Mandy Rhodes

1 month ago | holyrood.com | Mandy Rhodes

Maggie Chapman, like other dogmatists, lacks self-awareness when it comes to how she hurts others while berating everyone else for not being kind. And my conclusion is that she just doesn’t care. Her imperious demands for her way or the highway, her assumptions about the motivations and prejudice of others, and her lack of any contrition about the damage she has inflicted on the reputation of the body politic by refusing to back down on her Trumpian attack on the Supreme Court is telling.

2 months ago | holyrood.com | Mandy Rhodes

It was the lesbians wot won it. Having always been the more ignored sexual minority, it was a defining moment in the For Women Scotland vs Scottish Ministers’ case at the Supreme Court when the great legal minds wrestling with the apparently vexed question of ‘what is a woman’ had to then grapple with the idea that lesbians were not sexually attracted to a certificate. It was a comedic moment in what had already felt like a surreal case. It seemed like the right time to stop for lunch.

2 months ago | holyrood.com | Mandy Rhodes

The SNP will eradicate child poverty by 2030. It’s a bold claim. But that is the target, the legal obligation, and John Swinney’s guiding moral mission. But today, less than five years and one election to go to that deadline and with 18 years of governing Scotland already on the clock – most of that with the now first minister in charge of the public coffers – there are more than 10,000 children being housed (not homed) in temporary accommodation.

Mar 21, 2025 | holyrood.com | Mandy Rhodes

I literally bumped into Nicola Sturgeon a couple of months ago when I crossed the street and almost tripped over her as she wheeled her suitcase down the Royal Mile for one of her rare appearances at Holyrood. The meeting surprised us both – we haven’t spoken in years – and the greeting, while reasonably polite as the conventions of etiquette leap-frogged the creeping realisation of all that has passed between us, was cold – a muffled salutation that gave no hint to the warmth we once shared.

Mar 7, 2025 | holyrood.com | Mandy Rhodes

Trumpian politics might well turn our sensitive stomachs. I suspect our prime minister finds them as abhorrent as most. Afterall, slugging it out in public is hardly the ‘British way’.