Stephen Daisley

Watching the proceedings of the Scottish Parliament, a thought often occurs: if these people won elections, imagine the runners up. The runner-up to the SNP’s Collette Stevenson in East Kilbride was Joe Fagan, and while the Labour man ultimately got in via the regional list – truly the participation trophy of Holyrood’s proportional voting system – he must return to those vote tallies every now and then and wonder what he did wrong.  Yesterday, Holyrood’s transport committee was scrutinising plans by the SNP government to restructure Transport Scotland. Without getting too deep into the weeds of devolved administration, Transport Scotland is an executive agency, a self-contained government body that answers to ministers but isn’t integrated into the transport department.

The slow demise of the United Kingdom is suddenly gaining speed. The proximate cause is Andy Burnham’s statement last Wednesday that Scotland and Northern Ireland are in ‘exactly the same’ constitutional situation and that majority public support was sufficient for either to secure a border poll. However, longer trends brought us here, from historical population movements to the decline of Empire to the dawn of devolution. We’ll set aside the first two because plenty has been written about them already and focus instead on the third.

Ever since the Supreme Court ruled in November 2022 that the Scottish Parliament could not hold a unilateral referendum on breaking up Britain, Scottish independence has been dead in the water. Nicola Sturgeon went, Humza Yousaf came (and went not too long after), the party lost all but a handful of its Commons seats in the general election, and John Swinney, a man with the personality of a pedestrian crossing, limped home in May’s devolved elections on the SNP’s lowest vote share in two decades. Beset by headlines about women banged up with rapists, missing ferries, and embezzled camper vans, the Nationalists just couldn’t catch a break. Until now.  Prime Minister’s Questions is a minefield.

Scottish politics has all the dynamism of day-old porridge. Nothing ever changes, except for the worse. The latest results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), covering educational performance among 15-year-olds across 91 developed countries and territories, place England in the top ten for maths, science and reading. Scotland is not in the top ten for any of the three. In maths, the nation of John Napier lags England by 25 points. In science, the country that gave the world James Clerk Maxwell trails England, again, by 25 points. Reading is the runaway success story, where Walter Scott’s homeland is a mere nine points behind its southern brethren.

The Programme for Government – picture a dour, cheapo version of the King’s Speech – is an annual statement by the Scottish First Minister outlining his legislative plans for the coming year. SNP leader John Swinney delivered his latest PfG (even the acronym is soulless) on Tuesday and the word of the day was ‘reform’. Swinney proposed to scrap 12 health boards, redraw local council boundaries, reduce the number of public bodies, and generally make government more streamlined and responsive to the needs of service users.

The Scots language advocate Billy Kay has caused a richt stooshie wi’ his thochts on Unionists and their lawte tae the kintra. The writer and broadcaster mused on a podcast from The National: ‘One strand that has practically disappeared, I think, is Unionists who were patriotic Scots…Because of the rise of modern nationalism I think that brand of Unionism almost has died a death. I don't know anyone like that nowadays. I knew people personally from some of the old Tory families that I came across when I was interviewing people. They were all very patriotically Scottish, but they were Scottish Unionists, and they belonged to a tradition.

The result in Clacton is more evidence for my thesis that voters are so entrenched in their attitudes towards Nigel Farage that his chances of reaching No. 10 are slim. Reform is spinning the 17 per cent jump in its leader’s vote share as a triumph – and it might have been if it weren’t for the circumstances. This is a man we’re told wants to be the next prime minister, but just look at that result for Count Binface, the alleged comedy candidate.  A vote share of 27 per cent for an establishment progressive in Clacton of all places is a pretty significant data point. It’s no good blaming the other parties for dingying the contest or the media for being out to get Farage.

The great civic crisis of our times is state capacity. When policies favoured by voters are repeatedly met with a bureaucratic 403 error – the action you requested is forbidden by our servers – dissatisfaction with the established order grows, as does the appeal of those outside the mainstream who wish to topple that order.

