Latest news with #ScottishIndependence
Telegraph
10 hours ago
- Politics
- Telegraph
SNP leader provokes fresh rebellion over independence
Rebel SNP members have lashed out at John Swinney after their alternative plan to achieve Scottish independence was blocked from being discussed at the party conference. They had unveiled a blueprint to open independence negotiations with the UK Government if nationalist parties got a majority of the popular vote in next year's Holyrood election. The plan differed markedly from Mr Swinney's proposal that the SNP winning an outright majority of seats in the election should force Sir Keir Starmer to allow another independence referendum. But a resolution outlining the rebel plan was not selected by a powerful party committee for discussion at October's conference, despite it being backed by 43 local branches. The Herald reported that it was excluded from a draft agenda for the conference, which has been distributed to members. Unless it is amended, this means that the rebel plan will not directly rival Mr Swinney's motion on his blueprint, which will be discussed and voted on by members at the Aberdeen gathering. It has previously emerged that some of the rebel group want to oust Mr Swinney as party leader amid concerns he is not doing enough to achieve independence. One SNP activist said: 'John Swinney last year made a point several times that he was going to listen to the membership. But he hasn't done so. 'There are just under 200 branches, nearly a quarter of all branches supported the resolution, but the party leadership is refusing to listen. 'If there is a difference of opinion between the leadership and the members then it should be debated at conference and conference should decide. To not let this resolution be debated at the conference is ignoring the internal democracy of the party.' A second activist, who supported the proposal, added: 'I am absolutely seething. I have never known a resolution with so much backing which has been so unceremoniously put to the side.' Mr Swinney has argued that the SNP winning an outright majority of seats next year should be the benchmark as this was the precedent set by the 2011 Holyrood election. Alex Salmond led the SNP to a majority win that year and David Cameron, the then prime minister, authorised the referendum that was lost by the nationalists in 2014. First Minister 'living in cuckoo land' But this is an extremely high bar and Alex Neil, a former SNP health secretary, previously told the Telegraph that Mr Swinney was 'living in cloud cuckoo land' given the current level of public support for the SNP. Under the rebel plan, independence negotiations would open between the Scottish and UK governments if the three nationalist parties – the SNP, the Greens and Alba – together achieve more than 50 per cent of the regional list vote. Successive UK governments have repeatedly turned down SNP calls for a second referendum, with the UK Supreme Court ruling in 2022 that only Westminster can allow another poll. Sir Keir said last month that he could not imagine another referendum being staged while he was prime minister and an SNP victory in the May 2026 election would not change his mind. Kenny MacAskill, the Alba Party leader and a former SNP justice secretary, said: 'You cannot expect the SNP members to unite behind a strategy when the views of 43 of its branches have been so casually dismissed. 'This is treating the grassroots of the party with utter contempt and is totally unacceptable in a democratic party.'
Daily Mail
5 days ago
- Politics
- Daily Mail
TOM UTLEY: I was once fiercely proud of being a Londoner born and bred. But as Sturgeon seeks greener pastures and after nine years of the Khan Terror, Mrs U and I are thinking the unthinkable...
