Scotland

There's a spectre haunting the Scottish Government: the spectre of Alex Salmond. Like Banquo at the feast, the former First Minister has returned once more to unsettle his successor and onetime protege, Nicola Sturgeon. For the Sunday Mail has today revealed that lawyers are probing claims that perjury was committed in the former First Minister's trial for sexual assault. The Crown Office and Procurator fiscal service has appointed an independent QC to investigate claims from Salmond's lawyers about a series of criminal allegations. He was cleared in 2020 of sexually assaulting nine women while he was First Minister.  A jury found the former SNP leader not guilty on 12 of the sexual assault charges facing him, while another was found not proven.

It started as farce but is quickly turning into something more ugly, perhaps even sinister. When Audit Scotland last week released a report shining a light on the SNP's costly ferries fiasco, all the talk was of painted on windows and a comical 'launch' event for an unfinished ship. It was Carry on Up the Clyde but with a rather dull cast of characters. This week the story has taken a different turn. Jim McColl, the Scottish billionaire who took over the shipyard at the centre of the controversy, has come out fighting. He gave an interview to the Sunday Times in which he accused Nicola Sturgeon's administration of hastily pushing through the contract for the new boats so the deal could be announced at the party's autumn conference in 2015.

Why is it that the Scottish government’s Covid restrictions permit people to attend a packed pub or nightclub without a face covering but require one in a place of worship? It's a question to which there is no obvious answer, not least because Nicola Sturgeon herself is content to sit in a church without one, as she did during the Duke of Edinburgh's memorial service in Westminster Abbey this week. Thankfully, the First Minister announced yesterday that this inconsistency will be coming to an end. As of Monday, it will no longer be a legal requirement to wear a face mask in a church, mosque, synagogue, mandir, gurdwara or other places of worship in Scotland. This is good news.

Susan Aitken, we meet again. The worst council leader in Britain is back in the news. What, pray, is it this time? Has Aitken finally fixed the rats which ran riot before COP26? Are Glasgow's finances now back in order? Will the 500 taxi trips on expenses be refunded now? Good God, no. For Aitken is above such petty, mundane trifles. Instead she has decided to focus on the issues that really matter: problematic statues and the eighteenth century slave trade. The Glasgow slavery audit has finally reported this month and identified eight statues in the city as representing people connected to the Atlantic slave trade.

With global tensions running high amid Russia’s continued bombardment of Ukraine, cool heads are needed now more than ever. Alternatively, we could instead listen to George Galloway. The fedora-rocking serial candidate advises his 400,000 Twitter followers that ‘the US is about to stage a false-flag #WMD incident in #Ukraine’. No word as of yet where Gorgeous George got this tip off. He of all people should know about 'sexed-up' intelligence. In recent months Galloway has been dedicating much of his time to his talk show Sputnik, which he co-hosts with his wife Gayatri on Russia Today. It’s like Richard and Judy if every title in their book club was self-published and about Western imperialism.

Something is rotten in the state of Scotland. No, not the creaking CalMac ferry fleet but rather the health of free speech in the birthplace of the Enlightenment. The warning signs have been there for years now, what with the Hate Crime Act, the Scottish government's efforts to evade Holyrood scrutiny and the SNP's own intolerance for any kind of internal party dissent. But now a minor episode at a leading university perhaps best illustrates the sorry state of the right to dissent in Nicola Sturgeon's Scotland. Students at the University of St Andrews last week published a short satirical article in their magazine the Saint, making fun of relations between London and Edinburgh.

Is the word of a Scottish government minister worth anything? The question arises in the wake of the SNP’s Hate Crime Act which, among much else, creates the offence of ‘stirring up hatred’ against ‘transgender identity’. Feminist groups warned early on that the Bill’s language could see people who don't believe that men can become women (or vice versa) prosecuted for what had hitherto been treated in law as legitimate expression. Prominent among these groups was MurrayBlackburnMackenzie (MBM), a policy analysis outfit whose principals boast extensive scholarship and years of experience inside the civil service.

