Snp

Friday

Alex Massie

Jeremy Corbyn comes to Scotland and discovers he has nothing to say

When all else fails, I suppose, you can just plead for mercy. That appears to be the message emanating from the Scottish Labour party's conference in Perth this weekend. The theme, Kezia Dugdale says, is "Take a fresh look" at Labour. OK. [Awkward silence.] Now what? The thing is, you see, that "Take a fresh look" has been the unofficial theme of every meeting of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist party since, oh, at least 1997. When you are reduced to pinching lines from the Scottish Tories you are probably in a position similar to the lost traveller seeking directions to Limerick who was told "Well, I wouldn't start from here". Here is where Labour are however and here is nowhere good.

Steerpike

Scottish Labour pull campaign video after spelling gaffe: #genertaion

Someone at Scottish Labour is having a very bad day. The beleaguered party's Perth conference has made the news. Alas, it has made the news for the wrong reason after a video posted on the party's official YouTube channel had an embarrassing typo. The video in question was supposed to help the party win the youth vote, with a message on the screen supposed to read 'generation for the next'. However, whichever Labour brain typed it up, ought to take some time out to brush up on their spelling as the message actually read 'genertaion': Still, at least they have won the attention of the SNP: https://twitter.

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 22 October 2015

Scotland isn’t failing Sir: It will take more than Adam Tomkins descending from the heights of academe to persuade the Scots that education, health, policing and everything else in Scotland is failing (‘The SNP’s One-Party State,’ 17 October). Scots aren’t stupid: they have heard all this before from the unionist press, and they don’t believe it. That’s why, after seven years in power, support for the SNP is still growing. Meanwhile, the Tories continue to have dreadful results in Scotland, despite having an articulate and personable leader in Ruth Davidson and no competition any more from the Lib Dems.

Isabel Hardman

MPs approve plan to introduce English votes for English laws

MPs have just approved the change to the Commons regulations that will introduce English votes for English laws by 312 votes to 270. The proposals mean an additional stage of scrutiny in the Commons where a grand committee of either English MPs or English and Welsh MPs can consider and veto the proposals. It is not particularly clear how often this situation would arise, and therefore it really does remain to be seen whether this will practically make a great deal of difference to Parliament. The debate on the measure saw Scottish National Party MPs warning of the creation of two classes of MP, and of damage to the Union.

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

Has Nicola Sturgeon found a verbal formula to disguise SNP’s failure of poor students?

At the SNP conference the First Minister and her deputy, John Swinney, both had precisely the same thing to say about university. Here’s Swinney: “Students from a poorer background have never had a better chance of a place at university than under the SNP”. And Nicola Sturgeon: “More students from poorer backgrounds are now going to university”. More. That's the test they set: if more poor students are going to uni then the SNP is succeeding. They both talk about “university,” as distinct from other forms of further education. Yes, the ratio of poor kids at uni is rising in Scotland – but shamefully, it’s half the level of England. Worse, the gap is growing (see chart, above).

Saturday

Isabel Hardman

Nicola Sturgeon: the SNP would welcome uncomfortable scrutiny

Nicola Sturgeon spoke at the open and close of the SNP conference, and her speech today transposed the key themes of the short address she gave on Thursday morning. She attacked Jeremy Corbyn for disappointing her 'high hopes', saying 'so far, Jeremy Corbyn isn't changing Labour - he's allowing Labour to change him'. And she talked about independence, though in this speech the First Minister didn't talk about when, but how. Her first speech had acknowledged that the party couldn't commit to another referendum until there was evidence a majority of Scots were now in favour of leaving. Today she argued that 'if we want Scotland to be independent - and we most certainly do - then we've got work to do'. She said the party needed to convince voters that 'independence is the best future'.

Alex Massie

The Age of Nicola: Sturgeon maps out the road to independence

The problem with Nicola Sturgeon is that she is, by the standards of contemporary politics, unusually straightforward. There is little artifice and even less deceit about Scotland's First Minister. What you see is what you get; what she says is what she mostly means. That is, even when she's sidling past the truth it's clear what she really means. And so, there it was, out in the open at last: a clear confirmation that Jeremy Corbyn and his Labour party are Nicola Sturgeon's useful idiots. Sure, there may not be any need for another referendum on independence before 2020 - not least because, as matters stand, that referendum might, like last year's plebiscite, be lost - but there will be another referendum at some point. And it will be won.