Blow me down, who would have thought it? Nicola Sturgeon, the nationalist former First Minister of Scotland, who has spent her entire political life fighting for Scottish independence and slagging off evil England, now says she's thinking of leaving her native land. And where does she plan to move to? Unbelievably, her destination of choice appears to be... evil England! More specifically, she hints strongly this week that the ideal place she would like to escape to, at least for a 'wee while', is my own native London – capital of the kingdom she has tirelessly campaigned to leave. 'This may shock many people to hear,' she says, 'but I love London... So, yeah, maybe a bit of time down there. Who knows?' But will she really find the capital as pleasant a place to live as she seems to imagine? Or will she find that in moving from her own party's Scotland to mayor Sir Sadiq Khan 's Labour London, she'll just be swapping one nightmare terror for another? I'll come back to that question in a moment. But first, I'll let Ms Sturgeon explain why she's tempted to move. In an interview to promote her self-justifying, self-pitying new memoir, she tells the BBC: 'I belong to Scotland, it's my home. But I think being physically out of Scotland for a period might just help to reset my perspective and, to be more selfish about it, just remove me a little bit from that goldfish bowl scrutiny that I still live under in Scotland. 'I don't mean that as a complaint, it's just the reality that Scotland's quite a small country, it's quite a small body politic . . . Suffocating is maybe putting it too strongly, but I sometimes feel I can't breathe freely in Scotland.' Of course, Ms Sturgeon will hardly be the first Scot to head south in the hope of breathing more freely. Indeed, my own Scottish mother-in-law made that same move more than six decades ago, taking her five Ayrshire-born daughters with her, including the future Mrs U, who was then only five years old. Like Ms Sturgeon, she had recently separated from her husband – and like her, too, no doubt, she wanted to escape from her tight-knit, gossipy local community, where all her neighbours and relations knew or wanted to know everything that was going on in her life. Mind you, I suspect that the number of Scots who yearn to move south has grown ever greater since Ms Sturgeon's SNP came to power in 2007, and set about turning the country into an oppressive socialist stronghold, in thrall to mad, woke ideas. Thanks largely to England's generosity, we learned this week, every year Scotland now receives nearly £2,700 a head more in public funding than the UK average – an extraordinary £21,192 per person, compared with £18,523 in the kingdom as a whole. Yet in spite of this, Ms Sturgeon's party has managed to wreck Scotland's public services, including an education system that was once the envy of the rest of the UK. In 2006, for example, the nation achieved by far the UK's best results in maths, as measured by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's rankings. By 2022, it had plunged to second worst, a long way behind England and ahead only of Wales. Meanwhile, the number of NHS patients who have to wait more than two years for treatment north of the border is almost 100 times higher than in England, while Scotland still holds the unenviable record of having the highest number of drug deaths in Europe. Indeed, Ms Sturgeon and her party appear to have tested to destruction the theory that the way to solve social problems is to hurl ever greater quantities of other people's money at them. Then there was the debacle over the former First Minister's crazy plan for gender self-recognition, which would have allowed male rapists to serve their time in women's prisons. Add Ms Sturgeon's little local difficulties with her husband and the police, and perhaps it's no wonder that she wants to make herself scarce for a while, away from the scene of all the destruction and chaos her party has wrought. But back to that question: will she really find London any better? If you'd asked me that a few years ago, I would have had no hesitation in saying it was the best place to live on the planet. I was fiercely proud of being one of the few London residents I know who was born and brought up in the capital, while most of my neighbours and colleagues were drawn to it by its job opportunities, innumerable amenities and other attractions. In the words of the wartime song, I used to 'get a funny feeling inside of me/ Just walking up and down/ Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner/ That I love London town.' But I can't say the same any longer. After nine years under Sir Sadiq Khan, in cahoots with my disastrous Labour council, shoplifters and fare dodgers abound, the streets reek of cannabis and deliveries left on my neighbours' doorsteps are stolen within minutes. Yet there's never a copper to be seen, except for those flashing past in their cars, with sirens blaring (perhaps to arrest someone suspected of tweeting something disobliging about Hamas). At the same time, driving and parking in London have become all but impossible for the rest of us, as Khan and his party's councillors carry on their war against motorists, with their Ultra Low Emission Zones, cycle lanes, Controlled Parking Zones, Low Traffic Neighbourhoods – hated by all except eco-zealots. Then there are the endless road closures for minority religious festivals, celebrations of LGBTQ+ Pride, and the like. Since Tony Blair threw open our borders, it has also becoming increasingly rare to hear an English voice on the bus or the Tube, in a city where already 60 per cent of live births are to mothers born outside the UK. Meanwhile, many London schools have become battlegrounds, where teachers face a daily struggle simply to keep their pupils from each other's throats. No, the fact is that the London where I live today has become almost unrecognisable as the city I used to love. Sadly, two of our four London-born sons have already moved to the West Country, driven away from their birthplace by the hope of a better life and the impossibility of finding an affordable home in the capital. A third speaks of moving to Liverpool, and I don't suppose the fourth will remain in London for much longer. Now, for the first time in all these decades, my wife and I are seriously tempted to follow their example. The only question that remains is where, in this benighted kingdom, is the best place for an ageing couple to settle, most untouched by the blight of woke socialism? One thing's for sure. After Ms Sturgeon's long stint in power, not even the beauties of the scenery will tempt us to move to the land of Mrs U's birth.