Fresh from apologising for the persecution of witches in the sixteenth century, Nicola Sturgeon has now jumped on to the next big challenge. You'd have thought the energy, cost-of-living and health crises might keep the First Minister occupied, not to mention the various issues around Scotland's schools, transport links and criminal justice system.  Not a bit of it. For the nationalist-in-chief has found a new cause to involve herself in: international relations, an area specifically reserved for Westminster. Despite having no powers, mandate or army, Sturgeon today decided to take a swipe at Nato, using an interview with ITV to argue the defence bloc should review the idea of a 'no-fly zone' over Ukraine on a 'day to day basis.

It's groundhog day up in Scotland as once more the SNP have found a reason to suggest why their desperately-needed, long-overdue second independence referendum... might have to be delayed again. For, despite a pliant press, a captive state and 15 years in power, the tartan nationalists are still unable to breach the magic figure of 50 per cent support for independence.  Having demanded a second referendum barely after the dust had settled on the first one, the SNP don't seem so keen on holding it, given the lack of any sizeable shift in their favour. In light of Ian Blackford's latest intervention, below are just five reasons given by the SNP since 2014 on why they have not yet held their long-awaited second referendum.

On a recent television tour of Britain’s coast, Michael Portillo found himself in awe of the Outer Hebrides. Why would more people not live and work in this ‘paradise’, he wondered from a vast sun-kissed beach near where I live on Lewis. It was a fair question on such a day but the intrepid traveller had struck it lucky. Living on an island involves a high degree of dependency on ferries. And the reliability of the service provided by the state owned Caledonian MacBrayne, known as CalMac, on Scotland’s west coast is at an-time low for reasons that go far beyond the uncertainties of weather. This week alone brought news of further disruption after ‘corrosion’ was found in a 24 year-old vessel during annual maintenance.

Ah, gorgeous George, the man so often on the right side of history. The rabble-rousing politician, who has had more parties than Boris Johnson, has been at it again in recent weeks, insisting that 'the West provoked this crisis' in Ukraine. Coincidentally, the former Labour MP also hosts a show on Moscow-backed network RT UK – previously better known as Russia Today. Galloway struck a bet earlier this month with a pro-Unionist Twitter account. Under the suggested terms of the deal, if Europe reached July without an invasion, Ukrainian soldiers killed in action or without any Ukrainian territory gained by Russia, the user in question would have to change their profile picture to one of George Galloway and post a public apology.

‘Hate is not welcome in Scotland’, apparently, at least according to a public information film released in 2018 by the Scottish government. ‘We believe in acceptance, and it’s time you accept that’ continue the bright-eyed young people featured in the ad. Anyone who believes in this uplifting message might be puzzled if they pop into the City Art Centre in Edinburgh, where a new exhibition by artist Rachel Maclean seems to be very short on acceptance for Brexit and the awful Brits who voted for it. ‘Native Animals’ is a set of paintings and video installations which, according to the blurb are ‘examining the various motivations behind Brexit and its repercussions’.

'Never let a good crisis go to waste' said Churchill. And it seems the SNP have taken that maxim to heart, judging by the alacrity with which they've sought to exploit the current rumblings over Ukraine. Alyn Smith, the party's foreign affairs spokesperson, was straight out there in a fuel-guzzling jet at the beginning of the month, accompanied by several party cronies who smelt an opportunity in the east. None of them have any role in UK government foreign policy whatsoever. Smith, a man who has never met a camera he didn't like, duly clipped himself standing solemn in front of the country's foreign ministry, gravely intoning about the ongoing crisis – as if the poor Ukrainians hadn't suffered enough already.

Undeterred by the SNP's agonies, the Scottish Greens have now decided to jump into the row about post-Scexit pensions. The indy-backing party, which props up Nicola Sturgeon's government at Holyrood, has come out claiming that nervy Scots need not worry about their pensions being paid if the country voters for secession, according to one of its leading lights at the Scottish parliament. A not-so magnificent seven currently take the party whip up in Edinburgh; among them is Ross Greer, the charisma vacuum best known for hoping for the death of the-then critically ill Margaret Thatcher, for calling Churchill 'a white supremacist mass murderer and declaring that 'nothing would thrill me more than for Buckingham Palace to burn to the ground.