Iain Macwhirter

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 ruthlessly. But I don't think my tweet – whipped up by a handful of performative offence-takers – would have led to my cancellation had it happened in 2024. Why? Because Twitter/X has changed beyond all recognition. It no longer has a chokehold on political culture. Elon Musk has done the world a favour, even if the verdict is out on what X has turned into under his watch.

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 and emergency, the service is long past breaking point. Yet the NHS is gobbling up 40 per cent of the entire Scottish budget, according to Audit Scotland’s director, Stephen Boyle. With increased staffing and higher pay, the health service is simply ‘unsustainable’. The NHS, free at the point of need, is no longer sustainable We have known this for years. Audit Scotland’s last shock report was only eight months ago.

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. But if they’re confused about what a woman is, you say, why don’t they just consult a school textbook on human biology? Or perhaps ask a representative sample of women. A female human surely is defined by her birth sex. But no – in our crazy, looking-glass world of identity politics, there is, it appears, no fixed legal definition of womanhood. Over two days of hearings, five judges, led inevitably by a man, Lord Reed of Allermuir, will try to find one.

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 two fields won’t advance net zero by a single day since we will still have to import oil and gas from abroad. Shell, Equinor and Ithaca had received consent from the North Sea Transiton Authority last September to proceed with drilling in the fields following an environment impact assessment (EIA).

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 fewer than 24 gender categories. These include, in no particular order, genderqueer, genderfluid, bigender, androgynous, non-conforming, pangender, and neutral. Do they never learn? The LGBTQIA+ community will no doubt be worried about the absence of several gender that have featured prominently in the literature on non-binary identity, such as ‘two-spirit’.

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 help Scotland counter its falling birth rate. This is not the first time the idea of a Scottish visa has surfaced. It has long been campaigned for by the SNP, with the nationalist MP Stephen Gethins tabling an amendment this week to allow Scotland to set up its own visa regime.

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 Scotland was of the old school: combative and relentless, always on the phone, never stopping, never at rest, a 24/7 politician. We always said he would never cease promoting the cause of Scottish independence while he still had breath in his body. He didn’t. Alex Salmond died in North Macedonia, shortly after giving a speech. He was the most astute, gifted, and energetic politician of his generation The Scottish political world is in genuine shock.

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 on indefinitely'. 'Once somebody is charged then they have the right to a trial within a reasonable time,' he said. Many Scottish politicians have been saying this privately too – not all of them nationalists.

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 £149. Oh, and many pensioners have also lost their winter fuel payments thanks to Rachel Reeves, ‘the pensioner freezer’, as the Labour chancellor is being called, even by some in the Scottish Labour party. But that hike in the minimum unit price of alcohol, which adds insult to injury, is entirely down to the Scottish government.

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 union, the United Kingdom, that its advocates say does not serve the nation’s interests. Strip down the Leave campaign and it too was about erecting borders – albeit against a different union, the EU, which was claimed not to serve the nation’s interests. Indeed, historians may come to regard 2014 as the first manifestation of the national populism that has rocked Europe over the past decade. The 2016 Brexit referendum was just the next shoe to drop.

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 done to arrest the party’s electoral decline. But the SNP is without answers and most importantly without a credible leader after last month’s general election disaster. How, after losing 39 of the 48 seats it won in 2019, is John Swinney still in charge?

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. It’s all about poverty and deprivation, say politicians quoting the various drug charities who insist drug addiction should be treated as a social disease. But this doesn’t explain why the Scottish death rate is three times that of England's. Scotland is not three times more deprived. Nor is it down to Westminster cuts, as nationalists invariably claim. Scotland continues to receive about 20 per cent more per head in public expenditure than England.

There are disturbing parallels between the meltdown of the Labour administration in Wales and the recent chaos of the SNP government in Scotland. Dodgy fundraising issues, votes of no confidence, forced resignations, woke policies, ever-lengthening NHS waiting lists and even scandals over deleted WhatsApps during Covid. What’s going on? Is there something systemically awry with devolution? The Scottish and Welsh parliaments, established after referendums 25 years ago, were supposed to bring power closer to the people and improve the quality of government. In the recent past, at least, they have succeeded in doing neither. Reckless incompetence in both administrations has further diminished respect for politics and delivered demonstrably inferior government.

As the hours tick down to polling day, Scottish nationalists are beginning to assess the damage this election campaign has inflicted on the cause of Scottish independence. Far from being a springboard to a second independence referendum, as Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf had forecast, it looks set to draw a line under the wave of Scottish nationalism that has dominated Scottish politics for most of the last two decades as the SNP’s new leader, John Swinney fails to stop the party's relentless slide in voter support. If the SNP leader is living the dream his party looks set to inherit the nightmare It’s a hard lesson in the vicissitudes of politics.

The road to hell, as we all know, is paved with good intentions. It is also lined with reams of paper policies which inhibit action, increase bureaucracy and achieve contradictory results. The ones who generally benefit are the high priests of the bureaucratic order: lawyers, consultants, academics and NGOs. So no prizes for guessing who will mainly benefit from Labour’s promise to achieve the dream of every far-left activist since Proudhon: make economic inequality illegal.  The Labour manifesto commits Keir Starmer to implement the ‘socio-economic duty’ (SED) of the 2010 Equality Act, which potentially criminalises ‘inequalities that result from differences in occupation, education, place of residence or social class’.