Iain Macwhirter

The SNP government has rarely demonstrated great respect for legal precedent or the rights of the individual. When Humza Yousaf was justice secretary back in 2020, he forced through the most illiberal curbs on freedom of speech in British history with the Hate Crime (Scotland) Act. This criminalised ‘stirring up hatred’, even in the privacy

Humza Yousaf has just executed an embarrassing U-turn and effectively banned XL Bully dogs in line with England and Wales. This has inevitably unleashed a pack of bad canine puns about the SNP making a dog’s breakfast of devolution. We always thought Humza Yousaf was barking, now we know. Boom boom.  This episode is another botched

It seems that Humza Yousaf is taking diversity seriously – though not as we know it. Scotland’s First Minister has apparently welcomed the Christian fundamentalist former bus tycoon Brian Souter, regarded as a homophobe by the Scottish Greens, back into the SNP fold. Changed days.  The SNP needs all the help it can get with

As she faced her final press conference of 2022 last Christmas, the first minister of Scotland seemed unassailable. Nicola Sturgeon had negotiated the Covid pandemic with consummate skill – at least in terms of presentation. Her personal popularity, while not what it was, remained unnaturally high for the leader of a party that had been in

What do you think when you think about teachers? Two things, if you are anything like me: low pay and time off work with stress. It’s a hard job, no doubt. Teaching unions jealously guard their grievances and if you say that teachers are actually quite well paid and that teaching is a rewarding career you’ll be hounded by

Perhaps the Scottish government thinks it’s a good time to put out the rubbish. With the news agenda dominated by the Scottish Budget and with the Christmas recess imminent, First Minister Humza Yousaf has reportedly decided to abandon his appeal against the UK government’s Section 35 order on the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill. The bill, intended

Scottish nationalists have always looked to Scandinavian countries as models of what a caring, social democratic Scotland would look like if only it could escape the clutches of Westminster. Not anymore. National populism, or what the left call the far-right, is on the march across the Nordic landscape. The Sweden Democrats, the True Finns and

The first minister of Scotland, Humza Yousaf, has a painful choice following his latest defeat in the Court of Session today over the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill. Yousaf had challenged the UK government’s use of Section 35 to block the gender bill because it could undermine UK-wide protections for women. This futile exercise has

The former First Minister, Alex Salmond, is to sue Nicola Sturgeon and her former civil servants for ‘misfeasance’. In court documents today he accuses her and her officials of having ‘conducted themselves improperly, in bad faith and beyond their powers with the intention of injuring Mr Salmond’. The surprise is that it has taken him so

You have to hand it to the Scottish government: the deletion of WhatsApp messages is good preemptive news management, whether accidental, by default or deliberate. Once journalists get their hands on them, those curt, day-to-day messages can be just a tad embarrassing — as this week’s expletive-laden evidence to the UK Covid Inquiry confirms. The Scottish

It will no doubt be referred to in Whitehall circles in future as the ‘Jason Leitch protocol’. Scotland’s clinical director appears to have escaped scrutiny by the UK Covid Inquiry. It was revealed last night that his WhatsApp messages sent during the pandemic were deleted at the end of each day. The Scottish government have

Humza Yousaf’s main objective at this week’s SNP conference, his first as leader, was to free himself from the constitutional millstone placed round his neck by his predecessor Nicola Sturgeon: the ‘de facto’ referendum. He has united the party in ditching that phrase, though the phoney plebiscite remains in spirit. The new policy states that

As the SNP gathers for its conference in Aberdeen this weekend, Humza Yousaf faces a sea of trouble. But worst of all for the party leader, he faces disillusion with the ‘divisive’ independence project itself, as expressed by Lisa Cameron, MP for East Kilbride, who has (uniquely in SNP history) left the party for the

For nearly half a century, the Scottish National Party based its independence project on ‘Scotland’s Oil’ which it claimed had been stolen by England. Now the SNP seems to be saying it wasn’t Scotland’s oil at all and wasn’t even the UK’s to steal. The SNP and their Green coalition partners have discovered that North Sea oil is

Just when you thought it was safe to go to back in the gender-neutral loo, back comes the row about the Gender Recognition Reform Bill. It lands in Scotland’s highest court today, the Court of Session. Lady Haldane will hear three days of argument on the UK government’s unprecedented veto under the Section 35 of the

The SNP government can’t see a house fire without wanting to throw petrol on it. Scotland’s housing crisis is only too apparent to anyone looking for accommodation right now. Homelessness is rising rapidly with evictions doubling in a year; a quarter of a million Scots are on social housing waiting lists; and rents are going through

The Scottish Green party are often accused of promoting ‘student politics’ so it is perhaps no surprise they are fielding a 20-year-old social policy student, Cameron Eadie, in the forthcoming Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election. What is a surprise is that they are standing at all. They’ve never stood here before. Indeed, Greens tend to