We too have our illusions. For 30 years, British politicians mistook historical conditions for universal truths. They believed in progress — an improving world, the common rationality of humanity, the better angels of our nature —  and they believed in power, the unquestioned power of the British state. Mired in these illusions, Westminster politicians did something extraordinary — they aided and encouraged the secessionist parties of Scotland and Wales. Heedless of history, careless of the future, most MPs now greet devolution and nationalist power with equanimity or indifference. This equanimity may yet be tested. Yesterday, another poll showed a majority of Scottish residents support independence. In truth, the breakup of the United Kingdom would be a catastrophe — a catastrophe for the British people as a whole, and a catastrophe for the residents of Scotland and Wales. To understand why, we must look away from the constitutional tribulations of the British state, and consider instead the darkening world in which we find ourselves. 

If you are not worried about the future, you have not been listening. Over the following decades, our world is likely to be marked by runaway automation, resource competition, environmental degradation, state collapse, and the mass migration of people. The only mechanism through which the people of Great Britain can navigate these challenges is that of the state. Only the state can extract and redistribute revenue from foreign tech firms, only the state can defend our borders, and the state alone can maintain the popular legitimacy required to achieve both. To Balkanize Britain is to destroy our prosperity and security; no policy goal of Right or Left is strengthened by weakness and disunity.

More from this author

Death and glory at the Isle of Man TT

By James Kingston

We cannot presume that we are heading for a more prosperous future. Artificial intelligence is driving profound changes to work, economic activity, and the distribution of economic value. As more and more tasks are rendered subject to automation, the relative value of human labor will change. Lawyers, accountants, financial planners, and other members of the UK’s service-heavy bourgeoisie are highly exposed. Analysts suggest millions of these jobs will vanish in the years ahead, but no plan exists for their replacement. Perhaps, it is argued, we should encourage our children to become plumbers and builders. Yet this too misses an important trend now heaving into view — the mass rollout of humanoid service robots. Such robots will be cheap, tireless, and unable to complain. Cloud-connected and AI-enabled, they will be able to access the compressed summation of the entire body of human knowledge. The competitive logic of inter-company competition means these robots will get better and better, with billions of dollars being poured into boosting their ability to manipulate the physical world. Where, exactly, are human workers meant to compete?

Scale provides bargaining power. In an era of AI, global tech giants, and unabashed geopolitics, Britain’s collective self-interest requires all the scale it can muster. A traditional argument in favor of automation is that automation brings its own economic rewards; the profits from high-producing firms will boost the tax base and spread throughout the economy. Yet here, too, we have a problem — for the United Kingdom is heavily reliant upon US tech firms. It lacks its own AI models, and it lacks a strong robotics sector.  Foreign-owned technology will be taking British jobs, and there is no guarantee that new British jobs will emerge to absorb the unemployed. The only entity capable of extracting resources from foreign companies, and the only entity capable of doing this while also representing the public interest, will be the state. To split the state — to create one, or even three, new weak and fractious states upon Great Britain — is to smash democratic leverage over foreign capital.  

Managing technological change requires a strong state; so too does environmental breakdown. If automation is transforming the basis of the economy; global warming is transforming the material basis of society. By the 2050s, the world is likely to reach 2C of global warming. At 2C, sea levels will rise, droughts will increase, and crop yields decline. Yet 2C is itself a consensus scenario; other forecasts posit a rise as high as 3C or 4C. A few decades on, the earth will be even hotter. Under conservative estimates, we can expect the planet to be 3C hotter by the 2070s. Much of the world will be rendered uninhabitable; productive areas will suffer severe environmental stress, lowering agricultural productivity; major cities will be underwater. 

Environmental collapse will breed political instability. Within the more vulnerable regions, economies will falter and fail. Failing states will descend into conflict, and migrants will move in their millions. In October 2025, the UK Joint Intelligence Committee found that “every critical ecosystem is on the pathway to collapse.” Such collapse will drive migration, and however far away it may seem, such turmoil will affect Britain. Collapsing supply chains will affect our food security. Migrant flows and climate breakdown will increasingly affect international politics, and with it the security needs of the British state. 

An independent Scotland, possessed of nominal armed forces, would be unable to extend effective protection over its own territory. This would harm the people of Scotland; it would also harm the interests of those further south. Scottish independence also poses problems of hard power. Should it secede, the remnant United Kingdom would lose one third of its landmass, over 80% of its oil & gas production, most of its offshore wind resources, and 8% of its population. These figures are not artifacts of academic curiosity — they speak to the core security needs of the British state, and the British people as a whole. The only construct with the collective power and the popular legitimacy capable of navigating us through the storms ahead is that of the nation. As such, it must be rebuilt. The fact we need to rebuild it at all speaks to a fundamental constitutional failure — devolution.

Devolution has failed. It has failed not only because it was wrong; it has failed because it was stupid. Its planners and progenitors imagined it would strengthen the British Union, and provide better local government. They were mistaken, and misunderstood what a nation actually is. The classic account came from Benedict Anderson, who typified nations — nations, not ethnicities — as “imagined communities”. A nation is a group of people who, despite multitudinous variations of place, class, language or religion, imagine themselves to be, in some crucial sense, the same. Imagination brings them together, and imagination sustains them. Imagination is sustained and spread through stories and institutions, and rituals — the shared consciousness created by a “national” newspaper, participating in a “national” elections, or enjoying “national” sports. A nation is not an inevitability, one brought into being by the ineluctable forces of history; these forces do not exist. A nation is a choice, a discourse, and a project.

Elites build nations, for it is they who create and shape the institutions and stories which bind them together. Bismarck created modern Germany; Cavour constructed Italy; Ataturk wrought Turkey from the ruins of Ottoman collapse. Kings, presidents, and prime ministers rely in turn on the civil service — the teachers and administrators who, fanning out within their territorial borders, inculcate their people in the patterns and practices that will bind them together. From Egypt to Vietnam, the modernist states of the 19th and 20th century sought to engage in nation-building, to wield coherent peoples from their disparate groupings of faith, dialect, geography, and occupation. 

Britain’s elite, however, has done the opposite; it has chosen to dissolve the British nation. Blind to the lessons of the past, heedless to the risks of the future, Britain’s leadership class has spent 30 years reifying new nations within its borders. In devolution, and in the devaluing of Britain’s institutions, our leaders are dissolving the ties that bind this island together. The United Kingdom is a composite polity, one born in the union of different jurisdictions, ethnicities, and creeds. Scotland, Ireland, England and Wales existed long before the United Kingdom, as did the local identities of their inhabitants. The United Kingdom, and with it the British people, were born in the Union of these entities. It is the peculiarity of the British elite that they chose to limit their own nationhood via devolution — to place back in these pre-existing forms the power of imagination, the ability to create community, and the story-building institutions of political and institutional life. 

Devolution did more than strengthen local government — it created and strengthened new “imagined communities”, communities away from and in direct contrast to Britain as a whole. The advocates of devolution showed a basic failure to consider history, institutions, and human nature. They failed to consider that newly-created parliaments, populated and staffed by ambitious new legislators, might naturally seek to increase their own power. It is in the nature of institutions to seek power, and of individuals to seek power within them. The new Scottish Parliament was founded in 1999; the Welsh Assembly was opened in the same year. Devolution handed core responsibilities of the state over to the new parliaments. In both cases, but particularly so in Scotland, local nationalists have used these powers to begin corroding the British state. We see this more clearly in education and in health. 

The SNP party state has utilized control of the education system to strengthen its power and to undermine the basis of the British state. It has developed school history curricula to promote anti-English and anti-British sentiment. In 2008, it announced free university tuition for Scottish Undergraduates and citizens of the European Union; meanwhile, English students had to pay full tuition fees. Whereas 30% of Welsh students and 20% of Northern Irish students go to university elsewhere in the UK, 93% of Scottish students remain in Scotland — meaning they do not have the lived experience of the British Union. Graduates now make the core of SNP support.

Health policy shows how devolution hacks at the core collective experiences of British life. It is a truism of British public life that the NHS is the closest we have to a state religion. Its needs, its rituals, and its requirements form some of the core issues of our politics, and a primary focus of public sentimentality. Yet “our NHS” is seen less and less as a collective enterprise. In 1999, control of the NHS in Scotland was devolved to the new parliament. During the pandemic, devolved control over health policy gave rise to endless opportunities for nationalist posturing. Sturgeon’s regular health appearances appeared designed to undercut those of the British Prime Minister. There were leaks of information, and pre-emptions of UK-wide announcements. More importantly, the ability of the SNP-led government to impose different lockdown rules to those of England and Wales further underlined and created the appearance of Scottish separation. In a very real sense, Scottish people had a different pandemic; a core collective experience was instead turned into an opportunity for separatist consciousness formation. Every time Nicola Sturgeon addressed Scotland on its pandemic policy, and every time Mark Drakeford made his own announcements in respect to Wales, a further blow was dealt to the imagined community of the United Kingdom. 

Westminster’s disregard for nation-building, its fundamental lack of seriousness, was further underlined in its haphazard and casual approach to the 2014 referendum. Whereas states with written constitutions require supermajorities for major constitutional changes, the 2014 referendum was allowed to proceed on bare 50/50 vote — leaving a decision of the utmost historical gravity prey to basic questions of turnout or rounding errors. Despite the UK’s centuries-long heritage as a unified polity, one marked by the movement and intermixing of peoples across its regions, the vote was restricted only to those who could claim Scottish residency. Scots resident in London, Manchester, Belfast, or Cardiff — in other words, the Scots who might most fully embrace the Union itself — were barred. By accepting the debate could occur only in Scotland, among those resident only in Scotland, the UK leadership accepted a fundamental weakening of its position, and an implicit dismissal of the idea of Union. In devolution, and in the Scottish Referendum, Britain’s elite gave an intellectual surrender.

Suggested reading

On patrol with Glasgow’s vigilantes

By Felix Pope

The UK has been and is capable of change. Tom Nairn famously viewed the Anglo-British state as “Ukania” — an absurd relic, frozen in premodern form by a premature bourgeois revolution. Far from being a modern nation state, he saw it as an essentially imperial construct, founded and maintained in order to undergird the far-flung hegemony of a London-led empire. His view is paralleled by that of David Edgerton, for whom pre-War Britain was not so much a nation state as the governing and coordinating node in a world economic system. To Edgerton, however, a “British nation” came into being during the 20th century. This British nation was born in central planning, the pressure of war, and a postwar emphasis on material self-sufficiency. Through these, and in the moral narrative of the Second World War, a distinctive new national identity was forged. 

Today, the British elite must once again learn to embrace nation-building. We must make people feel British, and promote or rebuild the institutions that encourage them to do so; only then can the UK endure. The collapse of the United Kingdom is not pre-ordained; nothing is. Instead, it is a matter of chance, contingency, and will. The UK may or may not be an absurd construct, as Nairn considered. But in a world without order, one shorn of higher powers, to live means to embrace the absurd. As a Frenchman once wrote: “The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning.”

They splash through puddles on their way into town, but after a while the weather eases. The patrol wears mostly black, and stab-proof vests, though their work has not yet led to violence. Docherty, a joiner by day who founded Scots Active last year, has filled his pockets with the essentials: a yellow tube of naloxone, which reverses opioid overdoses; a flashlight; a pack of cigarettes; and a can of 2in1 Self-Defense Spray — a legal alternative to pepper spray that stains an assailant’s clothes.

Scots Active is just one of a number of night patrols that have formed across Glasgow in the past year. Dubbed vigilantes by the media, and disavowed by the police, they insist they are merely concerned citizens. The groups are doing “something the government cannae do”, says Lee, a lumbering young security guard who’s joined us to provide protection.

Suggested Reading

How Nicola Sturgeon failed Scotland

By Kathleen Stock

Trudging about until the early hours of the morning, the group hands out blankets to the homeless, and checks bridges along the Clyde where people might be considering suicide. Their primary motivation, however, and the reason why they have drawn such controversy, is their belief that the city’s women and girls are under threat from an influx of migrants. Drawn by a generous housing policy, more asylum seekers have ended up in Glasgow than any other local authority in Britain. Under the strain of supporting them all, tensions are beginning to rise.

Docherty’s patrol is the most visible manifestation of the city’s troubles. As we walk for hours, up and down throughout the city center, we see others. A teenager hunched into the corner of a subway stop, a glass pipe pushed up against his mouth. A sweet, childlike man with an Alsatian tied to his waist, who tells us that earlier that week he’d waded into a lake to die until the dog splashed in after him. Homeless men, vibrating in the cold.

Glasgow slumped in the 20th century, depopulating faster than any other British city. Then it began to recover, becoming something of a model for how post-industrial areas might be revived. Now, though, progress seems to be stalling, if not reversing. Youth violence is ticking up, with Will Linden of the Scottish Violence Reduction Unit warning of a sharp rise in knife crime. Glasgow still has the most drug deaths in Scotland — and Scotland the most in Europe.

The city’s Victorian architecture is meanwhile crumbling and burning and collapsing. When I arrive, a cube next to the train station remains cut off, weeks after a fire ripped out from a vape shop at the base of a 19th-century building. Peering over the barricades around it, I see black, charred stone.

In a 2023 essay, Rory Olcayto, an architectural writer, provoked debate when he described the city as a shipwreck. “Psychologically Glasgow is paralyzed,” he wrote. “It can’t imagine a future for itself.” The conurbation is too vast and sprawling for Scotland to cope with. It has discarded much of its past, but is unsure of what its future will be, leaving only a trite marketing slogan: People Make Glasgow. “It’s not the same,” bemoaned Ally McCoist of the city earlier this month, introducing a note of despair to TalkSport’s football coverage. “It breaks your heart to walk about Glasgow.”

Now, Reform UK, campaigning on the slogan “Glasgow is broken”, are predicted to break through at the Scottish Parliament election on 7 May. According to an MRP poll published last week, the party should win two seats in the city, pushing Labour into third place both here and across Scotland as a whole. With its growing discontent, anti-migrant neurosis and extrajudicial street politics, the country seems to be swiftly converging with its southern neighbor.

As the patrol tramps through central Glasgow, the crack-smoking teenager seems to appear behind us. He’s a lookout, Docherty claims, keeping an eye on Scots Active for a gang of drug dealers who loiter around the St Enoch subway station. As we pass by them, I see about a dozen of these boys hovering beside its curved glass wall, a puffa-clad mass.

Despite Glasgow’s recent travails, it used to be a far more violent place. While we walk, Docherty tells me about his adolescence on a “scheme”, or estate, in Govanhill, an ethnically diverse neighborhood south of the Clyde. He was raised amid running street street battles with other young “teams”, or gangs, from different areas. His secondary school, he claims, was a “race war” where white children battled Pakistani and black rivals. In one fight, a boy stabbed and stabbed at him, wildly, as he struggled to get away. It was only when Docherty finally broke free that he realized one of his testicles had been severed from his body.

In the press, Scots Active has been labeled far-Right. When I put this to Lisa, she insists that the group doesn’t discriminate and would help anyone in need. Yet discussing the supposed drug dealers, who are mainly non-white, Docherty makes his racialized view of Scottish identity clear. “They might have been born here,” he says. “But no, they’re not from Scotland. They’re not young Scottish boys.” That’s part of a broader trend: Scots Active has tapped into a Scottish ecosystem of anti-migrant politics, protesting alongside groups such as Unite The Clans, which has rallied around the country.

Later, Docherty and I begin talking about the suicidal man walking his Alsatian, and he says he has always struggled with depression himself. Sometimes he blacks out and starts smashing things up: his house, his mum’s house, the building site he works on. The only thing that quiets the negative voices in his head, he tells me, is self-medicating with cannabis.

Audrey Dempsey, too, has witnessed the alienation and violence bred by poverty. When she was hired as an addiction support worker, back in the 2000s, she says things were better than today. Then, Glasgow suffered some of the sharpest budget cuts of any local authority in Britain. The charity Dempsey founded in response — No. 1 Baby and Family Support Service — aims to make up some of the gap by providing second-hand prams, cots, clothes and toys. Visiting her charity’s users, Dempsey finds terrible, debilitating conditions. In one house, she met a mother who was cooking for her children on £1 disposable BBQs, bought after their electricity ran out. Schools approach her asking for nappies because their pupils were never toilet trained. She believes such colossal breakdowns are partly fueled by the state’s perverse system of incentives. “It’s as if,” she says, “they’re trying to create a benefits culture in Scotland.”

In 2022, Dempsey was elected to Glasgow City Council as a Labour representative for Springburn. Having expanded as a center of railway manufacturing, the area collapsed after the Second World War, becoming one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. The high rises built here in the late 20th century, to rehouse those moved out of tenements, became hives of social dysfunction. In 2010, a survey found it to be the most-feared neighborhood in Scotland for violent crime.

I meet Dempsey in a café on a retail park amid acres of tarmacked carpark, close to where William Wallace was captured by the English in 1305. She sketches a bleak vision of her city. “What’s been happening for the past 18, 19 years is definitely not progress,” she says. “The place is filthy. It’s run down. Services don’t exist anymore.” Last month, it was reported that health and social care services in Glasgow are facing a funding shortfall of almost £34 million.

Contributing to this budgetary pressure is the asylum system. Since 1999, Glasgow has been part of the national refugee dispersal system, in which the Home Office spreads asylum seekers across the country. Today, over 6,500 such people are currently in, with more than half of those in Glasgow. Once they are given refugee status, however, the migrants become the responsibility of the local authority. And in Scotland, homelessness legislation means that everybody must be housed. As for Glasgow, which declared a “housing emergency” in 2023, this has become a totemic issue.

Like Scots Active, with whom she has been out patrolling, Dempsey now fears ethnic violence. With community halls and public institutions shuttered, she believes it is impossible to properly integrate migrants. The councillor is convinced that race riots such as those that swept England in 2024 — but avoided Scotland — could break out here.

Her shifting views on migration, Dempsey tells me, have been driven by what happened to her daughter. Last year, she says, her 12-year-old girl was attacked by other children. She believes this was racially motivated and so, in its wake, asked at a council meeting about “racist attacks on white children and teachers”. When her comments were made public, the Labour Party suspended her. Now, she is standing for Reform in the Scottish parliamentary elections next week.

Dempsey is hopeful the party might provide the radical change she believes Glasgow needs. When I suggest that Nigel Farage is not known for his focus on child poverty, she agrees. “I have to be quite frank and say when I think of Reform in Scotland, I don’t think of Nigel Farage, ’cause I’ve never met him,” she says. “I think Malcolm Offord. And he gets it. He understands it. Now he does.”

Offord, previously a Conservative member of the House of Lords, was recently unveiled as Reform’s leader in Scotland. Dempsey argues he demonstrated his commitment to change  learning about Glasgow with her by visiting a homeless shelter and walking around with the night patrols. “Are [Reform] gonna be Tory point two?” she asks. “I think there’s enough people in there who are hellbent in making that not the case.”

Dempsey tells me she’s still angry that Sky News misrepresented her views on migration after she spoke to them last year. She is baffled that the journalist who interviewed her had doubted her belief that asylum and immigration were the biggest issues facing Glasgow. “I said to him, ‘have you never walked down Sauchiehall Street and spoke to people?’ You know, you talk to anybody, that’s the type of thing they say to you.”

The next day, I visit Sauchiehall Street myself. The route is Glasgow’s central shopping thoroughfare but, in recent years, it has declined precipitously. I go past vape shops, kebab houses, a half-demolished building, its facade ripped away. Delivery drivers on electric bikes weave past pedestrians at speed. Andrew Neil recently dubbed the area’s condition a “national scandal” but I struggle to see what makes it unique. It looks like every other high street in Britain.

Of the people I speak to, none say that immigration is the biggest issue facing Glasgow. Instead they list the rising cost of food, bills and gas, the closure of centers where the elderly might meet, the pathetic standard of the politicians who govern them. Catherine, a small woman in tortoiseshell glasses, thinks pedophiles could never be rehabilitated. She would like to be the prime minister, she adds sunnily, so that she could kill them herself.

That isn’t to say migration is a non-issue. Brian, sitting alone on a bench, says migration is not a problem at all, before complaining about people coming into the country and being housed immediately. He’s a socialist and voted Labour for decades before flipping to the SNP years ago. Labour had abandoned their principles. Is Glasgow broken? “Most cities are broken,” he says. “Most inner-city areas have their issues.”

Over the past century, Govan became synonymous with such decline. The neighborhood, on the south side of the Clyde, had once been a world-center of shipbuilding, in 1913 producing more vessels than all of Germany combined. But such heights just increased the impact of the eventual crash. After 1945, the residents who could moved out to newly built social housing. Tenements were torn down to leave gaping scars in the streetscape.

On a windy afternoon, I visit a soot-blackened church where a gaggle of children are trying to bodyslam grown men into the ground. This is the Glasgow School of Wrestling, founded by Ravie Davie, a former young team member turned performer. Violence, Davie tells me, appears to be rising again after a period of decline. “A lot more kids are getting murdered or stabbed,” he says. “A lot are being put in prison.” The numbers partly reflect this: though the total number of children accused of violent crime has actually decreased, the level of those guilty of attempted murder has seen a sharp jump.

The trend seems to have an ironic cause. Because of Glasgow’s success in tackling postcode violence over the past decade, children can now travel more freely around the city. And that means they are more able to meet up for fights — and are more valuable employees for organized crime. If Docherty fought for “respect” and due to boredom, teenagers are now sucked into a more nefarious, profit-driven criminal vortex.

Below a monumental pipe organ, I speak to Davie’s cousin, Zander. The pair put a postmodern twist on their area’s reputation for violence, wrestling in character as tracksuited hoodlums named the Govan Team. Now, Zander says, they want to help get local children out of their bedrooms and away from trouble by teaching them this art.

Above Govan’s skyline loom vast sheds. It is along the docks here that Paul Sweeney began working as a shipbuilder as a young man, seduced by the romance of the Clyde’s industrial past. After being tapped by Sarah Brown, Gordon’s wife, he became a Labour MP and now represents Springburn in the Scottish Parliament. I had wanted to talk to him because Glasgow has recently been experiencing something of a shipbuilding revival.

Near where we meet stands the newly erected Janet Harvey Hall — a vast, otherworldly metal structure — where two Type 26 frigates are being built for the Royal Navy. BAE has invested £300 million in modernizing these facilities, where new capabilities to combat drones and hypersonic missiles are being built. With history restarting amid global conflict, the Clyde may yet find itself central to British security again.

As we talk, Sweeney and I walk through Fairfield Heritage, a museum in the offices of what was once Glasgow’s preeminent shipping firm, now in the shadow of BAE’s sheds. He is wearing a Fairfield Heritage t-shirt and colorful socks with little drawings of trains on them. I ask him about the glut of asylum seekers that some believe is tearing Glasgow apart.

The SNP government in Holyrood had created a powerful incentive for refugees to present themselves in Scottish cities like Glasgow because single men have just as much of a right to be housed as families, Sweeney says, but they had failed to build enough houses to keep up with the ensuing demand. “It feels politically disingenuous to build the ends but not the means. That’s kind of my critique of the SNP is that they’re always about good things, nice things for everyone, but never actually make the difficult trade-off decisions.”

Even so, Sweeney dismisses the idea that migrants are depriving Glaswegians of resources, something he says has been egged on by Reform. Most of the party’s voters he had met were angry, older men who had spent too much time watching GB News. “If anything, one thing Glasgow needs is more people. It’s a city that’s the most depopulated in the UK. If anything, Glasgow needs an orchestrated attempt to reinflate its population.”

More from this author

Inside the mind of Laila Cunningham

By Felix Pope

We’d now reached what appeared to be the former Fairfield boardroom. It was all crown molding, thick red carpets and long wooden models of transatlantic ocean liners: an abandoned palace of the Glaswegian bourgeoisie. These men, who had fused Adam Smith’s Enlightenment with engineering genius, transformed the city, turning it into the dockyard of empire, the most easterly American city, the petri dish of industrial modernity. That seemed a long time ago now.

Glasgow had gone through a period of recovery since about 1990, Sweeney says, but then hit a phase of “one step forward, two steps back”. Devolution allowed the SNP to centralize power in Edinburgh, dragging resources eastward. He hopes the city might be granted a directly elected metro mayor, like Liverpool and Manchester, and thinks he would be good at the job.

Though he expresses optimism about Labour’s chances on 7 May, Sweeney also says that Starmer had become a drag on Labour’s chances of taking power in Holyrood, which now look slim to nonexistent. Anas Sarwar calling for the prime minister to resign had been essential, though. “It’s a bit like amputating an arm, you know? You would rather keep it, but if it’s gonna kill you, you might as well lose it.”

Next week, the SNP are expected to win Scotland again. The only remaining question seems to be whether they can claim an outright majority of seats. Neither outcome is likely to save the Glasgow shipwreck.

The night I accompany them, Scots Active’s patrol ends early. It had been a quiet night. They had seen a figure preparing to throw themselves to their death in the river, but on closer inspection it turned out to be a pole. Lisa had approached a lone girl, but she was just waiting for a bus. Some of the men had opened a mysterious, gray door behind which they feared migrants were doing something nefarious, but it only revealed a confused man who told them it was a pool club. Everywhere, phantasmagoric horrors seemed to lie in wait. But none were quite as they seemed.

A man and his sister prepare to take matters into their own hands. Colin McInnes, who is autistic, and his sister, who is in early recovery from addiction, make their way into the city center carrying a rucksack with a flask of lentil soup, a sandwich, and some broken bourbon biscuits inside. Colin’s aim is modest: to feed one hungry homeless person.

Little did he know that this small act of compassion would change the course of his entire life and the lives of countless others. As Colin turns to walk home with the empty rucksack, one street-dweller taps him on the shoulder and asks if he will be back. “I will,” he said. “I’ll be here at this time every night.”

Six years later, homelessness is only worsening, and this winter, Glasgow is as cold as ever. Thankfully, though, Colin has been busy. Inside the headquarters of his Homeless Project Scotland (HPS) — the result of the promise made on that cold night — 40 or so people are eating hot meals in a warm café. Sustained entirely by volunteers and public donations and operating without government funding, it provides food, shelter, emergency response and advocacy seven days a week. Every meal, bed and item of clothing here is paid for through public donations, and the quiet support of nearby businesses. At the back of the building, in a glass-fronted office, a man with a 1,000-yard stare chairs a meeting. It’s Colin.

The challenge facing him is acute. Across the UK, the scale of homelessness now runs into the hundreds of thousands. Shelter’s latest analysis shows that at least 382,000 people in England were homeless on a given day in 2025 — including many families stuck in temporary accommodation. Official government statistics show 132,410 households in temporary accommodation in England alone, and Shelter has calculated that there are as many as 100,000 children in temporary accommodation in London alone. To put that another way, one out of every 21 children in London is homeless, equivalent to more than one homeless child per class.

Taken together, these figures underline how pervasive housing insecurity has become, extending far beyond rough sleeping into widespread reliance on emergency and temporary housing. These trends reflect deeper structural pressures: a chronic shortage of genuinely affordable housing, spiraling private rents, insecure tenancies, and a welfare system reformed in ways that leave little margin for error when people hit crisis.

Westminster recently set out a new plan to prevent homelessness and rough sleeping, backed by £3.5 billion in promised investment. Yet critics argue that without a major expansion of social housing and meaningful action on poverty and insecurity, little will change.

Another factor worsening the crisis is dysfunction across the system itself. Research by Shelter has repeatedly shown how stretched resources at local level create avoidable delays to vulnerable people getting the support they need. This failure is often chalked up to the chaotic lives of the homeless as opposed to services arguably unfit for purpose. People with complex needs face specific challenges. Homeless Link’s Unhealthy State of Homelessness research found that 82% of people experiencing homelessness have a mental health diagnosis, but only 9% of accommodation providers state they are capable of supporting people them. They may be judged too risky for mainstream services, while rigid thresholds, poorly integrated services, and turgid referral systems delay timelier intervention. Public misunderstanding compounds the problem, allowing homelessness to be framed as inevitable, insoluble, or the fault of feckless individuals, relieving political pressure for meaningful change.

Suggested reading

Can Britain escape its housing trap?

By Peter Apps

Homeless Project Scotland is determined to change this. The charity represents a radical communitarian response to these traditional systems, many of which have grown overly cautious to intervene in a climate of scarce resources and institutional ass-covering. Powered by working-class volunteers with little experience of, or interest in, navigating bureaucracy, the project is driven by a palpable sense of moral urgency and a clear message to homeless people: if services won’t help you, we will.

Colin describes that night in Glasgow in 2019 as “something like Armageddon”. And what followed, he tells me, was not a plan but a series of improvised and messy responses to escalating need. He acted swiftly on the impulse to help so many of us feel but resist. Rucksacks became crates. Crates became a battered trailer dragged through the snow under Central Station Bridge. Food was cooked and reheated wherever possible. “We didn’t care about any legalities,” Colin says. “Just caring about humanity. Get it done and feed people.”

Word spread. Soon, Colin’s team was feeding hundreds. Then Covid hit. As other services shut down and staff were furloughed, Homeless Project Scotland kept going. “We were the only place providing food in the city center,” Colin says. “The whole city just became empty.” Eventually the operation was paused, not because demand fell, but because gathering together in the streets became unsafe.

What followed was even more ambitious. Volunteers cooked in their own homes, met in supermarket car parks and delivered food daily to hotels across the city where the homeless had been lodged during the pandemic. “We took out thousands and thousands of meals,” Colin says.

Made up of volunteers operating off their own backs and running mainly off proceeds from collection buckets passed around local pubs, HPS lacked a formal structure. When it was time to upscale, crowdfunders were launched and more volunteers signed up. In the absence of a professional PR operation, accusations of poor governance found easy purchase — and Colin applied to become a registered charity. “I wanted to be above board,” he says. “I wanted to show everybody where the books were.”

