Scotland

Mairi McAllan, the SNP government’s Housing Minister, Nicola Sturgeon protege, and leader in waiting (according to the gossip), has been lambasted for claiming that Scotland has ‘too few migrants’. McAllan said on the BBC’s The Sunday Show this week that migration was ‘good and necessary for the economy’. In doing so, she sidestepped the self-evident truth that the 4,000 or so asylum seekers who live in Glasgow – the highest figure for any local authority in the UK – are not making a particularly great contribution to the economy. She also brushed over other problematic issues, such as integration, but that’s par for the course with the Scot Nats.

A telling exchange from Tuesday night’s televised debate for the Scottish Parliament elections.  Malcolm Offord, businessman and Tory peer turned Reform’s leader north of the border, confronted Ross Greer, co-leader of the Scottish Greens and quite possibly the next deputy first minister of the devolved government. Reform is promising to cut voters’ taxes while the Greens are practically giddy at the prospect of raising them on ‘the super rich’, which would include Offord himself.  After detailing his background (Greenock tenement, local grammar, Edinburgh Uni) and his rocky entrepreneurial beginnings (he arrived in London 40 years ago, two grand in the red), Offord said: ‘Today, I own six houses, five cars, and six boats.

First Minister John Swinney needed a headline-grabbing new policy for the launch of his party’s Holyrood election manifesto yesterday, and it came in the form of a pledge to cap supermarket prices on ‘essential’ foods. Speaking in Glasgow’s East End, Swinney said that while inflation has come down, people are struggling to afford their groceries to such an extent that ‘for some the cost of food is so high that it is hitting their health and wellbeing’. He went on: ‘Now, with the current powers of our parliament, I cannot normally set prices at the till. But things have got so tough it is now impacting on our nation’s nutrition. That is a public health issue, and I have public health powers.

The Scottish Greens’ manifesto for Holyrood 2026 proposes the most far-reaching overhaul of the economy north of the border. I’ve been urging the party’s critics, of which I am one, to understand its growing support in the opinion polls as a reflection of Generation Rent, educated professionals and semi-professionals under the age of 40 who are stuck renting in the private sector. The Green manifesto, unveiled on Tuesday, is an unapologetic pitch to these voters, with pledges on housing, health, childcare, and workers’ rights to address their key concerns. Tenants would get the right to withhold rent where landlords fail to keep up with repairs and safety standards and would be entitled to four months’ notice before eviction.

A cardinal error in politics is hating your opponents so much you cannot understand them. If you know no one who supports Reform or the Greens, you have a limited social circle. If you cannot conceive of a reasonable person who might do so, you have a limited political imagination. A useful reminder comes in the form of a new poll from Ipsos that suggests the Greens will be the main opposition party in the Scottish Parliament after May’s devolved elections. Cue much horror and disbelief from the party’s detractors.

At this point there is only one way to salvage Reform’s Scottish Parliament election campaign. Granted it’s unorthodox and, well, illegal, but hear me out: arrange to have Malcolm Offord kidnapped. Not long-term or anything, just until 7 May and the Holyrood elections in which Reform Scotland is set to make sizeable gains. Or at least it was until mid-January, when the party was hit by a leadership crisis, that crisis being Offord’s appointment to the leadership. Offord has broken the cardinal rule of elections: don’t hand your opponents free ammunition Without a leader, Reform was climbing up the polls. With Offord as leader, it’s going back down again. I might be in some very small way to blame for this.

The Scottish Parliament is on the brink of passing a bill that would see Catholic hospitals and care homes shut down. The Bishops’ Conference of Scotland says it is ‘deeply disappointed’ by the rejection of an amendment to the Assisted Dying Bill that would have given institutions a right of conscientious objection. If the bill becomes law, it will mean that a Catholic hospice or care home would have no right to exempt itself from participation in the assisted suicide of one of its residents. The bishops state that assisted suicide is ‘fundamentally incompatible’ with the ‘guiding values’ of Catholic institutions, and raise the prospect of hospices and nursing homes having to ‘decide between acting contrary to their foundational values or closing’.

