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One of the worst features of devolution is the tendency of devocrats to insist on doing their own thing in all circumstances and at whatever cost. The idea that decentralisation would lead to experimentation and the sharing of best practice now seems hopelessly naive. Instead, politicians in Edinburgh and Cardiff try to use nationalism to earth criticism, treating an attack on their records as an insult to the Scottish or Welsh people. Perhaps the most abject example was when a Welsh minister accused Michael Gove of harbouring ‘colonial attitudes’ when the then-education secretary penned an article comparing English and Welsh school outcomes. Even the evidence base that might have supported

The debate over Scottish independence has gone rather quiet since the Holyrood elections in May. Boris Johnson is visiting Scotland this week without the issue dominating. But, as I say in the magazine this week, the issue is likely to return to the fore this autumn. Sturgeon is on the verge of doing a deal with the Greens which would give her government an absolute majority in the Scottish parliament. Armed with this, and given her activist base is increasingly impatient, she may move to introduce an independence bill this autumn. This would be a deliberate provocation. The constitution is a reserved matter – and it is very hard to see

Today marks two years since Boris Johnson accepted Her Majesty’s invitation to serve as her fourteenth Prime Minister. His tenure was meant to be all about Brexit but so far has mostly been about Covid, yet the invisible theme running under it all is the constitution. Britain is almost a quarter-century on from the legislative devolution experiments in Scotland, Wales and London, which leeched power away from Parliament and created rival seats of political authority to Westminster. Scotland is where devolution has taken its most aggressive form and where it has done the most to undermine the Union, parliamentary sovereignty and even the continued existence of the United Kingdom itself.

Willie Rennie’s resignation — announced, as only he could, via a self-shot video while climbing Benarty Hill in western Fife — means there’s now a vacancy at the top of the Scottish Liberal Democrats. Given the party holds just four seats at Holyrood and four at Westminster, the summit of Benarty enjoys a more elevated position than the Lib Dem leadership. But can Rennie’s replacement have any more luck in reviving the party’s fortunes? The party was in government at Holyrood from 1999 to 2007 as Scottish Labour’s junior partner but Nick Clegg’s coalition with David Cameron, the rise of the SNP and the political realignment brought about by the

My name is Stephen and I am a Bad Scot. At least that’s how I feel. For the past week Italian flags have been popping up all over Scotland ahead of tonight’s Euro 2020 final. Music station Pure Radio Scotland rebranded itself ‘Pure Radio Italy’ for the weekend. A shopper in Glasgow complained that Tesco was failing to ‘help boost national pride’ after their local branch played the England fan anthem ‘Vindaloo’. A pub in the city centre had the moment Gareth Southgate missed the decisive penalty against Germany in Euro 1996 blown up into a giant poster and is displaying it next to the bar’s entrance. The National newspaper

The announcement reeked of desperation. Nicola Sturgeon is ‘delighted’ that the SNP National Executive Committee has approved her nomination of retired MSP and party grandee Mike Russell as ‘political director of the HQ independence unit’. The statement, put out on Twitter last week, aimed to give a sense of momentum and industrious activity: Russell at the head of an elite squad of Nationalist campaigners who will deliver on promises of another referendum.  The appointment of Russell is not so much a sign of progress for the Nationalists as confirmation that their project to break up the UK has stalled. It follows the resignation, after just a few months in post,

No doubt Michael Gove is satisfied with how his latest comments on Scottish independence have gone down. The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, de facto minister for the Union (even though that’s meant to be someone else’s job), told the Telegraph he couldn’t see any circumstances under which the PM would allow Nicola Sturgeon a second referendum on breaking up Britain. This is exactly what Scotland’s embattled unionists want to hear and seem not to tire of hearing, even though they hear it a lot. Sturgeon has obliged by accusing Gove of ‘sneering, arrogant condescension’, ‘completely refusing to accept Scottish democracy’ and helping ‘build support for independence’. And so

