Scotland

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Scottish nationalism is no better than any other kind

Even the Americans are noticing Nicola Sturgeon now and if you are – like many nationalists – the kind of Scottish nationalist forever on the lookout for external validation, lengthy articles featuring the first minister in The New Yorker and The Atlantic is the kind of thing to make you proud. There has always been a strong streak of what I like to think of as Sally Field nationalism – 'And I can’t deny the fact that you like me! Right now, you like me!' However happy it might be, it cannot quite escape being cringeworthy. But there we have it; nationalism is essentially myopic and all nationalisms are alike in that respect.

Andrew Willshire

Scottish independence isn’t like Brexit. It would be a real disaster

A sure sign of paying too much attention to politics is when the arguments of your own side begin to grate as much as those of the opposition. Currently number one in my personal sources of ennui is the frequent damning of the SNP by comparing them to Brexiteers, with their claims of self-determination, demonisation of the ‘other place’ (Westminster/Brussels, delete as appropriate), a certain unwillingness to face hard facts, and a tendency to be slightly economical with the actualité. And, of course, there is more than a grain of truth to the accusation. Understandably, the SNP would reject the suggestion. After all, it is only the rank injustice of Brexit which has converted Nicola Sturgeon, a member of the SNP for 35 years, to the cause of Scottish independence.

James Heale

Your guide to the 2021 election results

This week will see the biggest set of polls in UK history outside of a general election. Contests are under way in Wales, Scotland, London and in the various mayoral, local and PCC elections across Britain as part of a so-called ‘Super Thursday.’ But while past election nights have been met with the chimes of the BBC’s Arthur theme and a Dimbleby fronting hours of programmes, Covid means there will be no all-night television special. Whereas normally all results are in by midday Friday, this year it will take longer to verify and count the votes than it has done in previous elections. This is due to both reduced staff numbers to allow for social distancing and the high number of polls taking place in some areas.

Isabel Hardman

The Tory strategist behind Scottish Labour’s revamp

Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar is being advised by a key figure behind ex-Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson’s political brand, Coffee House can reveal. Eddie Barnes, a former spinner for Davidson when she led the party, has been helping Scottish Labour during the Holyrood campaign with messaging and voter strategy. He helped craft Davidson’s cheery, accessible image as she brought her party back from the brink of extinction in Scotland. It’s not difficult to see his influence in the way Sarwar has led an upbeat and confident campaign with attention-grabbing moments such as this dance class. https://twitter.com/GordonMcKee_/status/1385935122038415360?

Steerpike

Las Vegas resident urges Scots to vote SNP

Sunday's anti-climactic finale looked set to be the biggest Line of Duty let-down for fans of the hit BBC series. But now one of the drama’s stars Martin Compston has waded into the Scottish independence debate and urged his fellow Scots to vote SNP this Thursday. He says that the ‘Tory government in Westminster’ some 325 miles from the Scottish border, ‘do not care about Scotland’ adding: ‘The big decisions, whether it be Scotland’s future relationship with Europe, whether it be nuclear weapons on the Clyde are best taken by the people who live here.’  There’s just one problem – Compston’s main residence is in Las Vegas a mere 4,872 miles away.

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Tories still struggling to fill hole left by Ruth Davidson

Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross has barely been seen in public without his chaperone, Ruth Davidson. She has accompanied him around the Holyrood elections campaign trail with such devotion that it's unclear who is standing for election and who is the actual party leader. The pair are campaigning in Edinburgh today and have sent out these letters – pictured below – to pro-Union voters. They have also launched an ad van and starred in a party political broadcast together. Perhaps 'starred' is an exaggeration for Ross, who played more of a cameo role in the PPB last month, with Davidson taking the limelight. Douglas Ross has struggled to have any kind of breakthrough moment in this campaign.

Steerpike

How would Whitehall respond to wildcat nats?