He also needed a premises. First, he persuaded a landlord to let him take over a disused property in a collapsing rat-infested building. After a letter to Network Rail — owner of a vacant retail unit beneath Central Station bridge in the heart of the city center — an Argyle Street office came next. Then, the current base on Glassford Street on the doorstep of Glasgow’s upmarket Merchant City. “We kept thinking: ‘This is too big,’” Colin says. “And then before you know it, that TARDIS got filled.”

Today the organization runs what Colin describes as the only fully volunteer-led night shelter in Scotland, alongside a food service producing tens of thousands of meals a month and a volunteer-run national helpline operating around the clock. People call in with all kinds of problems, from loneliness to hypothermia to domestic violence.

Colin is unapologetic about the absence of professional sheen that some apparently mistake for unseriousness. “Bureaucracy can fuck right off,” he says. “You will never fund my charity for a bureaucracy.”

What guides the organization instead is a simpler principle: people before procedure. It’s a principle as risky as it is provocative. Colin traces his distrust of rigid systems back to personal experience rather than ideology. “My approach is shaped entirely by lived experience,” he explains. “I am someone who has suffered at the hands of systems that were meant to protect, support, and care and which clearly failed to do so. That experience gave me a deep understanding of how easily people fall through the cracks and how invisible they can become.”

We take a break. I step out for a cigarette and get talking to a man named Andy. When Andy first contacted Homeless Project Scotland, he wasn’t in Glasgow. He was in Blackpool; after a period of poor decisions, his marriage had broken down and he’d become estranged from his children. Desperate, he phoned the helpline. Instead of receiving advice, a referral, or a soul-destroying automated message, as he might have done if he’d rung any other hotline, Andy got talking to Colin. Colin jumped in a van and drove south through the night. “He came down and picked me up from Blackpool,” Andy says. Within days, he was in the shelter. After three months, he moved into a hotel. Now, he has a furnished flat and is being assessed for a two-bedroom home so his children can visit.

Andy had tried accessing services before and “got nowhere”. If it wasn’t for Colin and the project, he says, “I think I would have committed suicide.” Andy now volunteers seven days a week.

On this brutally cold evening, the shelter is filling quietly. People queue in a seated area, are then greeted by name and guided through a process that is firm without being intimidating. There is no performative authority, no sense of suspicion. The atmosphere is strangely serene.

The dormitories are warm and well-ordered. Each bed is numbered. The system is meticulous rather than bureaucratic. If someone in bed eight gets unwell, staff can immediately access their medical information. There are showers, toilets, laundry facilities and a kitchen area in the shelter. There is a small cinema corner and a few well-stocked bookshelves. Bedding is high quality, supplied by the same company that services the boutique hotel next door. People here are not offered platitudes about “dignity” then fobbed off until Monday morning; rather, they’re treated with care and respect.

In creating such a sanctuary, Colin has come up against many of the computer-says-no types prevalent in officialdom; the kind of people who are so inured to the dysfunction of the sector that they no longer perceive it let alone raise their voices against it. As a result, his antenna for local authority bullshit is extremely well tuned. In a video posted by the project earlier this year, Colin explained that Glasgow City Council had refused him a planning application for a shelter on the grounds that people would queue outside the building for food, a decision he contrasted with the tolerance shown for lines of rowdy revelers outside nearby nightclubs.

Suggested reading

The rise of California's vanlords

By Matt Feeney

The project experiences a fair amount of resistance locally, Colin tells me, much of it framed in the language of health and safety. Risks are identified, concerns are flagged, and safeguards are invoked. In theory, these mechanisms exist to protect the vulnerable. In practice, Colin argues, they are often used to obstruct help at the moment it is most urgently needed. Fire safety was repeatedly cited as a reason not to act, even as people slept outdoors in lethal conditions. At the same time, “shared-air” sleeping spaces were dismissed as undignified, despite the alternative being a doorway in sub-zero temperatures. The contradiction is not lost on him. “The lengths that the SNP-led council and SNP government have gone to in order to defend the position that night shelters are ‘a thing of the past’ are extraordinary,” he says. “This is not about policy, ideology, or box-ticking. This is about life and death. When the choice is a warm, supervised indoor space or sleeping outside in sub-zero temperatures, the moral answer should be obvious.”

To Colin, this all reveals a risk-averse system more comfortable managing hypothetical threats than confronting immediate harm. Worse, he believes that bureaucracy has become a way for institutions to distance themselves from moral responsibility. When procedures are followed but people still freeze, starve or die, process becomes a means of deflection. The absurdities don’t stop there: each time someone is forced to sleep rough, the local authority is in breach of its own statutory duties — yet faces no penalty. In effect, the biggest rule-breaker is left enforcing the rules on everyone else.

By contrast, safety in this shelter is not ignored, it is simply understood differently. “We don’t have time for sitting writing policies,” Colin says. “People are coming in here in an emergency.”

Emergency is not overselling it. The situation in Glasgow is bleak. Official Scottish Government data shows Glasgow accounted for 43% of reports of rough sleeping in Scotland in 2024-25, far higher than other local authority areas. Independent counts by agencies like Simon Community Scotland regularly find around 25-30 people sleeping rough in the city on a given night (the real number is likely higher), illustrating the visibility and persistence of the problem. On a good night, Homeless Project Scotland will still be forced to turn people away because the shelter is at full capacity. The fact it is so oversubscribed demonstrates its direct impact; if it closed, rough sleeping numbers would rise overnight.

This is clearly not a service designed around political correctness. It is a response moving at a pace the homelessness crisis demands. What distinguishes it is not just the services it provides, but how it innovates in the face of administrative gridlock. Despite being run entirely by working-class volunteers, it is a model for what support for homeless people should look like in the 21st century. And while traditional systems have a lot to learn from the project, it’s likely it will inspire more radicalism outside the sector — and continued resentment within it.

While Colin believes his presence is an irritant to leaders both local and national, he has seen interest from politicians looking to capitalize on what is regarded by many as SNP complacency. The shelter has recently drawn visits from both Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar and Reform UK councillor Audrey Dempsey, no doubt on charm offensives ahead of Scottish Parliament elections in May. For now, Colin appears wary of political proximity, conscious that attention can just as easily dilute the message as strengthen it, and that keeping power at a safe distance may be essential to the project’s integrity. In truth, Colin, like many great social campaigners, thinks and talks just like a politician. It’s where his loyalty currently lies that ultimately distinguishes him.

I think again about Andy’s story as we walk back upstairs. Had his call been logged, deferred, or redirected to office hours, he might not be here at all. In a system where delay is too often presented as necessary due process, Homeless Project Scotland operates on a simpler moral principle: when someone is in crisis, you go to them. You do not ask them to wait. It’s a principle we could all learn from.

Or here is another puzzle. Why does the British Pregnancy Advisory Service — the UK’s main abortion provider, and uncompromising in its mission to facilitate women’s reproductive choices, whatever they are — explain on its website that their clients may take “pregnancy remains” away afterwards for a “private service, burial or cremation”? Why might anyone want to do such a thing?

It is easy enough to arrive at the answers to these questions in your head, provided you don’t have to say them out loud. The first says: ending the lives of fetuses simply because they are female is nowhere near good enough a justification for such a momentous action. Abortions should only be done for a highly restricted set of reasons. They should not be just nodded through for any reason a pregnant woman likes.

And the second says: a woman might want to have a private service or burial afterwards for her fetus, because she recognizes that her decision helped to cause the death of her child — or of her potential child, if you prefer. Either way, she may well be grieving the loss.

Underpinning each of these answers are further facts, equally difficult to spell out in polite society. A life is deliberately ended during the abortion process, whatever else is saved or enabled. Deliberately causing death is a morally serious matter, deserving deep consideration and adequate justification. For some, it is tempting to picture any pregnant adult woman contemplating this as in an unsought, perhaps even coerced situation, with no real responsibility for the outcome. But in a society that contains sex education, consensual relationships, free contraception, and the morning-after pill in pharmacies, this is just not true for many.

Putting things like this does not mean that abortion must be wrong. In a fraught situation with no winners, even the right decision can produce awful outcomes. Sometimes life forces you to opt, very reluctantly, for the least worst thing rather than the best.

More from this author

How Nicola Sturgeon failed Scotland

By Kathleen Stock

But thanks to the hegemonic, sanitized account of abortion circulated by influential medical and feminist organizations, this difficult conversation is not even available. Instead, enormous efforts are made to make the decision sound no more important than choosing to get a haircut, or opting to let it grow out. On this view, as summed up in the new Scottish report, “women should have the right to their own reproductive choices and are best placed to make pregnancy decisions based on their personal circumstances”. It’s just healthcare, after all — or so the experts keep insisting — and the fact that the health of the occupant in the womb is not obviously improved by the process is neither here nor there.

From the bland starting point of these people, it would be weirdly arbitrary to oppose women having abortions on sex-selective grounds. Why shouldn’t they have one for any reason they like, since the action is essentially trivial anyway? So morally negligible is the process supposed to be, that for years several Royal Colleges have been arguing it should be fully decriminalized, even up to full-term. In June this year, the House of Commons agreed.

During parliamentary debate at the time, ethical concern was mainly reserved for pregnant women who had illegal late-term abortions at home, and who then faced the supposedly cruel threat of prosecution afterwards. Implicit was the idea that such women could only have done harm to their own health, and not to anyone else’s; and hence that there was no need for any law to punish them, nor to deter future others from doing the same.

And now a Scottish “expert group” is arguing not just for decriminalization, but for a significant relaxation of current medical requirements too. Up to 24 weeks, you should be able to abort for any reason you like — including “because it’s a girl”, or indeed “because it’s a boy”. Post-24 weeks, current regulations restrict abortion to cases where the baby or mother’s life or health is gravely threatened; but the authors say that this too should be changed.

According to their recommendations, two “appropriately trained registered healthcare professionals” — not necessarily doctors — should now decide whether a post-24 weeks abortion is “appropriate”, vaguely taking relevant circumstances into account. Unspoken here is the fact that “appropriately trained” assessors will not be able to rule any such decision out; for on what grounds could they, or their trainers, object? It has already been conceded that abortion is a decision only relevant to the woman concerned. She is simply exercising her autonomy, with no downsides for anyone else important.

More from this author

I miss the great philosophers

By Kathleen Stock

It is not that this conspiracy of silence is badly motivated. Indeed, perversely, the staunch commitment to maintaining levels of denial pays secret tribute to the weightiness of the decision, coupled with the knowledge that so many women have already made that choice. There is a lot of guilt, shame, regret; not for everyone but certainly for some, albeit that most therapists will not openly acknowledge it either. In a spirit of sisterhood there is an urge not just to keep away from a painful place, but to try and make it less painful by positive reframing. Other women will try to make you feel better about a terrible haircut. Of course they are going to do it here too.

Signs of the desire to avoid reality are everywhere in the Scottish report. As usual with these things, there is a fussy focus on language. At one point, the sex of pregnant women is referred to as “assigned at birth”, technically making sex-selective abortion impossible anyway. Abortion is — to repeat — just a matter of receiving “healthcare”, a domain which suddenly and conveniently has no ethical dimensions whatsoever.

There is also a lot of cherry-picking, camouflaged in technocratic language. International “best practice” on abortion should be followed, we are told, except when it comes to endorsing the more conservative gestational age limits common in Europe. The concerns of dissenting “stakeholders” worried about existing age limits are waved away. Any attempt to bring the question back to morality is placed out of bounds: “the moral status” of the fetus, we are told, “fell outwith the scope of the review”.

In this way, the authors pretend to themselves they are not doing ethics, when quite obviously they have already taken a view. Admittedly, it is historically a complicated subject. Over the past few decades, there has been much philosophical discussion of whether fetuses count as babies, or human beings, or persons in their own right. It seems to me that, at least by the time we are urgently resuscitating their identically aged peers in neonatal intensive care units, they are clearly all three.

But even if younger, non-viable fetuses were only a kind of pre-human animal — animate and perhaps sentient, but otherwise unfortunately deficient in the personhood stakes — they should surely still be of some moral concern. They would not therefore be nothing. As a society, we care a lot about animals, and disapprove of harming them for no good reason. Why not here too?

I know how these conversations tend to go. Along with anger at the heresy — not to mention irrelevant comparisons to draconian US regimes — there will likely be deference paid to the supposed real-life judgments of actual women. People don’t tend to get an abortion lightly, I will be told. Actually, I know that is not always true. But to the extent that it is, it can only confirm my basic point: unlike many of those professionally interested in the subject, others understand that there is a weighty decision to be made about a prospective death, and not every motivation is a good one. The state putting limits on unacceptable decision-making is therefore as it should be. This is not the same as a “ban”.

It will take courage to talk openly about the social and personal losses of abortion, as well as the gains. Doing so need not entail placing unhelpful blame or stigma on woman who have had one (or two, or three); nor upon the medics who carried it out. It is clear that a well-oiled system, governed by a code of silence towards half of the story, has colluded to produce present behavior. But unless someone challenges the vision, we are not so much faced with a slippery slope as an utterly frictionless one.

The numbers are leaping up annually — perhaps fueled by the continuation of the pills-by-post scheme, first instigated during Covid and then kept on. We already have highly permissive rules, and yet they keep being challenged by people with simple-minded fixations, who show no signs of wanting to slow things down.

In order to complain about this respectably, you are not supposed to approach directly, but have to find some circuitous route: to talk hyperbolically about the evils of sex-selection, or about the dire specter of population decline. You can’t mention the most obvious ethical difficulty: hundreds and thousands of deaths. By all means, let’s talk about the effects of abortion on adults. But – if we have to use mindless bureaucratic language – let’s not pretend that there aren’t other stakeholders here too.

This, more or less, was a popular US take on a viral video circulating this week, showing a very young girl in Dundee menacing the person filming with an axe and a knife, plus a lot of high octane swearing and shouting. Though no potential migrant attackers could be visually detected, at least one heavily accented male voice could be heard urging the girl to “show the knife”, while she and another girl, said to be her sister, volubly accuse him of “battering kids”. The girl with the weapons was later arrested by police, the video put online, and its chaotic events processed by the meme factories to be served up frothing hot.

One typical image — mainlined into American veins via Elon Musk’s new pal Tommy Robinson — showed “Sophie” transplanted to a Highland setting, still brandishing weapons enthusiastically in the heather, but now tartaned-up in the colors of Clan Mel McGibson and with face daubed in saltire blue.  Meanwhile Musk himself was busy describing the police officers involved as “traitors to their own people”, as if a more responsible constabulary would have given the axe-wielding pre-teen a pat on the head and sent her on her way. A puzzled American discourse has since erupted about why Scottish people, or the men in particular, don’t adequately defend their women from tribes of marauding foreigners roaming unchecked across their ancestral lands. A donor page has been set up for the two girls, real names Lola (12) and Ruby (13). As I write, the fund stands at nearly £35,000, which is a lot of money for young Lola and Ruby to spend on machetes and Irn Bru. “May God save your country from the terrors happening there”, writes one plaintive donor.

At the same time, people who actually live in Dundee have been discussing what happened there, with less mythologizing and more weary familiarity with the city’s longstanding social problems. Though the local tourist board is probably not shouting about it, the place has the highest rate of child protection orders in Scotland, the highest national incidence rate of domestic abuse, the second lowest life expectancy, and the second highest rate of drug misuse deaths in Europe (beaten only by Glasgow). “A significant proportion of the difference in life expectancy between Dundee and many other [places] can be accounted for by deaths at a young age from drugs, alcohol and suicide”, notes a 2024 health and social care report.

On the city’s subreddit, one poster said she had watched the whole thing kicking off from the Farmfoods carpark — a place not remotely heather-strewn — and described witnessing “lots of swearing and aggressive behavior between both parties”, but no physical clashes. Another pointed out that the same girls — again identified as “Ruby” and “Lola” from Monifieth, ages 13 and 12 respectively — were reported missing in the Scottish press at the end of July, then traced shortly by the police afterwards. “Clearly there is a lot going on for them”, was one more sympathetic verdict. Mostly, though, there was a distinct lack of surprise about why a young girl might be walking about the city’s backstreets tooled up like a video game character. Said one: “I’m 31 this year and seen loads of that kind of pish growing up, average [housing] scheme behavior…  Mostly just troubled kids left to fend for themselves tbf. Just more people filming it now.”

In the end, then, febrile visions of the tomboy queen, Sophie of Dundee, have proved as accurate as that time in 2019 when the American Left collectively hallucinated MAGA-behatted students aggressing an “indigenous elder”. In both cases, it seems it is easy to make up self-serving things about young people you don’t know. The Daily Mail has since found the film’s cameraman, who turns out to be a Bulgarian Christian — which is to say, not Muslim — with legal residential status. The police, with the help of Farmfoods CCTV cameras, have confirmed “there is no evidence to support the online rumors Mr Dumana… committed any offense”. Rumors of migrant hordes have also been exaggerated: it is true that Dundee City council houses some Syrian, Iraqi, Afghan and Ukrainian refugees, but a quick look online shows the numbers are apparently in the hundreds not thousands. In 2019, 18% of babies in the city were born to mothers from outside the UK, a figure only marginally higher than the national average at the time.

More from this author

How Nicola Sturgeon failed Scotland

By Kathleen Stock

So: whatever the ultimate truth about what went on in the video, or about the fraying social contract in Dundee, it is clearly a lot less childishly simple than the feverish projections of people like Musk. Twenty-five years ago, I lived in the city, in a neighborhood full of nice houses left over from the prosperous 19th-century jute trade. I worked in an electrical retail shop in the center, from which hollow-eyed drug users would sometimes nonchalantly emerge with stolen stereos to sell in the alleyways off the main street. Back then it was a starkly divided place — and still is — though the major social divisions have little to do with skin color.

On the one hand, there are the hipster West End coffee shops and the fancy waterfront V&A museum, the backdrop to fictional native son Logan Roy’s surprise party in HBO’s Succession. On the other, there’s the scary tower blocks in places like the Hilltown and Lochee — known locally as “multis” — their stairwells adorned with “human shite, junkies shooting up, groups of neds and a dead dog”, as one disgruntled local resident recently described the situation. I had female friends who grew up in the multis; they were frequently plied with alcohol in their early teens then assaulted and raped by groups of local men. Safe to say, then, that the idea of sexually exploiting vulnerable minors didn’t start with brown-skinned incomers.

To make such obvious points seems to drive the online Right on both sides of the Atlantic into a spitting fury; as if, through a strange Tinkerbell-like alchemy, every time a white man is identified as responsible for sexual exploitation, an Asian-born culprit gets exonerated. When the objectors are from North America, there often seems to be an accompanying insult felt to self-identity and amour propre: as if some great-grandfather from Linlithgow or Leicester were being held personally responsible, and by extension all of his descendants. It is perfectly true, to our national shame, that Asian rape gangs have operated here with impunity, and been enabled by authorities in many cases. But it is also true that the strategies used by the perpetrators to lure young girls were hardly new or innovative, and nor was what they did to their victims afterwards. Sexual exploitation of minors has been rife in places like Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Dundee for decades — if not centuries — without the authorities getting a proper grip on it; and the perpetrators have usually been homegrown.

All but the most economically insulated of Scottish citizens already know this. Contact with everyday local reality, plus a phlegmatic, humorous outlook makes most of them constitutionally unlikely to fall for simplistic a priori narratives imposed from elsewhere, whether these be about existentially noble refugees or existentially noble working-class white people. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for many radical Right-wing onlookers, who seem neither in touch with reality, nor particularly phlegmatic or humorous. Credulously swallowing every bit of agitslop thrown their way by activists like Robinson, and without any apparent awareness of the high potential for being led up the garden path, they are now as desperately wedded to images of white British victimhood as foreign tourists generally are to the sight of Buckingham Palace or Harrods. And their current vision of Scotland is about as accurate as Brigadoon.

Suggested reading

How sororities seduced the online Right

By Kathleen Stock

There was perhaps a time not long ago when Musk-powered overseas attention to the scale of UK immigration and the scandal of grooming gangs was a bracing correction to elite inertia and denial about it over here. Perhaps it even briefly provided us with that most precious of gifts, according to Robert Burns: “to see oursels as ithers see us”. But if so, that time has definitively gone.

Though the aimlessly simmering political energy generated may look attractive, sober-minded British Right-wingers should be careful to avoid projected psychodramas about their home turf that come with twanging accents and the inability to pronounce “Edinburgh” correctly. And to be fair to them, so far most have, perhaps sensing the incipient danger. Curbing immigration is increasingly seen as a commonsensical position, even in Scotland; it would be a shame to spoil things by associating the position with the havering of ill-informed numpties. In the immortal words of imaginary Dundonian Logan Roy about his American children, these are not serious people; and it shows.

“At the author’s request, we are clarifying that on 11 June 2026, Ilia Belov was found guilty of making sexual remarks to a group of girls aged between 12 and 14 in Dundee before grabbing and pushing one of them to the ground. His sister, Nadjedzha Belova, 20, previously admitted assaulting a 13-year-old girl by seizing and pulling her hair, dragging her to the ground, and striking her on the head to her injury during the incident.”

Plowing through the early sections of the book, I started to understand the worry. There is certainly a startling mismatch between the former first minister’s famed communicative abilities and the descriptions on the page. For instance, if there’s one thing our author wants you to know, it’s that she loves books. The point comes up time and again: as a child, she was “bookish”; “rarely had her nose out of a book”; had a “fascination with words”. Early on, she became “immersed” in Jane Austen, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott. Later in life, no doubt thanks to all that reading, she describes herself as having the power “to communicate in a way that engaged both heart and head” and to understand “the importance in politics of telling a compelling story”.

But why, then, are her anecdotes from her childhood so plodding and banal? That time when she went to the “retail metropolis of Ayrshire” (i.e. Ayr), and her parents wouldn’t buy her a coveted Cilla Black record, but then… her grandad bought it for her instead. That time when her teenage boyfriend Sparky broke up with her: “it’s not impossible that in different circumstances we would have ended up together. Whether we would have lasted is another matter.” Even seismic events become comically flatfooted in her retelling: “It was from Uncle Dave that I first learned about death. He was thrown from a horse and killed during the annual Laminar (sic) Day celebrations in his hometown of Lanark.” So peremptorily and colorlessly does she rattle through various friends and acquaintances, it is as if she is ticking them off from a list.

An optimistic reader might suspect she is getting the boring stuff out of the way so she can get to the moment when life properly began: the fateful day when, aged 16, she knocked on the door of her local SNP candidate’s house and offered to help with canvassing. But even during the sections recounting her formative years as a political operator in a then up-and-coming party, narrative excitement remains elusive. For instance, the highlight of the 1989 Glasgow Central by-election, as far as she can recall, was a nightly “protest” — quotation marks hers — waged with her pal Shona against sexist bartenders at the Laurieston pub. “Every night after campaigning, we would perch ourselves on bar stools and loudly demand to be served, usually to no avail, leaving us to drink pints bought for us by our male friends instead”. Compared to this, Theresa May’s “running through fields of wheat” admission starts to look like glamorous juvenile delinquency.

Still, by the time we get to the heart of the story — that is, an allegedly unguarded recounting of the period between becoming deputy first minister in 2007 and her eventual resignation as premier in 2023 — there is some evidence that reading Robert Louis Stevenson has left its mark, however unconsciously. For a bit like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, there appear to be two different people battling within the breast of this book’s protagonist. Indeed, Sturgeon is sometimes herself aware of the tension: as when, in a climactic moment just after she has been made first minister, she describes listening to conference applause, and feeling “a sort of dissociation” between “the shy, dour, always self-doubting, frumpy girl… in the wings” and the “confident, articulate, almost stylish version of herself… [on] the stage”. Along with some readers perhaps, she wonders: “Who is that woman? Is she real?”

There are other, less self-flattering, dissociations evident in the book too. Its narrator keeps implying she is good at empathy and warmth; that she has been able to forge a “deep, almost emotional, connection… with a sizable swathe of the Scottish population”. Certainly, that is her public reputation. But warmth is in the showing not the saying, and there is little on show here; only robotic expressions of sadness and shock at various significant deaths and tragic events, before getting onto the more important business of how they might affect ongoing political maneuverings. Similarly, the official version of Sturgeon is admirably high-minded and principled, and particularly on behalf of women and girls. Constantly monitoring for the potential presence of misogyny, she can’t describe accepting a bunch of flowers from Govan trade union officials without noting “a touch of unconscious sexism in the gesture”. Yet at another point, she ruthlessly criticizes Labour leader Jack McConnell for having eschewed cheap sexist vibes and treated her with respect instead, describing his personal kindness to her as “naïve politics” and a “huge tactical error”.

Another mystery is why Sturgeon is a nationalist at all. Her main reflections on the question are that in 1987, when she first joined the SNP, the party was more of a natural home for her youthful socialist politics than Neil Kinnock’s Labour. Given the strength of social conservatism in the party back then, this is implausible; but more importantly, it is also underwhelming as a justification of her life’s work. Where are the traditional tartan romances, the misty-eyed misty glens, even just some memorized lines from Braveheart?

Her avowed heartfelt desire for Scottish independence is certainly not due to any deep knowledge of her country’s history: the occasional forays into this territory sound heavily mined from Wikipedia. It doesn’t seem to be informed by political theory either: there are no detailed discussions of the ideals of democracy or sovereignty here. It is clear Sturgeon loves Scotland; who could doubt it, faced with a sentence like: “Standing on the shore, looking out at Ailsa Craig — the uninhabited island about sixteen kilometers west of the mainland, home to puffins and gannets, and from which microgranite is quarried to make curling stones — still gives me a sense of peace and tranquility that I don’t find elsewhere”? But still, as she occasionally acknowledges rather grudgingly, many Unionists love their country too.

In Stevenson’s novella, Mr Hyde kills an elder father figure; and in a way Sturgeon does the same. The passages describing her complex relationship with Alex Salmond are among the book’s most engaging, though bound to infuriate his supporters. Whatever the truth of her involvement in the investigations he faced for alleged sexual misconduct (he was eventually cleared of all charges) — she says she had none — it is clear that she had to get out from under the charismatic politician’s spell to become the leader she did.

She owed much of her initial success to him, and she knew it: he plucked her from the crowd to serve as his deputy, which led seamlessly to her becoming first minister after he resigned. At the same time, he was everything she was not — a witty, risk-taking gambler, big on charm and low on detail — and the fact obviously annoyed her intensely. Her infuriated tale of writing a crucial White Paper during the highly pressured referendum period, then fielding a phone call from her boss at the racecourse, tipsily promising he would definitely read it before the big launch, will resonate with every i-dotting, t-crossing female employee ever faced with a slipshod superior.

Sturgeon’s own approach was very different: obsessing over minutiae, micromanaging underlings, staying up all night fretting nauseously about how things might go wrong. This seems to have worked well during her time as health secretary: when she was set clear objectives, she was all over her brief (at least, as she tells it). But once put in charge of overall goal-setting as first minister, she seems to flounder. Unable to bring about a second independence referendum, and apparently devoid of concrete ideas to deal with Scotland’s overwhelming social problems, she adopts a generic, vibes-based playbook and hopes for the best: some renewable energy and child welfare here, a bit of gender reform there, free university tuition fees all round. When Covid hits and she is able to return to full technocrat mode, you can sense her relief, even if the huge responsibility nearly breaks her.

But here, too, there are significant omissions. Despite her professed concern for children stuck in poverty, she offers no reflections about how lockdowns might have grievously affected them, making a bad situation even worse; nor about how social isolation might have led to a generation of unhappy teenagers falling deeper into an online world. And speaking of which: in the end, the gender reform thing didn’t work out so well either, indicating another puzzling split in the Sturgeon psyche.

Early on in the book, she tells readers, perfectly accurately, that “building common ground isn’t possible without compromise” and that “it is always a good idea to know your audience”. Yet in practice, Sturgeon plowed ahead obtusely with plans to reform gender recognition processes along self-identification lines, deaf to reasonable objections, and blind to the way her stance would be perceived by ordinary voters. By the end of the book, discussing the fallout from the Isla Bryson scandal — which saw a rapist heading to a female prison because he said he belonged there — the bad-tempered, stubborn version of Sturgeon seems to have vanquished the more politically astute one. Through gritted teeth, she attempts to admit to her own mistakes in this area, suggesting she should have “hit the pause button” on gender reform in order to develop consensus; but she still can’t help monstering her opponents at every turn. They are on the same side as Orbán, Putin, Trump; they stand alongside “raging homophobes”; they deny such facts with “brittle defensiveness” and “howls of outrage”.

Meanwhile, her attempted justification of her own position on the nature of womanhood is made even funnier by the fact she thinks it is “too technical” for people to properly understand: namely (drumroll) “there is no need for a man to claim to be a woman to commit acts of abuse or sexual assault” because “the threat to women comes from predatory, abusive and misogynistic men, not from trans women”. In other words, her new, post-Bryson assumption seems to be that, as soon as a trans-identified man becomes predatory or abusive, “she” ceases to be a woman — QED. Indeed, in a recent interview she has said that a rapist “probably forfeits the right to be the gender of their choice”. Ironically, this is a case of what is known as a “no true Scotsman” fallacy: the circular idea that “no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge” isn’t falsified by the sight of Hamish from Glasgow wielding the sugar spoon over his oats; because all this really shows is that Hamish from Glasgow is not a true Scotsman after all.

There was a time just after the 2015 general election, now hard to picture, when the wider world went mad for the progressive vibes Sturgeon was emitting, her party having just wiped Labour out north of the border. For a while, the first minister was mobbed and fawned over like a “rockstar” (her words) wherever she went — including by journalists in London. But looking back, it seems the whole thing was a comparison-based trick of the light: she looked more organized than Salmond, more authentic than Cameron, more effective than Miliband, more down-to-earth than Corbyn. Things got even easier for her in this respect when chaos merchants Johnson and Trump arrived.

