Iain Macwhirter

‘Now is not the time,’ successive Tory prime ministers told Nicola Sturgeon following her persistent calls for another independence referendum. It’s simply too soon after the last one, they said. In August, the Scottish secretary, Alister Jack, caused fury in nationalist circles after he stated there would need to be at least 60 per cent

Scotland has the worst drug death rate in Europe. More than half a million Scots are on hospital waiting lists. The NHS is being privatised by stealth as more and more Scots go private. We don’t hear much about this in the endless SNP leadership hustings. Instead there is an air of self-congratulation that things aren’t worse.

The SNP leadership has turned into open civil war. Alex Salmond has shafted the frontrunner Humza Yousaf who tried to shaft Kate Forbes, who was, in turn, shafted by Nicola Sturgeon. No wonder long-suffering deputy First Minister, John Swinney, has resigned.  Swinney’s departure came on the day Salmond torpedoed Yousaf, Sturgeon’s chosen successor, by claiming

Is the Windsor Framework a get-out-of-jail card for Scottish nationalists? The excitement expressed in SNP circles at Rishi Sunak’s Protocol breakthrough yesterday was palpable. For if remaining in the EU single market while staying in the UK is good for Northern Ireland, surely this could be the case too for an independent Scotland? Isn’t this

There’s a fourth person in this SNP leadership race, only he’s not on the ticket and he can’t be elected as leader. The former SNP leader and First Minister, Alex Salmond is using this chaotic leadership election to engineer his rehabilitation.  Ash Regan, the former community safety minister, who launched her leadership campaign on Friday

Bring back Nicola Sturgeon. The race to replace her as SNP leader and first minister has turned into the mother of all culture wars. Who would have thought that the party of independence would start tearing itself apart over a law on same sex marriage that was passed nearly a decade ago? The early front runner,

Scottish nationalists are shell-shocked after their leader did a bunk on Wednesday. And with good reason. Nicola Sturgeon left the SNP leaderless, directionless, failing on almost every policy front – from the NHS to bottle recycling – and with a legislative time bomb in the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which is due to go off just

Dazed and confused by their leader’s sudden departure, Scottish nationalists are now deeply worried that Nicola Sturgeon has taken the independence dream with her. She hasn’t of course. Independence is a long game and there remain many true believers. However the chances of transforming the Scottish National party’s immense electoral success into a referendum on

Nicola Sturgeon insisted last month she had ‘plenty in the tank’, but apparently the First Minister was already running on empty. Announcing her resignation this morning, Sturgeon said she finally decided to step down only yesterday at the funeral of a long-serving SNP activist. However she also made clear she had begun to realise over the

It is vanishingly rare for the SNP-supporting paper The National – a publication that makes Pravda look like the Washington Post – to place anything remotely critical of Nicola Sturgeon on its front page. Yet on Wednesday it warned that the Dear Leader’s ploy to turn the 2024 general election into a ‘de facto referendum’

Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, has led a charmed life. Even her sternest critics agree that she is immensely talented, one of the UK’s most successful politicians, a master of detail and an effective communicator. She has been at the pinnacle of public life for two decades. But all things must pass. Nearly ten years

Could the extraordinary scandal of transgender sex offenders being sent to women’s prisons come at any worse a time for Nicola Sturgeon? Only days after her flagship Gender Recognition Reform (GRR) Bill was stalled by Westminster’s government on the grounds that it might have an ‘adverse impact’ on women’s safety, it emerged that women have

When Rishi Sunak had dinner with Nicola Sturgeon last week, the idea was to show he was interested in a friendly relationship: a ‘constructive dialogue’. Liz Truss had dismissed Sturgeon as an ‘attention seeker’ who was ‘best ignored’, but Sunak preferred a more positive approach. He was keen to pose for pictures afterwards. This new

‘Shadowbanning’, ‘visibility filtering’, ‘de-amplification’ – the Twitter Files released since Elon Musk took over have given us a new and sinister language of digital censorship. I am no fan of Musk’s capricious self-promotion. His vanity appals me and his vindictive attacks on former Twitter employees are gross. However, I credit him with telling us more about the inner

Two self delusions have sustained the SNP through the past couple of decades of devolution. The first is the perennial grievance that deteriorating public services are the result of Westminster austerity. The second is that Scotland’s social problems can be solved through redistribution – by taxing the rich. Both have now collapsed in the face

The SNP should be basking in its recent formidable polling success. Not only does support for independence appear to be on the rise – with 56 per cent in favour, according to the latest Ipsos Mori poll – but there is evidence too that the SNP could win an outright majority in the next Scottish

Only Gordon Brown could come up with a 40-point plan for constitutional renewal. ‘Less is more’ is not a principle with which the former Prime Minister is familiar. When his UK constitutional commission was launched in 2020 we were promised a ‘radical alternative to nationalism’ and a ‘constitutional revolution’ to remake Britain along federal lines. What has