Iain Macwhirter

Just when you thought it was safe to go to back in the gender-neutral loo, back comes the row about the Gender Recognition Reform Bill. It lands in Scotland’s highest court today, the Court of Session. Lady Haldane will hear three days of argument on the UK government’s unprecedented veto under the Section 35 of the Scotland Act.  The GRR Bill, passed by the Scottish parliament in December after an acrimonious late-night debate, could allow people as young as 16 to change legal sex without a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria. It is opposed by around two thirds of Scottish voters. But the Scottish government is determined to see it on the statute book.

The SNP government can’t see a house fire without wanting to throw petrol on it. Scotland’s housing crisis is only too apparent to anyone looking for accommodation right now. Homelessness is rising rapidly with evictions doubling in a year; a quarter of a million Scots are on social housing waiting lists; and rents are going through the roof. Yet, the SNP Government and its Green partners seem determined to make matters worse by pursuing an ideological assault on private landlords which is forcing them out of the market.  It took governmental incompetence of epic proportions to create Scotland’s housing omnicrisis House prices have long been unaffordable in Scotland, having tripled since 2000. But now even the rental market is broken at every level.

The Scottish Green party are often accused of promoting ‘student politics’ so it is perhaps no surprise they are fielding a 20-year-old social policy student, Cameron Eadie, in the forthcoming Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election. What is a surprise is that they are standing at all. They’ve never stood here before. Indeed, Greens tend to avoid contesting constituency elections since they generally do rather badly, having only around 8 per cent of the popular vote in 2021. What mischief is the ‘wee green man’, Patrick Harvie, and his band of stop oil disrupters up to now, wonder SNP insiders. Haven’t the Greens caused enough trouble recently?

Among the exhibits in Edinburgh university’s famous anatomical museum are the bones of ‘Bowed Joseph’, a notorious 18th century rabble-rouser who could allegedly assemble a crowd of 10,000 by beating his drum. He was ‘bowed’ because Joseph had rickets, a disease that ravaged Scotland’s working classes until the middle of the last century. Rickets is a disease of poverty, caused by poor diet and lack of sunlight and it is back, to the shame of the Scottish government. Cases have risen 33 per cent from 354 in 2018 to 442 last year. Well, poverty is caused by Tory austerity, say SNP MSPs and nationalists on social media. This shows why Scotland must free itself from the toxic yoke of the Union. But wait a minute.

At last, a target Scotland's First Minister Humza Yousaf should have no trouble meeting. Waiting lists? The attainment gap? Dualling the A9? Of course not. Humza Yousaf says his forthcoming government reset can be expected to 'p**s people off'. When it comes to annoying people the First Minister is a veritable virtuoso. He has certainly irritated many in the SNP with his insistence on perpetuating the controversial alliance with the Scottish Green party.   Mr Yousaf clearly knows what side he’s on; unfortunately, Scottish voters are increasingly on the other side Yousaf is quite serious though.

The latest shock to hit the nationalist blogosphere is the revelation that the First Minister Humza Yousaf has recently broken bread with the billionaire Sir Brian Souter, the Stagecoach bus magnate. The encounter took place at a prayer breakfast last month and is regarded by some as a sign that Yousaf is trying to build bridges with the business community. No one knows what transpired in Yousaf’s meeting with the independence-supporting philanthropist. It may simply have been an attempt by the First Minister, a practising Muslim, to show his ecumenicism. Souter, after all, attends the evangelical Church of the Nazarene in his home town of Perth. However, there may also have been a more pecuniary motivation for the head-to-head.

The sad thing about the BBC’s dedicated Scottish channel, which has suffered another collapse in viewing figures, is that it’s actually rather good. Their flagship news programme The Nine, broadcast from BBC Scotland’s cavernous HQ at Pacific Quay on the Clyde, is very professional. It is presented by the excellent Martin Geissler, whose name you won’t find on the Daily Mail’s plutocratic presenter list of shame. They don’t pay that kind of money up here — and what they do get paid, they have to work twice as hard for. When I was asked to come north from Westminster to present the Holyrood Live programmes many years ago, I found the staffing was about one third of what I’d been used to in the BBC’s political HQ at Millbank.

Today Humza Yousaf’s 100 days as First Minister, yet not even that has gone right: the nationalist leader has been upstaged by the departure of Mhairi Black earlier this week. The SNP Westminster group's deputy leader announced she would not be standing for re-election on Tuesday, claiming that the culture of Westminster politics is too 'toxic'. That makes six nationalist MPs who have now thrown in the towel, or six 'Nats deserting the sinking ship', as Scottish Labour’s deputy leader Jackie Baillie put it. But this is certainly not the first time that Humza Yousaf has had the limelight stolen from him.