But while she had diligence in spades, ultimately, she never made a dent in the most pressing national problems — rising drug deaths, falling education standards, terrible public health, violent crime in cities — and that’s partly because, in terms of her capacity to understand the bigger picture, her intellect was always too limited, tempting her towards the superficial gesture as a substitute. If Frankly is anything to go by, then, strictly speaking Sturgeon never did have imposter syndrome. To have that particular malaise, your nagging suspicion you aren’t really up to the task has to be wrong.

In his article, Trump told the story of how he had built one of the “greatest” golf courses in the world, 10 miles north of Aberdeen. In the early days, Trump wrote, people “laughed when they saw what I had planned” — but eventually he convinced them. “Scotland has already been won,” Trump concluded. “And so will the United States.”

But had Scotland truly been won?

Last year, when I visited the Aberdeen branch of Trump International Golf Links — which lies just outside of the village of Balmedie (population: 2,500) — I discovered a very different story from the one Trump tells.

For almost two decades, a small band of Scots has resisted The Trump Organization’s efforts to turn their land into a playground for the super-rich. First he tried to buy them out, and then he tried to intimidate them — but they refused to uproot themselves for the sake of a billionaire’s bank account. This weekend, as Trump returns to Scotland to visit his beloved golf courses, the rebels will still be there — refusing to budge.

***

As so often with Trump, the story starts in Trump Tower. It was 2005. On one side of the room sat Trump and his advisers, including two of his children, Donald Jr. and Ivanka. On the other was a former officer in the Scots Guards, an elite unit in the British Army, delivering the most important pitch of his life.

Neil Hobday was used to mixing with the rich and powerful but, Hobday told me, he was still nervous. Trump could be a fierce interrogator.

More from this author

How Britain forgot Keighley's grooming gangs

By Jacob Furedi

The plan, Hobday told Trump, was ambitious but simple. North of Aberdeen, near a small village called Balmedie, sat Scotland’s Sahara: an expanse of rolling sand dunes that tumbled down to the beach. The Scottish government had designated the dunes a Site of Special Scientific Interest — which meant that they couldn’t be developed. But for the right amount of foreign investment, both the government and the main landowner were willing to sacrifice their protected status.

Just imagine, Hobday suggested, if they were turned into a golf course?

Trump loved the idea and Scotland’s charm offensive began. In October 2005, first minister Jack McConnell flew to New York to try and win him over. The golf course, he hoped, would provide the greatest economic boom to Scotland since its oil and gas discoveries.

Within five months, a deal was secured. And so, without Trump even visiting Scotland, his Organization announced its intention to buy “an 800-acre stretch of stunning sand dunes” at the Menie Estate in Aberdeenshire. Along with thousands of jobs and £1 billion of investment, he promised two golf courses, a hotel, nearly 1,000 holiday homes and 500 other dwellings. Sean Connery, he claimed, would hit the first ball. His membership number would be 007.

But all of this was predicated on local approval — and while Scotland’s national government had been seduced by Trump’s promise of foreign investment, the Aberdeenshire council still wasn’t convinced. Normal, rural people would be uprooted by construction, it warned, and the sand dunes irreparably destroyed. The proposal was rejected.

But local opposition was never going to stop Holyrood. And a week later, it stepped in, announcing that it had “called in” the proposal — a euphemistic way of saying that they, not the council, would have the final say.

In the year that followed, representatives of the Scottish Parliament flew back and forth to New York, where they dined with Trump and feasted on his vision. Chief among them was the future head of the Scottish government, Alex Salmond, then the representative for Aberdeenshire. Whatever was discussed, it wasn’t made public, though in March 2008 an official inquiry into the deal described Salmond’s behaviour as “cavalier”, and a sign of “exceptionally poor judgment”.

Nevertheless, later that year, on 16 December, a well-fed coterie of Scottish ministers granted The Trump Organization its planning approval. And in October 2009, construction at Trump International Golf Links began.

***

High above the 18th hole of Trump International, on a ridge that stretches into the sea, sits a decommissioned coast-guard station. David Milne, 60, the one-time cowboy actor, first bought the home with its quarter acre of land in 1992, and lives there with his wife.

For him, the story starts towards the end of 2005, a couple of months after Hobday’s trip to Trump Tower, when Milne received a phone call from a man called Peter Whyte. Whyte described how, after going shooting nearby, he had fallen in love with the area and wanted to buy a holiday home. Would Milne consider an offer?

Milne politely declined, and forgot about the incident until, in February the following year, Whyte turned up at his door and repeated his request. Milne declined again.

Suggested reading

Why the Scots love Trump

By Kathleen Stock

Only later, after a suspicious neighbour decided to look up Whyte’s number, did it become clear that he didn’t exist. It was an alias used by Hobday.

The deception, Hobday told me, was deemed necessary to avoid residents asking Trump to pay more than market value. When I asked him to clarify who made the decision to use such tactics, Hobday claimed it was the result of a conference call with “people in Trump’s office”. (The Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment.)

Michael Forbes’s outbuilding. (Credit: Jacob Furedi)

After the plans for the golf course became public, The Trump Organization openly tried to persuade the residents to sell their homes. In 2007, Milne was issued a formal offer of $230,000 for his property, which he rejected. Some of his neighbours caved, with half of the 10 or so households accepting offers on their properties, while the others held out.

At this point, the local media was on Trump’s side, with The Press and Journal lobbying hard in favour of the project. When the council voted against the course, the Evening Express attacked council members under the front-page headline: “You traitors.”

The fact that Sarah Malone, the Scot who served as executive vice president of the development, would later marry the editor of The Press and Journal, wasn’t lost on Milne. “It sort of explains why the local media wasn’t playing fair,” he said.

And so, the course was going to be constructed — even if it had to be built around the resisting households on the Menie Estate. When the diggers finally arrived in July 2010, Milne said, they assembled two-story mounds around each of the resisting properties. The sunlight was blocked from their homes. Sand leaked into their windows.

“At one point, they came in and ripped out the original coast-guard fence and replaced it with a new one,” said Milne. “And then they sent me a bill asking me to pay half for it.”

In the early days of construction, Donald Trump Jr. was a regular fixture in Aberdeenshire, knocking on residents’ doors every few weeks to see if they’d changed their minds about selling their properties. Meanwhile, Milne was offered a lifetime membership to the golf course, and the opportunity to buy one of the new houses, provided he sold his home for an increased offer of $300,000. He claims the second offer was less than half the value of his house. But even if it had been double, he said he wouldn’t have accepted.

Trump’s son grew increasingly frustrated. According to Milne, on one occasion he said: “The golf course is going to happen. You’re getting in the way. We’ll just bulldoze you like we do with the earth.”

But Milne would not be moved: “As I told him at the time, the only way I intend to leave is horizontally in a box.”

***

The first time Trump met Michael Forbes, he offered the fisherman a job on his golf course. Trump then offered to buy his home and build him another one. “I sussed him out in about two seconds,” Michael says.

To the untrained eye, the Mill of Menie may seem like every other farm on Scotland’s windswept eastern coast. The house is pebbledash, the yard dotted with chickens and rusty tractors. When the sky is clear in spring, you can see skylarks and linnets. Summers, though, are ruled by the Haar, the all-consuming fog that climbs out of the North Sea. Yet even through the Haar, you can see the graffiti on Michael’s outbuilding. “No more Trump lies,” it reads. “No golf course.”

When he first heard of Trump’s plan, Forbes lived here with his wife, Sheila, and his mother, Molly, who was in her early eighties — and, he tells me, she was even more outraged by the destruction of their community than he was. “She loved this place,” Forbes told me, showing me the annex she used to live in. “She called it ‘Paradise,’ ” he said, pointing to the sign hanging next to the door.

Despite Trump’s offer, the Forbes family refused to sell their land. And as the golf course began taking shape, various authorities turned up at the family’s doorstep, investigating reports that he kept an unlicensed gun, or hoarded flammable liquids. None was true, and Forbes said he’s confident he knows who made the initial reports. “They were trying everything to kick me out,” he added. (Neither the police nor the Scottish Environment Protection Agency responded to a request for comment.)

The Trump Organization was perfectly open about its desire to bulldoze the locals. It would later lobby Aberdeenshire Council to use its compulsory purchase powers to force out the residents. The threat still hangs over the community. “It has never been formally withdrawn,” Milne told me.

Faced with partisan local media and an impotent local council, the Trump resistance — which consisted of the endangered residents and a few local supporters — started to hold meetings at Milne’s house. In July 2009, they set up a website, and started sending bulletins to the national press. The campaign was called “Tripping Up Trump”, and within months, Scotland’s people had begun to rally behind them.

Protests were organised on the dunes; anti-Trump badges and pens were sold; Mickey Foote, the late producer of The Clash who lived nearby, was particularly outspoken. By 2010, a group of individuals — including Lord David Puttnam, the filmmaker who produced Chariots of Fire — supported the mass purchase of a parcel of Forbes’s land, to protect it from compulsory purchase.

Trump was infuriated. Forbes, he told the press, was “dirty, sloppy, and unkempt”. His house, Trump added, was “slumlike” and “disgusting”; Forbes “lived like a pig”. Forbes still laughs at this final barb: “Pigs are very clean animals.”

Molly Forbes’s ‘Paradise’ (Credit: Jacob Furedi)

And, he points out, if his family was unkempt, The Trump Organization was partly to blame. In July 2010, when his mother Molly, then 86, turned on one of Paradise’s taps, it let loose a trickle of sludge. The Trump Organization acknowledged that its workers had unintentionally broken a pipe that connected the Forbes’s home to the nearby well, depriving the family of clean water. But it claimed to have fixed it within 24 hours. Forbes disputes this, saying that the water remained contaminated.

Over the next five years, Molly would often have to walk 50 metres to a nearby stream and fill up a wheelbarrow with water when she needed to wash. Forbes claims that the pipe was only properly mended when he trespassed on Trump’s property to fix it himself, after rejecting the organisation’s offer to connect it to the main water supply rather than the well.

By this point, Forbes was a national hero. In 2012, he was voted “Top Scot” joining the ranks of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling and tennis champion Andy Murray. When Trump got wind of it, he Tweeted that the poll was rigged; calling it an “embarrassment”, he banned Glenfiddich, the event’s sponsor, from all of his properties.

By then the course was finished. The first ball was hit at Trump International Golf Links in July 2012. Sean Connery was nowhere to be seen.

Suggested reading

Donald Trump’s ascent to myth

By John Michael Greer

After the course opened, the resistance continued to engage in guerrilla tactics. In June 2016, Milne and Forbes hoisted Mexican flags above their properties — to show solidarity with “everyone else who Trump has derided, insulted, and intimidated”. Within days, messages of support arrived from Mexico — as well as more flags.

But for Forbes, this was a Pyrrhic victory. That year, during the height of the pandemic, both his mother Molly and wife Sheila died. Molly was 96; Sheila was in her sixties. Forbes is adamant that The Trump Organization’s campaign of harassment contributed to their deaths. “Of course it had an affect on their health,” he told me. The lack of fresh water; the sense of menace; the inevitable press attention — all, Forbes claims, took their toll.

Security is high at Trump’s golf courses this weekend. (Credit: Andy Buchanan/Getty)

This weekend, as an elaborately expensive security operation ramps up, Trump will open his second 18-hole golf course in Scotland. He will doubtless repeat his assertion that “it’s great to be home”. Starmer meanwhile will genuflect for the sake of tariffs and Scottish First Minister, John Swinney, thinks it is “in Scotland’s interest” for him to meet Trump.

But the majority of Scots would disagree. There is widespread anger at his politics, protests are planned and signs reading “Twinned with Epstein Island” are sprouting outside the links. Meanwhile, the small band of local resistors is bruised but undefeated and David Milne is still in place: “I’m going to sit up here with a beer and watch the circus,” he told reporters this week.

The circus, though, is a costly one. And not simply because of the security operation. None of Trump’s golf-course promises has come to pass. The resort has never made a profit; it lost more than $16 million over its first 11 years. It was supposed to provide “thousands” of jobs; today, there are fewer than 100 people employed there. A glistening mega-hotel was promised, but it is yet to materialise. Meanwhile, a number of Scotland’s leading cheerleaders for the golf course are showing signs of regret. Alex Salmond has publicly acknowledged Trump’s failure to deliver on his plan, while Hobday talked earlier this year of Scotland being “hoodwinked” by the American’s promise to invest $1 billion in the project.

But the locals weren’t hoodwinked. Mention the President’s Scottish heritage to any of them, and they start to bristle. The fact that the latest edition to his Scottish golf legacy is dedicated to his late mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, is particularly irksome. Almost everyone I spoke to mentioned the fact that, during his 2008 trip to his mother’s birthplace, 200 miles northwest of Aberdeen, he spent just 97 seconds in the home she grew up in.

“The whole Scottish thing is a joke,” said Milne, who points out that, before he decided to build a golf course in Scotland, Trump rarely visited the country. Few, however, are as disdainful as Forbes. “He didn’t give a shit about his mother,” he fired when I mentioned Mary MacLeod. “He doesn’t give a shit about nobody but himself.”

Another Trump legend says that, when Donald was just 12 years old, his mother Mary asked: “What kind of son have I created?” History didn’t record the response. Perhaps there’s an echo of an answer in the clubhouse’s gift shop where every last item carries Trump’s coat of arms: a lion clasping a spear. But where Scottish clans display their heraldic arms to commemorate centuries of lineage, Trump had a different approach. He stole his from a former owner of Mar-a-Lago — and made a single alteration.

Once its motto read “integritas”. Now, it just says “Trump”.

***

This is an edited version of a piece originally published in The Free Press.

Jacob Furedi is editor of Dispatch.

There are, however, some notable exceptions. Alasdair MacIntyre, who died last month at the age of 96, was born in Glasgow to parents of Irish descent, learnt how to read Irish as a child, and could still do so well into middle age. His father was one of the first generation of his family who spoke English as his first language. His hero was Andrew Fletcher, a Scottish patriot and enemy of the Act of Union with England. Though he taught at a range of universities, from Brandeis to Boston, Duke to Notre Dame, he kept Oxbridge for the most part at disdainful arm’s length, uneasy with its high-toned English culture. High Table and croquet in the quad weren’t his style. When he delivered a public lecture in Dublin some years ago, and was afterwards guest of honor at a banquet, he fled from the festivities and was found eating a sandwich alone in the bar.

Despite his suspicion of sociability, MacIntyre was a compulsive joiner, and in this sense true to his belief in the corporate rather than the individual. In the Fifties and Sixties, he moved from Presbyterianism to Christian Marxism, then to Marxism proper, joining the Communist Party only to leave it for various Trotskyist grouplets. He was active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Two decades later, he came (almost) full circle by converting to Roman Catholicism. Aristotle, Marx, Wittgenstein and Thomas Aquinas competed for his intellectual loyalty, most of them distinctly out of favor in orthodox philosophical circles. In fact, MacIntyre was throughout his life a ferocious critic of that orthodoxy — a scourge of liberal individualism, abstract human rights, the unfettered pursuit of power and wealth and the whole moral temper of Western modernity. (A belief in universal rights, he once wrote, was equivalent to a belief in witches and unicorns). His disillusion with Marxism first set in when he was dean of students in the late Sixties, at the politically turbulent University of Essex, then in the grip of student insurrection. One suspects that some kind of personal trauma was involved in this confrontation between a Marxist dean and his unruly flock. Not long after, MacIntyre published a blistering critique of the revolutionary students’ guru, Herbert Marcuse.

More from this author

How capitalism threatens democracy

By Terry Eagleton

In the wake of this disenchantment, he moved to the United States, renounced all political engagement, and began to speak in mildly nostalgic terms of small, self-governing cooperatives, communities of frugal fishermen, craftsmen and the like. It was this — the self-help America of the early puritans, not the later human jungle of Wall Street or Hollywood — which helped to tempt him, rather improbably, across the Atlantic. At the point when the capitalist system was becoming increasingly global in reach, MacIntyre was singing the praises of the local. Advanced capitalism was here to stay, but more humane forms of life could be practiced on its fringes. The operatives of capitalism were citizens of the world, and thus what the ancient Greeks knew as barbarians, meaning those who belonged to no city. But mini-cities could be constructed in the system’s shadow.

Despite his international celebrity, achieved through such masterpieces as After Virtue and Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, MacIntyre was always a voice from the Gaelic margins, deeply at odds with metropolitan English culture. He was keenly aware how the liberalism it took for granted was itself a specific, contestable tradition. Those who stand at an angle to conventional society can unmask what it takes as natural and universal as arbitrary and contingent. In fact, it’s remarkable how many of the luminaries of the so-called New Left of the late Sixties and Seventies were exiles and émigrés of one kind or another. Perry Anderson, for many decades the leading Marxist intellectual in Britain, is an Anglo-Irishman from County Waterford; Alexander Cockburn was an Anglo-Irishman from County Cork; Raymond Williams hailed from the Welsh borderlands, Eric Hobsbawm was a Jewish refugee from Central Europe. Tom Nairn came from Scotland, Tariq Ali from Pakistan, the cultural theorist Stuart Hall from Jamaica and the philosopher Charles Taylor from Quebec.

As a Scot of Irish descent, MacIntyre was heir to a history which for all its violence and deprivation was more attuned to the communal than the individualist. It could therefore provide the basis for a powerful critique of a liberalism for which men and women weren’t fundamentally social animals, reason was abstract and instrumental and the most precious value of all — freedom — would tell you little or nothing about what the good life is or how to attain it. Instead, it leaves such matters to one’s subjective choices in the moral marketplace. In MacIntyre’s view, this way of seeing overlooks the fact that individual reasoning participates in a more collective reasoning, one which is always historically specific. Liberty is in the end the liberty to seek truth, another concept increasingly redundant in the modern age. Ethics become little more than an expression of personal preference in a world which has lost almost all sense of the common good. The moral universe is privatized. We still use terms like “goodness” and “happiness”, but the concrete contexts in which they were once embedded have disappeared with the onset of modernity, leaving moral concepts hanging uselessly in the air.

For MacIntyre, by contrast, the good must be more than just what I happen to desire. It’s always embedded in a particular set of collective cultural practices. If we have forgotten this, it’s largely because the 18th century Enlightenment stripped the self of its concrete social identity, so that each of us becomes an isolated, autonomous self in a world of abstract universal principles. Anxious to avoid moral relativism, MacIntyre acknowledges that there are certain standards which different cultures share. But to live well is less to conform to principles common to everyone from 13th century Padua to 20th century Pasadena, as some Enlightenment thinkers would hold, than to flourish in a way appropriate to one’s role in a concrete form of life. A good merchant is someone who behaves as a good merchant should, according to the standards set by his particular culture and tradition. Whether this is also true of a good blackmailer is rather less obvious.

Since social roles are in some sense objective, moral values become so as well. A lot of modern moral thought makes a sharp distinction between facts and values. You can describe a situation as scrupulously as possible, but doing so won’t lead you to a moral judgment or obligation. In the era of modern science, facts are just blank, inert stuff, and values must consequently be imported from elsewhere. Perhaps they’re simply subjective, or the arbitrary decrees of a capricious God. MacIntyre rejects this dualism: for him, describing a social role already implies certain values, in the sense of the need to act in certain ways. It’s because the self has been shorn of this social dimension in modern times that the problem arises. At the same time, it has been deprived of what MacIntyre sees as its status as a form of narrative. In his view, we live in narrative, but can no longer recount coherent stories of ourselves.

Suggested reading

How moral is the Chelsea Flower Show?

By Giles Fraser

All this makes MacIntyre one of the great moral philosophers of the 20th century. He was a radical Scottish puritan, austere and high-minded, who ended up supporting the revival of monasticism and switched his sympathies from the Bolsheviks to St Benedict. His dissent from the priorities of the modern age took an incongruous variety of forms but remained wholly self-consistent. If he turned back to Aristotle and Aquinas, it was in order to move beyond what he saw as the skepticism and subjectivism of the present. His work showed up the limits of rationalism, but was deeply averse to the irrational. It could win praise from both Leftists and conservatives, but gave no comfort to neoliberalism. MacIntyre refused to subscribe to the view that the individual was at the center of the universe; that reason is timeless and independent of practical social life; and that relations are primarily contractual and actions chiefly instrumental. In contrast with a mean-spirited utilitarianism, he saw society not as a means of individual self-promotion but as a good in itself. He was interested in practices like playing chess or writing poetry whose goods, as he would say, were “internal” to themselves rather than external goals to be pursued.

MacIntyre celebrated rootedness, yet as an academic was continually on the move. He was a critic of capitalism who rejected multiculturalism and looked askance at the struggle for recognition of women, gays and others. His dislike of the autonomous self could lead him to overvalue the corporate and collective, as well as to bowing the knee to an authoritarian Church. Yet in an age when Anglophone philosophy had been reduced to a trivial game for those in the know, complete with its in-jokes, ritual gestures and stereotypical turns of phrase, he never ceased to raise the most profound of questions.

Scotland’s current gang war can feel like a Netflix series, from the mob dynasties and the firebombing to the villains-in-hiding nicknamed “Miami”. The current bout of feuding apparently concerns the theft of a cocaine shipment worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. Yet amid the social media threats and the Costa-del-Dubai exiles, the country’s gangsterism is actually a lot like Hay Drive itself — a strangely retro throwback, to a time before mass migration and when gangsterism was strictly local. It all speaks to the relative isolation of Britain’s Celtic fringe, and offers a useful reminder that not all our problems can be blamed on foreigners.

Much like the country itself, English organized crime is increasingly cosmopolitan. Dominated by multinational gangs, it’s a teeming bazaar, chaotic and transient. Loyalties change and business models adapt, all to the buzz of 24/7 TikTok commentary and grime crews. Criminal intelligence analysts find tracking this stuff like nailing jelly to the wall. By comparison, the Scottish underworld has a vibe reminiscent of a Berkshire high street circa 1995: dependable and dominated by big names. The Daniels and Lyons, two of the long-standing crime families involved in the current feud, might as well be Debenhams and The Gap. To paraphrase another retro classic, it’s a case of two tribes go to war.

More from this author

Surrey cokeheads are lining up chaos

By Dominic Adler

I’ve had a taste of crime north of the border. Serving as a London detective, I was sworn in as a constable at Glasgow Sheriff’s Court. It felt curiously like being in an old Western, swearing an oath like a deputy and signing a register. Working on a corruption investigation, I was given local police powers; English cops have no jurisdiction in Scotland (except for specific offenses, usually around terrorism). As a London copper, Glasgow felt reassuringly familiar, and not just because it’s my favorite Scottish city. Prior to the 2013 amalgamation of Scottish forces into Police Scotland, the city’s police were part of the Strathclyde force, known as the “Scottish Met”.

In my experience, Met officers enjoyed a good working relationship with their Glasgow counterparts. And, like the Met, surrounding forces saw Strathclyde as overly dominant. They were happy to see it taken down a peg or two. Many Glasgow coppers lamented its passing, as police are wont to do whenever change occurs.

Even so, criticism of the new force is about more than nostalgia. Politics often trumps operational effectiveness, with performance-obsessed restructuring sucking up organizational bandwidth better spent on crimefighting. Relations with a deeply political SNP administration have occasionally been strained too — and that was before the investigation into Nicola Sturgeon. Some officers have also felt the SNP are more focused on independence than bread-and-butter issues like education, health, or indeed crime. Did this mean the police took their eye off organized crime? This is the immediate context in which Scottish gangsterism should be viewed: that of distracted ministers and a mismanaged police force.

Even so, Scottish mobsterism is about something deeper than bureaucracy. The country only hosts 5.5 million people, or about 8% of the UK population. And, despite its regional differences, it’s 95% white, something England hasn’t been since the Eighties. The occasionally overegged issue of religious sectarianism aside, that makes Scotland practically a monoculture, certainly compared to Birmingham or London. More to the point, these demographics also make the working class communities of Glasgow and Edinburgh less transient, more cohesive, and more able to resist the encroaching globalization of Somalis or Kurds.

Nor is this simply a Scottish phenomenon. Right across the Celtic fringe, the old ways survive, offering real life folk-horror, with houses burning instead of wicker men. I’m thinking, for instance, of Liverpool, forever an outpost of the Irish Republic. Liverpool boasts the UK’s primary seaport linking the UK to the coca fields of South America. As such, it’s coveted by criminals. Yet law enforcement legend has it that even the brutal Albanian mafia are wary of the city: local Scouse gangs are too well-organized and violent. As for Belfast? Northern Irish gangs overlap with psychotic paramilitaries. They’re armed with assault rifles, and deeply embedded in their communities, strutting like central-casting bad guys in an action movie. The long-suffering, politically hamstrung and underfunded PSNI can only operate a strategy of appeasement and semi-containment.

Contrast all this with London’s traditional crime families. These days, they’re good for little more than straight-to-streaming movies, ghost-written memoirs and the occasional nonagenarian funeral. Terry Adams, the former scourge of Clerkenwell, now spends more time with his art collection. “Dodgy” Dave Courtney shot himself. Other old-school “faces” keep their heads down.

And not only that. For apart from remaining mostly untouched by globalization’s international criminal diaspora, Scottish criminals also employ an MO The Krays and Charlie Richardson would recognize.

This old-school works on familiarity. On personalities. On an understanding of the other side’s way of doing business, be it drugs or protection rackets or smuggling. Not so much movie talk of “codes” or “honor” — but more of knowing what to expect from whom. The threats, acts of violence and feuding all follow a time-honored pattern. Furthermore, the criminals enjoy significant ties to the “respectable” non-criminal world. Compared to, say, London? It’s an anachronism. The south’s multicultural postcode gangs, middle-market cocaine dealers and county lines retailers operate in a relative state of freewheeling anarcho-capitalism.

Then there’s corruption. Organized crime of the sort blighting Glasgow and Edinburgh can’t exist without palms being greased. I’m not suggesting Scotland is uniquely prone to graft. It is, however, vulnerable for the reasons I’ve described: a close-knit monoculture, ruled by cliquish elites. This is why I’d suggest political institutions and law enforcement north of the border are disposed to a specific type of compromise. For instance, Glasgow’s Labour-dominated political machine, prior to the ascension of the SNP, was no stranger to scandal.

As for the police, it’s in a similar vein to the corruption that dogged the Met until the early 2000s, some of it involving working-class detectives and the criminals they grew up with. Some years ago, a Scottish detective told me about an investigation into drug money. It ended mysteriously, when the trail meandered too close to establishment figures. In more recent times, Police Scotland’s Organized Crime and Counter Terrorism Unit was recently compromised by corrupt detectives leaking intelligence. That flavor of corruption is less common in London nowadays, replaced by something equally damaging but perhaps more fragmented: corruption stemming from poorly-vetted, hastily-selected cops, led by inexperienced and out-of-touch managers.

Suggested reading

How the Mob went mainstream

By Andrea Valentino

What, then, is the answer? As the violence escalates across Scotland’s two largest cities, the SNP-led administration has promised urgent action. A 100-strong task force is on the case, backed up by The National Crime Agency (NCA). As for the gangs themselves, the old ways are both a strength and a weakness. Yes, they’re deep-rooted, tough to infiltrate, operating a code of omertà. On the other hand, their identities are largely a matter of record. When your organized crime group has its own Wikipedia page? Yes, you’re lighting up the police radar. The authorities, therefore, know precisely who their targets are. The rest is a question of time, resources, political will and luck. Police officers specializing in proactive operations know all four are as rare as gold dust. And make no mistake: the Scottish Parliament will throw the kitchen sink at the gangs who so blatantly challenge their authority, even if the SNP has to grit its teeth and get support from south of the border.

Nor is needing help from Westminster very surprising. The “pointy end” of fighting organized crime can sometimes feel more like counterinsurgency than beat policing. The mantra “Clear, Hold, Build” sounds like something you might attempt in Basra or Helmand. And it’s something our establishment prefers to deny, not least as it undermines their cozy image of British policing. In this case, anyway, Police Scotland can’t handle the gang crisis alone: 100 officers is a trifling number for an operation of this scale. The NCA, and possibly the Security Service, will need to provide technical know-how and assets (like MI5 did with the Adams Family). At the less glamorous end of the business, meanwhile, local police will have to work doubly hard to develop intelligence by winning trust on the streets. This, as Scottish politicians are about to discover, illustrates the consequences of neglecting neighborhood policing, which has suffered swingeing cuts from Taunton to Aberdeen.

A three-ring circus of law enforcement will therefore be pitching up in Scotland, with its attendant politics, agendas and egos. Can its thoroughly modern methods, reliant on theoretical models, proportionality, human rights and technology, defeat such a tried-and-tested enemy? In Glasgow and Edinburgh, the Wicker Man burns. Let’s hope the officers sent to extinguish it have more luck than Edward Woodward.

Thanks to the tenacity of grassroots organization For Women Scotland in fighting several cases through the courts, judges at the highest level have now clarified that a man — with or without a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) — does not belong in any woman-only prison, hospital ward, dormitory, rape crisis service, or changing room. If trans-identified, he is rightly shielded from discrimination and harassment under the protected characteristic of “gender reassignment” but not those of “female” or “lesbian”. This classification also means that, if he’s a medical professional, he is not allowed to provide intimate care to unwilling women on the spurious grounds that he, too, is female. As a police or prison officer, he may not carry out strip searches of his “fellow women” either. His presence in the upper echelons of a workplace does not count towards feminist empowerment there. His athletic personal bests can no longer break female records, nor his football and rugby tackles break female bones.

Additionally, no matter what his personal confusion over identity, he does not get to count as a “lesbian”, and nor does he get to gatecrash designated lesbian-only social events or dating pools. (This last finding was of particular delight to me, since the organization I co-direct with Julie Bindel, The Lesbian Project, was one of a number of “lesbian interveners” in the Supreme Court case.)

This judgment was a humiliating failure for certain members of the Scottish government past and present, not least the former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon. The ministers’ position, that Equality Act protections for sex and sexual orientation pertained to “certificated” sex, rather than biological sex, was said by judges to exhibit “incoherence and absurdity” — a description which, to seasoned observers of SNP-related gender fiascos, seemed altogether too kind. But the result was also a wider defeat for the US transactivist movement as a whole: the end of a campaign so catastrophically overreaching and self-owning that it has to be up there with Operation Barbarossa.