Look back through the archive photos of England’s victory over Germany at the 1966 world cup and you’ll notice something rather strange. The cheering supporters aren’t waving the flag of St George. Instead the jubilant crowds are draped Union Jacks — reflecting the more fluid blend of loyalties of an age when Britain was much more at ease with itself. Now tune into the delayed Euro 2020 matches: you’re unlikely to catch the red white and blue standard of the United Kingdom. During the last England match, there was a lone pair of Rangers fans defiantly waving their Union Jack. These are my people. I’ll watch for them during tonight’s

It has been almost 45 years since Tam Dalyell first asked the West Lothian Question. It is a damning indictment of devolutionary unionists that they are still flailing for an answer. Dalyell, a Scottish Labour MP with the uncommon foresight and courage to oppose his party’s embrace of devolution, first posed it during the parliamentary debates that teed up the first referendums in 1979: ‘For how long will English constituencies and English Honourable members tolerate … at least 119 Honourable Members from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland exercising an important, and probably often decisive, effect on English politics while they themselves have no say in the same matters in Scotland,

One of the benefits of devolution has been giving Scots their own parliament in which the great issues of the day can be discussed. Issues that might not otherwise make it onto the political agenda. Now the Scottish parliament has posed a question that can be avoided no longer: are buses racist? James Dornan is the SNP MSP for Glasgow Cathcart and the man who has brought these matters to light. Speaking in a debate at Holyrood last week, Dornan raised the enduring blight of ‘institutional prejudice’ against Irish Catholics in Scotland. He could have cited many examples in evidence but admirably chose to make a more original case: ‘To

Has Police Scotland misunderstood the purpose of policing? A recent crackdown on ‘controversial stickers’ appears to suggest as much. ‘On Monday 17th May we received a report of controversial stickers having been placed on lampposts,’ said a message on Kirkcaldy police’s Twitter feed, posted last week. ‘Should you come across stickers of this nature, please contact ourselves or Fife Council so that their removal can be arranged’. So what did the stickers actually say? It transpired that they were emblazoned with the words: ‘Women won’t wheesht’ Baffling? Maybe. But is it really the business of the police to investigate such stickers? Various hashtags, including ‘SexNotGender’ and ‘WarOnWomen’, were also included. But

Get ready for a constitutional rammy during the first half of this, the sixth session of the Scottish parliament. Just don’t expect it to be over a second independence referendum. Recent polling shows momentum has moved back in favour of those wishing to remain in the UK, while signals from the public also consistently suggest a lack of appetite for another referendum anytime soon. Nicola Sturgeon knows this, which means the phoney war over a repeat plebiscite will likely trundle on without bringing any great change to the country. The real action is elsewhere. Specifically, the upcoming review of the Fiscal Framework Agreement, which is set to be fraught and,

As the dust settles from Scotland’s elections and the war of words heats up over a future referendum, one thing is perfectly clear: Alex Salmond’s Alba party has been a monumental failure. The former First Minister, whose disastrous party launch six weeks ago set the tone for what followed, failed to be elected as one of the seven North East MSPs, despite much talk of ‘gaming’ the list system. The 17 seats in that region were divided between the SNP (9) Conservatives (5) Labour (2) and Green (1).Salmond himself polled just 2.3 per cent of the vote in what was once his mighty heartland, with Alba failing to win a

This week will see the biggest set of polls in UK history outside of a general election. Contests are under way in Wales, Scotland, London and in the various mayoral, local and PCC elections across Britain as part of a so-called ‘Super Thursday.’ But while past election nights have been met with the chimes of the BBC’s Arthur theme and a Dimbleby fronting hours of programmes, Covid means there will be no all-night television special. Whereas normally all results are in by midday Friday, this year it will take longer to verify and count the votes than it has done in previous elections. This is due to both reduced staff