The SNP wants a second independence referendum. Boris Johnson has ruled one out. So what happens if the Scottish nationalists get a majority at Thursday's Holyrood elections? Nicola Sturgeon has indicated that she will hold a vote — with or without Westminster's legal consent. So Mr S decided to ask the Cabinet Office and the Scotland Office how they would respond to an unsanctioned Catalan-style referendum. In response to a Freedom of Information request, both departments said that they did not hold any contingency documents outlining the UK government's response to an unauthorised vote. (It's worth noting too that if such plans did exist, the departments would have to say so even if they decided such documents were exempt from disclosure).

Cristina Odone

Scotland’s inspiring success story with at-risk children

I never thought the Scots were more emotionally intelligent than the English. A year spent researching children at risk for the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) proved to me that they are. As documented in the CSJ’s latest report, Safely Reducing the Number of Children Going into Care, the Scots are far more advanced, in terms of their understanding of why we do what we do, than their English neighbours. Holyrood has embraced neuroscience, enthusiastically building a social infrastructure that will support those suffering from poor mental health and trauma. Westminster, by contrast, continues to languish in the dark ages when the public would pay a penny to gawp at the tragic inmates of Bedlam.

Monday

Steerpike

BBC makes a cameo in SNP election campaign

The SNP’s latest election graphic will make for uncomfortable viewing at BBC Scotland. As tweeted by Nicola Sturgeon today, the campaign material features a podium branded with the slogan ‘Protect our NHS’. Looming over it are the words: ‘On May 6, every vote counts in deciding who will be First Minister’, and in the bottom-right corner a logo that reads: ‘Both votes SNP for Nicola Sturgeon’. Electioneering off the back of a pandemic that has killed more than 10,000 Scots is a bold strategy. Especially bold when one-third of those deaths were among elderly residents and your health officials transferred untested and even Covid-positive patients into care homes.

Kevin Hague

Independence case is built on myths, denial and conspiracy theories

Anyone who engages in online debate about the case for Scottish independence will have encountered Scottish nationalist fact-deniers and myth-spreaders lurking on social media. They are not interested in engaging in serious debate; their ambition is simply to give their side licence to ignore basic economic facts. Keen to understand the true scale of this problem, we at These Islands commissioned Survation to poll Scottish voters about their understanding of basic economic facts and their attitudes towards some widely-circulated myths. We were dismayed to learn that economic fact-denial has spread far beyond the swampy backwaters of social media and is now mainstream among Scottish independence supporters.

Steerpike

Scottish Tories’ independence Twitter blunder

Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross seems to pride himself on his independence from Boris Johnson. The Moray MP quit his ministerial job at the Scotland Office over Dominic Cummings’ trip to Durham and yesterday he told Andrew Marr that ‘of course’ the Prime Minister should go if he broke the ministerial code over the funding of his Downing Street flat redecoration. Douglas Ross might be getting a little too independent, in all senses of the term. But the assistant referee might be getting a little too independent, in all senses of the term. Today he participated in a photo-op with former Tory leader Ruth Davidson, who has been a constant by Ross’s side throughout the campaign.

Andrew Willshire

Independence would spark a citizenship crisis in Scotland — and the UK

In the great debate around Scottish independence, one word is never far away: identity. ‘Who am I?’ is elevated from mere navel-gazing to expressive political allegiance. On one side are those who feel that one can be both Scottish and British without fear of contradiction, while on the other are those who feel that one crushes the other. By casting off Britishness, one’s Scottishness could flower more fully, or so it is supposed. Even so, it is something that, even in these times of performative politics, could remain between you, your God and your woad supplier. It certainly isn’t something to which an agency of the state would take much interest.

Saturday

Stephen Daisley

Maverick of the glen

Holyrood 2021 was supposed to be an election for the mavericks. Alex Salmond is back from the political dead with a new party promising to lead nationalists to independence where his former party has failed. George Galloway has turned his attention to Scotland and, despite his previous pronouncements on the matter, is heading up an outfit opposed to indyref2. While Salmond has had no trouble drumming up headlines, neither has made much of an impression on the polls. That might be because their respective parties appear to be all about one man. The opposite seems to be true of Andy Wightman, who actually is one man but his campaign is tapping into a grassroots movement for more rigour, integrity and free-thinking at Holyrood.

