This is worth watching.

They said no.

In four years of fighting in Iraq, the U.S. lost 4,500 troops. Russia lost thirty Iraq wars’ worth of men to take one Ukrainian town. They lost as many men as there are in the entire French army - to take a town most people can’t find on a map. Russia is not strong.

1/ Extraordinary. John Swinney appears genuinely unaware the SNP broke a 2021 manifesto commitment to freeze income tax rates. All the more remarkable as he was personally responsible for one of the increases, when he was acting Finance Secretary in 2022.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – the only way Scotland could become an independent nation is if it learns from the likes of Ireland and Singapore. We need to attract wealth creators and get the tax TAKE up, not the tax RATE up.

1/🚨The last remaining leg on which Scot Gov was standing has today been cut away by the Scottish Fiscal Commission. An SFC factsheet updates its forecasts, on which basis a majority of Scottish taxpayers paid more tax than they would elsewhere in the UK in 2023-24 and 2024-25.

The SNP’s claims about taxation in Scotland vs England continue to fall apart. As ever, Sam brings the receipts.

1/ Angus Robertson’s performance yesterday in parliament was absurd. His entire defence for never attending a HES board meeting is that there was no need to, because his civil servants were keeping him fully apprised of what was going on. Well plainly they weren’t.

Dave Doogan is going to be furious when he finds out what Nicola Sturgeon has been up to…

This will be a tough weekend for the Chancellor. She knew almost six weeks before the Budget from the OBR there was no ‘black hole’. Yet she and the Treasury still stoked up the idea that there was — and it would take big tax rises to fill it. By Oct 31 she knew from the OBR

The extraordinary reason we cannot know how often MSPs show up for work.

The Russians started the war, and there is no other way to put it. The whole world is a witness. They came with aggression to destroy us. We stopped them. Europe helped, America helped. Russia failed to occupy Ukraine first and foremost because of the strength of the Ukrainian

Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees. $30 per seat per month. $1.4 million annually. I called it "digital transformation." The board loved that phrase. They approved it in eleven minutes. No one asked what it would actually do. Including me. I

SPOILER: John Swinney will not deliver another independence referendum. Not if the SNP wins a majority at Holyrood. Not if they win a majority with the Greens. Not if Scotland wins the World Cup on penalties. The. Constitution. Is. Reserved. spectator.com/article/the-sn…

Short piece on the curious spectacle of the Scottish government saying in public that it "respects" the FWS Supreme Court judgment while privately and in court trying to undermine and reject it... thetimes.com/uk/scotland/ar…

Ahead of the budget tomorrow, the full story of the SNP’s statistical chicanery on income tax. these-islands.co.uk/publications/i…

Yesterday's Scottish Budget had a flagship policy: an increase in income tax thresholds. It's being widely reported as a cut in income tax for low earners. That isn't really correct. Four quick thoughts on a very peculiar tax cut.

You got 20% more public spending than UK average every year for three decades, very little of which you spent on investment or infrastructure.

The usual Trump sycophants and know-nothings are all piling in claiming he’s a genius, this is the art of the deal in action, he played hardball to get a better Greenland deal than was otherwise available. It’s all nonsense. In fact, it’s TACO in action, a Trump surrender, a

In a Sunday Times analysis of the predictions of 26 major economic forecasters of the UK, the Office for Budget Responsibility came joint last with a rating of 1 out of 10. That’s right. Joint last. Yet it’s on OBR forecasts that UK Budgets are constructed. And Chancellor Reeves