Bad news for unionists in Westminster. A new Opinium poll on the Scottish parliament elections projects that the SNP are on course for a majority come 6 May. The party is polling at 53 per cent (44 per cent on the list vote) and on this would get a majority of around 13 seats. Meanwhile, the Conservatives are on 21 per cent and Labour on 18 per cent.  The poll makes for disappointing reading for government ministers who had begun to hope that their Scotland problem might disappear of its own accord. After Nicola Sturgeon came under fire in the Salmond inquiry, support for the SNP fell, while several polls suggested support for independence was on

Although Alex Salmond and his Alba party have understandably been getting most of the attention, the separatists aren’t the only side riven with divisions over a new challenger. Unionist relations, especially between the Conservatives and partisans of George Galloway’s ‘All for Unity’ outfit, grow more rancorous by the day. To the former, the latter resemble little more than a band of egotists hell-bent on clawing their way into Holyrood even if the result is fewer pro-Union MSPs. The latter, having largely abandoned their original idea of ‘uniting to win’, are pitching themselves to angry Unionist voters as a chance to clear out the old guard and have a ‘real opposition’.

Two decades after devolution, the Scottish Parliament’s election system still confuses ordinary voters and seasoned political observers alike. Politicians on both the Unionist and Nationalist sides have capitalised on this complexity, putting forward new parties – most prominently George Galloway’s Alliance for Unity (A4U) and Alex Salmond’s Alba – that aim to game the system and maximise their side’s (on the matter of the constitution) number of MSPs by pulling regional list votes away from the major parties. But in fact, beneath its byzantine name and workings, Scotland’s modified d’Hondt Additional Member Electoral System translates to straightforward arithmetic, with a clear and inescapable conclusion: Galloway’s A4U gambit is likely to

There is a certain kind of critic of independence who hears the news that public funding for Scotland is 30 per cent higher than for England and sits back thinking: ‘Job done’. The latest analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies does indeed confirm that the Union is a bargain for Scotland. It finds that, while real-terms resource funding for the Scottish Government is two per cent lower per capita than in 2010 (the beginning of the Tories’ austerity experiment), the spending drop is lower north of the border than in England. Scotland gets more than £1.30 per person for public services for every £1 spent in England. Almost all

Alex Salmond’s reemergence on the Scottish political scene as leader of the Alba party had a pantomimic quality – some cheers, some boos, and a lively mix of interest and anxiety about where the plot would now go with the principal boy back centre stage. But working out how the appearance of Salmond’s new party affects what happens is a considerable challenge, thanks to Scotland’s infernally complex voting system. To paraphrase Lord Palmerston’s reference to the Schleswig-Holstein question, it may be that only around three people truly understand the D’Hondt voting system employed in Scottish parliamentary elections, though there are probably more, who like the fabled German professor, have gone

It’s the surest sign there’s an election on in Scotland: Nicola Sturgeon has become a social democrat again. Addressing her party’s spring conference today, the SNP leader vowed to double the Scottish child payment to £10 per week for under-16s in low-income families if the Nationalists are returned to government after 6 May. She explained:  ‘I want to make ending child poverty a driving mission for the next parliament. It is time to end the scandal of child poverty, and this will help us do it. And it is a down payment of what will be possible when we have the full powers over tax and social security that only

Don’t worry if you missed the press release announcing which Scottish taxes are going up to pay for Nicola Sturgeon’s headline grabbing four per cent minimum pay rise offer for certain front-line healthcare workers, including nurses. You missed it because there wasn’t one. In characteristically hubristic form, the Scottish Government made the announcement just a few hours before the pre-election ‘purdah’ period began, with Sturgeon immediately taking to Twitter to declare:  ‘Our NHS staff deserve more than applause and one per cent is not enough’.  It was a thinly-veiled dig at the offer Boris Johnson’s administration has put forward in England. Normally when a government makes an announcement like this the