Around 10 years ago, most organizations didn’t think twice about the relation between the Equality Act and the Gender Recognition Act, and were prepared to turn a blind eye to both men and women with GRCs using the facilities and services of the opposite sex. Given the small numbers of trans-identified people making use of this privilege, and the fact that many of these people exhibited medically-induced physical changes, the general public was none the wiser, and most wouldn’t have cared if they had been. But then transactivist organizations had the brilliant idea of pushing for a shiny new prize called “self-ID”. Any man with surging feelings of inner girlhood should count as a woman for all legal purposes, and vice versa for any woman in touch with her inner man. All of a sudden, there was supposedly no need for any certificate at all, and certainly no previous encounter with any doctor.

If one of the now-burgeoning numbers of trans-identified people did want a GRC, they should get one automatically, without professional oversight — or so a nationwide transactivist campaign, backed by every major political party, proclaimed. But even if they chose not to get a GRC at all, they still had the right to walk into whichever single-sex space or service they pleased, on the basis of however they felt that day. As a result of this piece of strategic brilliance, widely enacted on the advice of Stonewall by thousands of supine institutions, self-ID is now dead as a political project. What’s more, the complete irrelevance of GRCs in relation to single-sex protections has been legally established with maximum publicity.

Like a military historian reviewing the mistakes of wartime generals, we might ask: where did it all go wrong? One big problem was the abilities of the generals themselves. Under Ruth Hunt, Stonewall unilaterally embraced self-ID while still purporting to advocate for LGB people, ushering in what became known as its “no debate” era (as in: “Transwomen are women, no debate!”). In 2019, Hunt apparently gave the self-interested game away to the Guardian: “It’s about treating people as they want to be treated, and when it causes no disadvantage to me whatsoever, who am I to challenge it?”. Next at the helm was statistician Nancy Kelley, perhaps best remembered for likening lesbians to “sexual racists” for their failure to feel attraction towards men professing womanhood, although there was a notorious Census-related balls-up too.

Meanwhile over at Mermaids, the nation’s foremost charity for transitioning children, then-boss Susie Green was busy falsely telling already anxious young people that Mermaids’ critics hated them and wanted them to die. On her watch, there was a series of scandals and tactical missteps, including a disastrous legal attempt to get the LGB Alliance’s charity status removed. This was immediately followed by an embarrassing Charity Commission investigation into Mermaids itself. Green is now reduced to co-directing an “online telehealth service” selling “gender affirming care” including puberty blockers; while her former close associate Dr Helen Webberley is on TikTok, making videos about the supposed ongoing “ethnic cleansing” of trans-identified people, using footage of Auschwitz as a backdrop.

Aside from these personnel issues at the top, another big problem for transactivist campaigners was the restricted arsenal of argumentative weapons at their disposal. They couldn’t rely on reason or evidence as these concepts are commonly understood, because no good arguments for transubstantiation by means of lip gloss existed. This left only three options: intellectual misdirection, emotional blackmail, and aggressively shaming opponents into silence.

Suggested reading

Fortunes are changing in the culture war

By Kathleen Stock

The result of the first of these was fancy-sounding obfuscation about spectrums, social constructs, and the supposedly close relation between trans-identified and so-called intersex people. But this was only ever likely to work with the young or dull-witted, while cleverer minds watched and learned from the mistakes. Equally, as time passed, it became increasingly difficult to maintain heartrending fictions about the unique vulnerability of the trans-identified cohort as a whole. Over and over again, men claiming womanhood kept featuring as perpetrators in court reports. So that left only the tactic of terrifying critics into silence. We on the gender-critical and sex-realist side were called harpies, transphobes, bigots, Christian nationalists, National Socialists, and white supremacists; and that was just by Guardian writers.

At first, the ludicrous name-calling hurt quite a lot, particularly when it seemed those around you were in danger of believing the hype. But after endless mechanical repetition, the words start to bounce off. At that point, you have removed all the fuel from your opponents’ rhetorical flamethrowers, and no attempt to shame you in public is ever going to work again.

In other words: thanks to opponents’ heavy-handed tactics, an army of highly motivated and competent women emerged. These women could no longer be cowed or controlled by the fear of having their reputations destroyed. And even worse for their opponents, despite all the bullying, many proud inhabitants of Rainy Fascist Terf Island maintained an irreverent sense of humor, something nobody has ever said about British transactivists with a straight face.

After self-ID started to affect the Highgate Women’s Pond in 2018, an intrepid group known as “Man Friday” wore fake mustaches and beards to swim in the Men’s Pond. When David Lammy called us “dinosaurs” who were “hoarding rights”, activist Kellie-Jay Keen brought dinosaur costumes to protests. The passing of Scotland’s shameful Gender Recognition Reform Bill was met with horror from onlookers in the parliamentary chamber, but campaigner Elaine Miller defiantly highlighted its sponsors’ moral indecency by flashing a fake pubic wig. And while many hilarious placards and posters have been seen at protests over the years, my personal favorites were also Scottish ones: “No laddies in the ladies” and “Yer daw is not yer maw”.

So, while the other side most definitely had all the gender identities, our side had more tangible assets in the shape of brains, guts, and heart. Given the damage done by Sturgeon to the cause of women and girls north of the border, it is fitting that the biggest victory in the gender wars should belong to members of that esteemed company, the women who wouldn’t wheesht. In the former First Minister, we are given a perfect encapsulation of the tongue-clucking, eye-rolling, mostly performative feminist attitude favored by women in the progressive establishment. But thanks to For Women Scotland and their many grassroots allies, we have been given the real thing.

As voting closed in America on Tuesday night, the leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats was enthusiastically changing his X handle to “Alex Cole-Hamala”, reminding us that last month he had taken leave from the Scottish Parliament to campaign in Pennsylvania on Harris’s behalf. By Wednesday morning, he was forlornly telling The Scotsman that though his heroine “came really close”, “a dark new chapter in American history” was now beginning. “I am proud to have been among the Democrats fighting for Pennsylvania” he continued. “I am sorry it was not enough”.

Overweening delusions of grandeur and an inability to count aside, you could be forgiven for thinking that Cole-Hamilton’s negative reaction to Trump’s victory represented a fairly typical Scottish take. It sometimes seems as if being anti-Trump is the only thing holding an otherwise fractiously divided citizenry together — an antipathy apparently crossing class boundaries, sectarian rivalries, men versus women, Nats versus yoons.

According to her obituaries this week, one of the things for which the late Glaswegian comedian Janey Godley was best loved for was holding a sign saying “Trump is a cunt” while standing outside the then presidential candidate’s Turnberry golf course in Ayrshire. Yesterday, by way of tribute, The Guardian marshalled a series of outraged vox pops from dog walkers on Turnberry beach, primly noting that the only person they found who was pleased Trump won had “relatives in the United States”.

Indeed, such is the Caledonian reputation for hating the man that it seems some pro-Harris Americans are now investigating Scottish citizenship in the wake of his triumph. On Wednesday The National reported that Google had seen a surge in US-based web searches for “how to move to Scotland”, presumably emanating from disgruntled Democrat voters. Though no longer in government coalition himself, Green MSP Patrick Harvie was quoted as responding magisterially that “We believe in a Scotland that is open and welcome to all, a country that removes barriers rather than building walls… we are working to build a fairer, greener and more welcoming society that is the opposite of Trump’s destructive and hateful vision.”

Suggested reading

MAGA must be reborn

By Boyd Tonkin

In fact, though, conditions on the ground might not be as favourable as Harvie assumes. While Americans went to the polls, some fascinating alternative findings were simultaneously emerging from data collector Norstat. These indicated that, contrary to the standard narrative, Trump’s approval ratings are higher in Scotland than anywhere else in Western Europe. A quarter of Scottish respondents wanted him to win over Harris, as compared with 16% in the UK as a whole, 15% in Germany, and 14% in France. When you consider that both of the latter have a surging Right-wing electoral presence — and that Scotland doesn’t, at least on paper — the substantial difference in numbers look even more intriguing. Equally, according to the polling company, Scotland had the second lowest preference for Harris of all the countries surveyed, standing at 56%.

Assuming this data extrapolates more generally, what might be afoot? A simple explanation of the difference with other countries is that some inhabitants of Scotland see Donald John Trump as one of their own. His 18th century ancestors were victims of the Highland Clearances. His mother was born into a crofting family on the Isle of Lewis and spoke Gaelic before she spoke English. Indeed, clever local Labour MP Torcuil Crichton wrote on Wednesday — ruefully referring to the two named halves of the Hebridean island of Trump’s ancestors — “Congratulations to another son of Lewis, though I’ve never wished more to have woken today in the Isle of Harris.”

The President-elect has played up his Scottish origins many times, perhaps preferring them to a less marketable story about paternal German ancestry. He has also heavily invested in Turnberry and a separate golf course he owns in Aberdeenshire, with another one on the way, to be named after his mother. Both facts must have induced at least grudging affection in some. For once you know about his background, the facial features of one of the most powerful men in the world can sometimes mistily resolve into those of a Highland factor or fisherman, while you marvel at the gestalt switch. And the relentless patter suddenly seems more familiar too. As Kevin Bridges once put it: “Everything Donald Trump has said, I have heard from a Glasgow taxi driver.”

But tartan jingoism and a bit of financial self-interest can’t be the only reasons some Scots apparently now view the mogul as the lesser of two evils. When Godley mounted her one-woman protest at Turnberry in 2016, it was a different time. The most the average person knew about Trump was that he had been in the original version of The Apprentice, was the world’s richest ginger minger, and was running for president, to general incredulity. Political aficionados with their fingers on the pulse also knew he advocated grabbing women by the pussy, locking up Hillary Clinton, “draining the swamp” and “building a wall”.

More from this author

The sisterhood is a feminist lie

By Kathleen Stock

It was easy to feel honourably defensive on behalf of immigrants of the non-English sort — Scotland hardly had any. Meanwhile, back then Nicola Sturgeon could still say what a woman was, and the only time a Scottish politician ever took the knee was when celebrating a Celtic win. Intersectionality was probably something to do with town planning, though no one knew exactly what.

Unaware as most were about virtue-signalling excesses soon to come, it was easy to react to Trump’s existence with that most traditional of Scottish responses: mockery of the absurdly rich and entitled. Godley’s action at Turnberry was very much in this vein: an irreverent deflation of elite pomposity and hubris, enjoyably cathartic to witness. She was the underdog David facing off a ridiculous foreign Goliath. What could be more satisfying to watch than that? In the best possible sense, her gesture was a populist one, a fact not belied by the fact that she ended up espousing various woke causes soon afterwards.

Because let’s face it: soon afterwards, nearly everybody did. By 2018 — the same  year Greta Thunberg hit the scene, trans lassies suddenly became lassies, and the University of Glasgow started to decolonise its curriculum — Scottish anti-Trump protests had become both much larger and a lot more sanctimonious. Those attending them were quoted rhapsodising about the “inclusive atmosphere”, a dead giveaway they were moving with the times. Greenpeace mounted a paragliding protest at Turnberry. Owen Jones, never knowingly understated, fronted a short film about the Scottish protests to plead for Guardian subscriptions so that his employer could fight “a man who represents bigotry, hatred, misogyny, and racism, who threatens the environment and who threatens international peace”.

Two years later George Floyd died in Minneapolis, and University of Edinburgh bosses responded by taking 18th century philosopher David Hume’s name off a building for being “racist”. It was probably around this time prescient Scots began to suspect that not all anti-Trumpians were on the same side.

Fast-forward to 2024, and a substantially larger part of the Scottish population have now had their fill of vacuous posturing from politicians, academics, and activist journalists. They are tired of superficially rousing soundbites and high-minded policies about gender, race, lockdowns, farming, fishing, and oil, running directly contrary to the interests of many working-class and lower middle-class voters. It is small wonder some Scots seem to have taken Harris’s verbal porridge with a hefty pinch of salt. It all feels so familiar, somehow.

And given this painful experience, it is conceivable that perspectives on Trump have also changed, at least a bit. Barely glimpsed in 2016, a rival Goliath to Trump has fully emerged into the light: a po-faced modern religion with a west coast American accent, even lighter on laughs than Calvinism, with influence in nearly every Scottish public institution and most especially at the top. Its impenetrable dogma is faithfully mouthed by nearly all those in positions of power, while criticism from outside the members-only club is dismissed as bigoted or thick. And Trump despises and laughs at it all.

Meanwhile, adding to a sense of enraging disconnect, some of the most vocal Scots-adjacent Trump denouncers and Kamala stans recently are obviously drawn from tribes and clans historically more likely to Clear rather than be Cleared: Rory Stewart of Eton and Balliol, for instance, whose family hails from Broich House in Crieff; or Alex Cole-Hamilton himself, descended from Anglo-Irish aristocracy. Faced with the lofty moralising of genetic patricians socially insulated from their own mistakes, discerning the true anti-Establishment Scottish reaction to Trump no longer seems quite so easy.

In the end, the average Scots position on Trump will partly come down to how what direct contact they have had with the hypocrisy and vested interests of progressive poseurs in the last decade, and whether they have suffered because of it. Equally, others won’t have updated their 2016-based priors. As historian Dominic Sandbrook pointed out to Stewart during a much circulated clip, most people are not on X/Twitter, don’t read newspaper op-eds, and have no interest in the political preoccupations of commentators either on Right or Left.

This of course includes Scottish people. To a lot of them, Trump probably still looks as ludicrous and unreliable as he did before: a rambling, self-important buffoon, vaguely reminiscent of that uncle who can’t help showing off at family gatherings and making lewd remarks to his nieces. To others, though, he now looks like he is standing outside the members-only club with them, laughing at the daft cunts inside.

This scene takes place just after midday on a Monday — nothing unusual. Commuters and taxis pass by, indifferent to the events surrounding them. This is life in Europe’s drug death capital. Yet, for the city’s marginalised substance users, a new hope has been promised in the form of Scotland’s first sanctioned drug consumption room (SDCR). Scheduled to open last week, safety checks on the building have led to delays. The stunted opening seems in keeping with Scotland’s troubled approach to its drug crisis — the worst in Europe and second only to America, globally. 

The road to the UK’s first official SDCR has been long and winding. The first facility of its kind was run illegally by activist Peter Krykant out of a van in the city centre. In perhaps the most significant example of direct action in the history of drug campaigning in the UK, Krykant’s activism was instrumental in mainstreaming debate around Scottish drug reform, influencing the eventual approval of the UK’s first sanctioned drug consumption room in Glasgow. 

More from this author

Keir Starmer's insulting hypocrisy

By Darren McGarvey

Running parallel to Kyrkant’s campaign was Glasgow’s Heroin Assisted Treatment (HAT) programme, launched in 2019, which aimed to provide chronic heroin users with a pharmaceutical-grade substitute (diamorphine) under medical supervision. This harm reduction approach sought to reduce overdose deaths, minimise the harms associated with street heroin, and improve the quality of life for participants who had not responded to other treatments. 

Despite the initial hope, various reports on its effectiveness present a mixed picture. Participants saw improved health, reduced criminal activity, and access to additional services. However, enrolment was low with only 20 participants while also being expensive at an estimated annual cost of £12,000–£15,000 per person. This led to criticism of its scalability and limited impact on Scotland’s broader drug crisis, especially given the underfunding of other drug treatment services, namely residential rehab. While certainly a significant development in the long arc of a crisis now spanning decades, the HAT programme’s overall impact was nothing to write home about. This is, of course, a running theme where government-backed harm reduction strategies are concerned. 

Legal heaven and earth have been moved to establish a safe drug consumption room in Glasgow. This was initially hindered by UK legislation that criminalises drug possession and use. However, after years of advocacy and pressure from public health experts and local officials, the Scottish government worked with then Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain, Scotland’s chief legal officer, to find a pathway. In 2023, Bain agreed not to prosecute users of the proposed facility, effectively decriminalising drug use within the site and allowing the pilot programme to proceed without changes to UK-wide drug laws. This move marked a significant step forward in harm reduction efforts amid Scotland’s ongoing drug crisis. But in truth, like many policies adopted in Scotland, it came about 10 years too late and is not part of any wider strategy to steady the ship.  

While the SDCR is expected to reduce overdoses, infections, and connect users to services, the deeper issues driving demand for drugs persist. People in deprived communities are 18 times more likely to die from drug-related causes, pointing to poverty as a root cause. The healthcare offer made to the poorest is always inferior, but this inequality is compounded for addicts who face additional stigma in healthcare settings, where addiction is too often seen as a moral failing rather than a health condition. Treatment options remain limited, and SDCRs, such as methadone programmes, will at best merely keep users stable until better solutions emerge. Be under no illusions that this action alone will make any significant impact on the overall crisis.

That’s why it’s odd that the Scottish government chose to expend so much political capital creating the legal headroom for this initiative, because even if it succeeds as hoped, its impact will be minimal. In truth, politically speaking, a legal standoff with London was the path of least resistance when you consider the true scale of the crisis and the action on social inequality required to turn it around. Creating a constitutional spectacle produces a sense that something radical is being done when in truth, the status-quo has simply been repackaged. 

Rather than take more politically risky action that may involve ruffling the feathers of middle-class voters, leaders with no coherent vision for a more comprehensive treatment landscape look instead to well-placed harm-reduction advocates who propose more of the same initiatives. The challenge facing the SDRC is immense. Even if it all goes well, its remit is limited and questions remain as to how exactly these short-term, pop-up initiatives will have any real impact on a nationwide epidemic.  

Consider the practicalities of actually getting people through the door of the facility when it opens. One challenge is geographical: expecting vulnerable addicts to travel into the city centre frequently is unrealistic. Advocates argue there are plenty of drug users within the city centre already who are eligible, but many dispute not only those figures but also the merits of a service set up to target a narrow cohort of serious addicts within a small urban area. Arguably, it’s the intravenous drug users in the city’s surrounding housing estates who are not only most vulnerable but who are also creating the greatest negative impacts in their communities. Wouldn’t they stand to benefit most, with their participation reaping greater social benefits? In any event, how will they be incentivised to make the trip? How likely is it that they will hold onto a bag of heroin and jump a bus into town before safely injecting?  

Even once enrolled, participants face numerous barriers. Many will fear being drawn onto the social work or criminal justice radars merely by identifying themselves or filling out paperwork. Distrust of authority is pathological among this marginalised community for obvious reasons. If they do present at the SCDR, who will greet them? Who will reassure them and gain their trust? Will drug workers with lived experience lead this important work, or will well-meaning but less streetwise staff who arouse suspicion in users pull the strings behind the scenes? Ultimately, will the same class dynamics that subtly underscore lopsided drug policy and debate in Scotland be needlessly replicated, or has serious work been undertaken to identify and correct for that problem? Then there’s the very basic harm-reduction paradox produced by the pilot’s central focus on intravenous drug use — will smoking heroin or cocaine be discouraged even though it’s often safer than injecting? 

Suggested reading

How Britain abandoned Scotland

By Tom McTague

The notion the SDCR will act as a portal to other services only sounds plausible if you know nothing of what’s actually out there in this baron treatment hellscape. What other services do we mean, exactly? Even people with no history of drug problems may wait months for the most basic mental health counselling. The complexities of lives ravaged by addiction, police involvement and homelessness often require specialist multi-faceted care, that is, quite simply, unavailable for most people. Addicts also face lengthy waits — up to a year — for rehab placements should they desire one, by which time the addiction may have deepened, or the desire to enter a residential setting may have waned. We don’t have an integrated system that pulls in the same direction as in Norway, where, for example, rehab facilities are integrated with some prisons. In Scotland, different organisational factions operate independently of one another, pushing their own agendas, pursuing their own interests, often based on selective assessments of a narrow evidence-base and a keen awareness of what’s “trending” with the hapless Government holding the purse-strings.

Staff turnover in the drug sector is also high due to burnout, demoralisation and short-term funding settlements while wider health services are overwhelmed. Unlike Germany or Switzerland — cited often by advocates as best practice that could be easily replicated — Scotland’s fragmented and underfunded services, operating well overcapacity in a more structurally unjust society, will hamper similar success, irrespective of noble intentions. 

I want it to succeed. If not simply for the minor morale boost it may generate at a time where even seasoned campaigners like me have grown apathetic or walked away from the fight to regroup. Despite critics being labelled regularly as cynical (admittedly with some justification), it’s decades of dire harm reduction outcomes in Scotland that fuel this scepticism. The problem is not harm reduction as a philosophy, it’s the fragmented and untimely manner in which Scotland implements these policies. We’re always playing catch up while dealing with the consequences of unforced errors like cutting safe benzodiazepine prescribing (which drove demand for deadly street Valium) or slashing funding to services that demonstrably save lives. This has been the way of things since the first methadone programme was introduced as a treatment in the Nineties and it remains the predominant treatment for heroin addiction despite showing up on around half of all drug death certificates since records began. 

Nearly 40 years later, with drug deaths now many times higher than in those early days, harm reduction remains the only real tool in Scotland’s drug policy box — a political choice and not one imposed by Westminster. The safe consumption room pilot must be viewed in this broader context. Rather than a clean break offering something new, it’s the latest iteration of the same idea we’ve seen before, yet for some reason, we are encouraged to expect different results. Rumours of staff walking out after inductions, a defensive management team unwilling to address tough questions, and the fact the SDCR was still advertising job vacancies as recently as mid-September (one month before it was due to open), suggest to this hardened cynic deeper issues behind the delay than the building safety checks cited. 

If the countless headline-grabbing initiatives we’ve seen throughout the past decade — as deaths have risen to intolerable levels — are anything to go by, this may mark yet another harm reduction gimmick struggling before it even begins. I hope I’m wrong, but it all reads like a familiar tale and one that tells the real story of Scotland’s drug crisis.

No one will ever know quite when it began. Nor even why. But for hundreds of years, on the second Friday in August, a man in a small town in the south-east of Scotland has been covered with thousands of prickly plants and paraded for a nine-hour walk through the streets. Being plied with whisky eases his ordeal.

Long intrigued, I travelled up to South Queensferry this year to see Burryman day myself. When I arrive at my hotel, the receptionist asks if I am the Burryman himself. Alas not. To be the Burryman you need to have been born in South Queensferry. And since 2012 the title has gone to Andrew Taylor, a 42-year-old who works for Edinburgh Council. Not only is Taylor a South Queensferry native, he was born in the Staghead Hotel, the starting point for the Burryman’s epic walk. He was “destined to be the Burryman”.

Suggested reading

Who cancelled English folklore?

By Isabella Bengoechea

Various theories swirl around as to the origins of this eccentric folk tradition. One man tells me the Burryman was supposed to emerge from the sea, clutching the poles he now holds during his walk. And in the 19th century, according to Natalie Doig, who runs a history podcast called Weird in the Wade, both a man and a woman took part, known as the King and Queen. Alison, one of this year’s Burryman’s helpers, says that he is adorned with burrs because of… something to do with someone hiding from Oliver Cromwell and covering themselves in burrs.

You can see why he might need the whisky. Burrs don’t make comfortable clothes. And the night before the procession, thousands (approximately 11,000) of the spikey plants are collected for Burryman’s coat. They will cling viciously, with no need for glue. To protect his skin, he has to wear a tightly sewn undergarment, including a balaclava. A hot day is not Burryman’s friend. The garb means he can’t walk properly and has only small eye and mouth holes. But in South Queensferry, even though these burrs can cause irritation, injury and discomfort, they are emblems of good fortune.

And this is essentially the only thing we really know about the Burryman — he is supposed to bring good luck. It is one of a few similar rituals in local towns, all supposed to guarantee a good haul in the vital fishing trade. Aberdeen had a remarkably similar “Burreyman” also clad in prickles, but he was actually cast out of the town, along with the bad fishing luck. Unfortunately, because so much rested on the certainty of a good catch, he was often pursued and killed — something that might make the day harder to market as a quaint old British tradition.

Suggested reading

Why the fairies disappeared

By Mary Harrington

“Hip hip hooray, it’s the Burryman’s day!” George rings a bell and off we go. Our prickly star steps out of the Staghead where he is met by a gaggle of locals, tourists and photographers. A flowery garland perched on his head, he looks a little agonised as waddles stiffly around with the aid of two helpers and two poles bearing flowers and the royal banner of Scotland.

And so, within minutes of his seven-mile tour starting he stops for a “nip” of whisky to drink through a straw. This is a sacred feature of the modern iteration: the Burryman takes a drink at around 30 stops on his journey — including every pub. If he is offered one, so the lore stipulates, he has to accept. As the day wears on, the number of houses visited falls and the number of pubs rises. Though some accounts stipulate that the Burryman should not speak for the day — difficult, admittedly, through his small mouth hole and given the effects of the whisky — Taylor chats amiably with everyone. One man sings a song about him: “The women think he’s sex on legs / But he stops for lunch in Greggs. And an old woman wearing a top hat reads him a poem she’s written, eyes glistening all the while.”

The responsibility of the role and the outfit weigh heavily on the Burryman — and poor Taylor. In previous years, according to W W Fyffe, it was common for Burrymen to faint “under the heat and fatigue of the dressing”. I worry that Taylor might suffer the same kind of fate. “I’m a wee bit sore,” he says around the half-way mark, “but I’m OK.” The worst part, he says, are the arms, which are always extended out to the side to accommodate the bulkiness of the garb. He approaches the honour of the role with great seriousness: “You sort of switch off from anybody around you. You’re in your own wee world for the whole day, it sometimes feels like.”

The outfit also terrifies small children. “He’s meant to be a good thing that comes round to take the evil spirits away,” says Alison. “But it’s a big guy that looks like a bush, walking about.” He does, indeed, look like someone who might haunt even an adult’s dreams and even appear as a Doctor Who monster. His message is just as ambiguous as his past. While he appears to be a scapegoat punishing himself in service of the town, he is also supposed to be benevolent and literally made of good luck. Is he kindly, or wicked? Should he stay or should he go? The locals seem averse to casting him as a villain. They don’t want to throw him out, they want to give him whisky and coins.

At 5.30pm, a bagpiper plays us down the home stretch. The Staghead is almost in sight. Someone gives Taylor a whisky milkshake. After nine gruelling hours, he arrives where he started to be cut out of his outfit and gives a grateful, sweaty speech to the assembled crowd — which I’m told is bigger than ever.

Ben Edge, an artist inspired by the Burryman, is here for the fifth year. “I’ve been quite interested in the idea of it being a kind of activism to come to these things,” he says, “because we’re not all in tune with the wheel of the year any more.” With the need to guarantee good fishing gone, the value of the Burryman lies more in the simple fact that it brings people together. “It would be probably really traumatic and upsetting for the town if the Burryman wasn’t to come out one year.”

That he wasn’t being pursued and killed must have helped maintain the tradition. Along with the doughty nature of the man at its heart. But Taylor admits that with 13 Burrymen outings under his belt, he is “on the decline”. And that it might be time to make way for someone younger. His predecessor, John Nichol, went for 12 years. And before him, Alan Reid did it for 25. But when I press him, Taylor won’t put a number on it. It’s a significant responsibility to be a “custodian of the Burryman”: it’s far bigger than just him. With fishing no longer the vital lifeline it once was, these other local customs have died out. Indomitably, though, South Queenferry’s Burryman endures. Though it doesn’t really know why, the town can’t help but cling to him like the burrs on his suit.

“Send Ireland back into poverty and depopulation like Wales and Scotland! Tell them they’ve got a Barnett formula and how lucky they are! That Limerick wouldn’t have that roundabout if it wasn’t for the Irish Barnett formula! Up the Union!” I concede, it’s a good point.

MacNeil is a crofter turned politician from an island 60 miles south of Benbecula called Barra — the last in the island chain variously known as the Outer Hebrides or the Western Isles, from where nothing but ocean lies to its West until you reach Labrador.

In this election he is standing as an independent — “an independent for independence on independence day”, as he put it — having been kicked out of the SNP last year after clashing with the chief whip, angry at the party’s failure to push hard enough for independence after Brexit. His main rival and the favourite to win the seat is a journalist friend of mine, Torcuil Crichton, one time Daily Record reporter turned Labour politician. Both are Gaelic speakers from the islands; only Crichton is a unionist who believes the British state can use its heft to improve people’s lives out here, particularly when it comes to the green energy revolution. “GB Energy” is, I realise, the first big-state, pro-Union policy to come out of Westminster in decades. Whether it will be enough to save the Union in the long term is less clear.

MacNeil’s point about Ireland is, to me, the central challenge for the British state today: does it even work? Look at any of the small countries that have either seceded or all-but seceded from their one-time masters. Are any of them doing worse than Scotland? How would “rejoin the United Kingdom” fare in an Irish referendum? We don’t talk much about the fact that Ireland left as the poorest part of these islands, only to become the richest today. For those like me who feel an emotional attachment to the Union, who feel British and would like Britain to remain, Ireland stands as a living, breathing challenge.

This is not a new challenge. In 1810, just nine years after the union between Britain and Ireland, the Irish unionist William Cuasck-Smith began worrying about the gaping divide between what he called the “theory and principle” of the union and the “vile system” of its administrative reality. “How have the promises made by Unionists to Ireland been kept,” he wrote to his friend J.W. Croker, the MP for Downpatrick. “Has a single step been taken to mitigate the evils which that arrangement was destined to reduce?… Has a step been taken to console the pride and soothe the exasperation of a country fallen from its high esteem? Can a Unionist avoid blushing when he contrasts the performance with the promise?”