The Independent
6 days ago
- Politics
- The Independent
Sturgeon's ‘Stalinist' approach disastrous for SNP, claims Joanna Cherry
Nicola Sturgeon's 'Stalinist' approach to leadership had 'disastrous' consequences for the SNP, former SNP MP Joanna Cherry has told an audience at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Speaking at an on-stage conversation with Matt Forde on Wednesday, the lawyer said Ms Sturgeon's top-down approach lay behind the party failing to recognise concerns around gender self-identification, and its failure to achieve Scottish independence post-Brexit. She said that unlike her predecessor Alex Salmond, Ms Sturgeon had shut down debate within the party on strategy and policy discussions, and that 'it was her way or the highway', and dissenters were viewed with 'deep suspicion'. The former Edinburgh South West MP added that she had never been friends with Ms Sturgeon, but that their differences were political rather than personal. 'I've never been close to her. This is not a personality clash. This is a clash based on the way that we do politics,' she said. 'I believe in open debates and discussion. And I don't think she does. I think she was Stalinist in the way in which she ran the party and the country.' She also criticised Ms Sturgeon's strategy for securing a Scottish independence in the post-Brexit period, when she said she 'repeatedly' pursued a mandate for a second referendum from the UK Government without considering a plan B. 'The ideal thing would have been to get a second referendum, but it was unwise to close down other options, and we needed to discuss other options,' Ms Cherry said. 'She never wanted to discuss a plan B, and she never wanted to discuss the possibility of treating an election as a de facto referendum. 'And when she eventually decided to do that, it was only because she'd run out of options, and she did it without any debate or discussion.' She added: 'The reason that I feel that her strategy failed and was so wrong was it was very narrow, and she repeatedly banged her head off the brick wall of the British Government's refusal to grant a section 30 order, rather than having a multi-faceted strategy to put pressure on them to do so, whilst also having a back-up plan if they said no. 'A more skilled politician of the sort of person that Alex Salmond was would have had that kind of a plan, and she didn't have it.' Ms Cherry also described the independence referendum in 2014 as a 'flowering of ideas' that had come about from the 'grassroots up'. She said: 'I think Nicola and her husband, as chief executive of the party, set out to undermine that grassroots power because it scared them, and to make everything imposed in the top-down, and that has had disastrous results for the SNP and for the independence movement.' Ms Cherry also said it was 'irritating' that in her recent autobiography Ms Sturgeon conceded some of the problems with gender self-identification were valid, given, she said, there had been multiple attempts to get her to 'press pause' on the policy at the time. These included, she said, an open letter in the Scotsman newspaper in 2019 by herself and 'quite a few other SNP MPs, MSPs and councillors', and separate calls from herself for a citizens' assembly to examine the issue. She said of Ms Sturgeon's response: 'Not only did she close her ears to them, she demonised those of us who raised concerns. 'She said first of all that our concerns weren't valid. And then she actually compared us to the far-right, said we're misogynist, racist, homophobes.' Joanna Cherry was first elected to the UK Parliament in 2015, and was her party's spokesperson for justice and home affairs until 2021. She lost her seat to Labour in the 2024 general election.
Yahoo
7 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
What is the GERS report and how is it calculated?
