Stephen Daisley is a Spectator regular and a columnist for the Scottish Daily Mail
There isn’t much I agree with in the SNP’s manifesto for the Holyrood elections, so it seems peevish to cavil about the policies to which I am generally sympathetic. These are: a national care service, 100,000 new houses, abolition of dental charges, free school meals, investment in closing the attainment gap and more money for
This week’s Holyrood election debate should not be allowed to pass without noting how it highlighted the dismal state of Unionism. Nicola Sturgeon revisited a point she has been underscoring heavily during this campaign: that a majority of nationalist MSPs returned after May 6 would represent a mandate for another referendum on Scotland seceding from
Sometimes it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. In politics, it’s more often than not the latter that matters most. Liz Kendall, star of my somewhat unsuccessful 2015 campaign to ‘Make Liz Kendall Labour Leader and Queen of Everything’, has been pilloried online for suggesting care workers would be ‘better off stacking
There is a whiff of something in the current Scottish Parliament elections. It’s not quite strong enough to call it foul but nor is it faint enough to go undetected. What I can tell you is this: it doesn’t smell right. Yesterday, Alex Salmond’s new party, Alba, released a video depicting throngs of flag-waving nationalists
The death of the Duke of Edinburgh has paused campaigning in the Scottish Parliament election, which provides an opportunity to reflect on just how bizarre the election is proving to be. Naturally, the SNP is far ahead in the polls, on 53 per cent of the constituency vote in this week’s Ipsos-MORI research. SNP dominance
There was a Scooby Doo moment in Alex Salmond’s campaign launch on Tuesday. Something that made me think: ‘Ruh-roh’. The new leader of the Alba party was setting out his stall ahead of the 6 May Holyrood election and concentrating mostly on tactics. Voting for the SNP in the constituencies and Alba on the proportional
There is a certain kind of critic of independence who hears the news that public funding for Scotland is 30 per cent higher than for England and sits back thinking: ‘Job done’. The latest analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies does indeed confirm that the Union is a bargain for Scotland. It finds that,
I’m not sure anyone won the first leaders debate of the Holyrood election but Nicola Sturgeon definitely lost it. The SNP leader spent more than an hour on the defensive, first from voters, who joined via Zoom to harangue her for prioritising a second independence referendum during a pandemic, and then by the opposition leaders,
It’s the surest sign there’s an election on in Scotland: Nicola Sturgeon has become a social democrat again. Addressing her party’s spring conference today, the SNP leader vowed to double the Scottish child payment to £10 per week for under-16s in low-income families if the Nationalists are returned to government after 6 May. She explained:
When he was acquitted on sexual assault charges at the High Court in Edinburgh last March, I predicted: ‘Alex Salmond is back from the dead and he will have his revenge’. The past 12 months has seen a relentless onslaught against Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP establishment and anyone who thought that would culminate in
The Scottish government has suffered a major reversal in court over its Covid-19 regulations. The Court of Session has found its blanket ban on public worship to be unlawful. In January, Nicola Sturgeon closed places of worship across Scotland ‘for all purposes except broadcasting a service or conducting a funeral, wedding, or civil partnership’. She
There is a chance pro-Union voters in Scotland are about to shoot themselves in the foot, but every time I try to pry the gun away I’m met with outrage and incredulity. The source of the consternation is All for Unity (previously known as Alliance for Unity), or rather my insistence on pointing out some
The inquiry into the Alex Salmond affair has concluded that Nicola Sturgeon misled parliament and potentially breached the ministerial code. If you could swear you heard the exact opposite yesterday, that’s because you did. On Monday, the Scottish Government’s independent adviser James Hamilton released the findings of his inquiry into whether Sturgeon breached the code.
James Hamilton’s inquiry has found that Nicola Sturgeon did not breach the ministerial code. The former Irish prosecutor, who serves as the independent adviser on the code, was tasked with reviewing the Holyrood First Minister’s actions in relation to the Alex Salmond affair. Hamilton considered four allegations: That Sturgeon’s failure to record meetings and phone
The Scottish Parliament goes into recess on Wednesday ahead of devolved elections on 6 May. That gives Nicola Sturgeon three days to see off her opponents (inside the SNP as much as outside) before the campaign begins proper. Before she gets there, we will have to face the publication of the Holyrood inquiry report. This
My mob originates, we have come to assume, from somewhere in Ireland, though exactly where we don’t know. Humza Yousaf, justice secretary in the Scottish government, was born in Glasgow to immigrant parents — one from Pakistan, the other from Kenya. We were contemporaries at university (Glasgow), I became a journalist around the time he
The fallout from David Davis’s intervention in the Alex Salmond affair is all about the messages. The texts which the veteran Tory says he was given by a ‘whistleblower’ contain disturbing conversations between senior SNP and Scottish Government staffers. They raise questions about party involvement in a government investigation, the alleged ‘interference’ of Nicola Sturgeon’s
Among the many challenges facing Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross has been the question of definition. It is difficult to define yourself in the best of times, let alone in the middle of a pandemic. When, on top of this, your seat is in Westminster, and not the devolved parliament on which the Scottish media
Even for a virtual party conference, Boris Johnson’s speech to the Scottish Tories was a muted affair. As might be expected, the Prime Minister talked up the strength of the Union as demonstrated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Almost 2 million Scots had received a jab thanks to the 400 million vaccine doses secured by the
When Humza Yousaf first proposed his Hate Crime Bill, I compared it to the late, unlamented Offensive Behaviour Act. Similarly rushed through Holyrood by the SNP, it sought to rid Scottish football of sectarian behaviour by, among other things, criminalising the singing of certain songs at matches. The Act didn’t specify which songs and so
