Ian Macwhirter

NICOLA Sturgeon's reputation as a master of detail will never be quite the same. Both the Hamilton Inquiry, which says she didn't mislead parliament, and the Holyrood Harassment Committee, which said she did, are agreed on one thing: the First Minister has “regrettable lapses of memory", as James Hamilton put it.

TWENTY-SIX words. That’s all it took to shatter the balance of our public and intellectual life and plunge us into the cauldron of conspiracy, rage and division that goes under the euphemism “social” media.

The Great Decoupling: China, America and the Struggle for Technological Supremacy

“It's not the end; it's not even the beginning of the end; but it is perhaps the end of the beginning”. Churchill's famous wartime speech after the battle of El Alamein in November 1942 was an ambiguous rallying cry. After all, by saying it was only the beginning, he was suggesting that there could be worse to come.

Our report today that the SNP's long-awaited Growth Commission is looking at New Zealand, rather than Norway, as an economic model for an independent Scotland will cause consternation among many left-wing independence supporters.

TOO much of what passes as political controversy is largely synthetic, mere noise. A prime example is the row over Jeremy Corbyn’s alleged hatred of Jews and sympathy for anti-Semitism. This simply isn’t true, and all the noise won’t make it so. However, sometimes manifest cases of injustice happen under our very noses with hardly any noise at all.

Non-Tory parties in Holyrood are now agreed that it is time to increase income taxes

THERE is something richly ironic in the anti-immigration Ukip falling apart internally over accusations of Islamophobia. The party’s foreign spokesman, Jim Carver, has just resigned over manifesto pledges of his leader, Paul Nuttall, including outlawing the burqa, banning Sharia courts and compelling girls to take tests for female genital mutilation (FGM). Aaron Banks, the millionaire Ukip donor, accused his leader of launching a “war against the Muslim religion”.