Scotland

The Scottish National Party’s great and continuing success has been to mobilize a large part of the Scottish population to see England and the English as a more or less malign force. In this, the party has connected with and deepened strong currents of thought and belief in Scots culture, especially in the 20th century. The country’s most famed and lauded poet, Hugh MacDiarmid (Christopher Grieve), its most influential ideologist, Tom Nairn and its most prominent literary novelist, James Kelman have all adopted long-running acidic views of the southern neighbour. The Scottish sense of resentment against the elephantine presence of England in the UK, and the view, only partly stated,

It’s the SNP’s second annual national conference this weekend and already the organ-grinders are turning out their favourite hits. The National – a self-described newspaper in breach of the Trade Descriptions Act – has again combined the stridency of Pravda with the editorial values of the Beano. Adoring coverage of the conference was kicked off with its opening day headline: “‘Shameful’ Tory plan for ‘Union division’ in the army” – a ‘story’ about the British Army being, er, proud of Britain. Elsewhere Kate Forbes, the neophyte nationalist, has insisted that independence, not health or education, will dominate the four-day rally – because God forbid the state of public services be of interest

For months now, Mr S has chronicled the tribulations of Susan Aitken, who is the first SNP leader of Glasgow City Council and appears determined to be the last, too. She has presided over a waste crisis in which refuse-strewn streets have become a familiar sight even in the city’s leafier suburbs and which threatened to embarrass locals on the world stage ahead of COP26.  Challenged on this, Aitken insisted Glasgow needed only ‘a spruce up’. When that didn’t work, she trained her fire on her critics, detecting in the concerns of the GMB union ‘a real echo of the language that some far-right organisations have used’ and telling Sir Keir

It’s been some months since Mr S last reported on the antics of James Dornan, the SNP MSP and amateur Hate-Finder General. The gaffe-prone Glaswegian managed, in the space of just one week, to get himself embroiled in multiple minor scandals after accusing an Edinburgh bus company had stopped services on St Patrick’s Day because of ‘anti-Irish racism’ (an untrue claim for which he had no evidence) and then for refusing to apologise for claiming Rangers’ players had sung a sectarian tune (another untrue claim based on poorly-doctored footage). Three weeks later he also told the Catholic leader of the Commons Jacob Rees-Mogg: ‘If your God exists you will undoubtedly

Nicola Sturgeon wants to extend vaccine passports in Scotland, and today her government released a 70-page document purporting to show evidence. The snag? There’s not a shred of evidence to show that her vaccine passports are having any effect. The document, entitled Coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine certificationww: evidence paper update makes a very bold claim: that Scotland’s choice is more vaccine passports or restrictions. To suppress the virus further we are now faced with a choice. This is to limit social contacts and the risk of infection by limiting social contacts by closing venues, limiting group sizes and advising people not to meet each other. Alternatively we can enable people to meet

Nicola Sturgeon is considering extending vaccine passports to Scotland’s cinemas, theatres and pubs. ‘We are also considering whether an expansion of the scheme to cover more settings would be justified and prudent given the current state of the pandemic,’ the First Minister said yesterday: she’ll decide next Tuesday. As she mulls, what data will she have to go on? Her deputy, John Swinney, conceded earlier this month that the government doesn’t have much in the way of evidence: the data is ‘impossible to segment,’ he says. Yet he told The Spectator at an event this morning that he still believed vaccine passports had a ‘role to play’ — pointing to

As if negotiating a global climate deal into the early hours was not enough, delegates at COP26 have to worry about whether the haggis, neeps and tatties they enjoyed for lunch is destroying the planet. The COP26 menu tells delegates that each serving of the traditional Scottish dish generates 3.4kg of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e). It is the heaviest carbon footprint on the COP menu, worse even than the Scottish beef burger (at 3.3kg CO2e). Unsurprisingly, many climate-conscious delegates in Glasgow are turning their noses up at the Scottish national dish, and not just because they realised it was lamb offal. Perhaps they have good reason to be snobby? As an animal product, haggis takes

It was only a matter of time. When the Scottish Green party entered government alongside the SNP in August, it was clear Nicola Sturgeon would use the party as a shield against her questionable record and stance on the environment. The surprise is that it happened so quickly and so blatantly. This week we had the extraordinary situation of the Scottish Greens attacking Greenpeace for daring to push the First Minister to explicitly come out against exploitation of the Cambo oil field off Shetland. Scottish Green co-leader Patrick Harvie said Greenpeace was unfairly criticising Sturgeon and is ‘not particularly politically active in Scotland’. Ramping up the ‘othering’ of Greenpeace, Harvie’s

It’s some time since Steerpike last checked on the Scottish Greens, the minor party in Holyrood’s little-loved coalition government. The indy-loving eco-warriors celebrated their best results in May’s parliamentary elections before quickly resuming their favoured role as SNP enablers-in-chief, taking up ministerial roles as their price to keep Nicola Sturgeon in Bute House.  A not-so magnificent seven currently take the party whip up in Edinburgh; among them is Ross Greer, the charisma vacuum best known for hoping for the death of the then critically ill Margaret Thatcher, for calling Churchill ‘a white supremacist mass murderer and declaring that ‘nothing would thrill me more than for Buckingham Palace to burn to the ground.’ In a party led

Like her aquatic namesake, Nicola Sturgeon is a long-lived but slippery creature. The Scottish First Minister has seized on COP26 as a chance to push her separatist agenda — conveniently forgetting the fact it was the UK government which won the UN summit bid and selected Glasgow as host city. Just yesterday, she was relishing the chance to act the part of statesman on the global stage, telling Sky News:  I hope we can all put egos aside over the next few days and just work together to get the outcome we need. That’s what I am committed to doing. I’ve said that to the Prime Minister, to Alok Sharma. We’ve all

‘COP26: no time for delay’ scream the signs at Euston station. But for hundreds of desperate delegates yesterday it proved to be a cruel irony after dozens of rail services to Glasgow were cancelled thanks to a fallen tree and severe weather sparked rail chaos. Members of HM lobby took to their WhatsApp group to complain about the chaos, with Britain’s hacks forced to engage in an undignified game of Planes, Trains and Automobiles to race across the country to reach the UN eco-jamboree. The i paper‘s Paul Waugh had his Glasgow-bound train turned back at Milton Keynes while Red Lion regular Eleanor Langford was one of many forced to board domestic flights, as

Mr S had not intended to provide a rolling blog of COP26. But with the UN’s green games less than a week ago, things in host city Glasgow go from bad to worse as the world’s leaders prepare to jet in to tell the rest of us how to save the planet. Unite and GMB today confirmed their bin men, school cleaners and janitorial staff will be the latest workers out on strike during the eco-summit, joining the RMT’s train drivers and the GBA’s lawyers on the picket lines. At what does point does industrial action become a general strike…? And it’s that decision by the refuse collectors to walk out which will compound

This month we’ve seen the UK government introduce temporary visas for butchers after farmers were forced to slaughter healthy pigs, the extension of cabotage rights (whereby foreign lorry drivers can do additional pick-up-and-drop off jobs within a country) and a move to replace Brexit’s controversial Northern Ireland protocol. Supply chain problems can’t all be pinned on Brexit – and you could argue endlessly about which factor, Covid or Brexit, is dominant in the disruption we’re seeing – but most people would agree that leaving the EU single market and customs union has not helped matters. Which brings us to the issue of a Scottish exit from the UK (Scexit). Are