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Around 700,000 Scottish households – a quarter of the country – are facing £1,000 fines for failing to complete the census. Eleven years ago, the last time the census was run, it took 10 days to reach the current response rate of 74 per cent. This time it’s taken over a month. There’s not much hope in getting the rate up either. Studies from the US show census return rates don’t improve after the first few weeks.  If 700,000 households are to be fined this would be the largest prosecution in Scottish legal history, probably British too. In 2011 – where the final response rate was 94 per cent and over 90

It seems that the spirit of COP26 is still alive and well in Edinburgh. For the SNP’s parliamentarians have begun recycling their speeches at Holyrood, regardless of the occasion. Amid claims that the Scottish nationalists are nothing but a bunch of unthinking, zombie–like drones, blindly following the latest directive from Bute House, backbencher Willie Coffey MSP has decided to, er, conform exactly to type.  For the Kilmarnock MSP caused laughter in the Scottish parliament yesterday by delivering a concluding speech when standing up to introduce a debate. Coffey opened his closing remarks by saying:  Thank you, Presiding Officer. I thought that I was closing the debate, so this is a closing speech, as

Inflation. Energy spikes. Tax hikes. Low growth. It’s a tough time for hard-pressed Britons at present. The cost of living crisis has begun to bite and millions are starting to suffer. But not to worry: in these dark times, one man has emerged to champion the destitute and the needy. Step forward, Ian Blackford, the doughty defender of the dispossessed, who used yesterday’s Prime Ministers’ Questions to take up the cudgels of the nation’s underclass. The SNP’s Westminster leader – posing as a kind of Scottish Martin Lewis – inquired of Boris Johnson, with trembling lip, how British families are expected to afford April’s energy price spike.  Noble stuff, even if Blackford’s own leader

Eight years ago, and with the independence referendum one month away, the Clyde’s last commercial shipyard went into administration. The collapse of Ferguson’s not only threatened the jobs of 70 shipbuilders: it was an inconvenient symbol of industrial decline right as the SNP was trying to parlay rhetoric about an independent Scotland being ‘one of the world’s wealthiest nations’ into a Yes vote on polling day. The Scottish government intervened and quickly arranged for a billionaire adviser to then First Minister Alex Salmond to buy Ferguson’s. One year later, the Scottish government awarded Ferguson Marine, as it now was, a £97m fixed price contract to build two ferries but the

Is the word of a Scottish government minister worth anything? The question arises in the wake of the SNP’s Hate Crime Act which, among much else, creates the offence of ‘stirring up hatred’ against ‘transgender identity’. Feminist groups warned early on that the Bill’s language could see people who don’t believe that men can become women (or vice versa) prosecuted for what had hitherto been treated in law as legitimate expression. Prominent among these groups was MurrayBlackburnMackenzie (MBM), a policy analysis outfit whose principals boast extensive scholarship and years of experience inside the civil service. One of MBM’s principals, Lucy Hunter Blackburn, gave evidence to the Holyrood justice committee in

Perhaps it’s the absence of any oppression of their own country that compels Scottish nationalists to latch onto the oppression of others. On Monday, Michelle Thomson, an SNP MSP, retweeted news of Ukraine’s emergency application for EU membership, adding: ‘Delighted for Ukraine. It’s [sic] just goes to show what political will can achieve. Remember this Scotland!’ The SNP’s current position is for Scotland to secede from the UK then apply for membership of the EU, a process nationalists have previously suggested Brussels would fast-track. Thomson came in for a barrage of criticism and later deleted the tweet, admitting it was ‘insensitive’. She is taking all the flack but she’s hardly

Oh dear. It seems that the most illiberal party in Great Britain is at it again. In the nationwide haste to condemn the comedian Jimmy Carr for his remarks about the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller community in his Netflix special, an elected councillor from (who else?) the SNP has called for prosecutions. Not just for Carr himself, mind you; Julie McKenzie, who sits on Argyll and Bute council, wants the many members of Carr’s audience prosecuted too for ‘applauding’ the remarks.  The show, called His Dark Material, was released on Christmas Day but received widespread attention last Friday after a clip was posted and shared online. Carr said:  When people talk about the

Ian Blackford has been making the most of current Tory difficulties, railing against the corrosion of public trust on Monday caused by partygate. But is the SNP Westminster leader really best placed to talk? Mr S has already pointed out his party’s own lamentable record on inquiries and civil servants up at Holyrood. And now it seems the nationalists are happy to indulge in outright lies as to the future of Scottish pensioners in a post-Scexit nation. For speaking to the Scotland’s Choice podcast in December, Blackford was asked what would happen to Scotland’s state pension if the country voted for independence. He replied: Absolutely nothing. The important point is that those who

For weeks now, much of Westminster has been in full hue and cry of Boris Johnson over partygate. While some of the PM’s critics have legitimate grievances; others frankly, do not. Mr S has rarely seen a scandal spawn so much cant, humbug and windbaggery, as life-long opponents of the PM queue up to issue yet another demand for him to go. And what better embodiment of such self-righteous moralising than ardent Boris-basher, Ian Blackford? The SNP leader popped up at yesterday’s Commons debate to play another game of Blackford bingo. All the usual buzzwords were there: ‘public trust’, ‘shame’, ‘dignity’. Honour in public life – drink! Tory sleaze and corruption –

It takes some doing to make a census interesting. So congratulations to the National Records of Scotland (NRS). NRS, which administers the decennial survey, is facing a judicial review over its guidance on the document. On the question of sex, it states that ‘if you are transgender the answer you give can be different from what is on your birth certificate’. That is, something other than your legal sex. Feminist group Fair Play For Women will challenge this guidance at the Court of Session on 2 February. If this sounds familiar, it’s because similar guidance for last year’s census in England and Wales was challenged at the High Court and found to

As he blasts his way through the remaining support beams of the UK constitution, Gordon Brown is doing more to deliver Scottish independence than the SNP. The former Prime Minister is reportedly poised to recommend that Labour adopt ‘devo max’ as a policy, which would see the SNP-run Scottish parliament handed yet another tranche of powers. Only defence and foreign policy would remain in the hands of Westminster: everything else would be at the whim of Nicola Sturgeon. The theory is that by increasing the powers of Holyrood, the Scots’ appetite for independence will be sated. But is no evidence for this, and 23 years of evidence against it. From

Ping! An email in Steerpike’s inbox lands, subject line: ‘SNP’s attack on refs.’ Is this, at last, a moment of nationalist self-reflection? Have the 45 per cent-ers finally clocked most Scots don’t want another plebiscite? Could some SNP drone finally have switched off the autopilot to question the wisdom of a neverendum? Sadly for Scotland, the answer to all these questions is: no. For it seems that James Dornan, the hard-of-thinking MSP who frequently features in Steerpike’s pages, is once again up to his usual tricks. Dornan of course is the ‘racist buses’ conspiracy theorist who claimed in June that an Edinburgh transport company had stopped services on St Patrick’s Day because of

Nicola Sturgeon has said that Scotland should expect a ‘tsunami’ of Covid cases, so has said Christmas parties should be cancelled and household contacts of any positive case — Omicron or not — should isolate for ten days regardless of vaccination status. Given that Scotland and England have very similar Covid profiles (both in waves and vaccination) this is relevant to the whole of the UK. But what especially jumps out is the prediction from Scottish government modelling that Omicron will account for all Covid cases by Christmas. Her document: Omicron in Scotland — evidence paper released during Sturgeon’s TV appearance pointed to modelling to suggest that half of new cases could be

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,