Alex Salmond says Alba membership has risen after SNP leadership election
Nothing much to add to what I said before, but here’s something you won’t read in the MSM – what Alex Salmond is telling members of Alba, the new party he leads:
“At the start of this week I offered my congratulations to Humza Yousaf on his election as SNP leader and Scotland’s new First Minister.
It is now in the best interests of all the people of Scotland that he sets about restoring the Scottish Government’s reputation for competent Government. It was a hard won reputation, and sadly one which has been dissipated in recent years.
In the phrase which made the SNP leadership election campaign, “continuity won’t cut it”. It’s clear that people across the independence movement agree, and as a result we have welcomed hundreds of new members to ALBA, just over the past few days.
Therefore to all of our new members and to every single party member, thank you for your support.
As the new First Minister focuses on regaining the trust of the people in the delivery of our public services, the constitutional issue must not be kicked into the long grass yet again.
It is a false choice between campaigning for independence or governing well. The SNP governments which I led did both. That’s why the people of Scotland put their trust in the Scottish Government and it was that overwhelming support of the people that allowed us to bend Westminster to the will of Scotland to deliver an independence referendum in 2014.
Scotland is an energy rich nation but our people can’t afford to heat their homes. That’s the sort of issue that Humza Yousaf should be facing down Westminster over, not unpopular policies grafted onto the independence movement by the Green Party. Much less time should be spent pursuing self-identification and much more time spent on the achievement of self-determination. The people of Scotland have voted in election after election for Scotland to have a choice on its own future.
Humza Yousaf’s first serious initiative as First Minister should be to back the calls of other independence supporting parties and organisations and convene an Independence Convention. Indeed Kate Forbes and Ash Regan, who between them secured a majority votes, both backed this proposal during the leadership contest.”
Humza Yousaf’s kitchen cabinet signals more of the same from the SNP
SO it’s all over now, bar the shouting – the new SNP leader has been installed and he’s surrounded himself with a cabinet that wouldn’t be out of place in an old kitchen.
I’m not a fan of Humza Yousaf. I’ve always reckoned he thinks too much of himself, which was o
bvious during the leadership hustings. I thought it hilarious when Kate Forbes put him very firmly in his place during one of their debates, trashing his record in every government job he’s held.
She was correct there – can you imaging anybody in the private sector employing someone who had failed so abysmally in all their most recent jobs?
But he bounced back from that to win the race and pledged to reunite his party, which appeared more divided than ever after years of work by Nicola Sturgeon and her acolytes keeping their disagreements and splits well out of the public eye.
He was seen as the continuity candidate (ie more of the same) and we saw that with his cabinet of six women and three men – mainly allies of Nicola, including her close pal Shona Robison.
I do wonder what the new minister for independence, Jamie Hepburn, will do to justify his salary of up to £98,000 given the SNP’s total inertia on the issue since they came to power.
No wonder he’s smiling so heartily in every pic I’ve seen of him!
One thing Yousaf has not done is live up to the crap he spouted during pre- and post-election interviews regarding his contenders for the top job (keep your friends close and your enemies closer).
OK, he made Kate Forbes an offer she could quite easily (and did) refuse, apparently thinking that because she has a rural seat that she’d welcome a demotion to the rural affairs brief.
No chance!
What about his other rival for the leadership, Ash Regan? I don’t know if the new FM sees her as a particular threat, but in the latter days of the campaign there certainly appeared to be a groundswell of support for her as Yousaf and Forbes went for each other’s throats.
I’ve made no secret of my view that had I been a member of the party I would have voted for and probably campaigned for Ash, but I’m not so I didn’t.
I am surprised at Yousaf’s choice for energy minister – the potty-mouthed Aberdeenshire East MSP Gillian Martin – who apparently will never stop apologising: https://news.stv.tv/scotland/humza-yousaf-criticised-for-making-gillian-martin-minister-after-offensive-jokes-about-trans-and-black-people
That’s one that will come back to haunt him.
