Sturgeon is renowned for her staid, lawyerly command of briefs. There is no prospect that she would fight a referendum on a platform as flimsy as the Growth Commission.
Scottish politics
Ruth Davidson capitalised on the anti-2014 backlash, but those fires are almost extinguished, and the new leader sounds so shrill that the Party seems tempted to relegate him from frontline campaigning. One party source said of Ross, “he needs to smile more”. So far, he’s had nothing to smile about.
Source Direct Election Profile: The Scottish Conservatives
You get the sense that all these parties are worn but comfortable items of furniture, to be shuffled around Holyrood manor in a quinquennial dusting exercise, ultimately to be placed neatly back in their same groove.
Source Direct: Unionist Pearl Clutching, Nationalist Evasion
For me, the true danger of Alba is that it could amount to nothing. And, in establishing itself, it will have emptied the SNP of many of its most eloquent internal opponents, including Kenny MacAskill and, in all likelihood, many others to come.
Source Direct: Blackmail, Derangement and Pied Pipers
Leftists may view Alba as a break from Sturgeon’s dreary post-neoliberalism; nationalists as a break from Sturgeon’s constitutional coquetry; unionists as (an ironic) break on SNP government. Will this add up to a serious vote? It’s late in the day, but theoretically, yes it could.
Source Direct: The Spectre at the Feast
Symbolically, by comparison to Westminster’s slap in the face, this pay offer appears as a victory for decency. But we’ve got to start holding our government to higher standards than “one notch better than Westminster”.
Source Direct: Help for #Heroes
“In the 2012 agreement, both sides of the negotiation wanted a referendum. In any future agreement, only one side, Edinburgh, is likely to want it.”
Analysis: What pitfalls lie before the Draft Referendum Bill?
“It would be really, really nice is Hamilton’s verdict signalled a new stage of our political discourse – one which prioritised the issues facing Scotland, rather than its current and former first ministers, and where matters of sovereignty, social and economic justice, and protecting the vulnerable and the marginalised do not take a backseat to tortuous inquiries and the shenanigans they allow.”
Sean Bell: In the wake of Hamilton, Sturgeon’s critics must realise there is no cheat-code to victory
Nobody was surprised to see Anas Sarwar sweep the vote. He was the predictable, centrist, unionist option.
Source Direct: The Indignity of Labour
“Faced by the humiliation of Scottish democracy, we can choose either to hope that the Tories and the central British state will fail to press their advantage, or we can demand change in Scotland.”