The Holyrood election campaign kicks off with Nicola Sturgeon buoyed by James Hamilton’s report concluding that she did not break the ministerial code. Unionists in both London and Edinburgh have been taken aback by how decisively Hamilton stated that Sturgeon had not broken the code. But, as I say in the magazine this week, it would be wrong to think Sturgeon hasn’t been damaged by this whole business.  Voters feel that Scotland’s recovery from the pandemic should come first The independence bill her government published this week was also a misjudgement. It states that the referendum will be held in the first half of the next Scottish parliament. In other words,

The Scottish government has suffered a major reversal in court over its Covid-19 regulations. The Court of Session has found its blanket ban on public worship to be unlawful. In January, Nicola Sturgeon closed places of worship across Scotland ‘for all purposes except broadcasting a service or conducting a funeral, wedding, or civil partnership’. She said at the time that, while ministers were ‘well aware of how important communal worship is to people… we believe this restriction is necessary to reduce the risk of transmission’. Canon Tom White, parish priest of St Alphonsus in Glasgow’s east end, and representatives of other Christian denominations, sought judicial review. They argued that this closure

It’s only days before the Holyrood election campaign gets underway and Nicola Sturgeon is facing one of the most testing weeks of her political career. Two verdicts are due in the coming days on whether the First Minister broke the ministerial code over the Alex Salmond inquiry.  One is the finding of Scottish parliament’s Alex Salmond committee which is due on Tuesday. The panel, which is made up of MSPs, is widely expected to say she did mislead parliament. Sturgeon and her allies will likely dismiss it as politically motivated. Already this line is being pushed out by the First Minister and SNP politicians. Were Hamilton to find that Sturgeon knowingly misled parliament, it would be the worst case

My mob originates, we have come to assume, from somewhere in Ireland, though exactly where we don’t know. Humza Yousaf, justice secretary in the Scottish government, was born in Glasgow to immigrant parents — one from Pakistan, the other from Kenya. We were contemporaries at university (Glasgow), I became a journalist around the time he became a politician (SNP, alas), and while I’ve long been impressed by his abilities, his smiley-sinister Hate Crime Bill confirms him to be a nightmarish fusion of Judith Butler and Mary Whitehouse. What has never occurred to me is the notion that Yousaf is less Scottish than me. If anything, I wish he’d tone it

Unionists are finding reasons for optimism when it comes to saving the union. As Nicola Sturgeon comes under fire north of the border over her handling of the Alex Salmond inquiry, ‘No’ has taken the lead in several recent independence polls. A poll this week for the Scotsman also suggested the SNP is no longer set for a majority in May’s Scottish parliament election; instead it predicted a hung parliament. Of course, the SNP could still secure a majority in the upcoming elections. If anything, that is still viewed as the more likely scenario by Tories in Westminster. This is in part why ministers are having to carefully plan their response as to what do in such

Back in the autumn, every Scottish poll delivered bad news for Unionists. The ‘yes’ side was consistently ahead and the Nationalists began to argue that independence was becoming the ‘settled will’ of the Scottish people. But polling in the last seven days has, as I say in the magazine this week, disrupted this narrative.  There have now been several polls, including two more published just this morning, showing the Union side ahead. It is clear that there is nothing inevitable about Scottish independence. The Scotsman poll today also indicates that the SNP will fall just short of an overall majority in the Holyrood elections in May. Now, this shift in the

In the wake of the Black Lives Matters protests last year, Edinburgh Council announced the creation of the ‘Slavery and Colonialism Legacy Review Group’. Headed by Sir Geoff Palmer — an academic and human rights activist — the group is looking at all public memorials on council land that ‘perpetuated racism and oppression’ with the option of ‘removal or re-interpretation’ for problematic monuments. The grave of Adam Smith, as well as a statue dedicated to the Enlightenment thinker, have both been identified by the review due to a passage in which Smith, according to the body, ‘argued that slavery was ubiquitous and inevitable but that it was not as profitable