It is no surprise that the Scottish Conservative manifesto launch was centred on independence. While Scotland’s Tories talk about the SNP’s obsession with the subject, they are a little less happy to mention their own preoccupation with separatism. It’s rather more awkward for the Scottish Conservative and Unionist party to admit that, without independence on the table, their role in Scotland becomes a little less clear.
'Betgate' might be giving us some laughs but there's one person who clearly isn't cracking jokes. A notably vexed Rishi Sunak gave an interview to STV this afternoon on a visit to campaign with the Scottish Conservative party. He told the broadcaster that he was 'angry' about allegations that Tory candidates put bets on the date of the election and that the Conservatives are now running its own probe alongside the Gambling Commission. Anyone want to place a wager on who the culprits are? It was left to broadcaster Colin Mackay to suggest to Sunak that he should remove Craig Williams and Laura Sanders as Tory candidates before the election day.
Back to Scotland, where Rishi Sunak is attending the Scottish Conservatives’ manifesto launch in Edinburgh. Leaving the ongoing betting scandal in London, the Prime Minister walked into another controversy – about the football. Before Sunak launched into his speech he made a point of agreeing with Scottish Tory leader and linesman Douglas Ross that Scotland should have been awarded a penalty in last night's Euros match. It's certainly one way to get the Scots on side... The issue of oil and gas a key dividing line for the Scottish Tories, Sunak highlighted how the positions of other parties on new licences could cost jobs. Slamming Sir Keir's Labour lot, the PM claimed that Starmer's army would 'rather virtue signal to eco-zealots than protect jobs here at home'.
Women in Scotland have a difficult choice to make in this election. Those whoomen, that is, who are concerned about a return of any version of the infamous Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill and the policy of allowing transgender people to self-identify as another sex. It looks very much as if only the Conservative party is serious about abandoning self-ID, protecting women’s rights and asserting the primacy of biological sex, not least in what is taught in schools. Yet, very few Scottish women, and even fewer feminists, are natural Tory voters. Indeed, Scots of all genders tend to shun the party.
Oh dear. It seems that 'honest John' Swinney is embroiled in another fine mess, this time about taxpayer-funded election expenses at Holyrood. Strict rules state that MSPs are entitled to claim up to £5,500 per year for stationery, but it must be used only for parliamentary duties. Yet now one of the Scottish First Minister's staffers has been caught joking about the 'stamp fairy' helping with campaigning. Probably not the best quip to make when Operation Branchform is still ongoing... According to the Scottish parliament's rules, stamps and other items bought with the allowance must explicitly not be deployed for any 'party political purposes'.
Judges on the Supreme Court appear to have joined Just Stop Oil. In a landmark ruling, with profound implications for the UK energy industry, they’ve said that Surrey County Council cannot give permission to drill new wells on an existing extraction site, Horse Hill, which already has a couple of them. This is because the oil might be burnt – which admittedly tends to happen with hydrocarbon fuels. Net Zero campaigners who brought the original action against the 'Gatwick Gusher' as they called it back in 2019 are 'over the moon'. The Scottish government, however, is not quite so sanguine. The Supreme Court's ruling is illogical Could the ruling mean the end of oil and gas fields, such as Rosebank off Shetland and Jackdaw off Aberdeen?
The SNP may be in crisis, with police investigating the use of party funds and support from voters sliding, but the current General Election campaign obliges leader John Swinney to pretend everything in the garden continues to bloom. Launching the Nats' manifesto in Edinburgh on Wednesday, the First Minister acted as if his scandal-scarred party was still the unstoppable force it once seemed to be. On 4 July, if Scots wanted independence, then a vote for the SNP was the way to achieve it, he said. Victory in a majority of Scottish seats would, said Swinney, mean a mandate for him to 'embark on negotiations with the UK government to turn the democratic wishes of people in Scotland into a reality'.
