It is not accidental that David Davis used parliamentary privilege to name Nicola Sturgeon’s former chief of staff Liz Lloyd as the source of the leak to the Daily Record about allegations against Alex Salmond. It is not accidental that he used parliamentary privilege, so the rest of us who are not in parliament must be careful. It is also not accidental that it was David Davis. To the credit of both Salmond and Davis are friends, willing to disagree about politics but able to like each other anyway. It makes Salmond a different sort of human being to Sturgeon. It is finally not acciden ..read more

  Recently I noticed that I had got into trouble with the National again. A little while ago I wrote If you think you are Scottish and not British, then please renounce your British citizenship & rip up your passport. You can then be deported from the UK as you won't have the right to live here. Alternatively, you can accept that you are indeed British or else be a hypocrite Obviously, this is intended to be humorous. We struggle in the UK to deport anyone at all even those who arrive here illegally, so the idea that we could deport people who were born here and have lived here a ..read more

  Donald Trump did not suddenly become a different person because he survived an assassination attempt. He did not become a better candidate. The flaws in his character will remain. But it is quite certain now that he has won the presidency. The shooting revealed a side of his character that will define the election and define it in his favour. Bravery and defiance. Joe Biden is a decent man. A better man than Trump. But he has become weak, and it is quite clear now that he is unfit to lead anything let alone the free world. Trump has all of the character flaws of George Patton, Ulysse ..read more

  There is no use complaining about the British electoral system. We had a referendum on abolishing First Past the Post in 2011 and it won. You cannot reasonably argue for a second referendum if you argued against having a second referendum on Brexit or Scottish independence. Anyway, Labour is in charge now and it is unlikely to change a voting system that just gave it a landslide. The purpose of democracy is to give voters a real choice and the opportunity to decisively get rid of a government it dislikes. We have just done so. There is no question that voters have given their verdict on ..read more

  Scotland has decisively defeated the SNP in the General Election. There are now 37 Labour MPs and only 9 SNP MPs, but although those 37 MPs may do great things in London and may influence how the UK is governed in all sorts of ways, they will have next to no influence on Scotland. Labour came up with the ruse of the Scottish parliament as an antidote to Scotland voting Labour and getting a Conservative government. It was a sort of consolation prize and a concession to the soft nationalism that is still the norm in Scotland. But from the Labour point of view the Scottish parliament never ..read more

  If the price that we needed to pay for the SNP to be reduced to a handful of MPs was a Labour government with a large majority, it was a price worth paying. I am more optimistic than some people about Labour, but whatever Labour does and however long it rules, it will be temporary. What the SNP was trying to do since 2011 would have been permanent. The UK would have been broken up and that would have been final. That is what we were fighting for all these years. That is the victory that we have just achieved. When Labour used to win nearly all of the seats in Scotland, it did not gather ..read more

  Scotland for the past decade has been dominated by the SNP. It would oddly I think benefit the SNP if it were decisively defeated at the election, because then it would have to address its failure of the past decade. If the SNP wins a few seats less than Labour, it will continue as before. If it by some mischance wins one more seat than Labour, it will demand negotiations on independence with Keir Starmer beginning the day after the election and we will be back to where we started on the day after the referendum in 2014. The fundamental problem with Scottish nationalism is that while it ..read more

  The fuss about Nigel Farage’s remarks about the war in Ukraine is clearly overblown. He makes clear that he supports Ukrainian sovereignty and unequivocally says that it was wrong for Russia to invade. Describing the causes of the war is no more appeasing Russia or justifying Russia’s actions than arguing that the Versailles Treaty was one of the causes of the Second World War. To make this point neither excuses Germany of blame, nor in any way appeases. It is simply to discuss history. Ukraine is a sovereign state, and it ought to have been possible for it to choose to join the EU and ..read more

  The result of the election promises to be both strange and familiar, because it has already happened here and recently. The solution to the democratic problem will be the same because it has already happened here and still more recently. In 2015 the SNP won all but three of the seats in the General Election in Scotland and this dominance has continued in every General Election since then up to now. The opposition could not compete with an SNP that was winning around 45% of the vote because it was divided almost equally. The Conservatives and Lib Dems are strong in certain parts of Scotl ..read more

  Freedom of religion is an important value. It ought to be possible for people of all religions to worship as they please without encountering any sort of prejudice. It is wrong to discriminate against Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews and Sikhs. Religious forms of dress should be permitted so long as they do no harm to anyone else. It does me no harm if someone else wears a turban, a kippah, a headscarf or a cross. I dislike the word Islamophobia. I ought to be allowed to dislike Islam as a religion just as I ought to be allowed to dislike Christianity or any other religion. I ought to ..read more