Pip pip.
How ‘fixed’ is SNP leadership contest?
via Substack
SO, Nicola Sturgeon has called it a day as Scotland’s First Minister and leader of the SNP and I’m sure that Gordon Wilson – the late party leader – must be birlin’ in his grave at the miles of worldwide newspaper coverage and hours of and broadcast news about it.
I’ll run through the leadership contenders shortly. For the moment though let’s look at Nicola’s legacy – and what has driven the deep divisions in the party.
Nicola always appeared to be a decent FM who managed to get things done eventually, but the incestuous and autocratic running of the SNP was not a good look and was always going to backfire on her and her husband and party chief executive Peter Morrell.
This isn’t the place to talk about his £107,600 ‘loan’ to the party, which Nicola claimed to know nothing about. Instead, consider where we are now as we wait for the dwindling number of SNP faithful to cast their votes for the next person to occupy the hot seat.
Neither Kate Forbes nor Humza Yousaf would get my vote were I still a party member, and for different reasons.
I think Kate has done a sterling job with the finance brief, especially after stepping to deliver a budget at such short notice after Derek Mackay’s departure, and she has been relatively competent in the role since.
But – and it’s a BIG but – her remarks on gay marriage and people having children outside of marriage were something else.
Her church, the fundamentalist Free Church of Scotland, sprang to her defence accusing her detractors of “a level of bigotry” that had no place in society.
Of course, Ms Forbes is entitled to her beliefs, but I can’t understand why, after she admitted “tiptoeing” around them on other occasions, she decided to air them in a series of interviews which, I think, highlighted her naivety, as well as losing her some major political supporters.
Then we have Humza Yousaf reckoning that he is the man for the jobs. In every interview he does he touts his “experience in office” – but this is a man who has made a dog’s breakfast of almost every senior ScotGov position he’s held.
He started in Alex Salmond’s administration as external affairs and international development minister. Then, under Nicola’s reign he went to: Transport (remember the horrifically expensive and continuing ferries debacle and the delayed dualling of Scotland’s most dangerous road the A9); Justice (the controversial Hate Crime Bill which critics said stifled free speech); and Health (blaming the pandemic for everything he got wrong – NHS performance and A & E waiting times among them).
That is not an exhaustive list, but if he had failed so abysmally out in the real world he’d be unemployable.
So, with two Sturgeon loyalists leading the field (allegedly) that brings us on to the third – and many say the best – candidate, Ash Regan, who held the community safety brief before she quit government over the gender reform legislation Nicola and her squad were determined to railroad through the Scottish parliament.
In my book she gets five stars for stepping away from something who has torn the SNP apart, wasted parliamentary time and detracted from the main purpose of the party – to secure independence for Scotland.
Regan was elected to Holyrood in the 2016 election when she saw off the then-Labour leader Kezia Dugdale with a majority of over 5000.
Before Holyrood, she worked in marketing and PR, studied international relations, worked as head of campaigns and advocacy at the Common Weal (think-and-do tank) and joined the national committee of Women for Independence (WfI) in 2014 – when she also (post-referendum) joined the SNP.
She has said she will “re-invigorate” the SNP, which had “dismantled” the Yes movement since 2014; she has pledged more power to members and will return the indy movement “back to the people” and focus more on the cause – which all sounds good to me.
She told The Herald in an interview ahead of her campaign launch that the wider Yes movement had become “marginalised” in recent years and that if elected, she intended to change that.
Regan said: “As a party, I don’t think we’ve listened enough to the groups who got us here. I know these people because I campaigned side-by-side with them throughout the first referendum.
“The party has effectively dismantled the Yes campaign, but I want to re-constitute it once more.
“It’s also important that we get on with the business of governing on the day-to-day issues affecting all of the people of Scotland. And, as much as possible, allow some of the groups who did amazing work for the Yes cause in 2013 and 2014 to do what they did so well back then. I want to get the band back together, if you like.”
