Politics

All has not been well in the Scottish government for some time – and the latest revelation that former first minister Humza Yousaf was slamming civil servant press officers in WhatsApp chats is hardly likely to repair relations. It transpires that hapless Humza and one-time national clinical director Jason Leitch turned on their own officials in Covid message exchanges, uncovered by the Scottish Sun via Freedom of Information request. Oh dear. In a rather ironic twist, it has emerged that Yousaf complained he was ‘not hugely impressed’ by the efforts of the comms officials working in the health department, before promising to, er, ‘sort it out’. Perhaps he should’ve taken

Since the death of Alexei Navalny in an Arctic penal colony in February, Russia’s opposition movement has found itself in disarray. Instead of Navalny’s death uniting those exiled Kremlin critics campaigning for a democratic future for Russia, the past eight months have seen the opposition movement fracture into bickering factions, unable to collaborate on anything much at all. Now, that fighting has broken out into the open – and risks putting the cause of a future democratic Russia in jeopardy. Last week, Latvia’s anti-corruption bureau announced they had begun an investigation into allegations made by Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) that Latvian law enforcement officers had had a hand in organising a

If you need proof that the SNP’s modus operandi in government is to make it up on the hoof, consider the party’s plan for a National Care Service (NCS). Announced by former first minister Nicola Sturgeon, the NCS was to be a radical – even visionary – solution to growing pressure on both the National Health Service and the social care sector. By bringing sharp focus to the needs of a growing elderly population, the new care service would not only mean immediate improvements to the lives of those it was established to serve, it would also end the use of hospitals as unofficial care homes. The argument in favour of