Scotland

Is the SNP on a mission to make itself even more unpopular? Wellbeing economy minister Màiri McAllan is the latest politician to face a backlash after she confused voters with claims about Scotland’s progressive tax system on Twitter. McAllan first insisted that when making comparisons between Scotland and Ireland’s economic growth, the fact that Ireland was ‘(a) independent and (b) in the EU single market’ were ‘key recipes for growth’ and ‘critical to Scotland’s future prosperity’. Quelle surprise.

Police Scotland, who are responsible for enforcing Humza Yousaf’s Hate Crime Act, have found no criminality in a series of tweets posted by JK Rowling. On Monday, the day the Scottish law came into effect, the author, a gender-critical feminist, tweeted about a number of men who call themselves women – and insisted they were still men. In doing so, she said that, if this was a crime, she would ‘look forward to being arrested’ under the Act, which carries prison sentences of up to seven years. I would say this took some balls on her part but such metaphors are probably best avoided given the subject in hand.  Responding to the news, Rowling tweeted: https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1775187763995824350?

Humza Yousaf’s illiberal Hate Crime Act is now in force and its first day has been a doozy. The SNP’s minister for victims and community safety Siobhian Brown admitted on the Today programme that Scots could be investigated by the police for ‘misgendering’ trans people. It was revealed that one-third of police officers has still not received training on the legislation. JK Rowling posted a thread on Twitter discussing a number of transgender women and stated that all of them were men. The author, who is currently out of the country, added that, if saying this represents a criminal offence under the Hate Crime Act, ‘I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment’.

It is now exactly a year since Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s First Minister, rose to the pinnacle of Scottish politics. Pretty much everything that has happened since entitles those who doubted his leadership skills, political judgment and basic competence to mutter 'I told you so'. Even his most diehard supporters within the SNP must be starting to wonder what his leadership is all about. The warning signs were there from the start. Yousaf quickly emerged as the favourite to replace Nicola Sturgeon following her shock resignation last February. He simply wanted the job more than anyone else, and billed himself as the continuity candidate.

Would you trust this lot with assisted dying? The Scottish parliament’s record on issues of personal liberty has been pretty dire. Yet MSPs seem mustard-keen to introduce medically-supervised suicide as proposed by the Liberal Democrat MSP, Liam McArthur. His Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill, published today, is the third such Bill to hit Holyrood and the betting is that this one will go the distance. I’m not entirely sure this particular parliament possesses the moral standing to legislate on pot holes, let alone euthanasia ‘Too often’, says Alex Cole-Hamilton, the Scottish Lib Dem leader. ‘Dying people are facing traumatic deaths that harm both them and those they leave behind.

The Covid Inquiry’s recent Scottish sojourn brought several weeks of bad headlines for the SNP. One revelation got less attention than others but struck me as more significant than most, so I wrote about it for Coffee House. That revelation was an email chain dug up by the inquiry dating from the first summer of the pandemic. It contained a discussion about which countries should be added to the list of ‘travel corridor’ nations. In one email, a senior civil servant argued for Spain to be added to the list because ‘there is a real possibility they will never approve EU membership for an independent Scotland’ otherwise.

It’s the end of another rocky week for Scotland’s First Minister. Humza Yousaf has been dealing with national outrage over the hate crime bill and remains under pressure to sack one of his closest allies in the party over an £11,000 iPad scandal. So Kate Forbes’s latest intervention is the last thing he needs. On Thursday night, Yousaf’s onetime leadership rival admitted that the SNP lacks a ‘big vision’ and suggested that she hadn’t ruled out another leadership bid.

Since she stepped down from her role as First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon has played witness to her party’s extraordinary slump in the polls, months of SNP infighting and her own arrest as part of the ongoing police probe. But, Humza Yousaf insists, his predecessor will still campaign for the SNP in the upcoming general election. Talk about being out of touch… When asked in a ITV interview whether Sturgeon would be involved in the election campaign, Yousaf replied: ‘Oh, she definitely will — I’ve got no doubt about that.’ He went on: She’s one of the most successful politicians in Europe, she’s got a formidable track record in terms of election victories. Why on earth would you not want her to be involved in that election campaign?

Scotland’s climate goals are ‘no longer credible’ and there is ‘no comprehensive strategy’ to move away from carbon to Net Zero. That is the noxious assessment issued today by the Climate Change Committee (CCC), the statutory body set up in Scotland to advise national and regional government on emissions policies. Underscoring the gap between rhetoric heard and action seen, the committee delivers an almighty verbal skelping to the SNP and its carefully cultivated image as a green government. Under the SNP’s Climate Change (Emissions Reduction Targets) (Scotland) Act 2019, ‘the Scottish ministers must ensure that the net Scottish emissions account for the year 2030 is at least 75 per cent lower than the baseline’.

Another day, another SNP spat. Humza Yousaf spent the weekend trying to drum up support amongst his core voters for his nationalist party, which is predicted to lose almost half of its Westminster seats to Labour in the general election. The main problem with the First Minister’s message, however, was that it seemed to focus on the wrong target. ‘In this election, we have the chance to finally make Scotland Tory-free, for the first time in almost a quarter of a century,’ Yousaf roared at his audience. ‘Most seats across Scotland are a straight fight between the SNP and the Tories. Let the message from our party be heard loud and clear by every Tory MP in Scotland. Your time is up and the SNP is coming for you.’ Scary stuff.

In the midst of a new development in the never-ending motorhome saga, Humza Yousaf addressed a rather, er, sparse crowd at the SNP's 'national council' event in Perth today. With a speech that was much longer than it should have been, Yousaf spent most of his time lashing out at the Conservatives. Quelle surprise. 'We have the opportunity to ensure that Scotland is Tory free,' the First Minister told his devotees this afternoon. 'Not a single Tory MP left in Scotland. That is definitely a prize worth fighting for.' Possibly because he knows that trying to retain all his party's Westminster seats would be to fight a losing battle... But Yousaf didn't just contain himself to Tory-bashing. He quickly turned his attention to the real threat to his party: Labour.