Race for Holyrood: Your Scottish election briefing for Tueday, April 6

A lighter look at the Scottish election campaign trail.

Soapbox

@AnasSarwar: “Today I have unveiled the biggest and most ambitious job creation scheme in the history of the Scottish Parliament. Scotland is facing a national jobs emergency - this urgent action will help confront it head on.”

On Tuesday, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar announced the party’s £1.2 billion plan to revitalise Scotland’s job market. If elected in May, Mr Sarwar said Labour would spend £500 million on offering guaranteed jobs for young people, as well as targeted training funds to recruit and train thousands of nurses, carers and other frontline workers. He also promised to end Zero Hour Contracts within Public Sector Procurement and to accelerate the growth of the Scottish Investment Bank.

Caption This

Do you have a good caption for this photo of Willie Rennie? Let us know in the comments.

#FakeNews?

On Tuesday Nicola Sturgeon was called “disingenuous” by some teachers, after she insisted there was no requirement for school pupils to sit exams this year. Her comments come after widespread complaints that the SQA guidance on end-of-year assessments was steering teachers towards setting exams, despite the decision to cancel them in 2021. SQA guidance for physics teachers, for example, states that “key pieces of evidence” for assessing pupils’ attainment include question papers, as well as further “top up question papers” and “end-of-topic tests”. More than 6,000 people have signed a petition calling on the SQA to reconsider its guidance to teachers.

Lib Dem leader Willie Rennie handles a six-week-old badger during a visit to the SSPCA National Wildlife Rescue Centre at Fishcross near Alloa.

Campaign Trail

•Prominent pro-independence blogger Paul Kavanagh (a.k.a. Wee Ginger Dug) has announced he is “stepping back from the fray” to focus on his mental and physical wellbeing after receiving “homophobic” abuse from his fellow Scottish nationalists. In a blog posted on Monday Mr Kavanagh said the current election campaign was “the nastiest...and the most vitriolic” he had experienced, claiming that his public refusal to back Alex Salmond’s new Alba Party had also led to “snide and vicious remarks” about his disabilities.

•The UK's largest poll aggregator was left red-faced on Tuesday after a “bug” in one scenario of it’s Scottish election modelling gave the Alba Party more seats than it has candidates. Britain Elect’s interactive polling lets users change Alba’s share of predicted SNP list votes to see how it might impact the party’s share of seats. The glitch in the system - now thought to be fixed - meant that, when users gave Alba 100 per cent of predicted SNP list votes, the party won 34 seats at Holyrood - two more than the number of candidates it is fielding. The model of the same scenario also appeared to give the SNP a single list seat despite winning 0 per cent of the vote.

•Judges at the Court of Session in Edinburgh have been asked to rule on whether Scotland can hold a second independence referendum without Westminster’s consent - before voters head to the polls in May. It comes after the case was dismissed at a hearing in January, where Lady Carmichael ruled it was “plainly raised prematurely”. QCs acting on behalf of the Forward As One group, claim clarity on the issue is needed so people do not have to vote “in ignorance”.

Battleground

Dumfriesshire

•Winning party (2016): Scottish Conservatives

•Second place (2016): SNP

•Swing to lose: 1.70%

For years Dumfriesshire was considered a dependably red region of Scotland. Labour’s Elaine Murray won the now-defunct constituency of Dumfries at the three successive elections between the re-establishment of Holyrood in 1999, and the boundary review of 2008. Ms Murray even went on to win the newly-formed seat of Dumfriesshire in 2011, by a ten-point margin.

But in 2016, something strange happened. Labour were overtaken by not one, but two rival parties, when Mr Murray placed a distant third behind Scottish Conservative Oliver Mundell and the SNP’s Joan McAlpine. This time around, Dumfriesshire could end up being one of the most interesting constituency contests of the entire election.

Mr Mundell’s slender majority of just 1,230 will look tempting to the SNP - all the more so when they recall that Mr Mundell is a vocal Brexit supporter at a time when many voters see a route back to EU membership through Scottish independence.

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