Stephen Daisley

Kate Forbes has reportedly quit the Scottish government after new SNP leader Humza Yousaf offered her the job of rural affairs secretary. Given that Forbes has been finance secretary for the past three years, and a junior finance minister for two years before that, it’s a fairly transparent play: humiliate her into quitting government altogether.  After all, it would be the equivalent of Rishi Sunak reshuffling Jeremy Hunt to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Arguably it’s worse, because Forbes spent years rebuilding relations with the business community, which had been good under Alex Salmond but fell off a cliff once Nicola Sturgeon took over.

They have thrown everything at Kate Forbes. She has been subjected to a secular inquisition marked by triviality and partiality. Journalism is a trade neither teeming with religious believers nor one well-equipped for Biblical exegesis, and it shows.  ‘Gotcha’ interrogation has focused on scriptural provisions offensive to progressive attitudes pervasive among journalists (e.g. on homosexuality and fornication) and not other teachings with as much potential bearing on policymaking, such as the iniquities of the rich and powerful or the superior virtue of the poor and meek.

Nicola Sturgeon’s valedictory address to the RSA was her ‘And now we turn to the liars…’ speech. The outgoing SNP leader’s remarks were nominally about inequality and climate change but she was really there to talk about the distorting impact of social media on democratic politics. Given her departure was possibly hastened by the pushback against her Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which saw women’s rights campaigners and others organise via social media, it’s understandable that the First Minister would feel a little irked by these disruptively democratic platforms.  The ‘nature of the discourse’, Sturgeon opined, was ‘undermining our ability… to address the big issues’.

And so the Nicola Sturgeon years end with neither a bang or a whimper but with one pitiful desk-clearing after another. Peter Murrell, Sturgeon’s husband and the chief executive of the SNP, has announced his resignation. It comes after Murray Foote, the party’s chief spin doctor, walked on Friday. He had been rubbishing media reports that the party’s membership rolls had shrunk by 30,000 since 2021.  Then, Ash Regan, a candidate in the leadership contest to replace Sturgeon, questioned the integrity of that process and demanded the membership numbers be made public. Backed into a corner, SNP HQ released the figures, which showed a drop in members of 32,000 over the last two years.

The Chancellor’s decision to slap a ten per cent duty hike on Scotch whisky is bad economics. Exports broke the £6 billion mark last year and the industry employs 11,000 people in Scotland while supporting 42,000 jobs across the UK. But whisky is a luxury item in a competitive global market where increases in retail price impact consumer behaviour. Five of the top ten export destinations by value (United States, France, Germany, Japan and Spain) are economies experiencing sharp declines in household income.  Driving up the industry’s costs also hampers one of the biggest export challenges facing Scotch whisky today: breaking India. Per bottle sales rose 60 per cent last year but Scotch still only accounts for two per cent of the Indian whisky market.

The BBC’s decision to take Gary Lineker off the air is the sort of self-harming stupidity at which the Corporation excels. The Match of the Day presenter tweeted that the Illegal Migration Bill was ‘an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people’ and done ‘in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s’. As his social media activity makes clear, Lineker’s views are checklist progressive: anti-Tory, pro-Palestinian, anti-Brexit, pro-taking-the-knee. The BBC has previously censured him for a tweet it found to breach social media guidance and editorial standards of impartiality.

There’s a sudden vacancy in the constituency of Wakefield. The incumbent Labour MP hasn’t resigned or died. He just happens to be Simon Lightwood, a good example of nominative determinism. Lightwood’s weaselly intervention in Qurangate carries all the moral force of a sliver of driftwood carried along by the tide. In place of an MP, Wakefield has the faintest of shadows. Statement on the recent incident at Kettlethorpe High School: pic.twitter.com/k5a8eoslVA— Simon Lightwood MP (@simonlightwood) March 5, 2023 Note that he characterises teenage boys dropping and scuffing a book – a book which was the property of one of those boys – as ‘the incident’.  Note that he condemns threats and ‘hate speech’, as he calls it, ‘from anyone’.

‘I think the village of Huwara needs to be wiped out. I think the State of Israel should do it.’  I have read those words and read them again – and again. I have checked various news sources to be sure there was no error in translation or transcription. I have tried to parse the words to construe a meaning other than the one I know in my gut to be true. But it won’t work. The words mean what they say. They are a call for ethnic cleansing.  The words were spoken by Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister and leader of Tkuma, a religious nationalist party of the far right. Smotrich was interviewed yesterday morning at a conference hosted by Tel Aviv based financial newspaper, The Marker.

Alister Jack may be about to take another stand against reckless policy-making at Holyrood. According to reports, the Scottish Secretary may deny the Scottish government’s deposit return scheme (DRS) a trading exemption under the UK Internal Market Act (UKIMA). The DRS will see 20p added to every single-use packaged drink sold in Scotland, with consumers able to recoup the money by returning their used bottles and cans to retailers or reverse vending machines.  Any drinks producer that hasn’t signed up to the scheme by midnight tonight risks being unable to sell their products in Scotland.

Luciana Berger’s return to the Labour party is not only a restoration but a supreme act of forgiveness. The former MP was hounded out of the party in 2019 because she was Jewish at a point where the whole rotten institution had become infested with antisemites. Berger fought to hold on to her party, not wishing to hand a victory to Jew-haters. This steeliness was not surprising, given her pedigree.  Berger’s great-uncle was Manny Shinwell, Labour MP for Seaham and a straight-talking left-wing Jew. During a 1938 Commons debate, Shinwell was on his feet when the Conservative MP Robert Bower shouted: ‘Go back to Poland’. Shinwell paused his speech, walked across the gangway, socked Bower right in the jaw, then turn to the Speaker and said: ‘May I make a personal explanation?

Kate Forbes’ campaign to succeed Nicola Sturgeon has been largely written off by political rivals and the media. Her Christian faith is said to make her unsuitable to lead a progressive party like the SNP and to be the First Minister of a modern Scotland. Not least her admission that, while she doesn’t seek to roll back any existing rights, she wouldn’t have voted for same-sex marriage had she been an MSP when the legislation was before Holyrood. She also believes children should be born within wedlock and is sceptical of efforts to change the law on gender recognition. Game over, say people in the know.  However, a new poll of SNP supporters finds the contest wide open.