THE Scottish Government is due to publish its latest Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland (GERS) report on Wednesday morning. It comes around every year and is often at the centre of the debate on Scottish independence. But what is GERS and how is it all calculated? What is GERS? The GERS figures were published for the first time in 1992 under then-prime minister John Major. At the time, Tory ministers in the Scotland Office believed it would help inform the debate on devolution. Essentially, the report estimates the difference between what Scotland raises in taxation and what is spent on its public services. How is GERS calculated? GERS is produced by independent civil servant statisticians. The Scottish Government has previously said that GERS is a National Statistics publication, which means it is 'produced independently of Scottish ministers and has been assessed by the UK Statistics Authority as being produced in line with the Code of Practice for Official Statistics'. It added: 'This means the statistics have been found to meet user needs, to be methodologically sound, explained well and produced free of political interference.' The total spend is made up of Scottish and local government services as well as UK welfare spending and pensions in Scotland. It also includes UK Government spending in non-devolved areas such as defence and allocates a proportion of the UK's debt interest payments to Scotland. When it comes to revenue, there have previously been complaints that the data used is not collected for Scotland and has to be estimated using UK figures. However, in recent years, Scottish income tax, council tax, business rates, profits made by Scottish Water, landfill tax, land and building transactions tax and local authority user charges and fees are included. The Fraser of Allander Institute has said that estimates are not unusual when it comes to economic statistics. Does it represent the whole economy? On the Scottish Government's website, it's made clear that the GERS is only a report on public sector revenue and expenditure. It therefore 'does not directly report on Scotland's wider economy'. Anybody interested in this should refer to other economic statistics products. This includes the quarterly Gross Domestic Product figures or Quarterly National Accounts Scotland.
Yahoo
12-08-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Sturgeon: Salmond happier for SNP to be destroyed than succeed without him
Alex Salmond would rather have seen the SNP 'destroyed' than have it succeed without him, Nicola Sturgeon has claimed. In her memoir, Frankly, the former first minister said she had come to the realisation that her former friend and mentor 'wanted to destroy me'. She said her relationship with the late politician began to deteriorate as soon as she became leader of Scotland. Mr Salmond, who died last year, quit as SNP leader and first minister in 2014 after the Scottish independence referendum. Ms Sturgeon also claims in her book that Mr Salmond had admitted to her that the 'substance' of one of the sexual harassment complaints had been true. The former Alba Party leader was acquitted of all charges relating to the allegations at court in 2020, while a judicial review found the Scottish Government's own investigation of him was tainted with apparent bias. Ms Sturgeon said her former mentor had created a conspiracy theory about Scotland's core democratic institutions to shield himself from accountability. She said Mr Salmond never produced a 'shred of evidence' to support these claims. She accused him of trying to 'distort' and 'weaponise' the trauma of victims. In her book, which was on sale in some places ahead of schedule on Monday, she said: 'In his (Salmond's) efforts to turn himself into the wronged person, he demonstrated that nothing and no one was sacrosanct for him. 'There was never the merest hint of concern about the damage he did to the party he previously led. 'Indeed, it felt to me that he would have rather destroyed the SNP than see it succeed without him.' She accused her former boss of having 'impugned the integrity' of the institutions 'at the heart of Scottish democracy', including the Government, Police Scotland and Crown Office. She went on: 'The fact that he never produced a shred of credible evidence that a conspiracy existed, because it didn't, wasn't enough to stop him seeking to damage the reputation of these institutions and shatter the morale of those who worked in them. 'He was prepared to traumatise, time and again, the women at the centre of it all. 'A jury concluded that what they experienced wasn't criminal, but that does not mean those experiences didn't happen. 'Even if he never said so explicitly, he was accusing them of being liars, of making it all up.' The former SNP leader said Mr Salmond had made his former allies and SNP colleagues 'mortal enemies' in the fallout over misconduct claims against him. 'In that regard,' she wrote, 'I was clearly public enemy number one. For a while, I told myself that the bonds between us would be stronger than his thirst for revenge. 'Eventually, though, I had to face the fact that he was determined to destroy me. 'I was now engaged in mortal political combat with someone I knew to be both ruthless and highly effective. 'It was a difficult reality to reconcile myself to. 'So too was losing him as a friend. I went through what I can only describe as a grieving process. 'For a time after we stopped speaking, I would have conversations with him in my head about politics and the issues of the day. 'I had occasional, but always vivid, dreams in which we were still on good terms. I would wake up from these feeling utterly bereft.'
