John Ferry is a contributing editor for the think tank These Islands and a former financial journalist
Nicola Sturgeon and her colleagues plan to hold a referendum on Scotland leaving the UK a little over a year from now. All going to plan, they then intend to start governing a brand new state, with full control over taxes and spending, sometime in 2025. With such weighty obligations on the horizon, you would
You can imagine the glee with which Scottish government ministers and their advisers greeted the news they had a new convert arguing the case for Scotland exiting the UK, and that it was a Scots-born academic making a name for himself as an edgy, left-wing economist. Mark Blyth, hailing from Dundee but now professor of
This week we’ve had the bizarre occurrence of the SNP formally submitting a request to intervene in the Indyref2 Supreme Court case, even though Scotland’s top law officer, the Lord Advocate, has already put forward the Scottish Government’s written case. To recap, the Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain has referred a prospective bill on a referendum
No one should be too perturbed by Nicola Sturgeon’s latest referendum pronouncements. There will not be a referendum next year. The thought of the First Minister flying to London to start secession negotiations after gaining a majority of votes in Scotland at the next general election is Pythonesque in its absurdity. At some point this
In one sense Nicola Sturgeon’s new independence campaign launched today – which assumes there will be a second referendum within the next 18 months – does not signal anything new. Sturgeon did not unveil any new legislation. Nor did she submit a formal request for the UK government to allow a referendum to take place.
They can’t build a ferry, organise a census or keep the railways operating, but when it comes to organising a grievance campaign, nobody does it better than the SNP. This week saw perhaps the most impressive effort yet from team grievance as the SNP tried to turn the Chancellor’s announcement of a windfall tax on
Like so many SNP Scottish government initiatives, it was launched to great fanfare but has made questionable progress since. Established in November 2020 as an investment vehicle for delivering long-term, ‘patient capital’ to Scottish businesses, the creation of the Scottish National Investment Bank (SNIB) was described by Nicola Sturgeon as ‘one of the most significant
At the rate he’s going, the SNP’s hawkish spokesperson on defence, the MP Stewart McDonald, will soon be talking about an independent Scotland having a weekly armed forces day where citizens don camouflage and wargame defending the nation. McDonald is tasked with making the SNP sound sensible when it comes to defence and western collective
The Scottish government will start refreshing the ‘very positive case’ for exiting the UK, Nicola Sturgeon said this week, in the aftermath of Scotland’s local council elections. Can we expect anything radical to come out of this series of papers? Will there be a big departure from the last major overhaul of the independence pitch,
It started as farce but is quickly turning into something more ugly, perhaps even sinister. When Audit Scotland last week released a report shining a light on the SNP’s costly ferries fiasco, all the talk was of painted on windows and a comical ‘launch’ event for an unfinished ship. It was Carry on Up the
Whisper it, but the dream of a separate Scotland could be fading for Scottish nationalists. A new poll shows that only one-third of Scots want a referendum on independence to take place within the next two years. And while only a slim majority (51 per cent) support holding Britain together, the poll also found that
It was an odd launch event for what had previously been a much-touted initiative. While all eyes were on the war in Ukraine, Scotland’s finance minister, Kate Forbes, took to Dundee to set out Scotland’s new ten year National Strategy for Economic Transformation. Such events usually involve a room full of press, lots of questions,
There aren’t many whose name becomes part of the mythology of a nation while they are still alive. Gavin McCrone, author of After Brexit: The Economics of Scottish Independence, has inadvertently achieved this status. McCrone is an academic and a former chief economist to the Scottish Office. In 1974, he wrote an internal briefing paper
Amidst the Downing Street psychodrama, have we missed the moment the reality of Scottish fiscal autonomy finally dawned on the SNP? This week saw an extraordinary turn of events in London and at Holyrood. First there was an interview the SNP’s Commons leader Ian Blackford gave in which he stated the government of the remaining UK will
A new report from Holyrood’s finance and public administration committee is unusually blunt in its assessment. But is the SNP up to the task of dealing with Scotland’s looming fiscal time bomb? It seems unlikely. The Scottish government has given no signal of being serious about facing up to that challenge. Indeed, if anything, the ruling
In some ways it was refreshing to see the radical left brought to heel by the realities of government. Having spent years campaigning to ‘ditch neoliberal economics for good’, this week saw the Scottish Green Party celebrate Shell and BP winning contracts to exploit Scotland’s offshore wind potential for the enrichment of their shareholders. Far
This is the time of year when economists and political scientists make their predictions for the upcoming 12 months. Will we finally see the back of Covid and economic recovery? Will Boris Johnson survive as Prime Minister? In Scotland, the politerati are speculating on what Nicola Sturgeon’s next move on the constitution will be. It
The Omicron variant is upon us, which means the return of the Scottish First Minister’s news conferences. These can be testy affairs, as Michael Blackley, the Scottish Daily Mail‘s political editor, found out at a recent one. Blackley had the temerity to politely question the Scottish government’s support for the hospitality sector, asking if Sturgeon
There was one minor and one big surprise in the Scottish government’s latest budget, which was set out by Kate Forbes, the finance secretary, last week. The minor surprise was the Sturgeon administration’s decision to provide less business rates relief, in comparison with England, to the retail, hospitality and leisure sectors during the next financial
‘I hope the sterlingisation zombie now has a stake through the heart,’ tweeted SNP delegate Tim Rideout after getting his resolution on ‘The Scottish Reserve Bank Establishment Bill’ passed at his party’s conference last weekend. Rideout sits on the SNP’s policy committee and is part of a faction challenging the SNP leadership’s plan for Scotland