Cuasck-Smith’s challenge remains to this day. Can the British state avoid blushing when it contrasts its performance with its promise? Back in Cusack-Smith’s day, the union was supposed to modernise Ireland, extending to its people all the apparent privileges of the English constitution, and in doing so, creating a new, unified people — a single nation stretching across both kingdoms. At the time of the union, the protestant Belfast News Letter urged people to get behind this new endeavour, aware that many of the Orange lodges across Ulster had only recently passed resolutions against the union. “However inimical some of the people of Ireland may have heretofore been to the adoption of that certainly awful, and most important, measure,” the paper’s editorial began, “it is now become an interest, as well as the duty of the whole… to consider the Empire, not as composed of distinct political bodies, each having views incompatible with the happiness and prosperity of the rest — but containing only one people, united in interest as in dominion.” It’s fair to say it didn’t work out like that.

What was so striking up in Scotland was that even though the threat of independence is fading in the short term — Brexit, ironically, having snookered the SNP — the reality is that the hope of “one people, united in interest”, no longer even seems to stretch across Great Britain, let alone Ireland as well. At a hustings on Benbecula on Monday night, I heard again and again complaints about Scotland’s resources being extracted by the English; Labour’s plan for GB Energy was dismissed as mere crumbs from a loaf that should be Scotland’s.

“It happened with the oil and it’s happening again with the renewables,” the SNP’s Susan Thomson told the audience. “Scotland is more than producing enough for its own energy needs… but the value from that doesn’t stay in Scotland, it leaves Scotland, it goes south of the border.” One woman in the audience chipped in: “We’re getting nothing back but drips.”

The facts tell a different story. On average, Scots receive around £2,200 more per head per year from the British state than the average Englishman. And that’s not because they pay more in tax either. In 2023, Scotland “extracted” £25.8 billion more from the UK state than it paid in — which works out at £4,735 per head, according to the Office for National Statistics. Scotland is the extractor, not England.

Yet, such arguments are about the worst you could make for the Union. I remember becoming frustrated listening to one esteemed MEP in the months after the Brexit referendum lamenting what she saw as the stupidity of the Welsh for voting to leave the EU when they were receiving so much money from Brussels in structural funds. I tried to make the counterpoint: not simply that the UK, as a whole, was a net contributor to the EU and so her argument was essentially circular, but that it was not unreasonable for people to vote against a system in which they were so poor they required large fiscal transfers just to make the status quo tolerable. People have every right to demand more than poverty alleviation from their political settlement.

More from this author

Keir Starmer's class neurosis

By Tom McTague

And here is the point. Every region outside London and the South East is a net recipient of public spending today. The whole country — from Dover to Benbecula and across to Northern Ireland — is dependent on the economic wealth produced in one place: the capital. The British economy, in effect, is now a giant fiscal transfer union, dependent on London, which in turn is dependent on one part of London: the Square Mile. We are, in effect, Manhattan surrounded by Portugal, only without the weather or pasteis de nata.

And yet, people are not receiving a cheque on their doormat each year signed “from London, spend wisely”. Instead, all they actually experience in their lives is a dependence which, at best, cushions their seemingly relentless decline. “Our hospital used to work, but now it’s atrocious” one member of the audience in Benbecula told the panel of aspiring MPs on Monday. The chair of the debate that evening then set out the scale of the challenge facing the community. “Currently, you can’t have a baby on the island,” she said. “You can’t have chemotherapy on the island. You can’t have minor surgery, you can’t have a vasectomy. You can’t have any of the small minor surgery interventions that you used to be able to have.”

This is not unique to Benbecula, or even Scotland, but is playing out across the UK where services are noticeably deteriorating. My own grandmother was on the receiving end the other day, woken up at 3am by a telephone call from the hospital who had looked at her blood tests and decided she had to come in immediately, only to then make her wait for 15 hours, alone, before failing to give her the treatment she needed because the doctors changing shifts had not handed over correctly. Everyone now has stories like this.

I used to think that the difference between Right and Left in politics was that, at heart, the Right believed Britain was fundamentally too poor and so needed to prioritise economic growth, while the Left believed it wasn’t a question of wealth but of distribution, and so needed to prioritise public spending. The radicals on either side believed in major structural reforms to fix these problems, while the moderates simply concluded small technocratic changes would be enough. Today, though, there seems to be a consensus emerging that Britain is both too poor and too unequal and that small technocratic tweaks will not be enough.

Suggested reading

Westminster is devolving itself out of existence

By Travis Aaroe

Today, we pay more tax for less in public services, with record levels of immigration for record low growth, all papered over by ever more dependence on London, which only produces ever more resentment of the capital and those who live in it. Angus MacNeil is right that defending this system because we have a Barnett formula is not enough. Limerick, after all, has plenty of roundabouts that the Irish pay for themselves.

In one sense, the Union is the safest it has been since the Brexit vote in 2016. With that issue fading from memory and the other great destabilising force, the Tories (also known as the Conservative and Unionist Party), also seemingly on their way out, the structural threats are receding. The real point, though, is that countries can thrive with independence, devolved self-rule or within larger well-governed countries. But unless they think of themselves at some level as a place containing “one people, united in interest as in dominion”, as the News Letter once put it, they will always be vulnerable. Barnet is not enough. Scottish nationalism was born in the era that oil was discovered. Suddenly, it was Scotland’s oil not Britain’s. In the end, of course, it would be Shell’s, which rather sums up the problem.

Visit Benbecula today for a similar fable of modern Britain, where even the English I met on the island are now for independence. Here is a place on the edge of Europe where the British state was once present, building things and employing people. The island’s biggest village is called Balivanich, formerly home to a few rows of cheaply built military accommodation to serve the nearby MOD missile testing site. What has now happened to that site? It has been sold off to a company called Qinetiq which now runs the place from Hampshire. Who today does not blush at this reality?

***

Listen to Tom’s podcast report here: Has the SNP blown it?

The 21st-century battle began in 2019, as Scotland was on the verge of introducing a law that would allow men to self-identify as women. That same year, Katie Dolatowski, a six-foot-five transgender paedophile, was convicted of sexual offences against two girls aged 10 and 12 in a women’s toilets in Fife. Dolatowski, born male but identifying as female, was placed in a women-only hostel, putting vulnerable women at risk. Despite this, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, the self-professed “feminist to my fingertips”, forged ahead with self-ID legislation that most of Scotland either didn’t understand or didn’t want. Dolatowski, meanwhile, praised her for being a “great first minister”.

Around the same time, a new hashtag was born: #WomenWontWheesht. It was coined by a mother worried that her disabled daughter, given the proposed legislation, might be given intimate care by a male carer. In response to her voicing such concerns, she was accused of being a pearl-clutching transphobe. Her worries for her daughter’s dignity and safety were effectively deemed not inclusive enough of the sensitivities of adult men. And she was told to “weesht”. As a result, the hashtag became a battle cry: the symbol of the feminist resistance to being silenced. And this week, their book was published. The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht tells the stories of the individual women who fought to protect women’s sex-based rights, with testimonies from an SNP MP, a prison governor and J.K. Rowling.

As the book details, Mumsnet was an unlikely forum in which women would organise. In response to Swim England’s new guidance, released in 2018, Mumsnetters organised “Man Friday” events, in which they self-identified as men and rocked up to men-only swimming sessions bare-breasted and sometimes even sporting fake moustaches. Within two weeks, the new guidance had been withdrawn. Such demonstrations were akin to the Reclaim the Night marches, Greenham Common and the Lesbian and Gay Liberation Movement, marking a return to grassroots feminism. This was an antidote to the horrors being visited on women under the cloak of transgender rights.

Yet such movements were often hindered by financial constraints. The pro-gender ideology organisations were often funded by the Scottish government, while the women resisting did so on a shoestring. Women had to resort to shaking tins asking for donations to pay the lawyers, and crowd-funders were plastered all over social media. In the time-honoured tradition of feminist activism, this work was unpaid.

Female campaigners during this period faced appalling abuse. In 2018, the then-newly appointed rector at the University of Edinburgh, Ann Henderson, was plagued by baseless and vexatious complaints supported by the University and College Union. In the new book, she reflects on her experience: “Lesbian staff members felt excluded from networks. Women-only events were increasingly difficult even impossible — to arrange, and women were concerned about losing their female private facilities.”

Then, in June 2019, I spoke at Edinburgh University about the feminist campaign to end men’s violence towards women. As I was leaving the venue, I was attacked by a six-foot male transactivist, who was shouting that I was a “cunt” and responsible for the suicide of several trans people. The next day, Scottish Green MSP Andy Wightman caved into pressure from his party and apologised for attending the event.

That same month, poet Jenny Lindsay took to Twitter to complain about an article published in an arts publication, the Skinny, which advocated for violence against lesbian activists at Pride. The backlash was abhorrent — one friend turned against her, writing an “Open Letter on Transphobia” that more than 250 people signed. Lindsay recalls: “Every name I recognised was an emotional stabbing.”

A major boost to the feminist campaign came at the end of 2019, when J.K. Rowling publicly expressed support for Maya Forstater, who had lost her job after tweeting gender-critical views. Rowling recalls: “I’d watched in silence as girls and women with everything to lose had stood up in the face of a modern-day witch hunt, braving threats and intimidation, not only from activists in black balaclavas holding placards promising to beat and murder them, but from institutions and employers telling them they must accept and espouse an ideology in which they don’t believe, and surrender their rights.”

Suggested reading

Nicola Sturgeon's delusional second act

By Kathleen Stock

But even she couldn’t make the world see reason. Rowling was cancelled, as were all her supporters. After expressing her admiration for Rowling on Twitter, Young Adult author Gillian Philip was cast out of publishing circles and has since retrained as an HGV driver. She says: “I’m a great believer in fantasy fiction for children, but I draw the line at telling them it’s reality — especially when it threatens to do them actual physical harm.”

Together, these women who wouldn’t wheesht contributed to the downfall of Nicola Sturgeon. In early January 2023, the UK government prevented Sturgeon’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill from becoming law, arguing that it illegally impacted the Equality Act. Days later, Adam Graham (also known as Isla Bryson) was convicted of two counts of rape, both of which he committed before he decided he was a woman. Graham was sent to a women’s prison: a photograph emerged of him wearing a blonde wig and tight leggings — his male genitals clearly visible. In a car crash of an interview, Sturgeon was grilled about whether Graham was a man or a woman. Just over two weeks later, she resigned, giving no reason.

It is not my style to be precious, but I found reading this book exceptionally hard in parts. It reminded me of the dozens of hellish scenarios I have had to endure in the 20 years since I first spoke out against gender ideology. The memories of the physical attacks and threats, the humiliation of being de-platformed, the betrayals by women I had thought were committed feminists.

But the book also reminded me of the enduring strength of the feminist movement. Despite facing the worst men’s rights backlash in more than 40 years, feminists from all generations are uniting to fight back. This is a story of a war, written while the bombs are still exploding. But it’s also the story of the resistance — and it isn’t over yet.

Given Sturgeon’s much vaunted twin loves — novels and being a “voice for inclusion” — the venue was a perfect match. Not far from Brighton, we were at Charleston Farmhouse; a place where, for much of the 20th century, core members of the Bloomsbury Group — Vanessa Bell, art critic husband Clive Bell, and fellow painter Duncan Grant — lived experimentally with various illustrious literary and philosophical figures orbiting around them. Immersed in endlessly complicated romantic liaisons, this was a queer pangendered polycule before the SNP had even heard of one. (More simply, though not inaccurately, relatives of mine by marriage who farmed the land nearby would refer to the Bloomsburies as “those funny people up the road”.)

In the present day, those now in charge of Charleston try to capitalise on the frisson of inherited sexual dissidence with lots of queer-themed events, including a recent fashion exhibition sponsored by Christian Dior. Indeed, an event poster displayed onstage directly before Sturgeon’s interview showed a naked female standing crotch-deep in a lake, elective mastectomy scars glinting where breasts used to be. But despite management pretensions to be running a modern-day Weimar salon, the reality of the audience at Sturgeon’s talk was somewhat more prosaic: scruffy middle-aged people dressed in violently clashing prints, their LRB tote bags stuffed with books by George Monbiot and Judi Dench. Only a few bright young things were scattered here and there, paying homage to their second favourite politician. Their first favourite, former Green Party leader Caroline Lucas, swept in just before the start and sat at the front.

To the sound of applause, festival director Nathanial Hepburn introduced the main attraction, effectively warning off audience members from airing “their own views on politics” during the question period — a sentiment which drew further appreciative applause from some. Dawson began the softball questioning, and we were soon immersed in a touching fairy tale: about a shy working-class girl from Irvine who had joined the SNP to “try and make a difference”, and then challenged male dominance and discrimination in Scottish politics by rising to the top. Over time she became the great feminist champion who led her people through their darkest hour during Covid. But in the end, weary of acting as a lightning rod for unjust toxicity — including from those angry with her for being a steadfast supporter of marginalised people — she had altruistically stepped away from power, for the good of her country.

There is a mental delusion called Capgras Syndrome, during which a person becomes convinced that someone in their life has been secretly replaced with an identical duplicate. During my hour in the Charleston tent, I started dimly to understand what this must be like. For in many ways the version of Sturgeon in front of me seemed to bear only the vaguest of relations to her historical doppelganger North of the Border.

Not least, the cause of Scottish Independence — to which I was sure I could remember her devoting almost her entire political life — was mentioned briefly only once, with a reassurance that she had an English granny and wanted the two countries to be the “best of friends”. The ongoing police investigation into SNP finances was similarly glossed over fast, albeit partly for legal reasons. When asked what she had been most proud of during her time in office, she said her government had done “a lot to try and shift the dial on child poverty”, referring to increased funded childcare and the Scottish Child Payment, but not to the fact that child poverty figures overall had remained obstinately static on her watch.

Mistily recounting the Covid years — during which her government closed schools for months, and imposed tougher lockdown regulations than in England yet with no real difference in death rates — she seemed to suggest openness and transparency had been key: it had been important “to stand up every day and explain exactly what we were asking people to do, why we were asking people to do it”. Could this be the same woman, I wondered, who was unable to produce any WhatsApp messages from this period at the Covid Inquiry, having deleted them all?

Suggested reading

Westminster is devolving itself out of existence

By Travis Aaero

And having arguably stuffed her party full of young activists hellbent on promotion within the system — including presiding over a jaw-dropping NEC rule change in 2020 that saw younger candidates with newly self-identified disabilities promoted to the top of regional MSP lists — this Anglicised version of Sturgeon advised young people never to see politics “as a route to a job or a career” because “if that is your motivation, then you are doing it for all the wrong reasons”. In her view, “politics, including in my party, now is probably too full of young people who have just gone through the political ranks”.

By the time she got to the bit about how toxic the public discourse about “trans rights” had become, and how trans people had become a public scapegoat, because citizens “struggling” with “a cost of living crisis” and “rising levels of poverty” — “particularly young people who suffered during Covid” — were looking “for somebody to blame”, I started to check what was in my drink. “I just have this belief that people should be allowed to be who they are, feel comfortable, respected, safe and able to live with dignity as who they want to be,” said the premier who had overseen the putting of violent male felons in terrifyingly close quarters with impoverished, vulnerable female prisoners, with no apparent thought to the safety or dignity of the latter.

Was it really she who had closed her ears to any possible problems with introducing self-ID at age 16 upwards, arguing that some opponents would “cloak themselves in women’s rights to make it acceptable, but just as they’re transphobic you’ll also find that they’re deeply misogynist, often homophobic, possibly some of them racist as well”? Who had personally insisted that puberty blockers would still be used for physically healthy children in Scotland’s youth gender identity service even after serious concerns emerged in 2021; and whose Party was defending clinical standards at the service as late as last month? Did she really not understand why all of this might get reasonable people riled? Apparently she did not.

The audience mostly seemed to lap it up; partly, I assume, because they knew practically nothing concrete about the speaker’s nine years in government. Nationalists often complain that the English media ignores Scottish concerns, but in this case it has clearly worked in their former leader’s favour. Still, it was also obvious that this deeply middle-class and well-heeled bunch mostly didn’t want to know about any potentially complicating factors that might temper their adulation, for that would spoil all the fun of the festival: paying £65 per day ticket to feel appalled about the state of the world and the Tories, but rather better about themselves. To this end, they needed a suitable moral heroine to side with, mentally speaking: preferably someone with a charmingly authentic regional accent, getting intermittent jabs in at their favourite hate figures while decrying toxic masculinity, and whose stated values otherwise were vague enough that you could read almost anything positive you liked into them. And it seems that they found one.

During the Q&A, as instructed, political questions were indeed mostly eschewed, in favour of fatuous queries about who Sturgeon might like to do a podcast with (Theresa May, apparently) and which books she might leave on the desk of an incoming Prime Minister (the crime novels of her good pal Val McDermid, in case you were wondering). Towards the end of the session, a sonorously voiced male admirer seemed to encapsulate the general mood of histrionic unreality by imploring the politician: “Will you promise us, whatever the result of the Police Scotland investigation, that you will find a continuing role to speak out?”

By then, I had heard more than enough. As I left, I reflected on the strangeness of what I’d just witnessed: the creation of an utterly fantastical world, bearing practically no relation to the actual one, being wrought in real time via the psychological co-dependency of two highly unlikely parties: on the one hand, a former Scottish National Party leader; and on the other, the sort of deeply unself-aware, affluent, self-satisfied and soft-minded Southerner who for decades has been a source of both mockery and fury to most Scottish Nationalists in practice. When that memoir eventually does come out, she’ll know exactly where to go to sell it.

Or at least a kind of Whig history. It — infamously — relied on grand narratives. Here is one. In the Middle Ages, England made a precocious finish to what we might call the story of early modernity. It had a single language; a single legal code; central government; national feeling; no great magnates; no municipal liberties; no regional distinctions that mattered. There was no rigmarole of provincial Diets, as was the style almost everywhere else. There was one organ, Westminster, where people could speak of a national interest that was felt as keenly in Scunthorpe as in London. These were legislators, not petitioners pleading the case of a town, or a guild.

The logical next step for this hot-housed national England was to round out the polity, incorporating the rest of the island to prevent it being used as a “backdoor” by its rivals. The unification of England meant, inescapably, the unification of Great Britain. Everything seemed to be pulling in this direction. The Scottish aristocracy was Norman. The Lowlanders, great bulk of the country’s population, were Anglo-Saxons. The Reformation had given the people of Great Britain a common religion (mostly), and, still more, a common set of enemies.

That decision, in 1707, to take the plunge for full parliamentary union simply made sense. Sure, much of it was down to self-interest. But it was a self-interest that presupposed a common one. The sectarian difference, dowdy and obscure by continental standards even during the time of Oliver Cromwell, was becoming even less important. Scottish merchants declared that the internal customs barriers with England were intolerable — barriers which were still the European norm well into the 19th century. Nationhood had arrived, and required only its formal consummation.

Suggested reading

Welcome to stagnation nation

By Tom McTague

If the unity of the island of Great Britain seemed in some way preordained, it still feels that way. Modern technology means that centralised rule is easier than ever. The confessional divide between England and Scotland has vanished. So too has the economic one: the choice is no longer, as it was in the dog days of Churchill’s chancellorship, between the shipbuilders of the Clyde and the City of London. Scotland and England both are now sustained by high finance; luxury goods; education; tourism. The departure from the European single market has made the British single market more important than ever.

And yet, there has been a concerted effort to throw the tide of history into reverse. Since the Scottish referendum in 2014, it has become common to say that Great Britain is an artifice with no real historical existence. But that rupture — devolution, Scottish and otherwise — is part of a particular idea of authority that has become hegemonic over the past 25 years.

The administration that came to power in 1997 was decentralist and localist in its assumptions. It did not like the idea of a powerful central metropolis in London. It did not like Parliament, with its debates, its majorities, and its ability to make and unmake any law — which threatened new unfalsifiable ideas of human rights. New Labour opposed majorities, executive power, and central government. No tradition of distributed power existed in Britain, so it would invent one. So was born the Supreme Court and the devolved assemblies, both practically free from Parliament’s writ, and which would make endless bartering between claims of right the legerdemain of politics, not popular appeals, or debates.

That idea soon became bipartisan. As a political programme, it preferred the local and familiar to the remote and metropolitan. It wanted politicians to “stop arguing” and come to an agreement. It distrusted Power, and sought to set things up in such a way that no one could exercise it over anyone else — except over the common people. It was, as George Orwell once wrote of Swift, “despising authority while disbelieving in liberty”.

Suggested reading

The gravediggers of British conservatism

By Aris Roussinos

Modern Scottish nationalism is not separable from this programme of decentralism. The two are symbiotic. Devolution created a strange and subsidised layer of local politicians and bureaucrats, who, having no real reason for their existence, could do little else but play to provincial rights and an exaggerated Scottishness as a gambit for funding and jobs. Westminster, won for the cause of sham provincial liberties long ago, always obliged. As national life was purposefully fractured, rule from London began — completely by default — to seem like a foreign imposition.

As the entirely self-created “crisis of Union” began to mount in 2014, Westminster could answer only with yet more decentralisation. Everything about London’s response to the separatist threat presupposed that a Scottish nation already existed, and that a British one did not.

The latest invocation of local rights was that Scotland had recently been getting governments and policies it had not voted for (so had, say, Cambridge). When a set of voters is unhappy, the usual course is to change things around to appease them — as Rishi Sunak is now attempting in the Red Wall. Instead, London’s response was a promise to shield them from the English electorate: “The Vow”. Reform of public services had been the main aim of David Cameron’s premiership, but now these public services were to be devolved entirely. In his heart of hearts, the prime minister did not believe that his mandate from the British people gave him any real right to govern Scotland.

The Vow, and the further devolution that followed, was an avowal that a British body politic did not and should not exist. London conceded every premise of the SNP. But these were its own premises. For its part, while the SNP was not the creature of London, at every turn it consented to play the role marked out for it. In the years that followed the referendum, Nicola Sturgeon became a permanent fixture of national life, and offered a general running commentary on British affairs. She was acting the part cast for her by London: a stern and forthright provincial critic of central excess. Unlike in Catalonia, or Quebec, there was never any serious talk of unilateral secession, even as parliamentary government in London virtually collapsed between 2017-19.

Suggested reading

Penny Mordaunt: the perfect head for the headless Tories

By Mary Harrington

The implicit relationship became clearer during Humza Yousaf’s year in power. One of his first announcements was that no second referendum would be pursued until a “sustained majority” emerged for one. This was, in practice, a way to adjourn the idea forever. In his resignation speech, Yousaf warned of the threat of populism. What? Scottish nationalism’s aim is to break up the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland: a permanent member of the UN security council, a stately member of the international system, and a nuclear power. It is, ostensibly, one of the most populistic causes on the planet. But that is no longer its way. To its leadership, at least, Scottish nationalism is not for Scotland, merely against majoritarian democracy in Britain.

But this dependence on patronage and concession made the SNP’s position too precarious. Having forsworn demagogy, it could now only petition Westminster to carry through its own project by degrees. Up till now, it had always found a receptive audience. But were even the feeblest of unionism ever to emerge in London, it would be out of road.

So it proved. After 2016, London took the bold and daring step of not allowing the SNP to hold another referendum at the time of its choosing and with its own gerrymandered franchise. This threw the party into a crisis from which it never fully recovered. The end, when it came last year, was suitably anticlimactic. Scottish nationalism, as practised, did not survive contact with a unitary British state that was prepared to take even the smallest of steps to preserve itself; and it perished over a trifle. The decision to veto the Gender Recognition (Scotland) Bill in January 2023 was a humdrum affair, entirely normal under any federal or pseudo-federal structure. But it has probably buried the SNP for a generation.

Buried, but dormant. In Westminster, devolution remains the solution to all political problems, and has indeed been given energy anew by recent events. Britain’s governing classes now believe that devolution is the best bar to the populist threat. They could not have been more clear about this: every anti-establishment vote from the British people is interpreted as, really, an inchoate cry against London, and for local autonomy. People in Teesside did not truly want lower immigration, it was said — only an Assembly of the North East, and a Mayor.

Rather than any change of course, Britain’s rulers have answered populism with devolution: to reroute and blunt public anger at the direction of national policy; and, still more, to break up the unified British body politic that had just delivered those results. It is proposed to dismember an ancient constitutional polity and hand over the fragments to a series of local fanatics and workaday crooks, in exchange for the assurance that these people will preserve the country from populism.

For their part, the British people have been vaguely bewildered by devolution. For all that is made of a clamour for regional identity and local belonging, the mandates for the new devolved assemblies and metro mayors have been derisory. The recent election for Mayor of the North East had a turnout of 31%; for the Mayor of York and North Yorkshire it was 29.89%. In May of 2022, the people of Bristol voted to abolish their Mayor and return to the old system of council oligarchy. The Liverpool mayoralty has collapsed in scandal. London politics only really exists insofar as there have been attempts to artificially wall it off from the rest of southern England: the battle over Ulez being the case in point.

Devolution, as a means to bar the way to populism, may yet reawaken Scottish nationalism. Gordon Brown’s plan for a new federal constitution, A New Britain, includes such howlers as giving the Scottish Government the ability to conclude its own international treaties. These proposals are already being watered down, and are unlikely to be adopted in full. But they show a clear direction of travel — even as Scottish separatism itself starts to sputter out. The end of the British union, if it comes, will have been entirely self-inflicted.

More than anything else, it will be a tragedy. Great Britain was created as a vehicle to unleash the energies of two almost uniquely talented peoples: people who had much in common anyway, but were being forever side-tracked by a tedious and endless cousins’ war. Union seemed to make everything young again. Union meant that the Scottish and the English could turn outwards. They pounced on the world with a boyish enthusiasm unequalled since the days of Alexander.

Devolution aims to bring this grand enterprise to an end. It offers — demands — a slower pace of life for the island and its people. The United Kingdom was created to do Something. One gets the sense that Decentralised Britain — introverted, particular, ruminating — is by design meant to do nothing.

And there’s more. Ostensibly introduced for those victims of hate crimes too intimidated to speak to the police directly, there will now be designated “third-party reporting centres” for accusations of hateful crime, including one in a Glasgow sex shop. Snitch on someone you dislike and pick up a dildo at the same time — isn’t modern life wonderful?

Also accompanying the introduction of the Act has been an infantilising and much-derided publicity campaign, featuring a ginger “Hate Monster” strongly reminiscent of a Sesame Street character, and who is supposed to represent “that feeling some people get when they are frustrated and angry and take it out on others, because they feel like they need to show that they are better than them. In other words, they commit a hate crime”. Given the vagueness of this characterisation, upon first encountering the Hate Monster, I myself probably committed one — in imagination, at least — both upon the Monster and whatever lanyard-bedecked zealot invented him.

But not everyone feels the same. First Minister Humza Yousaf is an enthusiast for the new piece of muppetry, including its application in the home, and thinks that perception-based recording of non-crime hate incidents gives the police “an idea of where there might be spikes in hatred”. Perhaps he pictures the police station from Taggart, with glum-faced officers putting red pins into a wall map featuring J.K. Rowling’s house.

Growing up in Scotland as the offspring of sassenachs, I have certainly been made aware of the presence of spikes of hatred at various times in my life; but strangely enough, animus against the English does not figure heavily in defences of the policies. Instead, the focus is upon more fashionable victims. You may not understand what a non-binary person actually is, let alone be able to summon up enough negative emotion to persecute one, but according to the Scottish government such people are sufficiently threatened as to justify their specific inclusion in the Bill. Also included under the characteristic of transgender identity are people who “cross-dress”: good news for the many Scotswomen who wear trousers, as otherwise females don’t get much of a look-in, with sex not mentioned as a protected characteristic at all.

Meanwhile, another social tinderbox allegedly waiting to explode, according to policymakers, is widespread resentment against that 0.018% of the population “with variations in sex characteristics” — colloquially known as intersex people, and who will also be specially protected under the new law. If you didn’t know any better, you might conclude that several aspects of the legislation are a frivolous distraction from the country’s real problems.

Worse, you might infer that all of this is implicitly a cudgel with which to bash people who are poor and/or haven’t been to the University of St Andrews, as is heavily suggested by another aspect of the “Don’t Feed Hate” ad campaign: namely, its focus upon “young men aged 18-30” as being “most likely to commit hate crime”. In particular, we are told to watch out for “those from socially excluded communities who are heavily influenced by their peers”, and “who have deep-rooted feelings of being socially and economically disadvantaged, combined with ideas about white-male entitlement”. In other words, if you are a young white male, being influenced by your peers is bad (as opposed to being influenced by a big ginger muppet, one assumes); and your poverty and social exclusion are now reduced to mere “feelings”. Still, it seems that some feelings are taken more seriously by the Scottish ruling classes than others.

Many commentators are concerned that the whole Act will chill legitimate free speech, either via actual criminal sanctions or via misinterpretations of the law by police and others; and there are particular worries about speech that is critical of religion, either of the traditional or transactivist kinds. But the smooth-tongued rainbow mandarins paid to dictate equality policy to a mostly vacant-eyed political class have told everyone to take a deep breath and relax. As the chief executive of Equality Network in Scotland Rebecca Crowther soothingly told Sky News: “This legislation is not going to catch people online saying things that I might disagree with, that you might disagree with, things that might upset me, things that might upset others in the community… What it does legislate against is when that freedom of speech strays into something that is abusive, that could cause fear and alarm, and that also incites hatred or incites people to act on that hatred.”  Meanwhile Yousaf himself has said that he has “full confidence” that the police will look beyond “vexatious” complaints.

More from this author

What is Judith Butler afraid of?

By Kathleen Stock

But what this trite sort of response obviously ignores is that, as social norms change, it is increasingly difficult for people to distinguish between that which is merely disagreeable and upsetting, and that which is genuinely hateful and abusive. It is an irony of the present situation that so many seem to think that biology is socially constructed but that the meaning of hatred is natural and fixed. In fact, what counts as an adequate expression of a particular emotion is at least partly culturally determined, and these days the category of hatred seems to be a lot more expansive than it used to be. Previously, its presence was indicated by otherwise random-looking outbursts of violence towards outgroups, and the use of aggressive slurs. In present day Scotland, however, it seems detectable from saying things like “choosing to identify as ‘non-binary’ is as valid as choosing to identify as a cat” — a recent statement by the Conservative MSP Murdo Fraser, subsequently recorded by police as a non-crime hate incident, a verdict he now intends to contest in court.

