Stephen Daisley

Nicola Sturgeon’s cabinet reshuffle is an object lesson in making a very limited talent pool go a long way. John Swinney, who has been education secretary since 2016, has been shifted into a new brief in charge of the Covid recovery. Swinney’s tenure at education won’t be fondly remembered, presiding as he did over the SNP’s fundamentally flawed Curriculum for Excellence, a stubborn attainment gap between the richest and poorest pupils, a long-running teacher shortage and the 2020 exams fiasco. Any other minister in any other government would have been sent on his merry way long ago but Swinney is too valuable an ally for Sturgeon, having proved his political worth most recently in the Holyrood inquiry into the Sturgeon-Salmond affair.

Douglas Ross’s first Holyrood election as Scottish Tory leader ended with the party losing two constituencies but its overall seat tally remaining at 31. The Moray MP was not a hit on the campaign trail. Robotic, shouty, angry — pick your well-worn adjective. He was eviscerated daily by a hostile press and any number of commentators lined up to say all manner of uncharitable things about him. I was one of them. Yet the results are there for all to see. Ross lost the commentariat but won the voters. The electorate had better buck up its ideas sharpish.

It's a funny old business, politics. The SNP's number one target in the Holyrood election was Scotland's most marginal seat, Dumbarton. Held by Labour in 2016 by just 109 votes, the Nationalists put everything into unseating the incumbent Jackie Baillie.  It is no exaggeration to say Baillie is a hate-figure for Scottish nationalism. She is moderate Labour, staunchly pro-Union, pro-Trident (the Clyde Naval Base is in her constituency), and was a member of the Holyrood inquiry, during which she distinguished herself with fierce, forensic questioning of both Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Salmond. For all the damage they have inflicted on Labour in its one-time heartlands of west-central Scotland, the Nationalists have never been able to beat Baillie.

Scotland goes to the polls today to vote for 129 members of the Scottish Parliament. Polls forecast victory for the ruling SNP but there are a string of seats where the result last time was close enough to inject some unpredictability into proceedings. SNP targets Dumbarton Incumbent: Jackie Baillie (Labour)  Majority: 109 This is the seat the Nationalists want more than any other. Politically, it is a stubborn west-coast hold-out against the glories of nationalism. Symbolically, it is home to the Clyde Naval Base and the UK’s nuclear deterrent, which the SNP wants to scrap. But perhaps most important of all is the personal dimension.

Holyrood 2021 was supposed to be an election for the mavericks. Alex Salmond is back from the political dead with a new party promising to lead nationalists to independence where his former party has failed. George Galloway has turned his attention to Scotland and, despite his previous pronouncements on the matter, is heading up an outfit opposed to indyref2. While Salmond has had no trouble drumming up headlines, neither has made much of an impression on the polls. That might be because their respective parties appear to be all about one man. The opposite seems to be true of Andy Wightman, who actually is one man but his campaign is tapping into a grassroots movement for more rigour, integrity and free-thinking at Holyrood.

If there is more joy in Heaven over one devolutionist who repenteth, the celestial jubilations must be in full roar over a belated admission from Tony Blair. In an interview with ITV News, the former prime minister reflected: ‘I do think one of the weaknesses in the way we approached devolution was not to build real cultural ties and emphasise the enormous things that the different countries in the United Kingdom have in common.

Will Anas Sarwar lead Scottish Labour back into second place at Holyrood? On the strength of the campaign he has fought, he deserves to, for he has run the most positive, energetic and ideas-based offering in a dreary and rancorous election. Sarwar has been almost alone in trying to make the May 6 poll about something other than arid constitutionalism.  His proposals are all sound, social democratic measures: a jobs guarantee for young Scots; investing in cancer and mental health treatment; and extra funding for schools to recover from the educational setbacks of Covid-19. Against an increasingly stale-sounding Nicola Sturgeon and the Scottish Tories' angry-robot leader Douglas Ross, Sarwar has been a breath of fresh air.

Presented for whatever is the opposite of your edification, an exchange between the leaders of Scotland’s main political parties. The setting is Tuesday night’s Holyrood election hustings, hosted via Zoom by the National Union of Students. We begin with Nicola Sturgeon accusing Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross of being inconsistent on who gets credit for the Covid vaccination programme in Scotland. Nicola Sturgeon: Make your mind up. Douglas Ross: No, I was saying your rollout was poor. Your rollout was poor. NS: But the point is, the UK chose to— DR: But answer the question— It’s like watching a very dressed-down remake of Mean Girls. Totally not fetch.

There isn’t much I agree with in the SNP’s manifesto for the Holyrood elections, so it seems peevish to cavil about the policies to which I am generally sympathetic. These are: a national care service, 100,000 new houses, abolition of dental charges, free school meals, investment in closing the attainment gap and more money for skills and training. I might quibble with the universalism of some measures because I would rather see resources redistributed from those with means to those without them. Even so, the Nationalists are making some of the right noises, if purely for their own electoral benefit rather than any late conversion to social democracy. The obvious question, then: How do they intend to pay for it?

This week's Holyrood election debate should not be allowed to pass without noting how it highlighted the dismal state of Unionism. Nicola Sturgeon revisited a point she has been underscoring heavily during this campaign: that a majority of nationalist MSPs returned after May 6 would represent a mandate for another referendum on Scotland seceding from the United Kingdom. Scottish nationalists have a curious relationship with popular sovereignty, seeing no contradiction in espousing this doctrine while harking back to the Declaration of Arbroath, a pledge of aristocratic fealty and an apologia for the divine right of kings. Among Sturgeon’s statements during the STV debate was: ‘The future of the country should be for the people in Scotland to decide. That is democracy.

There is a whiff of something in the current Scottish Parliament elections. It’s not quite strong enough to call it foul but nor is it faint enough to go undetected. What I can tell you is this: it doesn’t smell right. Yesterday, Alex Salmond’s new party, Alba, released a video depicting throngs of flag-waving nationalists with a voiceover delivered by an actor from the imagined perspective of Robert the Bruce. (If that seems like an odd idea for an election ad, welcome to Scotland.) ‘Bruce’ described the Battle of Bannockburn thus: ‘People power by the small folk of Scotland was the straw which broke the spine of English superiority’.