Stephen Daisley

Peter Murrell, the most powerful man in Scotland, gave evidence under oath to the Alex Salmond inquiry on Tuesday. The SNP chief executive (and husband to Nicola Sturgeon) made a number of statements that already are under scrutiny, and others that soon may be. 1) Why doesn’t Sturgeon and Murrell’s evidence match up? Central to the committee’s attempts to shed light on Nicola Sturgeon’s actions has been trying to establish where she considers her role as SNP leader to end and her role as Scottish First Minister to begin.

Whenever the Scottish nationalists start talking about ‘fairness’, you know someone’s getting shafted. SNP education minister John Swinney has cancelled Scotland’s higher exams for 2021. Not out of concern over safely administering the assessments in a socially-distanced manner, but because letting them go ahead at all could be ‘unfair’. Nicola Sturgeon’s deputy told the Edinburgh parliament on Tuesday: ‘Exams cannot account for differential loss of learning and could lead to unfair results for our poorest pupils. This could lead to pupils’ futures being blighted through no fault of their own. That is simply not fair.’ You might remember Swinney from his previous stance on exam fairness.

There may be worse times to slash international development spending than the middle of a pandemic but it’s got to at least be in the top five. The reduction from 0.7 per cent of GDP to 0.5 represents a drop of £4 billion in investment. As Katy Balls notes, the current level was not only a manifesto commitment in 2019 but is enshrined in law, so ministers will have to ask parliament to legislate to allow them to break their own manifesto promise. International development is like foreign policy: there are no votes to be gained from it. In fact, abolishing it altogether would make the Tories more popular with their target voters. Even so, Rishi Sunak is making a mistake.

Sir Keir Starmer was having such a good year. He broke cover early on to attack the government’s handling of Covid-19 and did so by speaking explicitly to traditional Tory voters. He repeatedly bested Boris Johnson at Prime Minister’s Questions and gave a good first conference speech in the job. He brought his party’s poll numbers to within a hairsbreadth of the Conservatives, just as Number 10 descended into the dullest soap opera this side of The Archers. Even that cringe photo of him and Angela Rayner taking a knee in the Shadow Cabinet room — like your parents after listening to Stormzy for the first time — can be forgiven because, bless their hearts, they meant well. Then there was Jeremy Corbyn.

Boris Johnson says devolution has been a ‘disaster’. This has the rare quality for a Boris statement of being true but he, or rather the Scottish Tories, will be made to pay a political price for it. Barely had the contents of the Prime Minister’s remarks in a Zoom chat with northern MPs been reported than Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross was at the Twitter barricades: https://twitter.com/Douglas4Moray/status/1328438555429974018?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw Far from subduing the forces of nationalism, devolution built the separatists their own command centre at the foot of the Royal Mile The division of labour here is this: Boris is right intellectually, Ross is right politically. Devolution has been a disaster.

There it is, in black and white. For almost five years, Jews warned, nudged, reported, complained, pleaded and protested that there was a culture of anti-Semitism in the Labour party. For the most part, the party ignored them, although others assailed them, denounced them as fifth columnists, accused them of orchestrating a ‘smear’ campaign, of being agents of a well-financed ‘lobby’, of trying to destabilise Jeremy Corbyn in service of Israel. Scarcely better, and in some ways worse, were those who knew they were telling the truth but whose solidarity with them and commitment to resisting anti-Semitism was conditional on there not being an election in the offing.

Scottish nationalists have never been keen on Orwell. For decades, his ‘Notes on Nationalism’ has been quoted at them, with its description of their tendency as ‘power-hunger tempered by self-deception’ and the observation that ‘all nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts’. Not to mention, at risk of getting into indelicate matters, that some of the SNP’s early leading lights were on the other side of the old fascism question. But I’m happy to report a rapprochement between the two. Indeed, the Nationalists have so thoroughly warmed to their former foe that they are putting some of his ideas into practice.

The Scottish Tories are decidedly unenthusiastic about suggestions Westminster devolve further powers to the Scottish Parliament. A proposal to stave off independence by giving Holyrood additional financial powers and control over immigration, contained in a strategy memo leaked earlier this week, has been met with a chilly response from the party. I asked if they would be up for further devolution and got a blunt response from a party spokesman: ‘The Scottish Conservatives would not support more powers to the SNP.’ ‘More powers’ has been the Tory mantra for almost a decade now, despite the original devolution settlement being expansive.

Robert Conquest's third law (which may not have been his third law) says that the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation is most easily explained if one assumes it has been captured by enemy secret agents. This maxim often comes to mind when I read about the UK government’s latest wheeze to ‘save the Union’. Ministers’ new ideas are invariably the same idea they’ve been having for a decade now: devolution has failed, let’s have more of it. The Tories have already transferred more powers to Holyrood twice, in 2012 and 2016, and both times we were assured that doing so would subdue the separatists. And that was the last we heard of the SNP.

Whenever a new poll on Scottish independence is published, my phone begins buzzing so frantically it starts to register on the Richter scale. London-based editors want to know what it means. London-based politicians want to know what can be done to stop it meaning what they fear it means. The polls are not great for the Union these days and Wednesday’s, showing support for Scexit at 58 per cent, is further proof of the threat facing the United Kingdom. It’s only natural that this alarms instinctive Unionists but their Unionism could be a little more attentive. The United Kingdom has been under threat for years now, at least since the dawn of legislative devolution and especially after the SNP took control in Scotland in 2007.

Broadly speaking, there are two ways to respond to Communist China's national security law. First, there is the Tony Chung way. Chung, a 19-year-old activist, set up a pro-independence movement and became the first person arrested under the repressive legislation, imposed on Hong Kong by Beijing’s dictators earlier this year. Then there is the Lord Hodge way. The deputy president of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom (SCOTUK) has been appointed to the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal (HKCFA) and as such may help to apply the national security law.

Douglas Ross’s speech to the Conservative and Unionist Party conference was uncanny for being both conservative and unionist. The Scottish Tory leader pitched up to his podium and launched into an awkward conversation with colleagues south of the border. His theme was ‘putting an end to defeatism and disinterest’ and both he blamed on the English Tories and their turn away from Unionism. Unionism, in his rendering, was a categorical imperative of British conservatism. ‘You cannot be a conservative and not be a unionist, the two values are inseparable in our politics,’ he pronounced.