Stephen Daisley

Humza Yousaf’s programme for government — Holyrood’s duller, drabber answer to the King’s Speech — was mostly a Nicola Sturgeon tribute act. Heavy focus on social and cultural issues. Lots of leftish-sounding buzzwords (‘progressive’, ‘equality’, ‘diversity’) but nothing truly transformative. Still, just because the SNP leader’s speech and the legislative agenda attached were retreads of his predecessor’s era, it doesn’t mean this programme should be overlooked. In fact, there are a number of provisions that are worth keeping an eye on.  First up is one of the most disputed pieces of legislation ever produced by the Scottish parliament, one authored by Yousaf in his former role as Sturgeon’s justice minister: the Hate Crime and Public Order Act 2021.

American politics has become a tug-of-war between two generations. Boomers (and those older) dominate positions of power even as their capacity diminishes. Joe Biden, 80, has repeatedly displayed signs of frailty and confusion but, as far as we know, he’ll be running for re-election in 2024.  Over on Capitol Hill, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, 81, continues to freeze during public remarks and Diane Feinstein, 90, faces calls to retire from within her own party. While mental impairment is no impediment to serving in the United States Senate – if anything, it’s probably an advantage – the upper house is older than it has ever been. The average age in the Senate today is 65. There are eight serving senators who were born during Franklin Roosevelt’s administration.

For a decade or so, GERS Day has been something of an annual gloatfest for opponents of Scottish independence. The fiscal data dump would reliably show just how dependent Scotland is on cash transfers from the Treasury to fund the embryonic state created by devolution and its sizeable estate of public service provision. As a result, GERS, which stands for Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland, has become central to Scottish constitutional politics.  Anti-nationalists say it proves that independence would be financially devastating for Scotland. Nationalists dispute this. Some say independence is a matter of constitutional principle and fiscal considerations shouldn’t come into it.

If there is a right-wing cultural aesthetic in America, it is low-brow resentment. The old liberal-conservative tradition prized truth, beauty and the ‘the best which has been thought and said’. This has been shunted aside by a hair-trigger populism drawn to any cultural expression that scandalises progressive tastes. If people with graduate degrees hate it, today’s conservatives will love it.  Right-wing populists have a new cultural pin-up in Oliver Anthony, an ex-factory worker and singer-songwriter from Virginia. His track ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ has garnered 15 million views on YouTube in the space of a week and 1.5 million plays on Spotify in just five days. For each of those five days, it has also held the number one spot on iTunes.  https://www.

Every few weeks I write a ‘Why isn’t Scottish Labour ahead in the polls yet?’ piece. Here is the latest instalment and the take away is: Labour still hasn’t sealed the deal but it continues to close in on a vulnerable SNP. New polling from Redfield and Wilton shows the SNP retaining its three-point lead over Labour in Westminster voting intentions, with the Nationalists on 37 per cent and Labour on 34 per cent. Plugging these figures into the Electoral Calculus prediction tool gives the SNP 27 seats and Labour 22. If the next election played out this way, the SNP would have failed to win a majority of Scottish seats for the first time since 2015.

It’s not every day a supporter of Scottish independence is in the running for a peerage, least of all from a Tory government. So no doubt the SNP will be congratulating Mark Littlewood, who could soon be Lord Littlewood thanks to Liz Truss’s resignation honours. The outgoing director of the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) has distinguished himself in the world of London think tanks, where most are as uninterested in the fate of the Union as they are uninformed about Scottish politics. Not Littlewood, who is relaxed about the prospect of the Scots breaking away.  During a February 2017 appearance on Question Time, he told the Glasgow audience: ‘I see no reason why Scotland can’t take its place as a proud independent nation.

The Conservative party has had an idea. It’s not a very good idea, but it’s an idea and those are rare for the Tories. The idea is to start banging up repeat shoplifters and other low-level offenders. Transport minister Richard Holden has complained that ‘the police haven’t concentrated enough on some of these offences’ even though ‘they really do have a huge impact on our high streets and shops right across the country’. Without invoking the term, the minister was calling for an amped up version of broken windows policing, stamping out petty crimes that undermine public confidence and encourage more serious offending. So far, so 1980s right-wing criminology.  No. 10 may like the headlines but No.

They are the words Humza Yousaf has been dreading: Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election. South Lanarkshire Council confirmed yesterday afternoon that Margaret Ferrier, the incumbent MP, has been recalled by her constituents via petition. Ferrier was elected as an SNP MP but now sits as an independent after admitting that she travelled between London and Scotland on public transport having tested positive for Covid-19. She is currently serving a Commons suspension for these actions.  The by-election will be a major test for the First Minister and a chance to put his nightmare first four months behind him — or extend the agony, if his party loses the seat. Rutherglen and Hamilton West used to be Lanarkshire Labour heartlands, redder than a pillar box.