The wording of the Act tries to solve this problem by referring to what a “reasonable person” would think: so that, for instance, it is a necessary condition of committing a stirring-up offence that either one “behaves in a manner that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening or abusive”, or “communicates to another person material that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening or abusive” — and, in doing so, intends to stir up hatred against a protected group.

In this formulation, there is a pleasing echo of the Scottish Enlightenment and its emphasis on the tempering of emotion with more impartial rationality. For instance, despite thinking of moral judgement as mainly a matter of feelings not reason, David Hume still placed emphasis on the importance of “steady and general points of view”; meaning that we should not just blindly sympathise with what others are feeling but also apply rational discernment to get rid of prejudice and partisanship. Meanwhile, Adam Smith, another famous sentimentalist about morality, placed great emphasis not just on imaginatively simulating the feelings of others, but also upon taking the more distanced perspective of an “impartial spectator” in order to hone judgements of approval or disapproval about those feelings.

Suggested reading

Free speech is still worth fighting for

By Jonathan Sumption

Equally, though, both Hume and Smith were clear that you can only exercise reasoned judgement about the aptness or otherwise of another person’s emotional state if you are also adequately informed about what he or she is getting aerated about in the first place. And yet, this is precisely the level of information lacking these days from the average person’s perception of things like “abusiveness” or “hatred”. Instead, large numbers of citizens have been socially conditioned to take the barest presence of formerly standard features of ordinary discourse — expressed scepticism about certain popular values; unfamiliarity with middle-class speech codes; demurrals from progressive articles of faith, and so on — as automatically implying a hateful attitude, and to proceed to the nearest third-party reporting centre on that basis.

A reasonable person wouldn’t have gone along with any of this, and yet in Scotland crazily myopic and illiberal measures continue to be waved through, with stunning condescension on the part of their smug originators. In other words, there’s no use appealing to what some hypothetical reasonable person would think, when there appear to be no such people in the vicinity. They’ve probably all gone down the sex shop to report J.K. Rowling for saying homosexuality is a thing. It’s almost as if these people hate us.

But she was told her presence in the courtroom “would give a bad impression”. What the prosecuting counsel meant by that was: a jury might expect a real rape victim to be too distraught to listen to the details of the attack; by doing so, she might undermine her credibility. Instead, she sat outside the court while her elder brother relayed all the details.

Miss M had been traumatised by the performative nature of the cross-examination — the way the defence advocate (the Scottish equivalent of a barrister) “played to the jury” as he repeatedly accused her of lying. When Coxen was acquitted, via Scotland’s controversial and soon-to-be-scrapped Not Proven verdict, she was left asking herself what she might have done wrong.

“So much of it seemed to come down to the way we, as complainers, present to the jury,” she says, “the way we have to behave in order to be seen as ‘good victims’. I wondered: ‘Should I have behaved in a different way? Would the jury have seen me as a victim if I had demanded a screen?’”

Three years later, Miss M successfully brought civil proceedings against Coxen. Unlike in criminal cases, in civil courts complainers are offered a choice: between having their case decided by a jury or a sheriff. Miss M opted for a sheriff. This time, she says, she was able to sit in her own section of the court, rather than in the public gallery — and all the theatrics were gone. “The questioning style of the defence advocate in the civil case was so much better,” she says. “He had to do his job and test my evidence, but he wasn’t playing a game; he wasn’t trying to get a reaction out of me.”

A crucial difference between criminal and civil proceedings is that a prosecutor must prove the defendant’s guilt “beyond reasonable doubt”, whereas someone bringing a civil claim can succeed in proving their case if it is “more likely than not” what happened.

Nonetheless, as one of only two women in Scotland whose allegations of rape have been through both the criminal and civil process, Miss M’s experience could be regarded as a litmus test in the hostile debate currently polarising the country’s criminal justice system. It centres on a proposal — to find out what would happen if a rape trial took place without a jury.

Suggested reading

Scotland's failed #MeToo moment

By Sarah Ditum

On one side of this debate are Lady Dorrian, Scotland’s second most senior judge; the Lord Advocate, Dorothy Bain; and Rape Crisis Scotland. All of them are currently backing a pilot of juryless rape trials — proposed in the Victims, Witnesses, and Justice Reform (Scotland) Bill currently going through Parliament. On the other side of the debate is (almost all of) the rest of the legal profession: the Law Society, most KCs, and the Scottish Solicitors Bar Association (SSBA), which represents defence solicitors and has already pledged to boycott the pilot.

Those in favour of it believe some jurors allow their judgement to be influenced by “rape myths” — the myth that false allegations are common, for example, or that a delay in reporting makes a complainer less credible. They argue that defence lawyers play up to those myths — and point to the low conviction rate — 51% for rape compared to an overall conviction rate of 91% across all offences. Juryless trials, proponents contend, could provide a more effective, less adversarial process.

Those against the pilot see it as a direct attack on one of the most sacred tenets of British justice: if members of the public can be trusted to deliberate on complicated fraud cases, if they can be trusted to set aside racial or sectarian prejudices, why can’t they be trusted to disregard rape myths? They also argue that the low conviction rate is not down to rape myths but to insufficient evidence. “I have never seen anything to suggest juries don’t convict in cases where the charge has been proved beyond reasonable doubt,” says Thomas Leonard Ross KC.

“A lot of rape cases come down to the question of consent; they rest on the jury accepting the credibility of one individual over another. Both parties may be believable, but the jury is told it’s not a straight 50:50. It’s up to the Crown to prove the case. If the jurors feel they couldn’t have it on their conscience for someone to be jailed for six years on the basis of the evidence they’ve heard, they will [acquit].”

Suggested reading

The murder trial that broke me

By Julie Bindel

Ross says changes to the system mean defence advocates now face heavy restrictions, known as rape shield provisions, in what questions they can ask — to the point where material they consider significant is being deemed inadmissible. He agrees that questions about previous sexual history are not appropriate, but he says restrictions “can even include what happened in the lead-up to the alleged incident. Take a situation where a girl texted a boy earlier in the evening to suggest they meet up for sex, though she had told the police a different story. Of course she is entitled to change her mind, but, at the very least, these messages show she was not honest in her initial statement.”

Over the last 12 months, the defence lawyers’ outrage has spilled out into the media — with the most senior woman at the Scottish Bar comparing the proposal to Adolf Hitler’s scrapping of juries after the 1933 Reichstag Fire trial. That the debate has become so acrimonious can be partly explained by the context in which it is unfolding. The pilot is just one of a panoply of proposed reforms — which include scrapping the Not Proven verdict, reducing the number of jurors from 15 to 12, and setting up a specialist sexual offences court. And it coincides with an exodus of defence solicitors, after dramatic cuts in the Scottish government’s funding of legal aid.

One lawyer, who did not want to be named, pointed to the fact that criminal defence solicitors earn far less than those working for the prosecuting authority — even though the former work longer, more unsociable hours. “It’s not just that defence solicitors feel they are being screwed — although they are,” he says. “It’s the visible reality that the whole justice system is in ruins.”

So, resentful as they are about their own plight, defence solicitors may be predisposed to oppose a reform that will change the way their clients are represented — and on which, they insist, they were not properly consulted.

But the juryless rape trial pilot is also caught up in the backlash to the #MeToo movement. Some defence lawyers I spoke to believe the pendulum has already swung too far in favour of rape complainers, and that “special interest” organisations such as Rape Crisis Scotland — and, in particular, its chief executive Sandy Brindley — are pursuing a feminist agenda.

Suggested reading

Can you ever trust a jury?

By Adam King

For their part, feminist campaigners accuse the Faculty of Advocates of misogyny. They cite, for instance, its failure to adequately deal with lawyers such as Brian McConnachie KC — who in 2020 said in a text that he “might shag [Sandy Brindley], just to have something over her”.

McConnachie also sent a sexually explicit photograph of himself from the toilets of a High Court — shortly after defending a rape accused. It took three years for him to be fined £8,000 for professional misconduct. He was not suspended from practising as a lawyer or expelled from the Faculty.

There are many legitimate questions to be asked about potential juryless rape trials. It’s unsurprising though, that for some, the legal profession displays a “nothing-to-see-here” attitude that smacks of complacency.

Appearing before Holyrood’s justice committee in January, the Lord Advocate delivered a damning assessment of the experience of rape complainers: “What is happening at the moment just isn’t good enough,” said Dorothy Bain.

“All the efforts made over the years to bring in changes, such as the rape shield provisions … and supportive measures for vulnerable witnesses — none of that has shifted the dial on the basic problems: complainers’ anxiety about becoming involved in any way in the criminal justice process … and a lack of understanding and support that leaves them feeling abandoned.”

The Lord Advocate said “the ordinary adversarial approach” was not suited to sexual offence cases and referenced an appeal court judgement from 2020 — in which the complainer had been awarded damages for trauma caused by serious deficiencies in the way the trial was carried out. Scotland’s most senior judge, Lord Carloway, criticised the judge, the Crown and the Defence, adding that the woman had been subjected to repetitive, and at times irrelevant, questioning, without any intervention.

Suggested reading

Scotland's mid-life crisis

By Ruth Davidson

It was in this context that Lady Dorrian’s Review was set up, and her recommendations made. Of these, the pilot of juryless rape trials proved the most controversial. The research that informed it was contested. Analysis of the deliberations of “mock juries”, carried out by academics from Glasgow and Warwick Universities, found “considerable evidence” of jurors expressing unfounded assumptions. But a UCL study — which involved “real” jurors later completing a “rape myth” questionnaire — found that claims of bias in judging sexual offences cases were “not valid”. The two studies have been pitted against each other, though all that this contradiction demonstrates is the difficulty of gathering conclusive data when you are legally prevented from interviewing actual rape trial jurors about their actual deliberations.

Many of the details of the pilot — including its length and how it will be evaluated — are yet to be determined; but, if it is passed by Parliament, juryless rape trials will be used for all cases involving a single complainer and single accused.

The conviction rate for such cases is thought to be around 25%. Brindley, of Rape Crisis Scotland, claims this statistic shows “guilty men are regularly walking free”. She points to research from New Zealand showing that defence lawyers would opt for a jury nine times out of ten, because, when it comes to the credibility of the complainer, “it is easier to persuade a jury to entertain doubt”. This is not so very different from what Ross has told me; but while he views the caution of jurors as a crucial protection for the accused, Brindley views it as a barrier to securing justice for complainers.

Another potential benefit of the juryless rape trial would be the requirement that judges provide written “reasonings” for their decisions — something juries are not asked to do. The impact of such reasonings has already been seen in the three civil cases, in which the sheriff or judge’s explanations brought clarity and closure. “I was badly affected by not understanding why the Not Proven verdict had been given in the criminal trial,” Miss M says. The sheriff in the civil case found Coxen guilty on the balance of probabilities. “The judgement helped me understand what evidence had been considered important, and the thinking behind his decision.”

Defence lawyers on the other hand argue that judges are as likely to have unconscious biases as jurors — perhaps more so, given the narrow and socially-conservative demographic from which they are drawn. This is something that worries some complainers too. “The majority of judges are middle-aged, privately-educated men,” defence solicitor Matthew McGovern says. “This is significant when it comes to the type of single complainer/single accused rape cases the pilot is seeking to address, because those types of nights out, where there is alcohol and drugs consumption, are far removed from the lives judges have lived.”

Of even greater concern to McGovern, who is on the SSBA committee, is the possibility the pilot will place undue pressure on judges to return guilty verdicts. He believes this pressure would come not just from politicians — who might measure the success or failure of the pilot by its effect on the conviction rate — but also from public opinion, via the media.

“Juries are anonymous,” McGovern says. “Judges, on the other hand, are high-profile figures with accountability, but no right of reply. If they acquit ‘too many’ people, there will be FOI requests and front-page stories.

“I’m not suggesting those judges will be sitting there with a calculator working out how many people they should acquit and how many they should convict; but it will become an unconscious bias, which, ironically, is the very thing the pilot is seeking to address.”

Moreover, a lack of financial capacity means Scotland’s proposed juryless rape trials would be presided over by a single judge, rather than the panel of judges adopted in other jurisdictions that have dispensed with juries — most recently France. Simon di Rollo KC, who represented Miss M at her civil case, is one of the few advocates to broadly support a time-limited pilot — yet even he thinks a single judge set-up is less than ideal. “We all have our idiosyncrasies, and one person won’t necessarily spot everything,” he says. “The opportunity to discuss [the case] would obviously improve the decision-making process.”

Suggested reading

Scotland deserves better than this circus

By Darren 'Loki' McGarvey

With the Law Commission of England and Wales also proposing the introduction of juryless rape trials, the progress of the Victims, Witnesses, and Justice Reform (Scotland) Bill is being closely followed south of the border as well. Whether the pilot actually happens will depend at least in part on the Scottish government’s willingness to take on the SSBA — which is bent on a showdown. “No client of McGovern Reid will ever be exploited as part of a social experiment to satisfy the demands of the Special Interest Groups,” McGovern’s pinned tweet says.

“I think this is the hill [defence lawyers] are going to die on,” says Brindley. “You have to ask yourself what it is that they are scared of? Do they not trust judges to be able to evaluate evidence or is it that they trust judges too much to evaluate evidence and they worry there will be fewer acquittals?”

McGovern is clear his main fear is that the last remaining protections for his clients will be removed. He also fears the politicisation of the justice system will lead us into dark places. He says you only have to look at America to see what’s at stake: “Trump has politicised and weaponised the entire system; only anonymous juries have stood up to him.”

When I ask him if sabotaging a pilot passed by the Scottish Parliament would, in itself, be undemocratic, he insists the opposite is true. “First of all, [defence lawyers] are not compelled to try to make the best of what we consider to be poor legislation,” he says. “But also, we have concerns about the politicisation of the judiciary undermining the rights of ordinary citizens, so we think we are protecting democracy.”

Judge-only rape trials have the potential to forever change the Scottish legal system. Once juries are no longer inviolable, what’s to stop them being removed from other types of trials, such as those involving domestic violence, in which many of the same arguments would apply? No wonder the legal profession is so exercised. And yet, perhaps they do hold the answer to the problem Bain identified: the reluctance of many rape complainers to come forward, and the retraumatisation of those who do. We won’t know, unless the pilot goes ahead.

“Everyone keeps saying it’s not a fair trial without a jury, but I didn’t feel I got get a fair trial with a jury,” Miss M says. “When people say the name of the advocate that cross-examined me in the criminal trial it takes my breath away more than when they say ‘Stephen Coxen’.

“I know how much better the civil case, without the theatrics, was. It feels ridiculous that some lawyers aren’t willing to at least give the pilot a go.”

But there is a further, non-criminal, charge against both characters: mendacity. In their defence, it went with the job. The project of Scottish nationalism has always demanded that its leaders lie, or at least obfuscate, or grossly exaggerate. Sturgeon, who resigned (on flimsy grounds) as First Minister of Scotland a year ago today, was even better at that than her mentor. While he has always projected something of a wide-boy public persona, she leant on a reputation for rectitude, control and dedication to a great cause.

Since Sturgeon’s resignation, and his victory in the subsequent leadership contest, Humza Yousaf has attracted the same accusation — only without the period of public popularity his two predecessors enjoyed. And this is inextricable from the movement all three represent: their personal and political calamities are the products of an integral deceit at the heart of the independence project.

This first became glaringly apparent with Salmond’s original tilt at secession in 2014. In his reshaping of the SNP, he used (or abused) his economist’s training to produce a 667-page document which claimed that Scotland, the region with the highest public spending in Britain, could single-handedly accelerate to Scandinavian levels of child and maternal care (without Scandinavian levels of tax). This shaky mound of assertions was then blown apart when, in the following year, the oil price crashed from $110 to $50 a barrel and the independence referendum was spurned by a majority of 55%. Without the economic ballast of the former and democratic will of the latter, Scottish nationalism seemed a dead scheme, buried beneath a pile of half-truths.

Suggested Reading

Scotland deserves better than this circus

By Graham Robb

Salmond resigned and Sturgeon slipped into his place. She was left with the job of sustaining confidence in the vision of independence when the oil price fall translated into a “black hole” in Scottish revenue and expenditure of £18.6 billion. Had independence won, as the then leader of the Conservative opposition Ruth Davidson pointed out, it would have meant vast cuts to every public service. Faced with a propaganda disaster, the new First Minister resorted to windy rhetoric: “I believe and always will believe that the best way forward is to be in charge of our own resources, so we don’t have to be subject to the kind of cuts coming at us from the UK government, but instead could be masters of our own destiny.”

This response, ignoring facts in favour of faith, was in part the fruit of Sturgeon’s apprenticeship to Salmond. And given her own steely structure of personal commitment — secular, yet infused with a Calvinist rectitude — it was to be Sturgeon’s sword and shield through years of leadership. Thus when, following a Brexit that had the support of only a third of Scottish voters, she thickly underscored what the loss of membership meant to Scotland. Brexit became a way to showcase, as in one March 2021 speech, Scotland’s national if not actual autonomy: “… a country and not a region of a unitary state. Scotland’s position is therefore unique — a country, in a voluntary union, which has been removed from the EU against the will of the majority who live here.”

Nothing there of the difficulty, maybe impossibility, of re-joining the Union while keeping sterling (as the large majority of Scots wish) or of refusing to join the euro — as all new entrants must. Nor was there any mention of the necessary erection of a trade border between Scotland and the rest of the UK. Sturgeon always waved away such realities, pointing instead to the independence of other “small” countries like Ireland, Finland and Denmark. The latter is a constant comfort blanket for SNP leaders: Sturgeon opened the Scottish government’s Nordic Office in Copenhagen in August 2022, one of a chain of such centres designed to give the impression that Scotland is already a nation with a foreign policy. To serve such a vanity, when denied a meeting with Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, the First Minister submitted herself to a brief early morning photo opportunity with a grim-looking Jeppe Kofod, then Foreign Minister. The cosmetic appearance of international status trumped realpolitik.

Sturgeon’s energetic self-righteousness and authoritarian governing style sustained her and her party — until, on 15 February 2023, she resigned, citing weariness and a realisation that the leader’s post “can only be done, by anyone, for so long”. It was a thin rationalisation of departure by one so dedicated to the goals and power of her office. But in her subsequent public appearances, she has seemed overtaken by fatigue. Appearing for five hours at the Covid Inquiry in January, her self-command was tested by a barrage of questions from Jamie Dawson KC, both on her reluctance to retain email and other messages among her colleagues, and on the possibility she used her daily media appearances to “politicise” the lockdown — something which this most political of politicians firmly denied.

More from this author

2024 is the year of the New Right

By John Lloyd

She was brought to tears at times: whether they were involuntary or staged was much discussed. The breakdowns likely had elements of both. She was, after all, always aware of the need to present herself as the unsleeping leader of her afflicted people, even as she admitted to an overly-delayed lockdown and Scotland showed the highest rate of Covid-related deaths in care homes.

It was a difficult return to political life, but her own successor and protégé has fared even worse. Humza Yousaf has copied Sturgeon in feeling “never really… comfortable” with the word “national” in the party’s name (she had found the word “hugely problematic”). But, little more than an epigone, he proves daily that he has none of her force.

Instead, he makes absurd mathematical leaps: where Sturgeon had the idea that instant negotiations on independence with the British government should begin when a majority of votes were cast for the SNP, Yousaf has proposed that a majority of seats in the UK parliament — where Scotland has 57 seats — would serve as a trigger for an attempted secession. Yet polling in October found only 13% of voters agreed that the SNP’s winning a majority of seats was a mandate, and only 15% supported the “most seats” proposal.

Yousaf has inherited a party that has proved itself unable to fulfil its only policy — secession — while neglecting its other responsibilities. Health, Yousaf’s responsibility before becoming leader, is in deeper crisis than in England. In education, once the pride of all Scottish classes, the decline represents a national catastrophe.

Still, unionists cannot rejoice. Support for the SNP has declined steadily — it is now level with a resurgent Labour Party — but support for secession remains high, in most polls only slightly below 50%. The aspiration of independence has a positive image, and it has young legs — Scots born after the mid-Eighties are more than twice as likely to favour secession than those born in the late Forties or earlier. Graduates, once less inclined towards independence, now support it in droves. Meanwhile, this constituency are repulsed by the party most associated with unionism: the Conservatives.

This social-ideological feat accomplished by Salmond and Sturgeon has meant that Scots’ politics have become very considerably dislodged from material issues — money, jobs, public services — to alight on the more fashionable bases of identity and cosmopolitanism. But again this is an illusion. The SNP, as populist in its policies and propaganda as any party in Europe, might claim a principled difference from conservative England for its liberal views on immigration, gender, the EU and public spending. But it has many fewer immigrants per head than England, and its unpopular attempt to allow men claiming to have changed gender to be housed in women’s prisons failed. The SNP is a liberal vanguard atop a conservative nation.

And this was further revealed in the leadership contest Yousaf fought a year ago. He won narrowly, securing 52.1% to Kate Forbes’s 47.9%. But her aggressive scrutiny of his ministerial record considerably exposed the SNP’s general mediocrity: “You were a transport minister and the trains were never on time, when you were justice secretary the police were stretched to breaking point, and now as health minister we’ve got record high waiting times.” Her religion — she is a member of the doctrinally strict Free Church of Scotland — was held up by Yousaf’s supporters as a threat to the party’s liberal positions on gender and other matters. (Yousaf, a Muslim with as many non-liberal commandments to obey, was not so challenged.) But the fact that she came so close to winning does indicate a strain of conservatism running through the party, as well as some internal doubts about its achievements in government.

Suggested reading

Scotland deserves better than this circus

By Darren 'Loki' McGarvey

A performative politics — developed by two great political performers, Salmond and Sturgeon — has for the moment triumphed in a Scotland whose older self-image as a country of rational, enlightened and prudent citizens has been allowed to lapse. This gives the unionist forces a large problem — but possibly also an opening, especially for the Labour Party. The more that Scotland’s liberal, credentialed classes become dominant in nationalism, the more the material interests of the majority, especially the working- and lower-middle classes, will be ignored. A party which could mobilise the latter, and offer a fresh and genuine image of national renaissance, could benefit greatly from SNP decline.

For now though, while Yousaf’s lacklustre leadership will damage the SNP, it has so far not damaged its cause. He has the capacity of his predecessors to protect himself with false and meaningless rhetoric, covering up the chasm where policy delivery should be. And that’s because he lives in the virtual world Salmond and Sturgeon created, where a country only needs to burst the bonds of UK oppression to become Denmark. They had the rhetorical energy to sustain the illusion: he is unlikely to develop it further. Yet as long as nationalism still endures, someone else — Kate Forbes perhaps, a very Christian soldier — could emerge to pick up the standard, and take it onward as another false promise to an already wounded nation.

In those days we didn’t worry about cultural appropriation. But now I can’t help but think of one academic’s objection to Nancy Pelosi posing in a traditional Ghanaian fabric as a tribute to George Floyd: “My ancestors did not invent Kente cloth for them to be worn by publicity (obsessed) politicians as ‘activism’ in 2020.” But what if you’re wearing someone else’s national dress just because you like the pretty pattern? Is that worse? Does tartan not count, because Scots are insufficiently oppressed?

Regardless, back in the day it never occurred to me to wonder whether my ancestors would have approved of the kilted Canadian. Now, I suspect that they wouldn’t have given a shit.

I certainly didn’t. But perhaps I was relaxed about the pseudo-Scotsman because I knew that the whole “ancient tradition” of clan tartans was itself a fiction. I still remember the shock and disbelief I felt 30 years ago, when one of my lecturers at the University of Edinburgh explained that Walter Scott had cooked it up for a pageant celebrating King George IV’s visit to Scotland in 1822. Having been raised in the myth myself, it seemed incredible that so fundamental a symbol of Scotland could be at once so recent, and so fake. It being St Andrew’s Day today, the story bears retelling.

George IV was the first British king to travel north of the border in almost 200 years. At the time, the Edinburgh-born Scott’s historical novels were bestsellers, and the monarch was a fan. So, Scott was tasked with making him feel welcome. But the festival he organised owed far more to his imagination than historic reality. In it, representatives of Scottish clans cosplayed as highlanders — wearing their supposedly traditional and unique clan tartans.

Scott didn’t make it all up out of nothing, of course. Highlanders had worn tartan, and there were regional variations, but not a strict family taxonomy. And following the decisive defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s highlander army at the Battle of Culloden in 1746, tartan was banned for 40 years. By the time the ban was lifted, highlanders had got used to wearing the same kind of clothes that lowland Scots wore, which were very similar to the kind of clothes that English people wore.

More from this author

Scotland has lost its sense of humour

By Daniel Kalder

Nostalgia for the past remained, however. But it was commerce that revived tartan. In the early 19th century, a family of entrepreneurial merchant weavers in Edinburgh started a successful business matching tartans to clans, reinventing old designs or offering entirely new ones for “chieftains”. Scott dialled this polite fiction up to 11 — and tartan was established as one of the ultra-symbols of Scotland.

Some baulked at the artifice of it all. One Edinburgh resident complained that Scott had “ridiculously made us appear to be a nation of Highlanders, and the bagpipe and the tartan are the order of the day”. His own son-in-law referred to it as a “hallucination”. But many embraced Scott’s romantic retconning of history. The king himself was delighted to claim his Scottish roots, and strut about in a Royal Stuart tartan mini-kilt and pink tights. Lowlanders began dressing in the colours of imaginary highlanders and the tartan biscuit tin was born. Two decades later, Queen Victoria’s German consort Prince Albert decked out Balmoral as a kitsch Celtic fantasia and designed his own tartan.

Since the days of Scott, tartan has been inextricably bound with a desire to sell Scotland to the rest of the world. Walk down Edinburgh’s Royal Mile today and you will see tartan scarves, tartan skirts, tartan cardigans, tartan shortbread tins, tartan bonnets and, of course, tartan kilts. The target audience for this abundance of tradition is not local; it is the visitor looking to take something “authentic” home. If a Scot wears tartan, more likely than not it’s for a wedding.

And yet, when Scots emigrate abroad, it is Scott’s “hallucination” that endures after all memory of the homeland has faded. A 14” x 14” square of tartan made it to the moon three years before The Bible did because astronaut Alan Bean, whose Scottish ancestor had left the motherland in the mid-17th century, took a sample of the Clan MacBean for a spin in his Lunar Excursion Module in 1969. North Carolina’s Scottish Tartans Museum, in business since 1988, recently celebrated a 20-year extension on its lease. And while the Highland Games in Salado, Texas, can be a confused and confusing affair — I recall getting mildly irritated at all the songs about Irish whiskey and fields of emerald green — the Farquhars and the Colquhouns certainly knew their tartans, as did all the other representatives of the clans, proud standard bearers of an ancient tradition that dates all the way back to 50 years after the US itself was invented.

Suggested reading

Scottish nationalists can't bear reality

By Graham Robb

Personally, I prefer it when Americans invent their own tartans, with no connection to Scott’s highlander mythology whatsoever. These days, 27 states have their own tartan, including Texas, California, Hawaii and Rhode Island. USA Kilts (est. 2003) offer the American Dream tartan, which features 76 blue threads for the year 1776, 13 red stripes for the original colonies and a gold stripe as a reference to the “golden door” mentioned in the poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty.

An exhibition currently running at the V&A in Dundee highlights just how fluid tartan can be. On display are 300 exhibits from around the world, selected to demonstrate that the grid design is “open to infinite possibility”. Tartan, says the museum curator Mhairi Maxwell, is “a global phenomenon, expressing diverse ideas of belonging, kinship, nationalism, unity and resistance”. Indeed, it periodically slips loose of its moorings and acquires new meanings. When punks adopted tartan as an anti-establishment symbol in the Seventies, it was not the highland clearances that they were railing against. When Japanese schoolgirls wear short tartan skirts, they are not evoking the spirit of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobite rebellion.

In Scotland, too, people continue to invent tartans, now free of clan-connections. Recent years have seen a flourishing of designs. There is a Sikh tartan, commissioned by Gary Singh, a licensed grocer from Edinburgh. Since 2020 we have been blessed with not one but two tartans dedicated to climate change —  the Climate Emergency tartan and COP26 — A New Dawn. In 2017, the Hunter Foundation commissioned the Obama Family tartan to commemorate the celebrated podcaster’s golfing holiday in Saint Andrews. The year before that, the Russian Consulate in Edinburgh commissioned the rather more sombre Second World War-themed Russian Arctic Convoy tartan, though whether anyone is likely to wear it in the current political climate seems doubtful. There is also a “Homeless” tartan to promote the plight of homeless people, and a Trump tartan which was designed to decorate the Trump International Golf Links in Aberdeenshire.

Suggested reading

Scotland deserves better than this circus

By Darren 'Loki' McGarvey

Tartan is not the only national signifier that frequently becomes detached from what it once signified. The Union Jack exists both as national flag and as global style icon, and its latter status owes much more to the music, films and fashions of the Sixties than it does to King James VI’s design sense. The Guy Fawkes mask transcended its historic origins through V for Vendetta, and has since become a free-floating symbol of revolt (with Warner Brothers collecting a royalty for each mask sold). And of course, there are countless other, non-British examples. Russian matryoshka dolls originated in Japan, while Mexico City’s Day of the Dead parade was inspired by a scene in a James Bond film. Entire national cultures were confected by Stalin and imposed upon Central Asia. Today, the successor states decide which bits of those Soviet identities they wish to keep, and which to discard.

Though unusually flexible, tartan is therefore typical of national symbols. Sir Walter Scott’s vision of Scottish tradition may have been a hallucination, but what do you call a hallucination when it lasts for two centuries and engulfs the world, evolving along the way? This Saint Andrew’s Day, I propose that we recognise him as the patron saint of culture-as-hallucination, of high artifice and symbolic mutability. Let the example of tartan demonstrate an alternative, better pathway for those who would seek to ring fence “tradition” and put a “private property” sign on culture. That approach leads to the smallness of the biscuit tin, and the prison house of “heritage”. A robust culture is attained through fantasy, through making things up — and continuing to make things up.