In a general election campaign that has oftentimes presented scenarios that feel like a fever dream, the surreal headlines keep coming. ‘Sir Keir Starmer agrees with Sir Tony Blair,’ we read this week, ‘that a man has a penis and a woman has a vagina’. Newspaper articles focused on two Labour leaders in simpatico and this is the outcome? ‘Tony’s right about that,’ Sir Keir said, in response to his colleague’s statement of fact: ‘He put it very well.’ That clattering noise is the sound of women’s eyebrows shooting from their heads to hit the ceiling; women who have said – and said repeatedly – this very thing, only to receive abuse. While the manifesto pledges may differ in substance, they have in common the fact they are both frustratingly vague.
‘Is the biggest problem for the SNP at this election,’ a Times journalist quizzed Scotland’s First Minister John Swinney this morning, ‘a deficit of enthusiasm?’ The SNP leader was in Edinburgh, launching the party’s general election manifesto. It focused on public service improvement, eradication of child poverty, worker’s rights and, of course, Scottish independence. But enthusiasm for the party is hitting new lows – and at a time when the Westminster group looks on track to lose over half its seats in the election, was the manifesto enough to convince Scotland’s undecided voters to vote SNP? Independence may be ‘page one, line one’ of the SNP’s manifesto, but it was only first mentioned in the fourteenth sentence of Swinney’s launch speech today.
Line one page one of the SNP manifesto is, as promised, about independence. If the SNP wins a majority of seats it will 'be empowered to begin immediate negotiations with the UK government to give democratic effect to Scotland becoming an independent country'. Well in your dreams. No one seriously believes that independence is coming, even in the SNP. The leadership has been underplaying independence in this election so far; John Swinney hardly mentioned it in the first leaders debate. The nationalists realise that it is better not to call this 2024 general election any kind of 'de facto referendum' as Nicola Sturgeon claimed it would be. This is for the very obvious reason that they would lose it.
It's a day ending in 'y' which means that a political party somewhere is having candidate drama. This time it's Sir Keir Starmer's lefty Labour lot, who have had to drop their Aberdeenshire North and Moray East candidate over controversial social media posts about Russia and antisemitism. Oh dear... Andy Brown shared contentious posts about the 2018 Salisbury poisonings, in which the nerve agent Novichok was used in an attempt to take the lives of former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. The links shared by the ex-Labour candidate raised doubts about Putin's involvement in the attack and suggested that the life-threatening nerve agent did not come from Russia.
'The thing is,' says one Conservative member of the Scottish parliament, 'that we wanted rid of him – just not like this.' Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross’s decision to stand in next month’s General Election infuriated colleagues. His response to that backlash – to resign his position – has driven some of them positively apoplectic with rage. If Douglas Ross’s successor wishes to see a revival in the political centre-right in Scotland, their first decision should be to abolish the party they lead The Scottish Conservatives, revived from near death by former leader Ruth Davidson, are now heading towards polling day under the stewardship of a man who’s made it abundantly clear that he prioritises Westminster over Holyrood.
Humza Yousaf is back with a bang. Now the embattled politician has taken to the Grauniad’s opinion pages to write a fiery piece on ‘anti-Muslim hatred’. In an explosive entry, the ex-SNP leader claims that Muslims across the continent are ‘fearful’ due to ‘growing popularity and mainstreaming of the far right’. 'It is increasingly difficult to persuade fellow Muslims that Europe does not have a problem with our very existence,’ he notes. In 2024, almost half the world’s population will take part in elections. Many countries have already gone to the polls, and in a number of countries, particularly across Europe, the biggest gains have been made by those who make a living out of vilifying Muslims.
Dear oh dear. Back to Scotland and the chaos of the SNP. Former health secretary Michael Matheson was suspended for 27 days and received a 54-day salary ban last month after he tried to use the public purse to cover his £11,000 iPad data roaming bill. Now it transpires that the Nat has accepted a £12,000 ‘golden goodbye’ despite his suspension. Talk about shameless… Although the former minister was hit with one of the harshest punishments that Holyrood’s standards committee has ever dished out, it turns out that Matheson has still accepted £12,712.25 of resettlement grant money.
