Steerpike

Well, well, well. As Nigel Farage's Reform party continues to poll well across the UK, north of the border the right-wing group is making yet more gains in Scotland. Now yet another Scottish Tory councillor has defected to join Reform UK, with the party announcing this morning that Alec Leishman had switched sides – as Scottish Tory leader Russell Findlay was delivering a keynote speech – before dubbing the move as a 'bitter blow' to the Conservatives. Another one bites the dust… The Renfrewshire councillor remarked today that he is 'delighted' to have joined Reform. Quick to blast his former party, Leishman proclaimed: Scotland badly needs change.

Well, well, well. Gender is back on the agenda in Holyrood again after the ongoing Sandie Peggie v NHS Fife case sparked outrage across the country. Scottish politicians held off on declaring their support for the female nurse, who took her health board and transgender doctor Dr Beth Upton to a tribunal over harassment allegations, until the weekend when Scottish Tory and SNP MSPs began to tweet that they 'stand with Sandie Peggie'. Scottish Labour, however, remained rather quiet on the issue. That is, until now… Speaking to the Holyrood Sources podcast today, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar and his party's deputy leader Jackie Baillie have finally pledged their support for nurse Peggie.

President Trump has been hard at work scrapping diversity courses stateside and international companies have followed suit – with Goldman Sachs and Deloitte some of the latest corporations to bin off their inclusion schemes. Whether the UK government will take a leaf out of Trump’s book is quite another matter, however. The Tories have called on Prime Minister Keir Starmer to ‘unshackle’ Britain from equality initiatives while Reform’s Rupert Lowe has been busy quizzing the government on their DEI spend in 2024 – which, Mr S can reveal, has taken a not insignificant sum from the public purse… In 2024, more than £1,000 of taxpayer’s cash was splurged on average every month on diversity training schemes by government departments.

Oh dear. Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar will have been hoping for some positive headlines this weekend, as his party’s 2025 conference looms next week – but it wasn’t to be. New Norstat polling for the Sunday Times, interviewing 1,026 people between 11-14 February, suggests Sarwar’s group is heading for its worst Holyrood election result since devolution. When it rains for the Labour lot, it pours… After Sir Keir Starmer’s army won a landslide victory at the general election, some in the Scottish Labour group harboured high hopes for their chances in the 2026 Holyrood election.

To Germany, where the Munich Security Conference is in full swing. The city is hosting a number of political bigwigs – although Prime Minister Keir Starmer didn't make an appearance – including US Vice President JD Vance. Addressing the conference this afternoon, the VP gave a rather punchy speech, first taking aim at Nato before claiming that 'in Britain and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat'. Crikey. Using the example of abortion buffer zones to describe how the 'religious liberties' of Britons were being curbed, the VP stressed his concerns about the role of the state in European countries and the UK. Going on, Vance told the conference: The threat that I worry the most about vis à vis Europe is not Russia, it's not China, it's not any other external actor.

To Scotland, where Nicola Sturgeon is, er, not very busy. In fact, Mr S can reveal the SNP's former Dear Leader has made a grand total of two spoken contributions in the Holyrood Chamber over the last 12 months. One was during a debate on Ukraine while another speech reminded MSPs that more needs to be done by her own government to protect Scotland's young people. Talk about taking a back seat, eh? The former first minister may be keeping a low profile in the Scottish parliament but she has suggested, rather curiously, that she might not quit frontline politics just yet. It transpires that Sturgeon has submitted her application to the SNP to be considered for the election – and she has passed internal vetting.

It wasn't Kemi Badenoch's best day in the House of Commons today. But amid Keir Starmer's endless demands that the Tory leader 'do the homework', the Prime Minister might just have slipped up halfway through the weekly Q&A. Badenoch asked her Labour counterpart about a ruling by an immigration judge which suggests that Palestinian migrants have the right to live in the UK by applying through a scheme meant for Ukrainian refugees. Starmer replied by insisting that: She hasn't quite done her homework because the decision, the decision in question, was taken under the last government, according to the legal framework of the last government Is that really the case?