Iain Macwhirter

The Scottish National party (SNP) has failed to win an overall majority in the Scottish parliament. With an expected 58 MSPs, it has fallen short of the 65 target which John Swinney said would have been a mandate for an independence referendum – not that Westminster would have authorised one any time soon. However, this

The Scottish Green party can usually be relied upon to provide some light relief at election time. But this year, in their manifesto for the Scottish Parliament elections on 7 May, they have outdone themselves in fantasy policy-making. The Greens want to ban everything from horse racing to homework; from nuclear power to wood-burning stoves. Candidates such

When the Scottish Liberal Democrat MSP, Liam McArthur, first tabled his Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill two years ago, the result seemed almost a foregone conclusion. Nearly all of the party leaders supported it, at least in principle, along with a clear majority their elected members. Around 80 per cent of Scottish

Few would argue that Scotland’s present pattern of land tenure is ideal. Around half of private land is owned by fewer than 500 individuals, corporates or pension funds. The vast estates date from two centuries ago when landlords, often clan chiefs, expelled the Scottish peasantry from their villages in the interests of ‘improvement’ – mainly

Kemi Badenoch’s rediscovery of the North Sea oil and gas industry would be more convincing had it not been successive Conservative governments that promoted its decline in the first place. In a speech in Aberdeen today, she will call for “every last drop” of oil to be extracted from our waters. Contrary to popular belief,

Nicola Sturgeon’s memoir Frankly, finally published today, is already looking like the most ill-advised autobiography since Prince Harry’s Spare. Her attempts to denigrate her former mentor, the late Alex Salmond, have rebounded disastrously. Her teasing about her ‘non-binary’ sexuality sounded contrived. Her complaints of victimhood ring hollow coming from a politician who had a relatively

What was Nicola Sturgeon thinking, reopening the war with Alex Salmond, her former mentor, who died last year, in her forthcoming book, Frankly? What did she hope to gain by raking over the darkest episode in Scottish nationalist history, claiming that it was all an attempt by Salmond to ‘destroy’ her politically? Poor me, wronged by

In little over a week, the Scottish National Party (SNP) has lost two of its greatest political stars. Mhairi Black, the left-wing MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire South, threw in the towel last week, citing the ‘toxicity’ of politics and the party’s lack of support for transgender rights. Now, the deputy leader of the SNP,

Donald Trump touches down in Scotland today on what is ostensibly a private visit to open an 18-hole golf course dedicated to his mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, who was born on the Isle of Lewis. The State Visit isn’t until September. But Police Scotland aren’t taking any chances. Trump will be pursued by a ragged coalition

One of the first casualties of the Covid pandemic was the millennial left’s defining project of a Universal Basic Income. Once it became clear just how expensive it is for the state to pay people not to work, as in Rishi Sunak’s lockdown income guarantee, this quasi-socialist project died a well-deserved death. But not everyone

Here we go again. The Scottish parliament risks embarking on yet another exercise in legislative virtue signalling: the Labour MSP Monica Lennon’s emotively titled Ecocide Bill. The Scottish government is reportedly looking favourably on this legislation, which would make destroying the environment a criminal offence punishable by up to 20 years in prison. Does this

If the Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar is sincere in wishing to deprive Nigel Farage of the ‘oxygen of publicity’, he’s got a funny way of going about it. In a vituperative interview on the BBC’s Good Morning Scotland today, he gave the Reform leader another blast of oxygen by offering a public debate on the eve

Another grim milestone in Britain’s elective deindustrialisation was reached today: Scotland’s only remaining petrochemical plant, Grangemouth in Fife, ceased refining crude oil after more than half a century of processing output from the Forties field in the North Sea. It was hardly a surprise. PetroIneos, the part-Chinese-owned company, announced last year that Grangemouth was to

“Storm clouds are gathering. We can all see them.” No, not Winston Churchill on the rise of the Nazis in Europe, but John Swinney on the march of the “far right” in Scotland. Today, the First Minister will host a “mobilisation of mainstream Scotland” against Reform and its “racist” leader, Nigel Farage, who he says,

The first thing to say is that Nicola Sturgeon has been cleared in an investigation into the SNP’s funding and finances, with no case to answer, scot-free. That may seem a statement of the bleedin’ obvious, but there are many in and out of the independence movement who do not and never will believe that

The departure of the former Scottish First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, from active politics draws a line under the Scottish National Party’s greatest generation. Her former mentor, Alex Salmond, died suddenly of a heart attack in October. Now, Sturgeon has told her supporters that “the time is right for me to embrace different opportunities and to

Keir Starmer has sought to get into Donald Trump’s good books by boosting defence expenditure – and doing it in a very Maga way: slashing the UK aid budget to pay for it. That has no doubt caught the eye of the US president, as has the Prime Minister’s promise to put British boots on

What were they thinking? When Tony Blair agreed, in 2004, to legislation allowing transsexuals – as they were then called – to change their legal sex, he probably thought Labour was merely ‘being kind’ to a tiny number of people with the medical condition of gender dysphoria. He never expected thousands of young people to start asking