Philip Patrick

Alex Salmond is hosting a show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this week. It’s called ‘The Ayes Have It’ and features special guests such as old mucker David Davis, trusty lieutenant Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh and former Commons sparring partner John Bercow. SNP notables Kate Forbes and Fergus Ewing are popping up and there will be a guest appearance from former first minister Henry McLeish. Salmond, some suspect, might be dreaming of a political comeback – but is a return realistic? Salmond is probably the only independence supporting politician in Scotland who could mount a show like this without fear of outright ridicule. By contrast, former first minister and festival regular Nicola Sturgeon has just one low key appearance, while Humza Yousaf won’t be participating at all.

Just four members of the US football team at the Women’s World Cup sang their country’s national anthem before their game against Portugal yesterday. The rest stayed silent and impassive with their hands conspicuously by their side, not over their hearts. This was the third time the US team, or much of it, has made a silent protest at this World Cup in New Zealand. Are they to be condemned for this, or does every player have the right to express their feelings for their country, or lack of, in their own way? Pre-match protests have become popular in recent years and the US players are not alone in seizing the limelight to make a point.

A Japanese government report has revealed that over a 50-year period, under a policy of forced sterilisation, 16,500 people were operated on without their consent. The youngest, a boy and a girl, were just nine. Another 8,000 apparently gave their consent, though under what sort of pressure is unclear. A further 60,000 women had abortions due to hereditary illnesses. This was all done under a eugenics law enacted in 1948 and not repealed until the 1990s. Victims of the policy, often young girls spirited away to clinics for mysterious operations they didn’t understand, have been campaigning for compensation for decades.

Want to avoid Pride month? Bit tired of the, almost literally, in your face, carnival of uninhibited sexual freedom we see on our streets throughout June? Then come to Japan. It’s not that Pride doesn’t happen here at all, just that the Japanese for various cultural and historic reasons, don’t make a song and dance – or a borderline street cabaret – out of it. Japan’s version ‘Rainbow Pride’ is held in April and lasts just two days. It was back on this year for the first time since 2019 and was apparently reasonably well-attended. I say ‘apparently’ because I saw no sign of it, nor watched or read a single report in the media. It was, to use an old-fashioned term, discreet. But for how much longer?

‘We need to be careful with the language we use,’ said Gary Lineker as he picked up an award from Amnesty International in Rome for his ‘strong commitment towards immigration and human rights issues’. It was an interesting line to take, given it was Lineker’s intemperate tweeting – particularly his referencing of 1930s Germany in relation to language used by Home Secretary Suella Braverman – that boosted his social justice warrior profile and probably helped win him the award. Having collected his gong, Lineker claimed in a waffly interview with Channel 4 to be a believer in freedom of speech.

The SNP has announced that if the next general election results in a hung parliament it will, as power brokers, ‘undo Brexit as far as possible’. Alyn Smyth, the SNP’s EU accession spokesperson, said his party would demand the UK has a close relationship with Brussels in any negotiations with a minority Labour government. There might be a few titters at this and jokes about signing cheques that can’t be cashed from a scandal-beset party whose relevance and even long-term viability is in serious doubt. But the SNP clearly think this is a winning strategy that can arrest their decline and boost their chances. Whether it truly is, and whether their avowed antipathy to Brexit is all that it is purported to be, is questionable.

Devolution has largely failed in Scotland and Wales and some powers need to be returned to Westminster. This is a precis of a controversial article by Lord Frost in the Daily Telegraph last week that continues to provoke outrage. Leading members of the SNP have denounced it. Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf has vowed to ‘defend our democracy’ in the face of the attack, and Stephen Flynn, the SNP leader at Westminster, has called it evidence of ‘a deliberate, co-ordinated attempt to reverse devolution, …and force Scotland under Westminster control.

Has Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida just survived an assassination attempt? Kishida was evacuated from the site of a stump speech in the fishing port of Sakizaki in Wakayama western Japan after what appeared to be a pipe bomb was thrown in his direction. No one was injured but people fled in terror after the attack, which occurred at around 11:25 AM shortly before the PM was due to speak. A man was wrestled to the ground clearly holding a cylindrical metal object identical to the one thrown at Kishida before being arrested and taken away.  That’s as much as we know for now. It is not clear yet whether the ‘explosive’ was capable of killing anyone.

As expected, Humza Yousaf has won the SNP leadership election and, barring something extraordinary, will become the next First Minister of Scotland. Yousaf may have been the bookies' choice but that’s about as far as the favourability extends. Yousaf had a -20 rating with the general public of Scotland and only +11 with his own party (just 33 per cent of the party’s 72,000 members voted for him). Yousaf is widely regarded as incompetent, gaffe prone, and charmless. His much-tweeted speech on the ‘whiteness’ of Scottish society, which seemed designed to annoy the 96 per cent of Scots who are Caucasian, is one of the most controversial in the inglorious history of the Scottish parliament.

Yesterday saw the final televised debate between the three contenders for leader of the SNP and First Minister of Scotland. Voting will end and the winner will be declared on 27 March.  Or will it? Those sick of this increasingly tawdry contest should prepare themselves: it may have a way to go yet. There are calls for the contest to be halted, restarted or at least reset. And if that doesn’t happen, there is a risk that the winner will not be recognised by certain sectors of the party. There is a talk of a legal challenge from pro-independence blog Wings Over Scotland (which is mulling crowdfunding such a move).  The reasons are simple. There are serious concerns about the integrity of the process and about who will actually be voting/has already voted.

Ed Miliband must be relieved. With Ash Regan’s idea for an ‘independence thermometer’, a giant screen or billboard visually representing progress towards various aspects of independence, his ‘Edstone’ now has competition for the most ridiculous idea ever presented by a UK politician during an election campaign. It is a measure of how absurd the contest to replace Nicola Sturgeon has become that Regan’s Heath Robinson-esque brainwave has caused only mild amusement. Regan followed up her inspiration by going full Braveheart and endorsing Alex Salmond’s idea of withholding the Stone of Destiny from the upcoming coronation. Quite how this benefits the people of Scotland or advances the cause of independence was left unclear.