Humza Yousaf’s government is adrift, of that there can be no doubt. The question is how much longer the drift will be allowed to continue before the SNP leader corrects course. In the four months since he replaced Nicola Sturgeon, Yousaf has staggered from one catastrophe to another. The First Minister has seen his predecessor and other senior figures arrested (and released without charge) by police investigating the SNP’s financial affairs. His government’s flagship deposit return scheme has imploded after failing to gain the support of business and Westminster. He has been forced to U-turn on plans to ban fishing in 10 per cent of Scottish waters.

Scottish nationalists can sometimes be heard to say the United Kingdom is not a normal country. As evidence, they point to the unelected head of state, absence of a codified constitution and what they see as the dominance of one nation over other, smaller nations within the state. This analysis only underscores the very cultural overlap the SNP tries to downplay — for in their splendid ignorance of the political character of much of the democratic world they echo uncannily those London and university town progressives who delude themselves that the UK’s immigration debate is an insular outlier in an open and tolerant Europe.  It is not normal, in sum, for a sovereign state to facilitate and finance a process intended to separate it from part of its territory.

Ann Clwyd, who has died aged 86, never held ministerial office or high office of any kind. Unless, of course, you count a stint as chair of the parliamentary Labour party, though that is more of a penance than a power trip. She did a few tours on the opposition front bench under Neil Kinnock, John Smith and, briefly, Tony Blair, but she was too independent-minded and probably not metro enough for a New Labour red box. That she was rebelling against the government a few months into its first term only confirmed that. Voting against an early Harriet Harman benefit cut, designed to force single parents into the labour market, Clwyd pointed out there were ‘about 1,500 single parents and only 200 jobs available’ in her Cynon Valley constituency.

Some Conservatives are going to take heart from the by-election results. They may have lost Somerset and Frome to the Liberal Democrats on a 29 per cent swing. Selby and Ainsty may have fallen to Labour, who overturned their biggest ever majority (20,137) at a by-election. But they held on in Boris Johnson’s former seat, Uxbridge and South Ruislip. By just 495 votes, mind you, but a win is a win. Labour is blaming its defeat on local opposition to Sadiq Khan’s Ulez policy.  The lesson some Tories will take from this is that they must pivot to champion ordinary people, particularly motorists, over policies to limit carbon emissions. Put Sir Keir Starmer on the wrong side of the very workers he has to win back to form a Labour government. There are a few problems with this.

After ‘it’s not happening’, ‘it may be happening, but for different reasons’, and ‘would it be such a bad thing if it was happening?’, we have finally arrived at the ‘it’s happening and it’s a good thing’ stage of the Nigel Farage banking story. This now-familiar pattern of motivated reasoning was first identified by conservative writer Rod Dreher in his law of merited impossibility, which described how progressives could simultaneously hold the views that gay marriage wouldn’t diminish religious liberty and that the religious liberty of opponents of gay marriage ought to be diminished. As Dreher put it: ‘It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.

There’s a school of thought that, since Scotland isn’t likely to become independent anytime soon, interrogating the SNP’s claims about what independence would mean in practical terms is hypothetical and academic. This view is usually expressed by Unionists rather than nationalists, and reflects a frustration with the refusal of the constitutional question to go away. Journalists and commentators, they complain, are artificially invigorating a debate that would otherwise fade to silence.  Setting aside the wishful thinking required to sustain such a belief, there are two stories in the news that illustrate why continuing examination of the case for independence is necessary.

Scotland is the drug deaths capital of Europe and changing that is going to take something radical. The Scottish government thinks it’s found that something: the decriminalisation of all drugs for personal use. Humza Yousaf’s administration has issued a call for ‘a caring, compassionate and human rights informed drugs policy, with public health and the reduction of harm as its underlying principles’.  Between 2000 and 2021, 14,426 Scots died a drug-related death.

If you just ignore the opinion polls, Humza Yousaf’s first 100 days as First Minister have been an unqualified disaster. Yousaf eked across the finishing line after an internal election drenched in ruthless skullduggery and bitter factionalism. In the aftermath, he alienated and exiled his party rivals and turned the SNP backbenches from a North Korean military parade into a Holyrood remake of House of Cards.  His deposit return scheme imploded and his proposed ban on fishing in 10 per cent of Scottish waters was sunk by public opposition.

I think it was when she described Margo MacDonald as ‘just magic’ that I fell in love with Mhairi Black. As summations of pivotal political figures go, it’s akin to a first-time Labour parliamentary candidate calling Nye Bevan an absolute mad lad. This is how Black speaks, assessing political history as if she’s talking about that time Architects played the Cathouse. It’s not what you might expect from a middle-class lassie from Ralston, but it’s nothing so cynical as an act. Glasgow zillennial patter is a rhetorical mix of  imported American sitcoms and a self-consciously Scottish tone. It’s like someone remade The Big Bang Theory with an all-Weegie cast.