The SNP has dominated Scotland since 2015. In an election held just months after the independence referendum, the country turned almost entirely yellow – with the exception of just three seats. Subsequent national polls have resulted in nothing more than modest change. The question this time is whether the SNP’s hold over Scotland is about to break – and nowhere is this issue more pressing than in Scotland’s central belt. The bellwether constituency of East Renfrewshire is facing a unique three-horse race between Scotland’s main parties. But despite the abundance of choice on offer to constituents this time, there’s just one problem: they’ve fallen out of love with politics.
Uh oh. Back to Scotland where, for once, the chaos doesn't concern the country's biggest nationalist party. This time Alex Salmond’s pro-independence group, Alba, is in the spotlight over a rather public debacle with Scottish broadcasters STV. Salmond has taken issue with STV’s decision to move his party’s election broadcast slot from this Friday – the same day Scotland will play Germany in the Euros – to next week. The broadcaster changed the timings over concerns that the party would have an 'unfair advantage' if the screening went out before or after the game – to which Alba have responded by sending out a number of fiery press releases that demand STV be taken to 'Ofcom's election court' and shown the ‘red card’. Goodness...
It is a measure of the extent of the SNP’s decline that nationalist activists have seized on a new Ipsos poll that shows the party is now neck and neck with Scottish Labour. After all, it was only 18 months ago that the same company suggested the SNP enjoyed the support of more than half of people in Scotland, with Anas Sarwar’s party languishing on 25 per cent. Two resignations, a campervan and several unpopular policies later, however, and the SNP is now regularly recorded as being behind Scottish Labour, in one recent poll by as much as 10 points. Hence the excitement in otherwise weary nationalist circles that they may now be, at least, back to level pegging. But despite the encouraging overall headline in this latest poll for the SNP, the devil is in the detail.
Back to Scotland, where the SNP's Dear Leader is back in the news — literally, this time. It transpires that Nicola Sturgeon will be one of ITV's election night pundits during the overnight vote count. The former first minister will appear alongside Ed Balls and George Osborne to provide expert analysis while the election results come out, with Sturgeon billed by the broadcaster as a 'political insider'. You can say that again... But where Sturgeon goes, drama is never too far behind. Predictably the former FM's critics have been quick to lambast the ex-SNP leader, with charges of hypocrisy levelled at Sturgeon for accepting a gig her party once blasted Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson for.
Scottish Tory leader, Douglas Ross, has said he’ll resign after the 4 July election following criticism of his treatment of a rival Tory candidate and questions over his expenses. It is unusual, to say the least, for a party leader to announce their intention to step down during a general election campaign rather than after it. Even more singular for that leader to continue representing his party in leadership debates, as Ross did on the BBC last night. That elicited the best line of the night from a quick-witted audience member: 'You need to tidy the flat before you move out, John' With this in mind, the best question of the night came from the BBC presenter, Stephen Jardine, who asked Ross: 'Why should anyone vote for a party you don’t even want to lead?'.
Another day, another drama. As general election campaign shenanigans continue, it now transpires that Robin Harper — the UK's first ever Green parliamentarian and former leader of the Scottish Greens — has jumped ship to Sir Keir Starmer's Labour party. With just over three and a half weeks to go until polling day, the veteran politician has announced he is endorsing the Shadow Scotland Secretary, Ian Murray, in Edinburgh South. The writing was on the wall when the ex-Edinburgh MP revealed last week that Harper was helping as a 'volunteer' during his campaigning. Murray — who until last year's Rutherglen by-election was the only Scottish Labour MP since 2019 — has held the seat since 2010 and achieved a majority of over 11,000 in the 2019 poll.