Farewell, then, Alba, the little party that tried to take on the Scottish political establishment and learned, as others had before it, that the establishment always wins. You can join it but you can never beat it. When Salmond went, so did Alba’s soul Just to rub salt into the wound, the party has imploded only two months before the Scottish Parliament elections. And that was Alba’s only real purpose: to contribute to a pro-independence majority at Holyrood which, so the notion went, would then notify Westminster that Scotland was leaving. This was the plan set out by the late Alex Salmond in which he would have played the part of Moses, Keir Starmer Pharaoh, and the Scots the Israelites: ‘Let ma people go!

The SNP might be heading to another victory – but all is not going swimmingly for the nationalists. The party's former chief executive Peter Murrell – best known as Nicola Sturgeon's estranged husband – is in the firing line over more allegations concerning the party finances. Murrell is facing a charge of embezzling £459,000 from the party over a period of more than 12 years, according to a copy of an indictment seen by the BBC and Scottish Sun. Uh oh... According to the document, Murrell is accused of embezzling the funds between August 2010 and January 2023. He is is alleged to have used the cash to buy items including cars, a motorhome, luxury goods, shoes, cosmetics and jewellery over a twelve-and-a-half year period.

There is a 1953 Warner Bros short, Zipping Along, in which Wile E. Coyote, frustrated with the failure of his elaborate schemes to kill the Road Runner, opts for a simpler method. He acquires a grenade, pulls the pin with his teeth, and chucks the explosive at the infernal Californian cuckoo. Only he does it the wrong way round, chomping down on the body, lobbing the safety pin at the Road Runner and promptly blowing himself up.  Anas Sarwar has done much the same with his statement calling for Keir Starmer to resign as prime minister over the Peter Mandelson/Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Addressing journalists in Glasgow, he said Scots were ‘crying out for competent government’ and that ‘the situation in Downing Street is not good enough; there have been too many mistakes.

There is no shortage of noise in contemporary politics, nor of people keen to confuse it with authority. Jeane Freeman, the former Scottish health minister who passed away this weekend, never did. She moved through political life with the calm confidence of someone who was always three steps ahead of any room she was in and entirely comfortable letting others catch up. This is not, however, to be confused with arrogance, of which she displayed not a hint. I came to know Jeane a little over the last few years, meeting every so often for coffee or lunch. I can’t claim we were close friends, but I always enjoyed those catch-ups. They were fun, full of gossip and the sort of dark humour that comes naturally to people who have spent too long watching their own party eat itself.

The women are at it again. For Women Scotland (FWS), specifically. They’re the pressure group who took on the Scottish government, which believes men are women if they say so, and secured a Supreme Court judgment that ‘sex’ in the Equality Act refers to biological rather than ‘certificated’ sex. Now they’re back in court taking on the same government over its policy of allowing some male prisoners who identify as trans to be held in the female estate. Aidan O’Neill KC, who is representing FWS, suggested to the Court of Session on Tuesday morning that the Scottish government was doubling down as ‘a political calculation’ and that women locked up with men were being ‘used by the Scottish government in this case to be traded as pawns for political gain’.

Humza Yousaf’s inglorious year as first minister will not be remembered for many lasting achievements. But he does, at least, have one legacy. In October 2023, Yousaf told the SNP party conference: ‘I can confirm that by the end of this parliament the SNP Government will – subject of course to due diligence and market testing – go directly to the international bond market for the first time in our own right.’ Yousaf did not hide the true motivation for the bond programme, adding: We will show the world not only that we are a country to invest in today. We will also demonstrate the credibility to international markets that we will need when we become an independent country. Delegates, the SNP is delivering for the people of Scotland today.

The biggest beneficiary of Robert Jenrick’s defenestration and defection was neither Kemi Badenoch nor Nigel Farage but Malcolm Offord. He is the former Tory peer whose unveiling as Reform’s Scottish leader was in progress when the purring notifications orchestra struck up among the assembled reporters and Reform staffers. The news of Jenrick’s ouster dominated the remainder of the proceedings, which was fortunate for Offord because his first media event as leader was a handy reminder of his shortcomings. Reform is trying to have it both ways with Offord, selling him as a political outsider and a safe pair of hands with experience in parliament and government. If he truly were a political outsider, it might mitigate some of his unimpressive responses to media questions.