This week, that thing was the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election. A two-horse race between the SNP and Labour, the result of which was supposed to offer important clues as to the direction of political travel both north and south of the border. Or at least, that’s what all the commentators and analysts were saying.

They know that the only way Labour can win a significant majority at the next UK general election is if a sizeable chunk of Scotland flips from yellow to red. And Rutherglen and Hamilton West had done exactly that on three occasions since 2010, which is why the SNP and Labour were on a war-footing there long before disgraced MP Margret Ferrier was recalled and then ousted for breaching Covid rules in 2020. Yesterday, there was a 20.4 percentage point swing back to Labour.

The two politicians fighting it out were the SNP’s Katy Loudon and Labour’s Michael Shanks. They are young and energetic. And even though relatively unseasoned, it is clear that each has already acquired the necessary affectations to bullshit their way through a live political debate. So rather than a battle of ideas, during their television debates we saw a battle of the brands fought with all the authenticity of a used-car salesman gesturing towards a smoking electric car, assuring you that “it’s a great little runner”.

We had Loudon, a South Lanarkshire councillor since 2017, pressing Shanks on his change of heart over Brexit and the two-child cap, which places not only him but Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar out of step with Keir Starmer. And she accused Labour of flip-flopping on its commitments, which might have landed more powerfully if only her party, in government now for longer than the Tories, were not also serial flip-floppers.

More from this author

Scotland's poor are left to die

By Darren 'Loki' McGarvey

And then we had Shanks, delivering political platitudes and then failing to press Loudon on her party’s indecision over arts funding, free school meals for all kids, abolition of the council tax, and its position on nuclear weapons. He then turned on her for supporting tax hikes in a cost-of-living crisis, knowing perfectly well that the hikes would be on high earners, living in the most valuable properties — the sort of progressive taxation you’d expect a Labour up-and-comer to support.

What was utterly lacking was anything specific about the actual constituency. The whole campaign has been an exhibition of nervous insincerity. The candidates know what’s at stake; they know they’ve been pulled in off the bench in the 80th minute in the wider war between the SNP and Labour. The sheer volume of heavy-hitters who have made cameo appearances to bolster both campaigns speaks to the height of the stakes here — and to the painful truth at the heart of this by-election: the most deprived locals are merely useful pawns in a tribal game.

Swathes of South Lanarkshire — the local authority in which a decent chunk of this constituency sits — are unglamorous, grey-washed urban purgatories rendered nondescript by post-industrial malaise. Maybe that’s a little harsh. We have some wonderful partially closed Sixties swimming pools.

Poor health and poverty are also embedded across this part of the country. Three years ago, South Lanarkshire Council published public health statistics that didn’t make comfortable reading: two in three people were deemed overweight. One in three was obese. Just 19% of babies were exclusively breastfed — significantly lower than the Scottish average of 27% — and around 20% of children lived in poverty. Out of a population of over 300,000, 41,000 were income-deprived. And the poorest residents of Rutherglen and Cambuslang — two areas which fall within this well-publicised contest – were, at that time, regarded as among the unhealthiest in Scotland.

Some will argue that’s because of their poor choices. But what choices do they have when their community consists of too much traffic on too few rush-hour expressways connecting rundown retail parks to gambling facilities, charity shops and junk food outlets?

The above statistics were published before Covid. Since then, every metric by which inequality is measured is flashing red. We have bouncers on the doors of Tesco Express. Security tags on baby food. And more food banks than we have McDonald’s, all while a billionaire class enters a new space race and no politician has yet suggested taxing them upon re-entry. On the plus side, energy prices are now so high the Tories can only afford to gaslight us for another four months.

Given the level of media interest in Rutherglen and Hamilton West, the scale of political campaigning, and the partisan chatter on social media, the casual onlooker would be forgiven for thinking the contest is of great material significance to local people. They’d be wrong.

This wasn’t about Rutherglen and Hamilton West. This by-election was both a progress report on First Minister Humza Yousaf’s wobbly early spell in Scotland’s top job, and a litmus test for how a resurgent Labour may fare at the next UK election. Pundits obsessed over possible turnout: would SNP voters stay home, unenthused by the lack of movement on indyref2? Or worse still, would more moderate pro-indy supporters sense a chance to oust the Tories and, perhaps worse than staying home, vote Labour. What would become of the Tory and Lib-Dem vote, which, if combined, is significant enough to swing the result if deployed tactically? And what do Jackie Ballie, Angus Robertson, Keir Starmer and Fiona Hyslop think of it all? Utterly riveting stuff.

More from this author

Scotland's drug shame

By Darren 'Loki' McGarvey

This was politics at its worst. There were no big ideas here. No grand visions. Even the insults rang hollow. The reason for this is simple: all that separates these two broadly progressive parties are their respective positions on constitutional issues which grow less salient by day — yet they must engage in the charade that there are profound differences.

According to the SNP, Labour are just the same as the Tories. Labour, meanwhile, wants us to believe the SNP are not the same as the Tories — they’re worse. This level of debate is worryingly disingenuous. Either these people actually believe the pish they talk — or they’re so cynical they willingly talk pish they do not believe. You would find more consistency of logic on the stands of a local football stadium. Yes, it’s politics. Yes, there are forces at play which constrain political discourse in ways that politicians cannot always control. But does it all have to be so tedious and predictable and insincere?

You can really see the draw of becoming a political diehard. Of nailing your colours to the mast and warring till the bitter end. It’s a far simpler existence. You train your eyes and ears for the errors of others, while remaining blind to your own. Behind the impressive professional facades both parties project, what we see are flawed, embittered, manipulative and often quite delusional people. There’s no craft, no skill, and no courage. Just both sides constantly trying to pin things on their opponent that they themselves have been guilty of in the past, or worse, are actively participating in as they speak.

Take the tit-for-tat over public services. The very day Scottish Labour talked up rumours of closures to local police stations, including three in Rutherglen and Hamilton West, blaming SNP cuts, the Labour-controlled council in neighbouring North Lanarkshire was forced into an embarrassing U-turn following a backlash to its planned closure of no less than 39 cultural and leisure facilities. Labour insisted the by-election was a mini-referendum on two failed governments at Holyrood and Westminster — but Labour is the party in control of both this constituency’s councils. Whether centrally controlling their parties, marginalising critical voices, or announcing policies they have no intention of actually implementing for fleeting traction in the press, the idea that one of these political shitshows has a moral high ground above the other is utterly laughable.

It suits both the SNP and Labour to portray themselves as diametrically opposed, but they’re two flaps of the same fanny. Most of us see clearly that these apparently rival factions are variants of the same essential strain of managerial centrism — both holding the belief that you can radically change society without doing or saying anything radical.

Suggested reading

Scottish nationalism is fuelled by resentment

By Kathleen Stock

Anas Sarwar, while steering Scottish Labour assuredly through some choppy political waters, claims Scotland needs fundamental change and says he can provide it. But I’ve looked up “fundamental” in the dictionary and that doesn’t match his actions. As far as I know, he has been out chapping doors for days in the plusher parts of the contested constituency, warning those comfortable homeowners cloistered around the best-performing schools that the SNP plans to punish them by raising their council tax to something approaching fair. This, from the same Labour Party that simultaneously lambasts the SNP for failing to reform local taxation after 16 years in government.

Their campaign has involved walking the classic centrist tightrope of promising action to the poorest on poverty, while keeping the middle-class happy with the sort of perks that only entrench the inequality. Scottish Labour needs to attract the kind of people who are not worrying about multi-morbidity, or two-week waits for GP appointments, or the stigma of food poverty, or the two-child benefit cap. Being on the right side of Scotland’s educational attainment gap, and a world away from the drug death crisis, voters of this ilk, while certainly feeling the cost-of-living pinch, are not exactly hard-up. And if they vote Labour, they’ll expect something in return. They’ll expect the various mechanisms by which opportunity is distributed blindly upward to be maintained and expanded.

Conversely, the SNP is paying the price for a decade spent playing the same game. Their problems run deeper than Yousaf being less popular than predecessor Nicola Sturgeon. The tragedy is that at precisely the moment where Yousaf could legitimately claim to have moved even further to the Left than ever before — going toe-to-toe with landlords over short-term lets, pioneering child poverty payment, nationalising Scotrail and abolishing peak fares — their own base is beginning to lose interest. People are so numb after years of political capital being blown on the pretence that another referendum was imminent that, even though the SNP seems finally to be using devolved power to make a difference — safe consumption rooms, progressive taxation, and at some point in the near future, a Scottish Welfare System — many simply shrug when these achievements are pointed out.

The biggest problem both parties have, even if they end up in power at the same time, is that they are now political hostages to their own bullshit. Namely, the volatile constitutional issues of Brexit and Independence in which they are now, in their own ways, enmeshed, yet forbidden by electoral imperative from speaking honestly about.

Suggested reading

Rural Scotland is dying of cold

By Cal Flyn

The SNP has known for a long time that IndyRef2 will not happen soon — even the movement’s most gung-ho campaigners are placing the next referendum a firm 10 years away — yet it has engaged in the charade that it was just around the corner. Meanwhile, the party insists that because Scotland voted to Remain, we’ve been torn out of a lucrative political and economic union against our will, failing to see the contradiction at the heart of their campaign to take Scotland out of the UK without evidence that a majority of Scots actually want this to happen. The SNP wants us to believe two contradictory ideas at the same time: that Brexit is harmful to Scotland and that Independence won’t be (I’m all for indy, but I’m also realistic about the challenges it will bring).

These intellectual gymnastics are mocked and mirrored by Labour. Starmer, Sarwar and the rest of them must pretend Brexit is settled and that the shambles of leaving the EU in the hardest possible fashion has had little bearing on the UK’s dire economic fortunes — even though they understand only too well that such a tumultuous exit from the Single Market has made the very people who voted for it poorer. But Scottish Labour must also talk tough on independence to fend off the threat of the Scottish Tories, while knowing full well that the Scottish Government will always be severely constrained in the progress it can make when key issues such as immigration, labour laws and most taxes remain the preserve of London politicians.

More from this author

My social mobility shame

By Darren 'Loki' McGarvey

Some might be relieved that constitutional issues were not as prominent in this by-election, but it is clear that, without the mobilising prospect of a rematch on either Brexit or a second independence referendum, Labour and the SNP will return to their comfort zones, taking their loyal bases for granted, pricing-in working class apathy, and targeting middle-class moderates whose political convictions could be written on the back of a fag packet — leaving space for all 228 lines of “Tam o’ Shanter”.

The only people actually buying what the politicians are selling are devout party activists, students yet to be disabused of their naivety, partisan hacks who study politics the way your Auntie Betty studies Emmerdale, and middle-class moderates who’ll swallow any old, reheated pish for stable house prices and a quiet two-driveway life. Nobody else gives a shit. If we can be bothered, we turn up on polling day, we hold our noses, and we vote for whichever party we believe is the least terrible option that year.

Coincidentally, the scepticism many Scots feel when London journos take a sudden interest in our affairs is precisely the scepticism many in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West constituency probably feel about the preening top-flight Scottish politicians chewing scenery in the run-up to the by-election. Working-class people here are mere beads on an abacus, their votes appropriated for some national narrative that doesn’t serve them. Today, the travelling political circus will pack up and leave without a backward glance.

This stunningly beautiful archipelago off the north-easternmost tip of Scotland is also supposed to be the “happiest place in Britain”. And yet all is not well. On Tuesday, with a show of a dozen or so hands, the islands’ local council gave its support for “alternative forms of governance”, which could reframe its relationship with Westminster in line with crown dependencies such as Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man, or overseas territories like the Falklands. It could attempt to go even further, declaring its independence and reviving its historic links with Norway to becoming a self-governing territory, like the Faroe Islands, an autonomous region of Denmark.

While discussions about going back to their Scandinavian roots are at the exploratory stage — even newspapers haven’t yet settled on whether such a move should be called “Orxit”, “Orkxit” or “Orkexit” — Orcadians seem to be sold on the idea. Reasons for the disgruntlement with Westminster and Holyrood are various, but include under-subsidised ferry fares, a miserly dividend from four decades of North Sea oil exploration and underinvestment by central governments into potentially lucrative wind power projects. As Scotland’s smallest council, it also receives hundreds of pounds less per person than the others.

Certainly, Orkney — and Shetland to its north — is distinct from the rest of the United Kingdom. Geographically closer to Oslo than Edinburgh, the islands retain a strong Nordic character, even though they were last under Norwegian and Danish control in 1472. And life on the archipelago certainly has its upsides. It has good schools, affordable houses, clean air and abundance of space, but its winning edge is a form of Scandinavian communitarianism that instils a profound sense of safety and social trust among its 23,000 residents.

Here, crime is rare — the sort of place where farm equipment is shared and a builder’s yard won’t charge you for half a bag of sand. Nearly 40 years ago, my parents bought a property overlooking Scapa Flow which, with a few short intermissions, had been held by our wider family for centuries. On requesting the door key, the estate agent replied that one didn’t exist. (Despite soaring local house prices, which rose 8.5% last year, the average cost of a property on Orkney is just £221,000.)

“Bleak” is a word only our opponents use to describe the place. True, the first view of the high cliffs and red sandstone of Hoy can seem forbidding. Frightening even, particularly if shrouded in sea fret. And the weather in the Northern Isles is changeable, and best described in quantitative terms. The total absence of trees can upset people — but Orcadians reply, I think correctly, that they would only spoil the view.

Suggested reading

The Viking war on woke

By Dominic Sandbrook

It is a quirk of medieval history that the Orkneys — for centuries, a central hinge in a Nordic chain linking Scandinavia with Iceland and Greenland — ever found themselves to be a peripheral province of Scotland. Last month, while raising the prospect of greater autonomy, financial security and economic opportunity for his islands, James Stockan, leader of the Orkney Island Council, noted that “we were part of the Norse kingdom for much longer than we were part of the United Kingdom”. And Stockan believes the islands are being “failed dreadfully”. He recently told BBC Scotland: “The funding we get from the Scottish government is significantly less per head than Shetland and the Western Isles to run the same services — we can’t go on as we are.”

Scotland’s acquisition of Orkney in 1472 was accidental. In 1468, the daughter of King Christian I of Norway and Denmark was betrothed to King James III of Scotland. The marriage treaty promised a dowry of 60,000 Rhenish Florins, but the impoverished Nordic King didn’t have this sum immediately to hand. Consequently, the archipelagos of Orkney and Shetland were pawned to Scotland with the intention of being later redeemed once the cash could be found. Alas, this never happened — a tragic turn for Orkney, which found itself a peripheral province of Scotland. Formal sovereignty was never transferred, and historians have long made the case that Scotland holds Orkney and Shetland in pledge rather than by sovereign right. To this day, Orcadians continue to make this point.

Would Orkney fit back into the Norse realm? Well, Orcadians do wear their Viking heritage with great pride. Norn, the local language of Orkney and similar to Icelandic and Faroese, was gradually replaced by Scots, but survived on the outer islands until the late 1700s. The modern Orkney dialect has a noticeable “sing-song” Scandinavian quality, characterised by a rising intonation at the end of a word (known as “the post-stressed syllable”).

Suggested reading

Rural Scotland is dying of cold

By Cal Flyn

The island also enjoys a strong sense of local patriotism and a separateness to the rest of Scotland. Orcadian poet Edwin Muir once infamously disparaged Scotland as “a sham nation”. In his History of Orkney of the late 1700s, George Low noted that Orcadians were reserved in their sentiments, honest in their dealings with one another, but “studious to conceal their gains”, while also being tenacious in their preservation of old customs. A politeness and civility also seems to pervade the islands, one now sadly absent in many other parts of Britain.

By modern standards, Orkney remains basically monocultural. Of course, the very idea might seem impolite and déclassé in a society where diversity is now promoted as a foundational value. For progressives, monocultures seem unacceptable, exclusionary things, in need of correction. However, Orkney’s monocultural strength makes it far easier for incomers to fit in. Unlike most of Britain, Orcadians set a cultural tone into which new arrivals can assimilate. The setting of clear rules and norms make it easier for outsiders to find a place in the community. It’s not uncommon for settlers from the south, called ferry-loupers, to give their Orkney-born children names such as Erland, Thorfinn and Mangus.

As large states like Britain become increasingly divided, I can see the attraction to Orcadians of re-uniting with their Nordic brethren. There’s a reason the UK government would resist these ideas out of hand though. The oil might be running out, but Orkney played a pivotal part in Britain’s naval operations in both world wars. It was in Scapa Flow that naval aviation was born in 1917, when Squadron Commander Edwin Harris Dunning first landed an aircraft on a moving ship at sea. The loss of the Northern Isles would be a serious strategic loss to the United Kingdom.

While it is difficult to imagine any circumstances in which Orkney would be permitted to leave — only last week, the Prime Minister’s official spokeswoman said: “There is no mechanism for the conferral of crown dependency or overseas territory status on any part of the UK” — an exit from a newly independent Scotland would seem much more promising. After all, if arguments of history and self-determination are ever to grant independence to Scotland, the very same would apply to Orkney. And this is where an even more practical issue would emerge: resources. A fledgling independent Scotland would struggle to balance its budget. Indeed, it may even be uncertain of how to pay its pensions — and in what currency? Without the unwarranted fiscal largesse of the Barnett formula, used to calculate the overall level of funding allocated by the UK Treasury to devolved governments, so-called “Highland economics” would be brutally applied by Holyrood.

Suggested reading

Denmark is a Right-wing paradise

By Maurice Frank

It is in these circumstances that the prospect of self-governing status, similar to that enjoyed by the Faroe Islands, might suddenly suit Orkney very nicely. Who wouldn’t wish to be part of a Norwegian state that boasts a $1.4 trillion sovereign wealth fund?

Orcadians are acutely aware from their surroundings that kingdoms rise and kingdoms fall and that political jurisdictions are transitory. The archipelago resembles a pin cushion of archeological sites spanning from the 5,000-year-old Neolithic Stones of Stenness to Pictish brochs from 200 BC, to Viking drinking halls from a mere thousand years ago. What an irony it would be if an Orkney earldom lost to Norway in 1472 through lack of money was lost centuries later by Scotland for the very same reason.

In the late Iron Age, the Debatable Land was a remarkably stable buffer zone between three Celtic tribes. It survived as an independent territory until the mid-16th century, when it became the last part of Great Britain to be brought under the control of a state. In what now seems an impressive act of international cooperation, the Debatable Land was divided equally between Scotland and England. The English deported the most troublesome inhabitants of their half to Ireland; the Scots enlisted a wily local warlord who helpfully hanged, drowned, burned, denuded and dismembered the autarkic groups that made up the local population.

I published a book about this neglected relic of a self-governing British statelet just in time to include the battle for Scottish independence and its aftermath. It gave the normally genteel process of promoting a book a missionary thrill. It also had the strange effect of fictionalising the place I call home. The ideology of nationalism requires a drastic compression and repackaging of the mass of people, geography and history that constitutes a nation. It politicises the very landscape, trivialises local ways of life and promotes ignorance of the country it purports to represent.

As the Manchester-born son of Scottish parents, I knew all about English ignorance of Scotland. Several visitors to our home on the border shared their surprise at discovering that Carlisle is not in Scotland and that Hadrian’s Wall is not the national border. I could understand the Scots’ frustration with oblivious, snooty, Scots-baiting politicians and commentators (the kind who attached sub-racist labels such as “dour”, “canny” and “thrifty” to an entire population). But I was surprised to find similar ignorance in Scotland.

On a rainy night in the spring of 2018, I gave a talk in one of the few council areas of Scotland in which a majority had voted for independence. In the bowels of the Mitchell Library in Glasgow, a red-faced man glowered at me as I spoke. His wife appeared to be egging him on to do something. When the time came for questions, I pointed him out to the chair, and then the pent-up question burst forth: “Where is this “Debatable Land”?”

More from this author

The curse of Northern stereotypes

By Graham Robb

I began a minute description of its bounds, but this enraged the man even more. “I’m not answering your question, am I?” “Well,” he shouted triumphantly, “I’ve never heard of it! And I was born in Dumfries!”

In normal circumstances, it would have been a mystifying remark. The man had never heard of the land 20 miles from his place of birth which had been a major foreign policy issue for English and Scottish parliaments for more than a century and which appeared to have made a mockery of the very idea of nationhood. Therefore, he denied its existence.

The evidence that Scottish borderers had once belonged to neither nation often evoked intense scepticism, as did the well-established fact that few neighbouring nations in Europe enjoyed such long and mutually profitable periods of stability and peaceful cooperation. The bullish brand of nationalism peddled by Alex Salmond had fostered a state of heroic indignation in which historical truths were a matter of personal choice. It was succinctly expressed on local radio by a nationalist representative of Scottish farming interests. Tired of being proved statistically wrong, he brought the discussion to a sudden end: “Well, I don’t care about arguments anyway. I’m a nation­alist, and that’s that!”

Nine days before Nicola Sturgeon unexpectedly resigned as First Minister of Scotland, Salmond accused her, in a tub-thumping Burns Supper speech in Dundee, of undermining 30 years’ of hard campaigning. She had “damaged the independence movement” with “some daft ideology imported from elsewhere”. This was a reference to what Salmond contemptuously called the “self-indulgent nonsense” of her gender recognition reforms. Commenting on Sturgeon’s resignation on The World At One, Salmond adopted a more oleaginous tone. In his view, the First Minister should have “[separated] the case for independence from the day-to-day business of government”. “The articulation of the fundamental case for independence,” complained the deposed leader of the SNP, “has sometimes got muddied and lost in the business of government.’

Suggested reading

Nicola Sturgeon is rewriting history

By Kathleen Stock

This is the populist fantasy of a sacred cause existing in stainless purity far above the mess of daily administration. Nationalism had conjured up a culturally coherent race of non-English Britons battling angrily to free itself from the condescending Auld Enemy. The independence campaign had relied heavily on a brazen simplification of Scottish history. Divisions in Scottish society of which many English people are unaware were obscured and erased.

As little as possible was said on the subject of religious sectarianism: the old antagonism of teuchters (Gaelic-speaking Highlanders) and Lowland Sassenachs was rebranded as a conflict of tartan-wearing city-dwellers and “posh” Edinbourgeois. Some campaigners, envisioning independence as the cause of a despised proletariat, argued that southern Scots with a Morningside or a Kelvinside accent were constitutionally English. The nationalist incarnation of Robert the Bruce was unrecognisable as the ambitious Anglo-Norman landowner whose father was born in Essex and who invited two of his combatant English friends to breakfast after the Battle of Bannockburn.

It was oddly exciting to witness the bonfire of facts to which Scottish history was subjected. One fact proved particularly controversial. In the 16th-century, in the Debatable Land and neighbouring parts of England and Scotland, cross-border marriages had been the norm, despite being punishable by death. Contemplating the copious written evidence, but reluctant to accept that interbreeding had been so prevalent, one Scottish academic historian described reports of those marriages as “scaremongering”. A key concept in the nationalist campaign, “scaremongering” means “unfairly rebutting an ideological argument by using brute fact”. Curious to know whether the modern border had interfered with this tradition, I drew a map of these cross-border marriages and showed it to passengers on the 127 bus, which starts in the Scottish village of Newcastleton and ends 24 miles later in the city of Carlisle. Several passengers were able to mention long-married couples to whom the border meant as little as it did to their ancestors.

The 127 bus follows the route of the defunct North British Railway. On Tuesdays and Fridays, it runs along the southern edge of the Debatable Land before plunging down to the river Liddel and the border with England. On the eve of the Scottish Independence Referendum, when polls suggested a narrowing gap between “Yes” and “No”, the mood on the bus was untypically sombre.

Suggested reading

Scottish nationalism will survive Sturgeon

By Tom McTague

Politicians far away in Edinburgh and London were planning to impose changes of some indeterminable but certainly inconvenient nature. They talked about the Border in ignorance of the people who lived and worked on either side of it. Many of them even confused the borderlands with the vast administrative division called “Scottish Borders”, which ends at the outskirts of Edinburgh. In this impoverished, agricultural region, the main concern was the “day-to-day business of government”, as former First Minister Salmond dismissively calls it.

Here, though the accent changes abruptly from one side of the river to the other, nationality is hardly ever mentioned. When the border was closed during the Covid lockdowns, it seemed a ridiculous, arbitrary measure, as though a dream of ages past had solidified in the present. Whenever I mentioned the book I was writing, no one thought it odd that there had once been an independent enclave whose inhabitants considered themselves neither English nor Scottish. Some people thought it “not a bad idea”.

Nationalist ideology struggles to integrate debatable lands like this one. Humza Yousaf has taken charge of a party which has become addicted to its fictions. By introducing its gender recognition reforms in the knowledge that the High Court of Justice would probably quash them (as it did), and deciding to treat the next general election as a “de facto referendum”, it was acting out a fantasy. The best hope for Scottish nationalism now is to separate itself from the cause of independence and to fight for a less lop-sided and unrealistic United Kingdom.

There are radiators. They work, and she puts them on. But the house doesn’t seem to get any warmer. This winter, she says, the temperature inside her house hovered between 10 and 12°C — well below the recommended domestic temperature range of 18 to 21°C. Every minute, as those heaters exude their vanishing warmth, the bills are ticking up, up, up. Currently, she says, it costs her between £10 and £15 a day to heat the little house — or to not heat it, which is what it really feels like she’s doing.

Lindsay suffers from chronic pain, one symptom of the fibromyalgia that impacts her ability to work, and the cold exacerbates her condition. Recently, she told me, it’s all become too much. She’s in crisis. Watching her money run out as she sleeps under a duvet that seems wet to the touch — it feels like more than anyone should have to cope with. She’s not sure that she can anymore.

When money is tight, all winters are bad winters. But at the turn of 2022-23, after energy costs soared, more Britons than ever have been facing hard choices and cold beds as they struggle to get by while wages stagnate and prices soar. From October 2021 to October 2022, domestic gas prices increased by 129% and electricity by 66%, according to data from the UK government; the average annual energy bill has increased almost 96% over the same period, to £2,500.

Suggested reading

Scotland's poor are left to die

By Darren 'Loki' McGarvey

With some fanfare, Liz Truss’s short-lived regime offered a “guarantee” that the energy price cap would not rise any further for households for at least another two years. Rishi Sunak’s administration soon rowed back on that — although the Budget earlier this month did extend the energy price cap for three more months, until June. As for the new SNP leader Humza Yousaf, who is now staring at a £1.5 billion black hole in the national budget according to the Scottish Fiscal Commission, fuel poverty in Scotland’s coldest rural regions presents a significant financial challenge. All this uncertainty has left Lindsay, and those who have suffered similarly difficult winters, with little idea about what help they will or won’t be entitled to in the future.

Those living in rural Scotland are under singularly intense pressure. Because the price cap and associated guarantees apply to unit cost, not the total bill, bills will often end up more than £2,500 in households requiring higher consumption to maintain a decent temperature. And for any homes where the main energy source is anything other mains gas or electricity, nothing is capped or guaranteed. Nearly 90% of homes in Na h-Eileanan Siar (also known as the Outer Hebrides) and 100% of homes in Orkney and Shetland are not connected to the mains gas grid, forcing residents to use more expensive and uncapped options such as bottled gas or domestic heating oil.

In Autumn 2022, Energy Action Scotland published an analysis that showed residents of some Scottish council areas — Na h-Eileanan Siar, Shetland, and Argyll and Bute — have seen bills rise to more than £4,000 a year. A huge outgoing when you consider that the median Scottish household income is £27,716. Partly these higher bills are a function of the harsher climate — those raging gales that blow in off the sea, battering the rooftops and bringing a bitter windchill for days at a time. But partly, too, it is linked to a poorer standard of housing; rural houses are less likely to be well insulated.

Suggested reading

Scotland's drug shame

By Darren 'Loki' McGarvey

Lindsay’s experience underlines what the statistics tell us: cold homes are associated with both mental and physical illness. Long-term exposure to the cold increases the risk of respiratory and circulatory illnesses, as well as exacerbating the symptoms of chronic conditions such as arthritis, diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Issues of damp and mould, common in poorly insulated and cold homes, are associated with asthma and respiratory infections, especially in children. The death of two-year-old Awaab Ishak due to breathing difficulties in a mouldy Rochdale flat, which inspired much soul-searching in England after the 2022 coroner’s inquest, occurred on the winter solstice in 2020.

“Physiologically,” Dr Raquel Nunes, an assistant professor of public health at Warwick University, told me, “the body will try to compensate for the cold. What happens is that the blood becomes thicker, and that can cause clots.” The clots can then cause heart attacks or strokes. “Cold also affects the ability of the body to fight infection. That increases the probability of common colds, flu, and other diseases.”

Unheated houses also have insidious effects on mental health. The fear of being unable to keep your family warm is a major source of anxiety. Those in fuel poverty often limit socialising — either because they stop inviting people to their homes, or simply go to bed early to keep warm under the blankets.

Suggested reading

Jack Monroe: The acceptable face of poverty

By Kathleen Stock

This rings true to Miranda, a woman in her early thirties who lives with a dog and a cat in a row of old farm workers cottages near the Dornoch Firth, in the northeast Highlands. She lives with complex health problems and as a result has been “medically retired” for some time and must rely on disability benefits. This has left her in dire financial straits. Hers is an old stone cottage, “only a small two-bedroom”, but though well-built it’s not good for retaining warmth. “It costs £15 a day to heat. I can’t afford that.” The cold, and the aches and anxiety that come with it, is “definitely having an effect on my head,” she says. Her depression, she says, is “horrific”. She just cannot see how she’s going to get through the next year.

As winter set in last year, new research confirmed that when people’s homes become cold, the danger of severe mental distress significantly increases. Data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study reveals that the risk doubles among those who have not previously suffered mental health problems; it triples for those who have previously suffered even minor symptoms. Those with underlying psychiatric disorders are also more likely to die or be admitted to hospital during periods of extreme cold.

