish First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, from active politics draws a line under the Scottish National Party’s greatest generation. Her former mentor, Alex Salmond, died suddenly of a heart attack in October. Now, Sturgeon has told her supporters that “the time is right for me to embrace different opportunities and to
Keir Starmer has sought to get into Donald Trump’s good books by boosting defence expenditure – and doing it in a very Maga way: slashing the UK aid budget to pay for it. That has no doubt caught the eye of the US president, as has the Prime Minister’s promise to put British boots on
What were they thinking? When Tony Blair agreed, in 2004, to legislation allowing transsexuals – as they were then called – to change their legal sex, he probably thought Labour was merely ‘being kind’ to a tiny number of people with the medical condition of gender dysphoria. He never expected thousands of young people to start asking
I never imagined that I would see a real revolution, at least not in the West. Sure, when I was a student, I fantasised, along with a number of my Edinburgh University lecturers, about a socialist revolution in the UK. Expropriate the expropriators! Ban the bosses! Nationalise everything and abolish money. But, of course, nothing
Drill, baby drill. The mood on Net Zero is changing in the Scottish parliament where a majority of MSPs have signed a petition calling for a reversal on the ban on new oil and gas licenses in the North Sea. This sea change in attitudes to the black stuff, if you’ll excuse the pun, could
Two years ago, I was the victim of a peculiarly postmodern version of left-wing cancel culture. After joking on Twitter about the Tory government being a ‘coconut cabinet’, I was given the boot by the Herald, a newspaper where I had worked for 20 years. My downfall was swift. People I trusted turned on me
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The SNP presented their budget this week in Holyrood with the news that all pensioners would receive a winter fuel allowance and a pledge to scrap the two-child benefit cap. Questions remain about how they will make this budget work financially, but it is clear that they have one eye on the 2026 Scottish Parliament
Another Scottish budget and another dire warning from the spending watchdog, Audit Scotland, that the National Health Service in Scotland is out of control and heading for disaster. With almost one sixth of the Scottish population on a waiting list, around 10 per cent of beds occupied by people who shouldn’t be there, and daily horror stories from accident
In a scenario straight out of Monty Python, learned judges in the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom will today start solemnly debating what a ‘woman’ is. Yes, really. After a decade of misogynistic sophistry, the most elemental fact of human existence is now in doubt and has been handed to the highest court to determine.
Environmental campaigners are hoping to announce at Cop29 that they’ve halted two major oil and gas fields in the North Sea. A crucial court battle over the fate of the the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields began in the Court of Session in Edinburgh today. The greens smell victory over evil fossil fuel companies. But closing these
You may have thought that the Scottish government had abandoned gender metaphysics after the collapse of the ‘Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill’ last year. Think again. The SNP government appears to be heading back down the non-binary rabbit hole. This week it issued official guidance to public bodies suggesting that they should record public identities under no
The last thing Labour needs right now, after the last hundred days of scandal and mishap, is a row over immigration. So the party will not have been pleased this morning to see reports in the Scottish press suggesting that the Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, is considering introducing a separate Scottish immigration visa, which would
It is hard to believe that I will no longer wake up on Monday mornings to the sound of Alex Salmond on the phone, either berating me for my latest offence against journalism or telling me what I should be saying about the most recent political scandal. The former SNP leader and First Minister of
So here’s a thing. Last week a prominent defence lawyer broke ranks and declared that the police investigation into alleged misuse of SNP party funds – Operation Branchform – had been going on too long and should be wound up pronto. Scottish criminal defence lawyer Thomas Leonard Ross KC told Sky News the probe ‘cannot go
Hard-working Scots could be forgiven for resorting to a stiff drink tonight as they contemplate an extraordinary triple attack on their living standards. The minimum unit price of alcohol has risen by 30 per cent, peak-time rail tickets have nearly doubled, and the energy price cap has just gone up by 10 per cent or
If you really want to annoy a Scottish nationalist, tell them the 2014 Scottish independence referendum had a lot in common with Brexit. Well, what was the battle cry in both cases? It was ‘take back control’. For all its internationalist rhetoric, the Yes campaign was – is – a campaign to erect borders against a
The poor are always with us, Jesus said, and that has never been more true than in Scotland over the past 25 years. One in four children is still languishing in poverty, according to the Scottish government’s own statistics. This ratio never seems to change, whoever is in power and however much is spent on it. First Minister John
As the SNP gathers for its conference in Edinburgh this weekend, its membership nearly halved from a peak of 125,691, there is a palpable sense of confusion and drift, laced with anxiety for the future. ‘Horsed’ is how the former SNP MP Stewart McDonald describes the SNP’s likely fate at the 2026 Holyrood election unless something serious is
Scotland’s drug misuse deaths – the worst in Europe – have long been a stain on the Scottish government’s record. Today it just got worse. The latest figures show a shocking 12 per cent increase in drug deaths to 1,172. It dashes hopes that last year’s dip in mortality showed that the problem was easing.
