Scottish referendum

You get bad losers in politics and bad winners, too, but it’s surely a rare business to get a bad winner who didn’t actually win. Yet this, since they lost last September’s referendum, has been the role of the SNP. Dismay, reassessment, introspection, contrition, resignation; all of these have been wholly absent. Instead, they have been triumphalist. Lording it, with cruel and haughty disdain, over their vanquished foes. Who, we must remember, they didn’t even vanquish. Well, maybe they’ve vanquished them now. I write this pre-election, with the polls all saying that the Nats will win something between almost every Scottish seat and actually every Scottish seat. Only, of course,

If the election in England is the political equivalent of trench warfare with Labour and the Tories inching forwards and then back, what’s going on in Scotland is a rout with the SNP driving all before it. What is remarkable is how the Nationalists are even in with a chance of winning seats such as Edinburgh South West that voted No by a more than twenty point margin. At the moment, everything their opponents throw at it seems to bounce off the SNP. The so-called Sturgeon memo, which claimed that she had told the French Ambassador that—contrary to all her public protestations—she would prefer Cameron to Miliband as Prime Minister,

What a load of mendacious balls everybody talks about Scotland. It’s like a disease. It’s like, you know how they say Ebola probably started in some festering bat cave in Guinea? Well, the referendum campaign was that cave. We had secret oilfields and fantasies about the NHS and endless guff about austerity being done for evil Tory fun, and the VOW the VOW and, dear God, the relief when it ended. Only it didn’t end. Instead it spread. And it set the tone. People talk now, for example, about an SNP/Labour coalition. As though this would make sense, when they must know it wouldn’t at all. As though Ed Miliband

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_5_Feb_2015_v4.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth and Alex Massie discuss Labour’s problems north of the border” startat=1118] Listen [/audioplayer]Just four months ago Scotland was the scene of great cross-party co-operation — unprecedented in peace-time politics. Gordon Brown was offering advice on David Cameron’s speeches, Douglas Alexander and the Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson turned themselves into a formidable debating duo, and Charles Kennedy was being hailed by Labour strategists as the man who would save the Union. Even George Galloway got in on the act. One of the oddest sights I have witnessed in politics was the Respect MP gushingly introducing the Liberal Democrat Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander, at

Nearly 20 years ago, during one of the many impasses on the road to ‘peace’ in Northern Ireland, Gerry Adams reminded his opponents that the republican movement would set the terms of any agreement. The IRA reserved a power of veto. ‘They haven’t gone away, you know,’ he said. Scotland is not Ulster, of course, but the Scottish nationalists haven’t gone away either. Anyone who thinks the referendum settled this country’s constitutional future hasn’t been paying attention. The long war continues, albeit — and mercifully — in figurative terms. If anything, defeat has encouraged the nationalists to redouble their efforts. The SNP is the only political party in Scotland that can

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_20_Nov_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth and Alex Massie discuss Scotland’s new First Minister” startat=730] Listen [/audioplayer]‘She sold out the Hydro arena faster than Kylie Minogue,’ said one awestruck unionist of Nicola Sturgeon this week. Scotland’s new first minister has come into office on a tide of support that many in Westminster find hard to imagine. Not only is she packing out concert venues, her party is also consistently scoring above 40 per cent in the polls. If she can keep this momentum going, she will rout Scottish Labour at the next general election. Defeat in the independence referendum has not halted the nationalists’ momentum — quite the opposite. The party stands

George Osborne will give his speech in a few minutes, and we’ll analyse it straight after. But I’d like to pick up on something he said this morning on Radio 4. It was an aside, a claim that For the first time in my lifetime, the march of the separatists in Scotland has been reversed This is, of course, not quite true – the SNP have been pushed into reverse many times. Depressingly they tend to bounce back, stronger than ever. After devolution, it looked as if their fox had been shot. After Salmond quit the first time, they looked like a quaint irrelevance. Yet just eleven days ago the ‘yes’ campaign won 45pc

As the Saltires are put away and the fireworks dismantled, some celebrities waking up to the Scottish referendum result took it rather badly, the poor lambs. Russell Brand was in his usual Citizen Smith mode: Fear is more powerful than faith. Until that changes none of us are free. — Russell Brand (@rustyrockets) September 19, 2014 Where at least Frankie Boyle was trying to be funny: I should have expected this, because if you’d asked me to estimate how many cunts there were in Scotland I’d have said about 2 million — Frankie Boyle (@frankieboyle) September 19, 2014 To be fair, I’ve always hated Scotland — Frankie Boyle (@frankieboyle) September 19,

I have been almost silent about the Scottish independence campaign. Not just because, like a lot of British people, I had assumed that this terrible matter would never have been opened unless people who know more than me were certain that the union would continue. But also because there has been a stifling of debate which has even carried me along. Since the start of this campaign there has been a whittling down of who is and who is not a suitable person to speak about it. Anybody who doesn’t live in Scotland at the moment – even if we have in the past, or were born and brought up there – has