In a world where the SNP establishment hadn’t stitched everything up, Ash Regan would be a shoo-in to the leadership and FM post, but sadly that will only happen if SNP members take a look around them and see what’s happened to their once principled party.
Shortly before he died Gordon Wilson told me the SNP had to learn how to cope with the mass influx of members who signed up to the party after the 2014 referendum. He recalled a surge of membership during his leadership – “nothing like as huge as this time, but still too many for us to cope with” – and how the leadership didn’t know how to handle it. He said the proper way to do it would be to embrace the wider Yes movement and bring them into the fold. Give that success pro-indy demonstrations since then – organised by the movement instead of a party allegedly supporting the cause – have been massive, he wasn’t far off the mark.
This is exactly what Ash Regan wants to do as SNP leader and I think she’d make a superb leader because she is willing to embrace EVERYONE who wants independence and not simply the SNP few.
In his second volume of The Battle for Independence, Wilson said: “The independence referendum has place Scotland on the world map … brought Scotland out of the shadows only to disclose an invincible ignorance as the campaign developed.”
Sturgeon’s resignation, as I said earlier, made headlines around the world.
Let us hope her successor can keep our country in the news – and for all the right reasons.
What next for Dundee’s Three Js as D C Thomson cuts hundreds of jobs?
I was as shocked as anybody at news that D C Thomson, the company that put the third ‘J’ in Dundee’s 3Js is cutting 300 jobs from its workforce of 1600 – a total that’s shrunk by over 500 since 2016.
From its newspapers such as the Courier, Evening Telegraph, Press and Journal, The Sunday Post and People’s Friend, to the UK’s longest running comic, The Beano, everyone in Scotland has come across DCT in their lifetime.
The notoriously private family firm is axing around 40 publications and will close its operation in Colchester – Aceville Publications – which publishes over 20 magazines from the 50 or so DCT acquired in 2018.
How did it come to the point where a stalwart of Scotland’s newspaper and magazine publishing sector – as well as the relatively recent addition of commercial radio to its portfolio – can deliver such devastating news?
DCT has always been cautious when planning ahead. Moving into radio and taking on Wave in Dundee, Kingdom FM in Fife and Original 106 in Aberdeen was a brave move, but not an ultimately fatal one.
Management at DCT are now planning a digital reset as more and more publications go online, where they are likely to stay.
It’s a great shame that one of the biggest names in Scottish newspapers and journalism should stumble over a digital hurdle.
I will always remember the day I stepped into the magnificent, red sandstone-clad building in Meadowside, Dundee for my first day at work there.
From a uniformed doorman at the main office of the Courier Building, to the rumble of the presses underneath and the hissing of the compressed air system that sped messages between Meadowside and the Bank Street offices and press hall, I was an awe-struck young man.
A reporter came down to meet me and guided me into the lift that trundled us to the fourth floor. I had been there before for an interview with a stern-looking relic with a grey, handlebar moustache who had demanded to know what my religion was, but this was different – I was about to start work in a place whose training had help journalists secure placements in national publications and further afield in print and in broadcasting.
I made many friends at DCT, but a number of them are unfortunately long gone. I did my fair share of council meetings, district, sheriff and high courts, all helped by DCT’s in-house shorthand classes.
The company knew what it wanted from its reporters and its training ensured that they were fit for the job, either in Dundee, one of the many branch offices, or at other newspapers.
I only stayed at DCT for a few years before spreading my wings and departing Clootie City for pastures new, but I treasure my memories of the time and the people.
Every time I am back in the city I like to walk around just to see the New York Times-inspired Courier Building dominating the town centre.
I am sure DCT will survive this “blip” and welcome many more generations of young hopefuls into Meadowside’s hallowed halls.
Picture Copyright 2017 Laerol. First publication through Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA-4.0 license).