Steerpike

Nicola Sturgeon parties with the Daily Mail

Nicola Sturgeon and the Daily Mail hosted a drinks reception for journalists last night. The unholy alliance included speeches from the First Minister and Scottish Daily Mail political editor Alan Roden. Roden recounted a fashion show he had covered at the Scottish parliament which had involved Sturgeon as one of the models, and two Mail correspondents covering it, while Sturgeon teased the journalist for asking so many questions about her shoes that she had begun to wonder whether he was less interested in writing about them and more interested in buying them. She then handed Roden a sewing kit so he could fix a pair of split trousers. ‘Can you do it for me?’ he asked, jokingly, as Sturgeon threw the pack to him.

Isabel Hardman

The strangest thing about the SNP conference is how normal it is

The SNP conference has had to get bigger as the party has grown. Those who’ve been coming for years are a tad unsettled by quite how big and slick this event is. The exhibition hall is much bigger and is packed with lobbyists and big corporate stands, including a McDonald’s stall. The hall is bigger, the fringe events organised by lobbyists, too, and at first glance, it looks rather like a mainstream party conference: not one packed with eccentricities like the Ukip or Lib Dem conferences. That’s unsurprising given the SNP is a party of government and given it has a chunk of MPs in Westminster. But all of the party’s MPs, MSPs and activists who I’ve met over the past few days say the same thing: it still feels like a family.

John R. Bradley

Leaked extracts of Nicola Sturgeon’s speech suggests she doesn’t care much about Syria

Nicola Sturgeon is to close the SNP annual conference today, and her aides have leaked what she proposes to say about UK military intervention in Syria. I hope there's time for her to change the text because, as it stands, it's muddled and rather embarrassing - it suggests that she does not understand the situation at all. Unilateral air strikes, she is due to say, will merely add to the “already unimaginable human suffering” in the region. She will vaguely urge a diplomatic push at the UN to help bring the four-year civil war to an end (Isis, meet Mr Assad. Now, please shake hands).

Friday

Sebastian Payne

Watch: SNP’s Stewart Hosie asks interviewer ‘why are you doing this?’ as he flounders on NHS and oil

Pity Stewart Hosie, the SNP’s deputy leader. He appeared on the Daily Politics today to defend the party’s North Sea oil revenue projections and its record in government on health spending. He seemed rather unprepared. When questioned by Andrew Neil on the SNP’s comically inaccurate projections for oil revenue (it expected over £8 billion by now; only £500 million emerged), he was asked how on earth he would have filled that gap. Would he have cut spending by 14 per cent, raised taxes by 16 per cent — or a combination of the two? 'We didn't win the referendum, Andrew,' he said — as if that were an answer. He then went on: 'Every time I'm on this programme, you seem to want to fight last year's referendum...

Isabel Hardman

Angus Robertson: Older voters took longer to persuade in the referendum than we predicted

The SNP didn’t win the independence referendum, but is still talking about the lessons it can learn from what happened a year later. That’s because it wants to win the next one - and everyone at this conference believes that the next referendum only has question marks about when, not if, it will happen. SNP Westminster leader Angus Robertson suggested at a fringe organised by The Times this lunchtime that two major lessons he’d learned from last year’s result were that older voters would not be persuaded to vote ‘Yes’ as easily by younger generations than he had imagined they would be, and that the ‘Yes’ campaign failed to communicate effectively with those voters who came from the rest of the UK.

Sebastian Payne

Nicola Sturgeon explains how a second independence referendum could be ‘unstoppable’

Nicola Sturgeon has a plan about how to achieve another independence referendum, even if there won’t be a pledge for one in the SNP’s next manifesto. On the Today programme, Sturgeon pointed the finger at the Tories in Westminster — the bogeymen she believes will help the nationalists make the case for independence: ‘I think we do what we have done over a period of years: we continue to make the argument for the economic and social and political case for Scotland to be independent country and I believe very strongly the onus is on those who support independence to do that.

