I would just add that the woman whose identity is causing the deadlock in the investigation could resolve matters by waiving her anonymity in the interest of the public good.

The political immaturity of the Scots is incorrigible. They voted overwhelmingly for Labour for decades despite the party's incompetence and corruption and then transferred in lockstep to the SNP whose mismanagement of government has been blindly ignored. They seem to be under the spell of independence to the exclusion of everything else despite the fact that winning it would be a backward step materially for 80% of them.

The crux of the struggle over Salmond is whether Sturgeon and her husband who is the SNP chief executive conspired to put Salmond in jail which would be a huge scandal with no precedent in British politics if true. Yet Massie, speaking to Andrew Neil on Spectator TV said most Scots were unaware of what was at stake which is whether they are capable of clean government under independence. Henry Hill's readers are better informed than the average Scottish voter.

My objection to Scottish independence from the start has been that as a temperamentally authoritarian people, they need the UK to save them from themselves. The union does them a huge favour if they but knew it. The SNP's serial assaults over the years on individual rights and capture by woke women have provided ample evidence that the spirit of Calvinism is incompatible with European modernity. Now Gordon Brown wants to save the union with a constitutional federation under which dominant Big England will inflame the Scottish separatists even more. Nobody in England needs this.

I come increasingly to the conclusion that we are fighting for a union that is already lost; Celts and Saxons no longer have the ability to co-exist consensually and the former will never be happy until they are free to wallow in the consequences of their own delusions. Contrary to what received wisdom claims, England will be none the poorer and will still keep its international prestige if it abandons the union. It does not need either the Scots or the Welsh. Just let them go and feed on their grievances on their own.

Covid elimination in one country will not work unless we seal or borders from all contact with the rest of the world where the virus circulates and cannot be destroyed.

I've been reading this article for 70 years. We lack venture capital because no one with money has trusted either Conservative or Labour governments under the postwar consensus that gave trade unions a disruptive voice (noisily used) in economic policy until Thatcher. And then it became cheaper to manufacture in Asia which is where the factories are still. Of the US Big Tech industries, only Amazon is a large scale home grown employer. Investment by foreign car companies has been a life saver for the US where Biden is busily shutting down energy jobs.

The answer to the UK's difficulties has always been to let the pound fall, inflation rise and house prices rip to provide a compensating asset safe haven from the former two. Inflation has been taken off the board. The pound has dropped over the last 15 years from €1.65 to about €1.12 and Goodman says it's still over-valued which has advantages as well as serious disadvantages for an importing country. No other developed country has seen a collapse of such proportions under normal conditions. How low does he want it to go.

Even Thatcher got a fright when the pound and the dollar neared parity.

Someone a judge thinks should get five or 10 years will serve only half before near automatic release release so he sentences him to double. seems obvious. If we have a large prison population, it's because we have a lot of criminals and certainly more than we catch. We know that it is very hard for a young man to get himself sent to prison which will only happen after multiple convictions and then they get out half way through. The raw figures themselves don't tell us much without a breakdown by nationality. Are some sectors and age groups of the population more troublesome than others? Violent crime is up a lot for one things. As Gauke says, 10 years for lying on a form is excessive and it will never be imposed. It's gesture politics which, I agree, is also wrong.

Trump's presidency would have been more normal had the Democratic party and the liberal MSM not declared war on his legitimacy from the moment of his election; Twitter was the only forum where he could defend himself. Naturally Biden faces nothing like the same hostility, rather the opposite, so that the people who helped make the Trump presidency abnormal can claim that Biden has restored normalcy. Not much of a benchmark. Trump was an outsider who threatened the swamp's privileges but that was no excuse for the barrage of hatred and disinformation that engulfed him. You want to know what was fake news? Russian collusion was fake news and everyone knew it from the start but it was peddled daily as a fact by the same MSM that complains about it and by the Democratic party. Theyre still repeating it as a fact despite their own special counsel saying there was no collusion by any American. Given all the question marks over Biden's ability to govern, you would expect his White House to come under tight scrutiny. But the media being Dems themselves, they're reporting absent.

Independence is a scam on behalf of the politico-public sector who will be the only ones to benefit. The SNP leadership are not deluded but the poor fools they dupe are. An independent Scotland will have a vastly expanded politico-public sector in well-paid taxpayer funded jobs even if the Scottish economy is on its knees.

The other fantasy being pushed is that England will have a reduced status internationally if Scotland leaves. This is nonsense. Scotland needs England but England does not need Scotland. It will remain an important country with established institutions and a world class economy.

What is Scottish independence really for and do the former Labour-supporting working class enthusiasts in west central Scotland know?

Craig Murray, the former UK diplomat who blogs about his support for independence, posted about the great things in store for the public sector elites. He thinks an independent Scotland will need to expand its core civil service from the current 11,000. He cited Sweden (48,000) and Denmark (68,000) as comparable countries. He expects the creation of 20 to 25 ministries.

Independent Scotland will need to establish some 75 embassies and receive a similar number of ambassadors, say 800 officials and their families who will require Edinburgh residences commensurate with their status. The effect of the cost of housing for everybody will be dramatic. The parliamentary system will become bicameral with a second building and a new layer of administration.

All this will happen whether independence is an economic success or not and the costs fall entirely on Scottish taxpayers. Will the pro-independence residents of the Glasgow housing projects rejoice that those already doing well are doing even better regardless of performance.

Scotland is already breathtakingly corrupt as the Sturgeon vs Salmond fight is proving. What will it be like under independence.

Murray does not mention the one big thing that has happened since the 2014 referendum. Brexit means that if Scotland gain independence and joins the EU as Sturgeon intends, there will be a hard border between England and Scotland enforced by Brussels from which Scotland will suffer far more than England.

Republicans should not deliberately sabotage the Biden administration the way Democrats, disgracefully, did Trump's. It is not the job of the loyal opposition to cripple the government simply because it can. Nor should they take any responsibility for Biden's left wing agenda by voting for it. Let Biden take sole responsibility for opening the southern border to uncontrolled immigration, his ultra green plans to reduce America's energy independence, the relief of student debt, a minimum wage that will close many small business and letting CRT run riot through the federal bureaucracy. These are not Republican objectives Trump or no Trump. Biden knows that democratic socialism is unattractive to grownups which is why he wants to peel off a few Republicans in order to say “it wasn't just me guv” to the electorate in 2022/24. He's got Kamala Harris's casting vote. Let him make do with that.

We have committed genocide ourselves in the past. What is it that allows us to be judgmental about others.