Latest from Coffee House

Meanwhile, STV have a poll asking punters who they think would make the best First Minister. The results are almost entertaining: Don’t Know – 37% Alex Salmond – 30% None of Them – 16% Annabel Goldie – 9% Iain Gray – 7% Tavish Scott – 2% Remember that the same poll has Labour and the SNP neck and neck (38% to 37% on the constituency vote and 35% each on the list vote) and so, by my calculations, fewer than one in five Labour voters will tell pollsters their so-called leader is the best man to head the government after this election. Mr Gray complains that the SNP are a

Taken last week actually but you get the idea and is posted for the especial interest of exiled Selkirk folk everywhere. People, rightly, go on about the Highlands but Southern Scotland can often be just as lovely and is, I think, comparatively under-rated. The same might be said of Northumberland. Note to the Scottish government: this landscape would not be improved by plonking a socking great wind farm atop these hills.

That’s the question Jeff Breslin asks at Better Nation and, as a bonus, he gets the answer right too: Alex Salmond. In truth, it’s not a difficult question no matter how one approaches it. From a governance perspective the SNP have been modestly underwhelming. This still represents a major advance from the days of the Labour-Lib Dem coalition that preceded them. Nor is there any reason to hope for anything this time around from a Labour party actively hostile to anything that might even be mistaken for a fresh idea. On those grounds alone, a Labour minority ministry in Edinburgh is a dreary prospect. The Scottish elections in May are

Though this blog has tried to ignore the fact, there are elections to the Scottish Parliament this year. In just over ten weeks time in fact. I’ve ignored the subject because, frankly, the idea of Iain Gray – he’s the leader of the Labour party in Scotland – becoming First Minister is too depressing to contemplate before the idea is thrust upon us by cruel reality and dastardly necessity. Mr Gray is the fifth person to lead Labour’s Holyrood group since devolution and by some hefty distance the least impressive. This is a low bar to fail to clear but there you have it. For months now it has looked

You know, when you see that Neil Clark has written a piece for the Guardian arguing that, from his perspective, this government is even worse than Margaret Thatcher’s you might expect to be entertained but you don’t anticipate him making sense. But, lo, here he is: […] Clegg, and his fellow Orange Book Liberals, are actually more keen on market forces and globalised capitalism than the so-called Tory wets were. In last year’s election, the free market fundamentalism of the Liberal Democrats was ignored by many commentators and voters who saw their opposition to Labour’s security measures, and their advocacy of electoral reform, as evidence that the party was progressive.

At some point it seems wise to suppose that Ed Miliband isn’t playing any devious or subtle long game and that, far from being baffling, his public pronouncements are probably a pretty reasonable guide to what he actually, truly believes. And he really doesn’t think that Labour made any significant errors while in office. Surpluses are for wimps; real men run deficits even in boom times. In this, as in so much else, Miliband rejects Tony Blair’s analysis and sides with his old mentor Gordon Brown. Fair enough. Iain Martin finds this perplexing, not least from any electoral/political perspective and he’s right. Miliband’s views are touchingly old-fashioned. So much so,

Tim Montgomerie’s response to Danny Finkelstein’s column is, as was expected, interesting and challenging. For now, however, let’s focus on just one line: Mainstream Conservatism is also more pro-poor because it’s the poorest Britons who suffer most from crime, uncontrolled immigration and the unfair deal that London’s lowest income boroughs get from the Barnet [sic] formula. Emphasis added. One hears this sort of thing quite frequently. Which is fine. But three points: first, over time Barnett is designed to actually reduce differences in spending allocations. It may do so more slowly than some would like but that’s a different argument. Secondly, identifiable government spending in London is almost as high,

Commenting on this post, “Robert the Bruce 2.0” complains: Scotland has its own Government, Parliament, Courts, Legal System, Royal Household, Great Offices of State, Flag, Banner, Badge, Anthem, Language, Lingo, Sense of Identity, Country and Football Team. It is a Nation that is more than capable of standing on its own feet. Yet now, under Devolution and ‘ Devolution 2.0’ it is treated as a semi-autonomous and semi-detached region of the UK. In a constitutional settlement that is patronising and insulting. If independence is good enough for the Irish, the Israelis and the Icelandic it should be good enough for Scotland too. Unless, of course, the people of Scotland consider

There are precious few heroes in Ireland today and no gods either. But not all the losers are Irish either. Some are Scottish. Chief among them, Alex Salmond and the Scottish National Party. Not because an independent Scotland would necessarily have been destroyed by the financial tsunami that swept the globe (though, to put it mildly, it would have been “difficult” to cope and might well have required a humiliating begging-trip to London) but because an independent Scotland would have made some of the same mistakes and unfortunate assumptions that have helped cripple poor Hibernia. Europe, you see, was an important part of the SNP’s slow rise to power. At

I gather this banner was seen at Celtic Park yesterday. Notice how these clowns can’t even spell. I wonder, too, what the club’s chairman, Dr John Reid, thinks of this sort of caper. For the rest of us, it kind of leaves one thinking that if there isn’t a refereeing conspiracy out to get Celtic (the buggers won 9-0 yesterday) then perhaps there should be? Then again: why give them the satisfaction? Also worth noting: this sort of dreary “protest” is so familiar that, like the 90-minute (at best) bigotry at Ibrox, it barely warrants much of a mention in the press.

The main sufferers of this admittedly rare condition are London-based Scots. Fraser, I’m afraid, seems to have come down with a case of SDS if this post is anything to go by. The murder of Linda Norgrove is a ghastly, horrid business that might, one would think, be considered sufficiently awful to be above or beyond politics. Apparently not. I see nothing wrong far less anything political in the First Minister issuing a statement about the murder of one of his compatriots in Afghanistan. Criticising Salmond for making cheap political capital out of such an awful business is itself a cheap journalistic shot.  Consider this: if Linda Norgrove had been

David, while one should never discount incompetence as the guiding force behind anything the Scottish Conservative & Unionist party proposes in this instance I fancy indifference – rather than self-interest or incompetence – is behind Aunt Annabel’s apparent admission that the party won’t take a view on the Alternative Vote. At present elections in Scotland are run using four different electoral systems: FPTP (Westminster), Additional Member System (Holyrood), Single Transferable Vote (council elections), Party List (European Elections). In other words, there’s precisely nothing sacrosanct about FPTP and, indeed, the case against it has been conceded at both the Holyrood and council level. This being so, what’s the point of pretending