Scotland

It’s been some months since Mr S last reported on the antics of James Dornan, the SNP MSP and amateur Hate-Finder General. The gaffe-prone Glaswegian managed, in the space of just one week, to get himself embroiled in multiple minor scandals after accusing an Edinburgh bus company had stopped services on St Patrick's Day because of 'anti-Irish racism’ (an untrue claim for which he had no evidence) and then for refusing to apologise for claiming Rangers’ players had sung a sectarian tune (another untrue claim based on poorly-doctored footage). Three weeks later he also told the Catholic leader of the Commons Jacob Rees-Mogg: ‘If your God exists you will undoubtedly rot in hell.’ Nice! https://twitter.com/glasgowcathcart/status/1462546725000810500?

Nicola Sturgeon wants to extend vaccine passports in Scotland, and today her government released a 70-page document purporting to show evidence. The snag? There’s not a shred of evidence to show that her vaccine passports are having any effect. The document, entitled Coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine certificationww: evidence paper update makes a very bold claim: that Scotland’s choice is more vaccine passports or restrictions. To suppress the virus further we are now faced with a choice. This is to limit social contacts and the risk of infection by limiting social contacts by closing venues, limiting group sizes and advising people not to meet each other.

Nicola Sturgeon is considering extending vaccine passports to Scotland’s cinemas, theatres and pubs. ‘We are also considering whether an expansion of the scheme to cover more settings would be justified and prudent given the current state of the pandemic,’ the First Minister said yesterday: she’ll decide next Tuesday. As she mulls, what data will she have to go on? Her deputy, John Swinney, conceded earlier this month that the government doesn’t have much in the way of evidence: the data is ‘impossible to segment,’ he says. Yet he told The Spectator at an event this morning that he still believed vaccine passports had a ‘role to play’ — pointing to an increased uptake of the vaccine in under-thirties.

As if negotiating a global climate deal into the early hours was not enough, delegates at COP26 have to worry about whether the haggis, neeps and tatties they enjoyed for lunch is destroying the planet. The COP26 menu tells delegates that each serving of the traditional Scottish dish generates 3.4kg of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e). It is the heaviest carbon footprint on the COP menu, worse even than the Scottish beef burger (at 3.3kg CO2e). Unsurprisingly, many climate-conscious delegates in Glasgow are turning their noses up at the Scottish national dish, and not just because they realised it was lamb offal. Perhaps they have good reason to be snobby?

It was only a matter of time. When the Scottish Green party entered government alongside the SNP in August, it was clear Nicola Sturgeon would use the party as a shield against her questionable record and stance on the environment. The surprise is that it happened so quickly and so blatantly. This week we had the extraordinary situation of the Scottish Greens attacking Greenpeace for daring to push the First Minister to explicitly come out against exploitation of the Cambo oil field off Shetland. Scottish Green co-leader Patrick Harvie said Greenpeace was unfairly criticising Sturgeon and is ‘not particularly politically active in Scotland’.

It's some time since Steerpike last checked on the Scottish Greens, the minor party in Holyrood's little-loved coalition government. The indy-loving eco-warriors celebrated their best results in May's parliamentary elections before quickly resuming their favoured role as SNP enablers-in-chief, taking up ministerial roles as their price to keep Nicola Sturgeon in Bute House.  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.

Like her aquatic namesake, Nicola Sturgeon is a long-lived but slippery creature. The Scottish First Minister has seized on COP26 as a chance to push her separatist agenda — conveniently forgetting the fact it was the UK government which won the UN summit bid and selected Glasgow as host city. Just yesterday, she was relishing the chance to act the part of statesman on the global stage, telling Sky News:  I hope we can all put egos aside over the next few days and just work together to get the outcome we need. That's what I am committed to doing. I've said that to the Prime Minister, to Alok Sharma.

'COP26: no time for delay' scream the signs at Euston station. But for hundreds of desperate delegates yesterday it proved to be a cruel irony after dozens of rail services to Glasgow were cancelled thanks to a fallen tree and severe weather sparked rail chaos. Members of HM lobby took to their WhatsApp group to complain about the chaos, with Britain's hacks forced to engage in an undignified game of Planes, Trains and Automobiles to race across the country to reach the UN eco-jamboree. The i paper's Paul Waugh had his Glasgow-bound train turned back at Milton Keynes while Red Lion regular Eleanor Langford was one of many forced to board domestic flights, as Mr S predicted on Saturday.

Mr S had not intended to provide a rolling blog of COP26. But with the UN's green games less than a week ago, things in host city Glasgow go from bad to worse as the world's leaders prepare to jet in to tell the rest of us how to save the planet. Unite and GMB today confirmed their bin men, school cleaners and janitorial staff will be the latest workers out on strike during the eco-summit, joining the RMT's train drivers and the GBA's lawyers on the picket lines. At what does point does industrial action become a general strike...? And it's that decision by the refuse collectors to walk out which will compound the other main issue currently plaguing Glasgow and its long-suffering residents.

This month we’ve seen the UK government introduce temporary visas for butchers after farmers were forced to slaughter healthy pigs, the extension of cabotage rights (whereby foreign lorry drivers can do additional pick-up-and-drop off jobs within a country) and a move to replace Brexit’s controversial Northern Ireland protocol. Supply chain problems can’t all be pinned on Brexit – and you could argue endlessly about which factor, Covid or Brexit, is dominant in the disruption we’re seeing – but most people would agree that leaving the EU single market and customs union has not helped matters. Which brings us to the issue of a Scottish exit from the UK (Scexit).

The Supreme Court judgment striking down a couple of Acts of the Scottish parliament has been greeted with typical outrage from the SNP. Nicola Sturgeon has been busy fulminating that she is now 'unable to fully protect children’s rights'. But the First Minister shouldn't be surprised by this legal defeat: there was little chance of it going any other way. In spite of Sturgeon's fury, the two Acts in question were not actually very significant. The more high-profile one sought with much fanfare to incorporate into Scots law a treaty little-known to most of us outside the progressive establishment, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Gavin Barwell has made a good point, albeit inadvertently. Theresa May’s former chief of staff has a book out, imaginatively titled Chief of Staff, and in it he touches upon the question of Brexit and Scottish independence. Noting that Boris Johnson is unpopular north of the border, the now Baron Barwell of Croydon says: ‘The UK government is on strong ground arguing that it is not the right time for a second independence referendum — polls show Scottish voters want the immediate focus to be on recovery from the pandemic — but the democratic mandate for the question to be asked again at some point is clear.’ No. It. Is. Not.

It can be a difficult task picking out the most incompetent minister in the Scottish government. There's Sturgeon's deputy John Swinney, the man who faced two votes of confidence in seven months. There's Shona Robison, resurrected in May having been forced to resign in 2018 amid near-universal criticism of her management of the health brief. And of course there's Transport minister Michael Matheson, a man with no discernible achievements to his name, now knee-deep in the ferries scandal. But of all the SNP's top talent surely no man has blundered more regularly than Humza Yousaf.