Scotland

The departure of the former Scottish First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, from active politics draws a line under the Scottish National Party’s greatest generation. Her former mentor, Alex Salmond, died suddenly of a heart attack in October. Now, Sturgeon has told her supporters that “the time is right for me to embrace different opportunities and to allow you to select a new standard-bearer”. Sturgeon, of course, relinquished her hold on the standard of government in February 2023 when she resigned suddenly and plunged her party into chaos from which it has yet to recover. When she departed Bute House, in the wake of the scandal over her flagship Gender Recognition Reform

It’s a day ending in ‘y’, which means the Scottish Nats are arguing amongst themselves again. Ex-SNP MP Mhairi Black has taken a pop at the party’s former Dear Leader Nicola Sturgeon in a new BBC documentary released this week about her time in politics. In the programme – in which Black blasts Westminster culture and laments the toll it took on her mental health – the outspoken nationalist took a pop at Sturgeon over the SNP’s careerist culture. In the Beeb’s new show, one of Black’s friends read out an article about the former first minister’s comments that there were too many careerists in the Scottish National party. Speaking

What do the Tories do with a problem like Reform? Kemi Badenoch’s party in Westminster has some time to consider this, with over four years to go until it has to put her strategy – whatever that is – to the test. But the same cannot be said of Russell Findlay, the Scottish Conservative party leader, who has an election in just over a year. While the UK group will be benchmarked against an historically poor Tory result in the 2024 general election, Findlay will be benchmarked against the best Holyrood election result in Tory history, with Douglas Ross winning 31 seats and a near one-quarter vote share. Seat extrapolations

There is little over a year to go until the 2026 Holyrood election and Scottish party selection processes are underway. This morning, two of the biggest names yet have said they will stand down at next year’s election: Finance Secretary Shona Robison and Transport Secretary Fiona Hyslop have announced they’re off. ‘The decision to retire is entirely personal and I do it for positive reasons,’ Hyslop insisted to reporters today. It is unlikely that will convince cynics who suggest the pair have jumped before they were pushed. The Holyrood selection process is a chance for the SNP to sort the wheat from the chaff The duo joins a long list

Well, you can’t say they don’t try. With Europe still reeling from Donald Trump’s oval office bust-up with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday, over in Scotland the SNP have piped up to make their feelings known about the American President. Never ones to miss a chance to try and stay relevant, the party’s leader John Swinney took to the airwaves to insist that Prime Minister Keir Starmer retract the invitation of a second state visit for Trump to the UK. ‘I cannot see how a state visit can go ahead for President Trump to the United Kingdom, if President Trump is not a steadfast ally of ours in protecting

Dear oh dear. Just as positive polling had lifted the spirits of the Scottish Nats, news of their membership exodus will bring them crashing down. As revealed by the august paper that is the Scotsman, the SNP has lost more than 5,500 members in six months alone. It’s hardly what you want to hear when you’ve an election to fight in a year, eh? The Scottish journal revealed that, as of 31 December 2024, the party had just 58,940 members – down from some 64,525 in the summer months. Not that SNP figures are strangers to an exodus, however. In 2019, the party had a staggering membership base totalling 125,000.

The SNP may be outperforming Scottish Labour in the polls, but the party of government still faces tough questions on its record as it approaches the 2026 Holyrood election. Today’s education attainment figures won’t help the nationalists’ argument that they deserve another chance in power – as the stats show the attainment gap between Scotland’s most and least deprived students has widened once again. The figures reveal that the number of school leavers heading to work, college or university in 2023/24 decreased from the previous year to 95.7 per cent. Despite John Swinney’s SNP government insisting it wants to eradicate child poverty and improve living conditions for the country’s poorest,

There is a perception that Scotland is a socialist basket case where a mammoth public sector is showered with English money, and I’m here to tell you that this perception is racist, offensive and… not entirely without foundation. The latest Scottish budget analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) examines public sector pay north of the border and concludes that the burgeoning bill poses a ‘fiscal challenge’ to Scottish government finances. State employees now account for 22 per cent of the entire workforce, compared to 17 per cent in England, with an annual pay bill of £27 billion. Salaries for public sector workers, whose number has increased 11 per

At long last, Scottish Labour has clearly and decisively set out its position on gender self-identification. Party leader Anas Sarwar and his deputy Jackie Baillie have now robustly stated the case that Scottish Labour supports single-sex spaces based on biological sex. Good, clear, precise messaging of the type entirely absent from the SNP leadership – and long overdue. Yet that clatter you hear is the sound of jaws dropping violently at the audacity. Shock at this astonishing volte face by Sarwar will be most keenly felt by two of his MSPs, Claire Baker and Carol Mochan, who were forced to resign their frontbench posts in the Scottish parliament when they declined to