Scotland

Nicola Sturgeon and her colleagues plan to hold a referendum on Scotland leaving the UK a little over a year from now. All going to plan, they then intend to start governing a brand new state, with full control over taxes and spending, sometime in 2025. With such weighty obligations on the horizon, you would think the release of new, up-to-date official numbers outlining Scotland’s stand-alone fiscal position would be hotly anticipated by the First Minister and her team. Apparently not. Instead of blocking out time in her diary this week to showcase the Government Expenditure & Revenue Scotland (Gers) 2021-22 statistics, which came out on Wednesday, and which outline

Nicola Sturgeon is having something of a summer of discontent. It started almost promisingly in July, when the Scottish Government managed to buy off ScotRail drivers with a five per cent pay bump. That brought to an end weeks of travel disruption caused by Aslef members refusing to work overtime on the newly-nationalised rail company. A temporary timetable instituted in response saw 700 services culled from Scotland’s rail network. No sooner was the ink dry on that deal than local government workers rejected a two per cent pay offer and voted to strike. Now 13,000 nursery staff, school janitors, dinner ladies and teaching assistants will walk out for 72 hours

You can imagine the glee with which Scottish government ministers and their advisers greeted the news they had a new convert arguing the case for Scotland exiting the UK, and that it was a Scots-born academic making a name for himself as an edgy, left-wing economist. Mark Blyth, hailing from Dundee but now professor of international economics at the Ivy League Brown University in Rhode Island, and co-author of anti-austerity book Angrynomics, was signed up to a new Scottish government economic advisory council last summer. The group, which had a remit to publish a strategy paper on turbo-charging Scotland’s economy, replaced a previous Council of Economic Advisors set up by

Nicola Sturgeon has a target painted on her back. Sadly for her, it’s the size of Ben Nevis. Failing public bodies, collapsing school grades and a census as poorly received as Jerry Sadowitz’s Edinburgh Fringe show means taking aim at the SNP is a popular and easy win. The Tory leadership bandwagon rattles its way into Scotland tonight, for its first and only hustings there. The debate in Perth provides the perfect opportunity for the most dangerous drinking game ever concocted: imbibe every time someone bashes Sturgeon and her barmy army. Paisley-raised Liz Truss, who brands herself as ‘a child of the union’, said she would ‘never let anyone talk

Catalonia’s president Pere Aragones has wanted to win independence from Madrid ever since since joining the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) as a teenager. Despite the obstacles standing in his way, he now seeks inspiration from two votes held in the UK: the Scottish independence referendum and Brexit. Aragones resumed negotiations with Spain’s socialist prime minister Pedro Sanchez last month, almost five years after an illegal referendum on Catalan secession triggered a constitutional crisis. But despite Madrid’s willingness to talk, he faces a Spanish establishment that is as pro-union now as it was in 2017. Two apparently immovable obstacles stand in the way of those seeking to secure an independent Catalonia: the 1978 Spanish constitution, with

With all the crises coming down the track, the Union has not received as much attention as it should in the Tory leadership contest. But given that the October supreme court hearing on the Scottish government’s plan for another independence referendum will push the issue right back up the agenda, the candidates should be thinking about it more. As I say in the Times today, the new prime minister will be the fourth that Sturgeon has dealt with as first minister. Whoever wins should follow three rules in dealing with her. First, they should not allow her to treat them as some kind of foreign visitor when they come to

The next Prime Minister, whoever they are, really needs to get a grip on the declinism and defeatism of the UK government. A case in point is the statement issued today confirming ministers have submitted their case to the Supreme Court in the referendum showdown with Nicola Sturgeon. For those unfamiliar, the Scottish government intends to hold a referendum on independence next year, despite the Union being reserved to Westminster under the Scotland Act and Westminster declining to grant permission. So Sturgeon’s Lord Advocate — who isn’t herself convinced that her First Minister’s plan is lawful — will now argue before the Supreme Court that Holyrood doesn’t need Westminster’s permission

Among the many superstitions of the SNP is that the reorienting of Scottish politics around the constitution has been a ‘joyous’ and ‘civic’ affair. Far from pumping bitter political and national sectarianism into the public square, dividing the population into nationalists and Unionists has facilitated a great intellectual contest in the very best spirit of democracy. Kevin Lang might have to disagree with that. Lang is the leader of the Liberal Democrats on Edinburgh City Council. Yesterday, he was delivering his newsletters in South Queensferry when he was assaulted by someone described as a ‘nationalist’. He posted on social media: I’ve been doing politics a long time so I’m used

In the fevered imaginations of some Remainiacs, Britain’s supermarkets are permanently bare, as Brexit-related supply shortages prompt an absence of the bountiful goods we once enjoyed in the EU. But there is one place in the UK where such dystopian fantasies have now indeed become a reality. Unfortunately for the more boss-eyed of Boris’s critics, it’s nowhere in Leave-voting England. Rather such shortages are now happening on certain windswept Scots islands, where the long-suffering local residents are enduring the effects of the SNP government’s woeful incompetence. Today’s The Herald on Sunday splashes on the news that shops on certain islands in the Hebrides have been forced to ration essential items owing

There is a lot of pearl-clutching over Liz Truss’s dismissive remarks about Nicola Sturgeon. Much of it involves conflating a dig at the leader of the SNP with a grave insult to Scotland. This is symptomatic not only of the fetid culture of grievance that permeates Scottish politics but of the steady merging of the party of government and the state itself. Were Emmanuel Macron to brand Boris Johnson an ‘attention seeker’, these same guardians of the public discourse would scoff at the suggestion it represented a slight against the British people. In fact, they would regard anyone proposing such an interpretation as a hysterical ideologue and perhaps even a

Given the Scottish political establishment’s misty-eyed myth-making about Scottish nationalism — it’s civic! Joyous! Inclusive! — Mr Steerpike admires the commitment of the grassroots to saying the quiet part out loud. The National has published a missive on its letters page this morning that calls for the English to be banned from owning land in an independent Scotland. The correspondent, replying to an article about transparency in land ownership, writes: Foreign nationals should be banned from buying large areas of the Scottish lands and countryside. We must be about the only country in Europe where this is allowed. I would seriously consider adding buyers from England to this list in

What is the most patronising response to Scottish nationalism? Received wisdom among the political, media and academic establishments north and south of the border says it is Unionism. Or rather, the sort of Unionism that says the constitution is reserved, Westminster should keep refusing another referendum, and perhaps should even legislate to inhibit or prohibit secession. I disagree. That sort of Unionism is the only one that respects nationalism. It listens to what the SNP has to say, takes its articles of faith at face value and, being of the opposite point of view, works to defeat the nationalists’ objectives. It is honourable intellectual combat. No, the most condescending response

Nicola Sturgeon has never been all that bothered about the remit of her devolved government and the parameters of its responsibilities. So exactly no one was surprised when she popped up this morning with another speech on independence. It comes as part of her ramp-up to a referendum which she insists she will hold next October, despite Westminster refusing permission. Today’s speech unveiled the second in a series of papers making the case for independence. What might have surprised casual observers of Scottish politics is just how closely the address resembled a party conference speech in its unabashedly partisan attacks on the Tories and Labour. Opining that the Tories appeared