Scotland

The SNP’s Dear Leader has not had the smoothest 18 months since her resignation last year – what with the police probe into SNP finances, the exodus of members from her party and the nationalists’ staggering loss of support in the general election. But it’s not all bad news for Nicola Sturgeon. It has now emerged that Scotland’s former first minister was paid a whopping £25,000 for playing pundit back in July, after Sturgeon controversially appeared on Channel 4’s election night special. Alright for some… The rather generous payment was logged by the SNP politician on the Scottish parliament’s register of interests’, which was published today. Sturgeon declared that her

If there’s one thing the SNP truly excels at, it’s maintaining double standards. The extraordinary case of the Scottish government and the missing legal advice makes clear just how hypocritical the SNP is when it comes to conduct in public life. Scottish nationalists are swift to condemn opponents at the slightest whiff of impropriety but, as this matter demonstrates, when it comes to their own morality, they’re more easy-going. Back in 2021, then first minister Nicola Sturgeon was cleared of breaching the Scottish parliament’s ministerial code over her involvement in the case of complaints made by female civil servants against her predecessor, the late Alex Salmond. Inevitably, opposition parties demanded

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 cancellation of the two-spirit people

The SNP has fired through multiple leaders in recent months, and it now looks to be doing the same with CEOs. After former Daily Record editor Murray Foote announced his resignation last week, the Nats have appointed a new interim chief executive – who has already managed to cause quite a stir… Carol Beattie was formerly the CEO of Stirling Council until she stepped down earlier this year, releasing a rather scathing resignation letter in the process. As reported by the Scottish Daily Mail, Beattie blasted party decisions after lamenting the council authority had suffered ‘more than a decade of cuts to its budget’, which is decided by the, er,

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. The UK government certainly seems

Heartfelt tributes were paid to the late Alex Salmond in the Commons today. A number of politicians from across the house shared memories of the former first minister of Scotland in a series of points of order, with the SNP’s Westminster leader Stephen Flynn first to speak on the ‘most talented, formidable and consequential politician of his generation’. Scotland Secretary Ian Murray joked that the Scotland Office had brought Salmond and his wife Moira together, while Conservative John Lamont insisted that the pro-indy politician was ‘undoubtedly a giant’ in politics. Next it was the turn of close friend and confidante of Salmond, Sir David Davis MP. ‘Very, very few people

In reflecting on the life of Alex Salmond, I should begin by paraphrasing his successor as First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon. I cannot pretend that the last few years of the breakdown in his relationship with the mainstream of the party he once led did not happen, but we cannot help but reflect on a remarkable political life. Salmond was central to the birth of the modern SNP. As former political editor of the Herald Murray Ritchie put it, he took an ‘ill-disciplined, fractious and impecunious fringe party and established it as the dominant force in Scottish political life’, noting: ‘This in a country where Labour had been in control for

When he lost his Gordon seat in the 2017 general election, Alex Salmond told his count and those watching – friend and foe – that ‘you’ve not seen the last o’ my bonnet and me’. The line comes from Sir Walter Scott’s Bonnie Dundee, an ode to John Graham, the 1st Viscount Dundee, who led the 1689 Jacobite uprising to restore James VII and the House of Stuart. Quoting the lyric was pure Salmond. Not only was he fond of weaving poetry into his public statements – an art sadly lost to most political rhetoricians – it reflected his self-mythologising as a modern-day Scottish rebel against the British establishment. Salmond

Welcome to the land of the unfree – otherwise known as Scotland. John Swinney’s SNP government have laid out its rules for anti-abortionists north of the border, and the measures are even worse than many campaigners first imagined. Buffer zones – in which pro-life activists cannot protest – were introduced at the end of September after MSPs passed the Abortion Services (Safe Access Zones) (Scotland) bill earlier in the year. And it now turns out that if residents living within these exclusion areas, within 200 metres of abortion clinics, hang protestations in their windows, they could be fined up to £10,000. Golly. In a letter sent to residents by the

The thing about being holier than thou is that you actually have to be holier. Stephen Flynn, the SNP’s leader at Westminster, has made much of Sir Keir Starmer’s freebie woes. The SNP called for an investigation into Lord Alli’s donations to the Prime Minister and Flynn used a newspaper column to observe: ‘Of course, it’s important to say that such clothing gifts come with no attachments. No, none at all. They are all just from the kindness of a filthy-rich donor’s heart. I mean, who doesn’t have friends like that?’ Fortunately – and unfortunately – for him, Labour donors aren’t the only generous contributors in politics. Questions are mounting