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

SNP toys with Labour by announcing troublesome Trident vote

The SNP are very, very happy that they now have 56 MPs in Westminster. But to listen to their conference in Aberdeen today, you’d think they were happiest that Labour is having a miserable time in the House of Commons. It wasn’t just Nicola Sturgeon’s speech, covered here, that showed their joy. It was also the ‘Westminster Hour’ session that the party ran later in the day, featuring a number of newly elected MPs, and the party’s Westminster group leader Angus Robertson and finance spokesman Stewart Hosie. Angus Robertson in particular gave the impression that he was enjoying the misery of the Labour party and the SNP’s hand in that as much as a cat enjoys toying with a mouse over several days.

Isabel Hardman

Nicola Sturgeon taunts ‘divided’ Labour party

Remember those Tory posters that put a tiny Ed Miliband in Alex Salmond’s coat pocket? Well, it’s only five months since the general election, but Nicola Sturgeon doesn’t seem all that keen to put Jeremy Corbyn in her handbag. She seemed to suggest that she had given up on being able to work with the new Labour leader, saying: ‘You know, there is much that I hoped the SNP and Jeremy Corbyn could work together on. But over these last few weeks, it has become glaringly obvious that he is unable to unite his party on any of the big issues of our day.

Isabel Hardman

Nicola Sturgeon: SNP needs to talk about governing

SNP members are gathering for the first day of their party’s autumn conference in Aberdeen. The party is keen to trumpet quite how much has changed in a year, and it’s not just proud of its 56 MPs. Last night it released ‘figures showing the scale of its growth since the referendum’. These include the conference hall having four times as many seats as it did last year (from 1,200 to 4,765), the exhibition space is three times the size, there are three times as many fringe meetings and a media centre six times the size ‘to accommodate over 500 members of the media’. (The press room is a rather outdoorsy tent, incidentally). But the party has changed so much since its last conference.

Sebastian Payne

Podcast: the disaster of the SNP’s illiberal, one-party state

The SNP’s eight years in government have been devoid of much scrutiny but in many areas, it has been a disaster. On the latest View from 22 podcast, Adam Tomkins from Glasgow University discusses this week’s Spectator cover feature with Kevin Pringle, the SNP’s former head of communications. Why are Police Scotland, the NHS north of the border and Scotland's education system failing to work properly? How has the independence argument stopped the nationalists being held to account? And are the opponents of independence overstating their criticisms about the SNP’s time in government?

Adam Tomkins

Centralising, illiberal, catastrophic: the SNP’s one-party state

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thedisasterofthesnp-silliberal-one-partystate/media.mp3" title="Adam Tomkins vs. Kevin Pringle on the SNP's 8 years in government" startat=37] Listen [/audioplayer]Imagine a country where the government so mistrusted parents that every child was assigned a state guardian — not a member of their family — to act as a direct link between the child and officials. Imagine that such a scheme was compulsory, no matter how strongly parents objected. Imagine that the ruling party controlled 95 per cent of MPs, and policed the political culture through a voluntary army of internet fanatics who seek out and shout down dissent. Welcome to Nicola Sturgeon’s Scotland in 2015. The First Minister is admired the world over.

Nick Cohen

What Scottish professors have to fear from Nicola Sturgeon’s power grab

In the grounds of Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University stands a one-tonne sculpture. Roughly hewn and about five feet high, it carries in its top corner an ill-carved sun. Beneath it are some words of Alex Salmond, half-sunk in the sandstone, as if they were the thoughts of a Scottish Ozymandias: ‘The rocks will melt with the sun before I allow tuition fees to be imposed on Scottish students.’ This clunky celebration of SNP -policy should raise a few doubts. Free higher education is not free for all in Scotland. Edinburgh can afford to pay the fees of only 124,000 students in Scottish universities. Their contemporaries might have the grades, but they must go elsewhere because Scottish universities need fee-payers from England and Wales to balance their books.