Miranda’s problems are, unfortunately, increasingly common. Research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that nearly a third of low-income households — more than 3 million of them — were already unable to adequately heat their homes in early 2022, before the impact of the energy price crisis were fully felt.

Suggested reading

Poverty is not inevitable

By Terry Eagleton

If the problems are distinctly intense in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, its people are also turning to one distinctive solution. Recent reports point to residents in the Western Isles, Caithness and Orkney reverting to traditional methods, cutting and drying more peat to use as fuel over winter; neat stacks of drying peat bricks line up along the road-sides all through Lewis and Harris. In January 2023, Press and Journal, the newspaper of the Highlands, carried an interview with Uist crofter Anne MacLellan, who had “got peat on the fire just now” as she talked, despite having “never heated her home with peat” in the past. She felt a “massive conflict” in light of the grim environmental consequences of disturbing and burning this carbon sink. But the quarter of Anne’s wage that was disappearing in energy bills each month was simply too much to bear.

Those in urban areas have different tactics — spending more time on public transport and other public spaces where they are not on the hook for keeping warm. All over the country, churches and community centres have opted to open their doors to those in need of a warm place to go. The Warm Welcome campaign maintains online listings of “warm banks” across the UK. There are more than 4,000 such hubs now open to the public — including synagogues, Salvation Army halls, pubs, and arts centres — their proliferation attesting not only to a remarkable generosity of spirit across civil society, but also to the extent of the crisis we now face.

Even those in full-time work are not exempt. Liam is a joiner and part-time gamekeeper who lives with his partner Rochelle and her teenage daughter in Dingwall, a market town around 30 minutes’ drive from Inverness. After finally managing to get together a deposit after years of saving, they bought a house — which when we spoke they were on the cusp of moving into — just as the cost-of-living crisis came to bite.

Suggested reading

The eviction of England's rural workers

By Rebecca Smith

He gets a good wage, he says. And Rochelle works too, in an outdoors shop, albeit on a zero-hours contract. But even so — he runs the figures in his head as we talk — almost a quarter of his salary goes on energy, which works out at around £350 a month. Until recently, in their rented house, they were able to avoid turning the heating by burning offcuts he brought home from work in a wood-burning stove. In the new house they won’t have that option: “We’ll grudge pushing that button.”

They feel fortunate, relatively speaking. But the couple are not immune from the pressures. It’s visible all around them, etched into the faces of their Highland neighbours. “There’s no spirit,” Liam says, “everything has gone. It’s bleak. Very bleak. No one wants to enjoy themselves — there’s no going down the pub for a couple of pints, or having drinks with the girls. People think: that’s three days’ heating.”

He and Rochelle are made of stoic stuff. They’ve been through hell and back, he says — both are previously divorced, and lost family members in upsetting circumstances. Money worries are nothing new. They talk about it, figure out a plan. Such is the picture in homes across the UK: couples sitting down to crisis talks; single parents checking their balance, turning down the heat. The black dog at the door. For many people, it is all too much to bear. 

***

This piece was from a longer essay in Broke: Fixing Britain’s poverty crisis (Biteback Publishing), edited by Tom Clark. Additional reporting by Laura Beveridge.

After years of drifting apart, the United Kingdom suddenly felt united again. It couldn’t last, of course, and it hasn’t: a new UnHerd Britain poll reveals that while 55% of UK citizens agree that it’s a good thing Britain has a monarchy, in Scotland only 45% do.

Yet while the results are unlikely to put a smile on King Charles’s face, they are not, in the end, all that surprising. If anything, they represent a reversion to historic norms, following the fever dream of grief that broke out upon the Queen’s death. Previous surveys on Scottish attitudes to the monarchy have also shown that the Royal Family is not especially popular: shortly before the Platinum Jubilee, for instance, a poll found that fewer than half of Scots supported keeping the monarchy, while the Royals were similarly unloved four years before that. On a visit home last summer, I found that while Tesco had decked out even the frozen meat aisle with “happy and glorious” banners to mark the Queen’s jubilee, it was a lot harder to find signs of celebration in Scottish shops and institutions. The management of the purportedly “Royal” Botanic Garden in Edinburgh had tucked their jubilee sign away in a corner, while at the celebratory garden party in my hometown of Dunfermline, there were no royal souvenirs, not even a mug — although there was a cut out of John Forbes, a long-dead local worthy who founded the city of Pittsburgh.

It may be tempting to connect increasingly negative attitudes to the monarchy with the rise of nationalist sentiment since devolution. Prominent cultural figures, such as the author Alasdair Gray and the SNP politician Margo MacDonald, espoused republicanism. Nicola Sturgeon’s anointed disciple, Humza Yousaf, has vowed not only to break up the UK using “any means necessary”, but also declared on Monday that within five years of independence, he’d expect Scotland to find a new head of state. But republicanism isn’t merely an SNP talking point; Scotland’s bad relationship with monarchy goes back a long way, at least as far back as the Reformation, nearly five centuries ago.

More from this author

The secrets of Scotland's ancient capital

By Daniel Kalder

Calvinism, the national philosophy that came to dominate afterwards, is an innately levelling creed, with its cheerful teaching that God has already decided who is saved and who is damned and there is nothing you can do about it. Post-Reformation, the inhabitants of Dunfermline managed to forget where they buried no fewer than seven Scottish kings, including one of the greats, Robert the Bruce, who was only rediscovered by accident in the 19th century. In Scotland, the monarch was not the head of the church; the ministers elected their own leader. John Knox, who spearheaded the Reformation, neither admired nor feared monarchs and reduced Mary Queen of Scots to tears in front of her own court. George Buchanan, the tutor of Mary’s son James, was the author of The Law of Government Among the Scots, wherein he wrote that “the people have the right to confer royal authority upon whomever they wish”, and that they were free to overthrow — and kill — tyrants. Buchanan freely admitted to having “whipped the king’s arse” when the heir to the throne annoyed him.

Chafing against the ideas that his Calvinist tutor had tried to impose upon him, James threw off any restraints on his power as soon as he could, describing monarchy as “the supremest thing on earth” after he became king of England as well as Scotland. His son Charles I attempted to rule in the same way, but when in 1637 he tried to bring the Scottish church to heel by forcing it to accept the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, the people did not meekly comply but rather rose up in anger, resulting in two wars of rebellion. Taking a leaf out of George Buchanan’s book, the Scots did not accept the King’s authority if it conflicted with the will of God (although they later agreed to fight for him when he agreed to support Presbyterianism).

But if the Scots were less than keen on monarchs, then the feeling seems to have been mutual. For a period of almost 200 years, following a brief appearance by Charles II in 1650, no king bothered to make the journey north of the border until George IV (described by Robert Burns as “a witless youth”) toured Scotland in 1822. This trip, in which the portly King appeared in a mini-kilt and pink tights, appears to have presaged a kind of thaw, and inadvertently laid the seeds of today’s heritage industry. Sir Walter Scott, at least, was very excited, and the pageant he organised cobbled together so many Scottish tropes that one resident of Edinburgh complained that he had “ridiculously made us appear to be a nation of Highlanders, and the bagpipe and the tartan are the order of the day”.

Suggested reading

Nicola Sturgeon is rewriting history

By Kathleen Stock

However, it was with the ascension of George’s granddaughter, Victoria, to the throne that Scotland really seems to have become integrated into the cult of monarchy. Prince Albert purchased Balmoral for his Queen in 1852 while Glasgow, today the most anti-monarchical place in the UK, was referred to as the Second City of the Empire, a title its inhabitants welcomed with pride. Indeed, the whole city was transformed into a monument to Empress Victoria; a statue of the Queen riding a horse (the first equestrian statue of a woman in the UK) stands close to the City Chambers (which she opened in 1888) to this day. This is easy enough to understand: in those days, Britain was winning at geopolitics, and the Scots wanted to be part of the winners’ club. While nationalists today may sometimes complain that Scotland is England’s last colony, the truth is that the Scots were enthusiastic colonisers themselves, proudly extending and administering the power of the British Empress across the globe.

Yet within a few decades of Victoria’s death, that sense of shared triumphalism vanished. My grandmother grew up in Clydebank in the heyday of the radical Red Clydesiders and remembered red flags flying at rallies in the Twenties and Thirties, while my father recalls attending a birthday party in a “communist chapel” in the early Fifties. He also remembers people booing Churchill when he appeared in cinema newsreels, and yet despite this radicalism, he has no memory of anyone booing the Queen. Indifference rather than hostility was the rule; she seemed “remote”.

Similarly, by the time I was growing up in Fife in the Eighties and Nineties, it was a given that the Royal Family were ludicrously posh and rich and out of touch, but we also accepted that that was kind of the point. Prince Charles may have liked to stride around Lochnagar in a kilt and paint landscapes of the Scottish wilderness, but this did not endear him to the masses; indeed, all that stuff about talking to plants inspired mocking impersonations at my school, and beyond. The Scottish comedian Craig Ferguson took his exceptionally cruel portrayal to the US, where it became a regular feature on his late-night chat show.

Suggested reading

The taming of the republicans

By Alwyn Turner

For all the talk of the Queen’s love of Scotland, which was emphasised after she died at Balmoral, it does seem that this profound emotional attachment was more than a wee bit correlated with that majestic estate. Although I do not doubt that the Queen was absolutely sincere when she spoke of her “deep and abiding affection for this wonderful country”, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to suggest that anybody who spends every summer in a castle surrounded by beautiful forests could reasonably be expected to love it. Indeed, I might never have emigrated to the US if Balmoral were my holiday home. By contrast, the Queen spent much less time at her official residence, the Palace of Holyrood House in Edinburgh.

Yet for all that, I do not recall meeting many vocal republicans until I went to university, and they were all English. The nationalists that I knew in the Nineties — and I knew somebody who ran (unsuccessfully) for the UK parliament — never talked about the Queen or her family. They weren’t fans, of course, but they didn’t care that they weren’t fans: the Royals were simply irrelevant. It is not until 2004 that the republican “Declaration of Calton Hill” — a spirited call for “an independent Scottish Republic built on the principles of liberty, equality, diversity and solidarity” — was issued, to coincide with the Queen’s visit to open the Scottish parliament. It attracted support from significant Scottish cultural figures such as Iain Banks, the poet Edwin Morgan, and Irvine Welsh. But it was organised by the Scottish Socialist Party, which currently has zero seats in the Scottish parliament. Ever since the days of Alex Salmond’s leadership, the official position of the SNP has been to retain the monarchy.

None of this is to say that I don’t think republicanism could become a serious force in Scottish politics. If Scotland were to become independent, then the lowest hanging fruit for nationalists to go after to maintain their sense of existential purpose would be the abolition of the monarchy, as Humza Yousaf’s sudden interest in republicanism makes clear. But until that day comes, the Royal Family simply will continue to be unpopular in Scotland, and poll after poll will reveal that they are unpopular, but it will not matter at all. Always “there” but never actually present, they will drift by on TV screens, occasionally turn up to open a building, and then go away again.

And Scottish apathy might, in the end, be for the better. Because although it is nice to think that we have an inherent aversion to authority, Scots were actually quite respectful towards Calvinist preachers for many centuries, and — as the willing submission to an extended lockdown revealed — the pursRed-lipped, finger-wagging, moralising style of leadership still has quite a constituency in the country. If not King Charles, then who? I’ll take my chances with the Royals, thank you.

After all, who doesn’t love beavers? As well as providing a furry flood-defence, beavers are lauded as “ecosystem engineers” for their stimulation of biodiversity. Their fans range from Michael Gove — who, as Environment Secretary, splurged £20,000 on a trial to reintroduce the rodents to the River Otter — to the residents of Pickering, in Yorkshire, whose homes were saved from flooding by an upstream beaver dam slowing excess water. Reassuringly, the Rewilding Britain charity informs us: “Beavers are vegan and don’t eat fish or other animals.”

That is the final straw. Beavermania needs a cold shower of reality. The “rewilding superstar” is herbivorous; veganism is a human philosophical choice. And reintroducing them comes with negatives, for the environment and for people. Indeed, their reintroduction is proof of the fallacy of “rewilding” as a conservation concept. A very expensive fallacy. Michael Gove’s £20,000 is but a drop in the river when it comes to the cost of beaver reintroduction. The Scottish Beaver Trial of 2009-14, which tested the waters for their reintroduction north of the border, cost £2 million in admin alone: a sum that is the stuff of dreams for most conservation charities. And then there is the infrastructure. The standard model of beaver re-introduction is to initially fence the “wild” animals in enclosures of about two hectares. Since beavers both burrow and climb, the fencing has to be heavy duty stuff: installation, per beaver introduction, easily costs £30,000.

Beavers also gnaw trees. An adult beaver can bring down a 10-inch-wide tree in under an hour; single beavers have been known to fell 200 trees a year. We are normally, if you remember, urged to plant trees, for the sake of the environment. But trees also have financial worth: in the upper Danube region of Germany, beavers have caused £5 million of damage. Alas, beavers are indiscriminate lumberjacks, so valuable timber requires guards, or deterrent slime. These things, too, cost money.

Beavers chop down the trees, of course, in order to build dams. And as any child who has ever played in a ditch or stream will explain, impede flowing water and you get flooding behind the impediment. When a dam built by humans floods a village, we protest. But when a beavers’ dam causes flooding, we call it a biodiverse wetland paradise. Yet it is no less destructive, of both infrastructure and agricultural land. The evidence for this can be found anywhere beavers have been reintroduced. The Scottish Beaver Trial at Knapdale paid out £38,000 to cover flood damage caused by a single colony of beavers to a mere 200 metres of road. To compensate farmers for loss of crops on flooded farmland, plus the beavers’ hearty liking for farmed veg, the German state of Bavaria coughs up €450,000 annually, while the Polish government paid out over €4 million in 2017 alone. As well as building their dams, beavers burrow into riverbanks, for up to 100 metres, destabilising them. The Polish Interior Ministry partly blamed the devastating floods of 2010 on the country’s then 70,000 beavers, stating: “The greatest enemy of the flood defences is an animal called the beaver.”

More from this author

Why food should be more expensive

By John Lewis-Stempel

Unsurprisingly, “initial societal enthusiasm” for beaver reintroductions in Poland, which commenced in 1975, is washing away, to be replaced with “pointing out the problems connected with the phenomenon”. Here is a lesson for the UK: the more beavers we have, the more potential there is for human-beaver conflict. Both Defra and the Scottish government already operate “beaver mitigation schemes”; the latter’s, after acknowledging that “not all beaver activity is helpful in every situation”, offers to, among other things, “provide free expert advice on how to manage beaver activity” and “trial new technology to track beaver activity to minimise the burden on land managers”. The dream and the goal of rewilding, according to Rewilding Britain, is “restoring ecosystems to the point where nature can take care of itself”, yet beavers in Scotland, fantastically, actually require state management. So much for “rewilding”.

And when the management fails, the beavers are relocated or killed. In Scotland, support for the species’s expansion is already declining: in 2021, 90 beavers were culled, and 120 captured, to prevent serious damage to agriculture. Those who advocate uncontrolled beaver reintroduction are as culpable of the killings as the person pulling the trigger: it is well-known that wherever you have large beaver populations, and anything more than a negligible human population, the former end up being culled. The beaver population of Poland is 3.2 per 10 km²; in 2019, permits were issued for the reduction of about 6% of that population, a sum of 8,391 beavers. Beaver culling and relocating in Scotland, the area with the lowest human population density, has already reached over 10%. If rewilding can’t happen in Scotland, it can’t happen anywhere in the UK.

But maybe beavers are worth all this inconvenience, and all the millions? Maybe their heralded “natural flood-prevention” and ecosystem engineering is a win, for the public purse and the environment? On the possibility of beavers being major mitigators of flooding in Britain, the mathematicians of Leeds University are barely unable to contain their mirth:

“even a 10% flood reduction of the FEV [Flood Excess Volume] using beaver colonies and beaver dams, requires hundreds of such colonies per river catchment… serious flood mitigation by massive introduction of beaver colonies is completely unrealistic, in stark contrast to statements made in scientific literature and in the media.”

To this observation, one must add another: when beavers build dams on streams, they effectively replace one habitat — that of fast moving water — with another, that of ponds and wetland. Arguments rage as to whether this beaver eco-engineering is good or bad for other species. As Beavermaniacs frequently remind us, the wetlands created by the dams of Castor fiber are favourable to creatures ranging from frog to kingfisher. But conservationists concerned about our dwindling, fragile numbers of wild trout and salmon — now at their lowest levels since records began and “reaching crisis point” — have gnawing fears about beaver dams, which are barriers to piscatorial migration.

Each side, almost daily, advances a scientific report proving their case. The only safe conclusion is that of The Earth Science Review: “Effective management of beaver impacts on fish may simply come down to careful consideration of individual dam and site characteristics… and the characteristics of the fish species being considered.” In plain English: “It depends on the stream, on the dam.” Since beavers cannot be relied upon to determine whether their settlement on a stream is good or bad for the neighbourhood fish, humans will have to. Again: so much for rewilding.

Suggested reading

Britain betrays its farmers again

By James Rebanks

Besides, whether we have beavers and whether we have wetlands are separate questions. There exists an animal even better at dam-making than Castor fiber. It is called Homo sapiens sapiens. Consider the branch of low-cost conservation called “beaver dam mimicry”, whereby dams are built out of rocks or posts. Last time I did it, it was a morning’s work with a digger. Want to emulate the beavers’ tree-felling? Use a chainsaw. You don’t need beavers to create wetland, or a tree-felled riverbank. You need a couple of hundred quid’s worth of kit. Also, human-constructed dams can be fabricated with built-in access for migratory fish, so the salmon win too. Faux-beaver dams, now commonplace in the US, show “promise in achieving a range of conservation goals, including increasing the retention of water and sediment, helping maintain late season flows, and improving stream and streamside habitat quality”. So, the benefits of beaver without the negatives of beaver.

In a de-natured countryside, it is pertinent to ask whether the greater good of the environment is really served by channelling so much conservation money into one species. Plenty of fauna and flora are extinct or locally extinct — including the hare, the corncrake, the ghost orchid. Any of them might appreciate some of the cash thrown at Castor fiber. Rabbit, like beavers, are “eco-system engineers”. Their numbers decreased 83% in Scotland between 1996 and 2018. Where is the fuss on their behalf? Is it lacking because bunnies don’t satisfy the rewilders’ romantic fantasies of the return of the wildwood?

Yes, beavers are engaging ambassadors for nature — no small matter — and yes, they have value as tourist attractions. But only for now, while their numbers are limited. When our countryside and towns heave with beavers, they will lose their appeal. When they cause the environment more problems than they solve, we will regret idealising them. It’s time to press pause on beaver reintroduction. Before they become a damn costly pest.

During her address to journalists, the First Minister’s well-honed rhetorical abilities cast their usual spell — broken only during the Q&A, when she was asked about her legacy of a collapsing NHS, widening attainment gaps in literacy and numeracy in schools, and soaring numbers of drug deaths every year. Before that, though, we were firmly in Sturgeonland, where — a bit like being on a Highland distillery tour — reality tends to disappear in a euphoric haze and temporarily everything looks better than it actually is.

Despite plummeting personal approval ratings, she focused several times on consoling those who, she assumed, would be saddened by her departure, giving the impression of trying to avert outpourings of weeping in the streets. Putting an optimistic gloss on the general mediocrity of her party, she implied that for too long she had eclipsed the many talented SNP politicians with her own brilliance, promising that from now on we would be able to see them more clearly. And perhaps most startlingly — fresh from calling critics of her government’s gender law reforms “homophobic” and “racist” only a fortnight ago  —  she noted that, over the years, she had somehow become a lightning rod for “irrationality” in the “tone and tenor of discourse” on controversial areas, and expressed the fervent desire that things be less polarised from now on.

All of this must have been quite enraging for one of the few actually talented individuals left in the SNP, Joanna Cherry. Cherry is well-known for disagreeing with the party line on gender law reform in favour of self-identification, arguing that it will harm women’s and lesbians’ rights. In 2021, on the same day that an SNP supporter sent her violent sexualised threats for which he was later convicted, Cherry was sacked from her Westminster front-bench role, apparently for her opposition to self-ID. You don’t get much more “intensity” and “brutality” in politics than that.

Equally, Sturgeon’s new turn as a pacifist in the culture wars must have been hard for Joan McAlpine to hear. She was a highly successful MSP for a decade, but was viciously ostracised in 2019 for expressing reservations about the conflation of sex and gender identity in the Scottish Census. She was eventually pushed out of politics via a gerrymandered party rule change that some suspected was deliberately designed to oust her.

Sturgeon did nothing at the time to reduce toxicity in the party with respect to Cherry and McAlpine, even when SNP MPs were openly describing the pair as hateful for views about self-ID which — it now turns out — most of the Scottish population share. Quite the contrary: she frequently turned the heat up, via the regular delivery of public statements of support for transactivist causes that could easily be read as green lights for others to carry on smearing. Right up until the moment a fortnight ago when the First Minister was left havering on ITV about whether Isla Bryson is or is not a woman, she tended to present any dissent towards the “trans women are women” mantra as the product of confused or malicious thinking. When a headteacher publicly sides with the school bullies, she might as well have declared open season on their victims.

More from this author

The problem with 'trans women are women'

By Kathleen Stock

It was also Sturgeon’s government that funded one of the main engines of transactivist insanity in Scotland and the UK more generally, the Scottish Trans Alliance (now Scottish Trans). Effectively, they paid this organisation and its parent charity, Equality Network, to tell them what to think on trans issues, and then obediently did exactly what they were told — including pushing for self-ID, and dismissing all objections to it as hateful.

In 2016, then-director James Morton told the Women and Equalities Select Committee that rape crisis and domestic violence services for women should admit males self-identifying as women, and should work to “educate” any traumatised female service-users who complained — a point that was uncritically incorporated into committee’s final report. And in 2018, Morton wrote about how his government-funded organisation had deliberately influenced the Scottish Prison Service to introduce males into female prisons, reasoning that introducing self-ID in these “very challenging circumstances” would put pressure on other public services to adopt it too. And — factually at least, though not ethically — he was right.

So, for Sturgeon to pose at the press conference on Wednesday as some kind of throwback to the Scottish Enlightenment, urging that “debates should be rational” and that “Scotland should be capable of having them”, may well count as the most brass-necked reverse ferret of her long career. She is certainly no Thomas Reid or Dugald Stewart, two 18th-century philosophers closely associated with the Scottish school of common-sense realism, and who each emphasised the importance of trusting one’s senses and guarding against paradox. For the policy of self-ID is manifestly a failure on both counts.

Never mind that — despite an apparently shared interest in witch-burning, Sturgeon doesn’t even reach the fairly low bar for public rationality set by Presbyterian founder and general miserabilist John Knox. Knox may have been fond of ducking-stools, stocks, and pillories, but at least he thought that people should interpret biblical texts for themselves, without the interposition of priests in funny robes spouting incomprehensible jargon.

Suggested reading

Scottish nationalism will survive Sturgeon

By Tom McTague

Partly thanks to Knox and the high levels of literacy he encouraged in schoolchildren for Bible-reading purposes, Scottish culture has a long and justly famed tradition of valuing independent thinking. There is a rejection of closed hierarchies of power, and a habit of nose-thumbing authority figures. Outward appearances of prestige are supposed to mean little, and the lowliest and poorest member of society is thought equal to the most powerful and well-connected. “A man’s a man for a’ that,” Robert Burns famously told us. “Trans women are women,” piped the incongruent refrain from Sturgeon. To prove it, she put violent, unstable murderers and paedophiles into close living arrangements with impoverished, abused females. And then she left them to get on with it.

Politicians are generally good at rewriting history. In the general Great Forgetting which, I assume, will follow the eventual Great Resetting on gender policies towards something more sensible, the SNP may well feign collective amnesia about their former glorious leader’s role in helping discourse in Scotland on trans matters become as vicious and divided as it could possibly be. For all I know, Sturgeon might be about to announce her appointment as a Visiting Professor of Public Reason at Strathclyde Uni, or something. Stranger things have happened. So just in case — and as the woman herself might say — let me be very clear.

Over the course of her leadership, Sturgeon has presided over a closed system of mutual backscratching between her government and favoured courtier-transactivists, paying them to tell her and her government what to think. She has helped shut down free and lawful public discussion of their demands, enabled the unjust monstering of their critics, and sat silently watching as eminently capable women in her own party suffer unconscionable bullying and smearing from others within the party for dissenting.

More from this author

Scottish nationalism is fuelled by resentment

By Kathleen Stock

Even worse, while posing as both feminist and socialist, she monomaniacally has put the vested interests of a small group of privileged, university-educated activists over the interests of huge swathes of ordinary Scottish women, including many who are vulnerable and traumatised by violence and sexual abuse. And she has apparently done this for what she foolishly believed would be political gain.

Nicola Sturgeon may well be — in fact, obviously is — a human being. But she’s a hypocritical and callous one. She’s right to say that Scottish politics has become more intense and brutal, but she only has herself to blame.

Today, both secessionism and unionism feed off the other’s incoherence. Sturgeon’s press conference in Edinburgh compellingly proved this: she described her decision in ways that made it sound as if she were some kind of martyr. Under her leadership, she said, the cause of Scottish nationalism had suffered because it had become caught up in the irrational partisanship of her opponents, who had grown to dislike her so much that they could no longer judge Scottish independence on its own merits. She was, she intimated, sacrificing herself in the hope that a new leader would be able to bring more people into the tent of Scottish nationalism. Unionists should not be complacent about this prospect — she may actually be correct — but the structural problem for Scottish nationalism is not the prejudice of its opponents, but the failings of its own offer.

Brexit has made Scottish independence a far more complicated prospect than it was before. It is now possible that we will look back on the referendum in 2014 as the moment Scottish independence made the most sense. Fair or not, Brexit means that Scotland cannot dilute the dominating reality of England simply by leaving the union and joining the rump UK in a wider EU. If anything, Brexit has made England’s hulking presence next to Scotland even more pronounced, while demanding answers from the SNP that it does not seem ready or able to provide. What happens at the border with England? Will Scotland introduce the euro? Will Holyrood accept common European debts? Will it rejoin the Common Fisheries Policy? For the SNP, Brexit has turned out to be both the casus belli for its second push for independence and a strategic disaster. The best thing that could happen to Scottish nationalism would be for Britain to rejoin the European Union.

For unionists, however, Brexit might be an unexpected weapon in their constitutional arsenal, but it is one whose very existence is a reminder of the union’s inherent Englishness. Today, it is impossible to escape the reality that the UK has ceased to function in any meaningful sense as a unified British state; it now operates as an incoherent and imbalanced union of separate entities whose English character has not been softened by devolution, but incalculably sharpened. The fact is, the more Holyrood dominates Scotland’s national life, the more English the actual national parliament in Westminster becomes. This is a hole in the national barrel, draining the legitimacy of parliament and in time the union itself. The irony, then, is that just as Brexit acts as both an irritant and a salve to the threat of Scottish independence, devolution itself is a prime source of the union’s instability, the unbridgeable fault line in the body politic which no-one in Westminster is prepared to confront.

Watching Sturgeon’s resignation, I was reminded of the late Tom Nairn, the great academic pin-up of Scottish nationalism whose book The Break-up of Britain argued that the British state was destined to collapse like the Hapsburg, Tsarist or Prussian regimes of the 19th and early 20th centuries. “It is a basically indefensible and unadaptable relic, not a modern state,” wrote Nairn. “The only useful kind of speculation has assumed a geriatric odour: a motorised wheelchair and a decent funeral seem to have become the actual horizons of the Eighties.” Nairn’s book was published in 1977 and yet the geriatric old relic endures, still supported by half  of Scottish voters, despite Brexit and the political crises in Westminster that have followed.

Yet Nairn cannot be dismissed as a false prophet. As a political force, Scottish Nationalism has been transformed since 1977. The SNP is now the dominant force in Scottish politics, with independence supported by almost half the population and most of the young. As a result, Britain is easily the most fragile power in western Europe, or indeed the wider Western alliance. Almost no other country — apart from Canada or Spain — is as close to breaking apart.

Nairn was also right to argue in the 2002 edition of his book, when devolution was being hailed as a great reform which would permanently obstruct the demand for independence, that the British state remained structurally unstable. “A new tide seeking real independence is forming itself beneath the facade of Blairism,” he wrote. “It will rise into the spaces left by New Labour’s collapse, and by the increasing misfortunes of the old Union state.” Thirteen years later, the SNP expelled Labour from Scotland, winning every seat but three.

More from this author

Is Liz Truss really the next Barry Goldwater?

By Tom McTague

Nairn, in my view, was right to see long-term structural challenges to the British state, but wrong to believe that this made it uniquely outdated, or somehow destined to collapse. The fact that after eight years as First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon has resigned, still unable to answer how Scottish independence will be enacted, is testament to the inherent challenges of secession, not just continuity.

When I asked Nairn a few years ago about the challenge Brexit posed to Scottish nationalism, he was thoughtful and reflective, arguing that it changed the type of relationship an independent Scotland would have with the UK after the latter’s inevitable collapse. In his last interview before he died, Nairn argued that what would eventually replace Britain was still being worked out. “We’re trying to replace Great Britain… with something else, but what that is, there is no ready and living example of it to which we can turn. We have to make it up as we go along, because there is nothing else.”

In this he was right, but the truth is both sides are making it up as they go along. None of us have been here; everything is new. Unionism has yet to offer coherent answers to the problems posed by devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland but not England; Brexiteers have yet to offer coherent answers to the problem of Northern Ireland and its border with the Republic; and Scottish nationalists have yet to offer coherent answers to the problem of seceding from Britain after Britain has seceded from Europe. Nicola Sturgeon departs as First Minister of Scotland having failed to find them. But her opponents should not crow, for they have not succeeded in this task either.