Nicola Sturgeon says she is 'gutted' at the decision by the SNP Westminster group's deputy leader, Mhairi Black, to stand down before the next general election. The MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire South told the News Agents podcast that the House of Commons is a 'toxic workplace' that has taken a toll on her 'body and mind'. She also says she is 'just tired' and wants to spend more time with her partner Katie, whom she married in 2022. Black joins a raft of SNP MPs, including the former Westminster leader Ian Blackford, who have decided to abandon Westminster politics in recent months. Also in the departure lounge are MPs Peter Grant, Angela Crawley, Stewart Hosie and Douglas Chapman.

Nicola Sturgeon handled the Covid pandemic rather well. You might not expect me to say that after all that’s happened this year, but it’s true. The former first minister was – or is – a highly effective communicator who managed to persuade Scottish voters that she knew what she was doing, even as she made all the same mistakes as Boris Johnson.  In her daily pandemic press conferences, she always sounded well briefed and coherent — unlike the prime minister, who often bumbled his way through his script falling back on bad jokes. Sturgeon focussed relentlessly on a single message: that social democratic Scotland was dealing with the pandemic in a more humane way than the Brexit Tories. It was largely rubbish, but she sounded good.

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. It’s only one poll, and blowback from Sturgeon’s arrest was expected.

The Scottish National party has been through difficult times in the past, but can anything compare with this week? Nicola Sturgeon arrested 'as a suspect' by Police Scotland in the investigation into party finances. The ignominious collapse of the deposit return scheme; the deepening scandal of the Ferguson Marine ferries. This must be the nadir, surely, of SNP fortunes. Or is it?  As the week progressed, SNP figures became visibly more relaxed and even started sounding rather bullish. Nothing to see here...Nicola hasn't been charged with anything...voters are focussed on Boris’s crimes. The SNP MSP, James Dornan, even accused the police and the media of 'collusion' and complained that officers had raided Sturgeon’s Uddingston home as if it were 'Fred West's house'.

Nicola Sturgeon - progressive icon, feminist champion, scourge of corrupt Tories - is, almost by definition, incapable of wrongdoing. As she insisted after her arrest on Sunday: 'I know beyond doubt that I am in fact innocent of any wrongdoing.' It is her truth. Her MSPs agree and have, we're told, sent her flowers to soothe her distress at this injustice. It was therefore something of an inconvenience that Police Scotland noted in their press statement on Sunday that the former FM had been 'arrested as a suspect' in their investigation into the funds and fundraising of the Scottish National Party. She was released seven hours later without charge and with the police reminding reporters and social media sleuths that this is an ongoing criminal investigation.

Despite calls for Sturgeon to be suspended from the party, Humza Yousaf has said today that he will not do so, telling BBC Scotland that he sees 'no reason' to suspend a party member who has been released without charge. Not all SNP politicians agree with him, though. Angus MacNeil, the MP for Na h-Eileanan an Iar, tweeted yesterday: ‘This soap opera has gone far enough, Nicola Sturgeon suspended others from the SNP for an awful lot less! Time for political distance until the investigation ends either way.’ Michelle Thomson, the SNP MSP who was suspended herself despite never being under police investigation, has called on Sturgeon to ensure her values are ‘consistent’ – and to resign the party whip after her arrest.

Given declining membership, internal divisions and the failure to deliver a referendum, it’s hardly surprising that the coffers of the Scottish National party appear to be emptying rather rapidly. The Electoral Commisson records that the SNP received only £4,000 in donations in the first quarter of 2023, down from over £90,000 in the same period last year. The Scottish Labour party raised £100,000 in those months — as did the Scottish LibDems. The last time a living person made a reportable donation to the party was in 2021. The SNP has always relied disproportionately on individual donations rather than corporate money from business or wealthy trade unions. That £4,000 came from the will of one donor, Mr James Murdoch (no relation).

It takes mismanagement of epic proportions to turn a relatively simple recycling scheme for bottles and cans into a major governmental crisis. It takes Herculean hypocrisy to then blame it on Westminster. Scotland's deposit return scheme (DRS), which plans to place a recoverable 20p on every single use container at the point of purchase, has been in a state of perpetual crisis for years, largely through the incompetence of the Green circular economy minister, Lorna Slater — well named because of her gyrations over the policy.  But now Humza Yousaf has decided to delay the introduction of the DRS until the UK scheme comes on stream around 2025.

'Dear transphobes, we have a phobia of your behaviour...Yours, Scotland'. That was just one of Police Scotland's 'Letters from Scotland' campaign posters that started appearing across Scotland five years ago. Misogynists, racists and religious bigots were warned by the chief constable Sir Iain Livingstone, who fronted the campaign, that they'd be dealt with the full force of the law. So it is more than a little ironic that, according to Sir Iain himself, the haters have been hiding in plain sight in the ranks of his own force. 'Police Scotland is institutionally racist and discriminatory,' Sir Iain announced today to the Scottish Police Authority. It is also institutionally sexist and no doubt deeply transphobic, though he didn't actually name check transphobia this time.