Madeleine Kearns

How the SNP wrecked Scottish education

‘The politicians aren’t listening to us,’ an exasperated teacher tells me by phone. ‘There’s nothing left for us to do but get on with it.’ The despair felt by Scottish teachers is a notable shift from the anger I encountered in the staffroom when I trained among them five years ago. That was the year of the ‘PISA shock’, 2015, when Scotland performed abysmally in reading, maths, and science in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Distinguished education professors at top Scottish universities were left reeling. One such academic suggested that the Scottish government had five years to fix the problem.

Friday

Jamie Gillies

The illiberal attack on Douglas Ross over gay marriage

Same-sex marriage could not be described as a central issue in the Holyrood election, having been legal in Scotland since 2014. However, some are keen to make it one. Earlier this week, the Daily Record published a bizarre story attacking Tory leader Douglas Ross for a seven-year-old comment about marriage.  In an ‘exclusive’ exposé the Record noted that: 'Scots Tory leader Douglas Ross would have voted against same-sex marriage in 2014 if he had been an MSP'. Ross also made the apparently heinous statement: ‘We need to recognise both sides of the argument.’ Other papers later aped the ‘revelations’, and they were even raised in a Channel 4 leaders’ debate.

John Ferry

Scotland’s post-reality politics

When the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) uses the word 'disappointing' in its press release, you know things are getting serious. This week, the IFS said a 'lack of credibility' unites the policy manifestos of the three biggest Scottish political parties (the SNP, Scottish Labour and the Scottish Conservatives) competing for votes in the Holyrood election next week. The IFS's David Phillips also said that, with the exception of the Scottish Conservatives, it was 'disappointing' to see 'no serious attempt by the parties to provide transparent and comprehensive costings for their plans'. The Tories still got a telling off though, as did the SNP again, for underestimating the true cost of their NHS spending promises.

Thursday

Susan Dalgety

Is Nicola Sturgeon in for a scare in her own seat?

Political geeks of a certain vintage are still nostalgic for that Portillo moment when, at 3.10 a.m. on 2 May 1997, Tory cabinet minister Michael Portillo lost his safe Enfield Southgate seat to a shocked Stephen Twigg. A ripple of applause ran through Britain as the result was read out, turning to screams of delight as people realised the moment signified an end to 18 years of Tory rule and the dawn of New Labour. There is little prospect of a similar earth-shaking tremor coursing through Scotland next week when the votes are counted in the Holyrood elections. The SNP will be the largest party and their Waitrose wing, the Scottish Greens, will get enough seats to justify their status as the Nationalists’ little helpers.

Stephen Daisley

Tony Blair states the obvious

If there is more joy in Heaven over one devolutionist who repenteth, the celestial jubilations must be in full roar over a belated admission from Tony Blair. In an interview with ITV News, the former prime minister reflected: ‘I do think one of the weaknesses in the way we approached devolution was not to build real cultural ties and emphasise the enormous things that the different countries in the United Kingdom have in common.

The Spectator

A vote for the SNP would mean another wasted decade in Scotland

Sometimes, Westminster unwittingly makes quite a good case for Scottish independence. Britain’s Covid emergency has ended, but the damage of the last year is enormous: the knock-on effects of lockdown can be seen in NHS waiting lists, the devastated high street, the mental health backlog and the 20,000 pupils who are absent from the school register. There is urgent work to do, yet the government is engaged in a battle to the death over who paid for wallpaper in Downing Street. We see a Prime Minister at war with his ex-adviser, unable to rise above the fray and capitalise on the opportunity of his vaccine success. Then there’s the opposition, unable to oppose.

James Forsyth

The nightmare: Boris’s battles are just beginning

When Boris Johnson parted company with Dominic Cummings at the end of last year, it was inevitable there would be trouble further down the line. To pick a fight with one of Britain’s most formidable campaigners and his allies was always going to have consequences. It’s now becoming clear what they are. Some of the revelations from Johnson’s enemies are quotable: for example, the allegation that he said in private he’d rather let ‘bodies pile high’ than allow a third lockdown. But what he said in anger, or what he considered doing, matters a lot less than what he actually did. That’s why the most serious question he’s facing is about the financing of the renovation of the Downing Street flat.