Scotland

If you just ignore the opinion polls, Humza Yousaf’s first 100 days as First Minister have been an unqualified disaster. Yousaf eked across the finishing line after an internal election drenched in ruthless skullduggery and bitter factionalism. In the aftermath, he alienated and exiled his party rivals and turned the SNP backbenches from a North Korean military parade into a Holyrood remake of House of Cards.  His deposit return scheme imploded and his proposed ban on fishing in 10 per cent of Scottish waters was sunk by public opposition.

All is not well among the SNP’s Westminster group and this time, it’s not Mhairi Black causing them trouble. Leader Stephen Flynn has today suspended Salmond ally Angus MacNeil from the party after a public bust up with the Chief Whip Brendan O’Hara. Tension has been brewing between MacNeil and O’Hara for a while but it came to a head last night in the Commons division lobbies. O’Hara is alleged to have been sending MacNeil, the MP for Na h-Eileanan an Iar, disciplinary notices about his poor attendance in parliament. It became one notice too many for MacNeil who, in his latest disagreement with the whip, reportedly seethed ‘You’re a small wee man!’ several times before flinging the whole lot of papers back at him. Oh dear.

Nicola Sturgeon says she is 'gutted' at the decision by the SNP Westminster group's deputy leader, Mhairi Black, to stand down before the next general election. The MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire South told the News Agents podcast that the House of Commons is a 'toxic workplace' that has taken a toll on her 'body and mind'. She also says she is 'just tired' and wants to spend more time with her partner Katie, whom she married in 2022. Black joins a raft of SNP MPs, including the former Westminster leader Ian Blackford, who have decided to abandon Westminster politics in recent months. Also in the departure lounge are MPs Peter Grant, Angela Crawley, Stewart Hosie and Douglas Chapman.

Nicola Sturgeon handled the Covid pandemic rather well. You might not expect me to say that after all that’s happened this year, but it’s true. The former first minister was – or is – a highly effective communicator who managed to persuade Scottish voters that she knew what she was doing, even as she made all the same mistakes as Boris Johnson.  In her daily pandemic press conferences, she always sounded well briefed and coherent — unlike the prime minister, who often bumbled his way through his script falling back on bad jokes. Sturgeon focussed relentlessly on a single message: that social democratic Scotland was dealing with the pandemic in a more humane way than the Brexit Tories. It was largely rubbish, but she sounded good.

The campaign for Scottish independence is at an impasse. Humza Yousaf used the SNP’s conference in Dundee to set out his party’s latest strategy for achieving statehood for Scotland. That strategy isn’t all that different from what the party faithful has heard before: keep winning elections, keep up the pressure on Westminster, and sooner or later something will happen.  The problem with this tartan Micawberism is that something has been going to happen for rather a long time. Here is a list, by no means exhaustive, of events that were supposed to shift the dial on independence: the SNP’s commanding wins in the 2015 and 2019 general elections; its victories at Holyrood in 2016 and 2021; the UK’s vote for Brexit; the arrival of Boris Johnson in No.

During her eight years as Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon perfected the art of false promises. She consistently told SNP supporters that a second independence referendum was within reach, but the truth was that she had no power to deliver one. All Sturgeon was able to do was lead her troops halfway up the hill before having to bring them back down again. ‘Continuity candidate’ Humza Yousaf, the SNP’s new leader, seems to think that this is a strategy worth copying. In a speech at the party’s independence convention in Dundee, Yousaf unveiled his new Indyref plan. His latest brainwave appears to be, on the face of it, a complete U-turn from everything he said on the subject during the leadership race.

The SNP meets in Dundee this weekend for a special conference on independence. Four months since Nicola Sturgeon resigned as leader and three months since Humza Yousaf narrowly became leader and the police investigation into party finances began, it's fair to say that the party is in a confused state. The mood is febrile. Some think that normalcy will return; others that the independence project can triumph in the near-future by some miracle fix. Many cling to the wreckage of Sturgeon, while a few still yearn for the return of the emperor over the water Alex Salmond. What is missing is an honest assessment and understanding of where the SNP is, the deep hole it occupies (much of it of its own making) and how it can begin to get out.

You might have thought that the National had successfully cornered the fiction market among SNP devotees. But now Mr S has discovered the existence of another pro-independence media outlet keen to shake up Scotland’s media landscape. ‘Skotia’ claims it will divert from the ‘obsessive hysteria of Scotland’s political class’ by making ‘life difficult for the architects of Scotland’s political consensus’ and maintaining a ‘constant vigilance on those who sow hate and inhumanity’. Noble stuff. Its launch video features the outlet’s new editor, Coll McCail, an earnest redhead, who proclaims: While the British state looks out for its own, the Scottish establishment is too comfortable.

A lot has happened in the last fortnight of Scottish politics, most notably the arrest of Nicola Sturgeon. This development has not passed voters by. Though support for Scottish independence remains steady, the reputation of former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has taken a substantial knock. Meanwhile, the threat posed by Labour to the SNP’s dominance of the country’s politics may now be even greater. These are the key messages from two new polls that provide us with the first glimpse of the public mood north of the border in the wake of Sturgeon’s arrest.  One poll, from Savanta, started its polling a few days before the former First Minister was taken into police custody, but two-thirds of its interviews were conducted after Sturgeon was released without charge.

Scottish government minister, Lorna Slater, has managed to survive a vote of no confidence tabled by Conservative MSP Liam Kerr. The circular economy minister, and co-leader of the Scottish Greens, has faced heavy criticism for her handling of Scotland’s controversial deposit return scheme in recent months. To make matters worse, hours before politicians voted on Kerr’s motion, Slater was this afternoon forced to admit that the company running the scheme, Circularity Scotland, had appointed administrators. Though Slater saw off the vote, with 55 MSPs voting for the motion while 68 voted against it, her reputation did not escape unscathed from the rather unedifying debate. The anger at deposit return scheme-related failings radiated from all sides of the chamber.

Have you opened a letter recently from your energy supplier and gasped at how much of your monthly budget is now going on electricity and gas? Are you living in constant pain or discomfort because you need an operation, but under the Scottish NHS you'll have to wait years for treatment? Or do you live on one of Scotland's islands and have been forced, for the first time in your life, to take to the streets in protest at the Scottish government's failure to provide lifeline ferry services for your community? If Scotland ever does cut away from the UK, the split is many years away. This makes it all the more frustrating that the Scottish government is spending millions of pounds on civil servants tasked with creating fantasy papers.