Scotland

It may be the the last First Minister’s Questions before Christmas, but no one in Scottish Parliament is in the festive spirit. After the SNP announced a winter budget that would make even Scrooge seem upbeat, it’s no surprise that hapless Humza got a grilling today. Douglas Ross appeared to be enjoying himself, with the Scottish Tory leader mocking a recent claim made by an SNP cabinet minister that ‘world leaders were lining up’ to get advice from the Scottish government. With 2023 being the year of the motorhome jokes, Ross continued mischievously: Now, it got me wondering: who is this that’s been calling for their advice? Has Justin Trudeau

You can say one thing about Jim Callaghan’s Labour government of the 1970s. It certainly kept migration under control. Over the course of his government, Britain saw net migration of around minus 65,000. That had quite a lot to do with a top tax rate of 83 per cent. Whether Scotland’s new tax rates will actually raise any revenue is another matter But if Keir Starmer says he won’t return to punitive tax rates, the SNP is certainly giving Callaghan’s Chancellor Denis Healey a run for his money. The Scottish government has just announced a new rate of 45 per cent for earnings between £75,000 and £125,140. But in some

Today’s Scottish government budget was tax-rise heavy – to the dismay of both individual earners and businesses — in the name of public service support. But while finance secretary Shona Robison spoke of her government’s ‘values’ of equality, opportunity and community, as well as the importance of its ‘social contract with the people of Scotland’, she failed to acknowledge the state her country’s public services are in.  Robison mentioned the NHS over ten times throughout her speech, using it to justify the contents of today’s budget. But Scotland’s health service is struggling more than ever; some hospitals are so congested that it is becoming the norm for dozens of patients

If there’s one thing the SNP are good at, it’s spin. But lately even the skill of self-promotion seems to have deserted Holyrood’s rulers, judging by their increasingly shaky grip on power. A perfect example of this was offered yesterday in the form of some shiny new graphics pumped out by the Scottish government’s official Twitter/X account. Run by civil servants, it is supposed to be Scotland’s voice to the world. But in Humza Yousaf’s Scotland, its relationship to the SNP increasingly resembles that of Pravda to the Kremlin. The Scottish government declared that: ‘Below-inflation funding uplifts in England impact Scotland’s budget. In the UK government’s Autumn Statement, only £10.8

Scottish nationalists have always looked to Scandinavian countries as models of what a caring, social democratic Scotland would look like if only it could escape the clutches of Westminster. Not anymore. National populism, or what the left call the far-right, is on the march across the Nordic landscape. The Sweden Democrats, the True Finns and the Norway Progress party have shifted the centre of political gravity in those supposedly socialist small states.  Even in Denmark – home of the left wing TV series Borgen, which Nicola Sturgeon liked to compare her administration to – the government is aggressively repatriating asylum seekers and reportedly bulldozing ‘non-western’ neighbourhoods Of course, migration is less of

‘The rocks will melt with the sun before I allow tuition fees to be imposed on Scotland.’ So read the words carved into a stone outside Heriot-Watt university in Edinburgh unveiled by Alex Salmond while he was first minister. But as the SNP’s education policy begins to unravel and the budgetary pressures build at Holyrood, how much longer before the Scottish government starts to revisit its practice of subsidising students, even middle-class ones who can well afford to pay tuition fees? From the vantage point of a Scottish sixth former, the system north of the border looks great. Unlike their English cousins, Scots attending Scottish universities pay no tuition fees.

For those who still believe in that old-fashioned thing called the British constitution, there has come a glimmer of hope from an unlikely source. Lord Cameron has threatened to withdraw Foreign Office support for overseas visits by Scottish government ministers if the SNP continues to disregard protocol on international jaunts. Humza Yousaf raised eyebrows during COP28 when he shook hands and chatted with Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The SNP leader, who was at the event in his capacity as first minister of the Scottish government, tweeted out a photograph of the meeting and said they had discussed the situation in Gaza. In the same tweet, Yousaf called for an

It’s safe to say that it’s not been a great year for the SNP. For 2023 ends as it began – with questions being asked about the long-running investigation into the party’s finances. And while a luxury campervan sparked headlines earlier this year, attention has now alighted on the purchase of a luxury £95,000 Jaguar car. Can’t beat buying British, eh? As part of Police Scotland’s ongoing probe, the cops are investigating the purchase of a top range electric vehicle. It is alleged to have been bought by Nicola Sturgeon’s husband Peter Murrell – the SNP’s former chief executive – from a dealership in Edinburgh in October 2019. A car of the same description as the Jaguar, registered in 2019, was photographed on the couple’s

Kate Forbes has called on the Scottish Government to accept Friday’s judgment on its controversial gender legislation. The Gender Recognition Reform Bill introduces ‘self-identification’, an approach which removes medical experts and other safeguards from the process, and lowers the age at which a person can change their legal sex to 16. It was passed overwhelmingly by the Scottish Parliament last December but blocked from becoming law by Scottish Secretary Alister Jack under a never-before-used power contained in the Scotland Act. Jack had received legal advice that the legislation would not only affect Scotland but equalities law across the UK. The SNP-Green Holyrood government petitioned for judicial review and yesterday the

Back up to Holyrood, where the nationalists never fail to entertain. To cover up for the absence of any real policy delivery by her party, SNP MSP Kaukab Stewart has decided to, er, rap. The Glasgow MSP was speaking in the Chamber yesterday evening about an amendment made to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child Bill. She told an unenthusiastic audience that ‘once a teacher, always a teacher’ before launching into a poem she had ‘penned and dedicated’ to the children listening. Mr S hates to burst the SNP’s bubble of self-delusion but he imagines children across Scotland have a number of things they’d rather do than,

And back to the SNP’s Scotland, which is not quite the land of milk and honey that the Nats would like to make out. It turns out that former first minister Nicola Sturgeon and the majority of her ministers refused to use government-issued mobile phones during her time in office. Cover-ups? Surely not! Government officials confirmed to the Times that the former first minister and her most senior colleagues used only personal devices to call or text workmates. It reports that, in fact, only a quarter of those ministers in post between February 2020 and January 2022 were recorded as having official phones. Interestingly, 26 of the 30 ministers currently

Once upon a time, Sir Keir Starmer was Scottish Labour’s greatest asset. In the dark days following the party’s 2019 general election drubbing, the party in Scotland remained an unlikely redoubt of Corbynism, languishing in the polls under the uninspiring leadership of trade unionist Richard Leonard. In such a context, Starmer’s election as Labour leader in March 2020 was a boon to the Scottish party, which many considered was in terminal decline.  As well as manoeuvring the ineffectual Leonard out of office and replacing him with the modernising Anas Sarwar, Starmer himself also proved an immediate hit with Scottish voters. In October 2020, for instance, Ipsos recorded an approval rating

Labour might be making headway in the polls, but the party’s rifts haven’t gone away. Today, Anas Sarwar, the leader of Scottish Labour, has hit out at the late Margaret Thatcher – only days after Sir Keir Starmer praised her ‘natural entrepreneurialism’ in his Sunday Telegraph op-Ed. Speaking to reporters, Sarwar said: Margaret Thatcher destroyed communities across the country. She decimated Scotland. That’s why it was right to oppose her then, and it’s right for us to oppose the modern day Thatcherism of this Conservative party. His comments continue a trend of Scottish Labour pushing back on policy positions adopted by their London-based colleagues – including the bedroom tax, the