Scotland

It was Cop26 in Glasgow and Nicola Sturgeon was in her element, posing for selfies with Greta Thunberg, David Attenborough and assorted world leaders. The then first minister was desperate to upstage Boris Johnson who had very much put his mark on the global climate shindig. ‘It’s one minute to midnight on the Doomsday clock,’ the prime minister warned the assembled green lobbyists and corporate CEOs, ‘and we need to act now’. He promised to cut UK greenhouse gas emissions by 68 per cent of 1990 levels by 2030 and to achieve net zero by 2050. Nicola Sturgeon just had to go one better. Scotland would cut emissions by 75 per

When will the Scottish government get on with the day job? Hot on the heels of his controversial Hate Crime Act, Humza Yousaf has now promised a misogyny law that will apparently protect members of both sexes. The First Minister insisted that ‘anyone affected’ by misogyny would be covered, whatever their biological sex. This includes, of course, transgender women. One wonders if the SNP is so detached from reality that it does not know the difference between men and women, or they are so deeply in the pockets of an activist lobby that they pretend not to know. Either way, it is bad for women and bad for Scotland. Once

If you don’t want to know the answer, don’t ask the question. That seems to be the mantra by which the SNP is currently abiding. Careful analysis of the many, many years of the ferry fiasco to the recent confusion over former health secretary Michael Matheson’s iPad bill has shown that important queries haven’t always been voiced when they should have been. And now, the latest example of question avoidance relates to a rather sensitive matter for the Scottish government: public trust.  It transpires that SNP ministers have quietly scrapped a question on this very issue from the Scottish Household Survey. The poll asks the public to rate their trust

Another day, another nationalist gaffe. This time it’s pro-indy filmmaker and columnist — for that august journal the National — Lesley Riddoch in the spotlight. In a rather bizarre attempt to persuade the good people of Scotland that independence wouldn’t be a terrible idea, Riddoch has demonstrated exactly why the Nats should not be in charge.  In a stilted documentary clip, Riddoch tries to contrast the Denmark-Sweden crossing with one that could exist between Scotland and England in an alternate reality. As she’s driving, Riddoch tells the camera of the ‘frictionless border between two different countries’. They have ‘different systems, different languages and different currencies’. She goes on: Does that

Back to Scotland and Humza Yousaf’s controversial new hate law. The First Minister’s Hate Crime Act has left an already overstretched and under-resourced police force swamped with trivial complaints. Of the over 7,000 reports made in the first week, only three per cent of these were actual crimes. And now the spotlight is on the rather strange public information campaign released by the Scottish government. Not only was it pretty ineffective at communicating exactly what a hate crime is (hence the low crime to report ratio), it has now transpired that it cost the taxpayer nearly, um, £400,000. Crikey. The questionable ‘Hate Hurts’ campaign — plastered across billboards and TV

Uh oh. Today brings tidings of misery for hapless Humza Yousaf as a new poll reveals that support for Labour has overtaken the SNP for the first time since the 2014 indyref. The YouGov survey sees Labour on 33 per cent, up a point since October last year, while support for the Nats has gone down by two points to 31 per cent. How the mighty fall… Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour has been narrowing the gap between the two parties for the last year, with the resignation, police probe and arrest of former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon providing a helping hand. Meanwhile support for independence has stagnated, with ‘yes’ stuck at

Oh dear. As the furore around Scotland’s Hate Crime Act extends into its sixth day, there are now fears about police spending as the force looks set to struggle with the sheer volume of complaints. It is understood that, since the Act was implemented on Monday, 40 officers a day have been required to work overtime to help tackle reports. With officers being paid time and a third for working extra hours, there are concerns about overstretching the Police Scotland budget. What a mess… Over 3,000 hate crime complaints were submitted in the first 24 hours of the Act and the Scottish Tories have predicted that at this rate, over

Scotland’s Hate Crime Act (HCA) has, by common agreement, been an unmitigated disaster. Less than a week old, there are already calls for it to be repealed – like the equally misconceived but more awfully named Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications (Scotland) Act 2012. The police are now clearly hesitant of arresting anyone for hate crime The police have been swamped with thousands of complaints, many vexatious, all of which they are pledged to investigate. JK Rowling has blown the doors off with her ‘arrest me’ tweets, but the First Minister, Humza Yousaf, attracted more hate crime complaints in the first two days than she did. SNP Ministers like Siobhan Brown have been ridiculed for misrepresenting their own

As Scotland’s embattled First Minister continues to face backlash over his Hate Crime Act, his party has been hit with yet more bad news. New polling from YouGov suggests that Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party will become the largest party in Scotland, taking 28 seats and pushing the SNP into second place. The Nats are predicted to lose almost 25 of their Westminster seats, retaining just 19, the next time the electorate head to the ballot box. The MRP poll suggests that Labour will sweep up across Scotland’s central belt – widely regarded within the Scottish party as being ‘the first red wall to fall’ – and is even predicted

Police Scotland, who are responsible for enforcing Humza Yousaf’s Hate Crime Act, have found no criminality in a series of tweets posted by JK Rowling. On Monday, the day the Scottish law came into effect, the author, a gender-critical feminist, tweeted about a number of men who call themselves women – and insisted they were still men. In doing so, she said that, if this was a crime, she would ‘look forward to being arrested’ under the Act, which carries prison sentences of up to seven years. I would say this took some balls on her part but such metaphors are probably best avoided given the subject in hand.  Responding to the