Kevin McKenna

WHEN Humza Yousaf took to the stage of Dundee’s Caird Hall on Tuesday to address STUC delegates, few among the audience were expecting the rafters to be in any immediate danger. Mr Yousaf’s speeches tend to be light on substance with an emphasis on old Nationalist barnacles that the passage of time and the changing of guards have failed to shift. At last month’s party conference he had pledged to rid Scotland of all Tories at the forthcoming Westminster election. How he planned to do this was left unsaid. Not that the party activists, straining to hide the spaces in a half-empty hall – like a short tee-shirt on a bouncer’s stomach – were caring.

Mr Yousaf couldn’t resist another outing for his favourite theme: how hateful Scotland has become. He reached out to “the everyday victims of hate crime” of which there are still “far too many”. Then it was on to those who “experience hate at work” or who are “victims of hatred”.

The most divisive and antagonistic debate in modern UK politics effectively started with a message of tolerance and hope. It was tweeted in December, 2019 by JK Rowling. “Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. Live your best life in peace and security. But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real?”

JIM SILLARS is recalling a visit he made to the Scottish Parliament for the unveiling of the portrait of his late wife, Margo MacDonald – warrior queen of Scottish Nationalism - by the renowned Scottish painter, Gerard Burns.

AN unintended consequence of the Scottish Government’s well-meaning Hate Crime Act has begun to trouble me. As the legislation has started to crumble, Scotland’s political elites have been deploying increasingly irascible language to defend it.

At 86, Jim Sillars is five years older than the American President yet his powers of recall, analysis and lucidity are characteristic of a man still in his prime.

Jim Sillars is telling me about the moment more than a decade ago when he came close to chucking his SNP membership in the bin.

SCOTLAND’S top political broadcaster has said he fears that “serious current affairs broadcasting is in danger of becoming a subset of the entertainment industry”.

“I’m so glad that our politicians are much more concerned with pronouns, hate speech, cheap swally and euthanasia than on tiresome issues like child poverty, homelessness, rough sleeping and the cost-of-living crisis,” said no resident of Scotland’s poorest neighbourhoods ever.

Bernard Ponsonby is telling me about John Cornfield, a former miner from Blantyre and the man who taught him most about politics. He provides some vivid, remembered snapshots of his old political mentor. It’s clear in the telling that a man such as this would never have been permitted to breach Holyrood’s platinum-lounge of managerial obsessives.