Whatever happened to the Democrats? Party of FDR, Kennedy and Clinton. Idealistic, moderate, gave a vague impression of actually liking the United States. That pragmatic, patriotic party is scarcely discernible from the hideous creature that stands before us. The far left has hollowed out the Democrats and now parades in their freshly flayed skin, like a keffiyeh-clad Buffalo Bill.  Overnight results from the Michigan senate primary are still coming in, but Congresswoman Haley Stevens, a mainstream liberal, is trailing Abdul El-Sayed, an epidemiologist and part of the leftist insurgency taking over the Democratic party.

No. 10 (North and South alike) will be heartened by polling suggesting that the more the British public sees of Andy Burnham, the more they like him. Leader approval research by More in Common shows Burnham on a rating of plus 19 after just over a week in the job – almost double Keir Starmer’s high point at the end of 2024. That these numbers are soft should not need saying. The metric that matters is not the public mood during the Prime Minister’s honeymoon but what they think of him once he’s a known quantity, has had to make hard decisions, and is asking for another five years in his own right. That is when we will learn how much of an electoral asset Burnham is to the Labour party.  I write here to make another point entirely: just look at those Nigel Farage numbers.

The Scottish Labour party is a bit like cigarette-smoking or the Church of Scotland: it used to be everywhere you looked, but now you can’t remember the last time you saw it. We have been reminded of the party’s existence thanks to the abrupt exit of its leader Anas Sarwar, who was given a peerage and ministerial gig by Andy Burnham for reasons having absolutely nothing to do with his February statement calling on Keir Starmer to resign. That leaves a vacancy at the top of Scottish Labour, and today North East Scotland MSP Michael Marra has followed his Glasgow colleague Monica Lennon in announcing his candidacy.

The leadership of the Scottish Labour party isn’t worth the price of a cold cup of tea. Anas Sarwar has confirmed this by jumping ship to a seat in the Lords and a billeting in Andy Burnham’s new government, reportedly as a business minister. The appointment – no, let’s be candid: the promotion – will involve Sarwar quitting as Scottish Labour leader and giving up his seat at Holyrood.I doubt either will prompt from him much in the way of farewell tears. Westminster is always where he has wanted to be because Westminster is where the power is. His decade at Holyrood was preceded by five years as MP for Glasgow Central, a seat he inherited from his father Chaudhry Mohammad Sarwar, who renounced his British citizenship, returned to Pakistan and was elected governor of Punjab.

Israel’s foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar has raised eyebrows with a late-night tweet mocking England’s defeat in the World Cup semifinals. Even if we allow for the fact that Sa’ar’s father was from Argentina, his taunting X post is unlikely to be taught as an example of best practice on any training courses for diplomats. ‘How does the song go?’ he began. ‘It’s coming home. Yes it is. It’s coming home to Argentina. Vamos Argentina!’ This slur on England’s honour will be avenged. The next time Israel is knocked out of a World Cup, our great-great-grandchildren will troll them with something awful. While Sa’ar’s family background probably plays a part, his comments reflect a new diplomatic froideur between Jerusalem and London.

The death of Ann Widdecombe calls to mind the song of the same name by Victoria Wood. The festive ditty describes the then-shadow home secretary, as ‘our favourite Tory biddy’ with Wood, done up to resemble the no-nonsense Conservative, emerging from behind a curtain crooning: ‘Ann Widdecombe! Ann Widdecombe! I sing, I dance, I lean to the right/ I’m truculent, I’m succulent, I am a star.

There is so little substance to Andy Burnham that it seems almost churlish to attack the one area where he amounts to more than ambition, sentiment and unfathomable vanity, but his big policy idea happens to be one with which I have some familiarity. In his speech this week at the People's History Museum in Manchester, the soon-to-be prime minister pledged ‘new opportunities to extend devolution in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland’ and the devolution of employment support to mayors in England.