In the two weeks since George Floyd’s murder, politicians have rushed to embrace the sentiments behind the Black Lives Matter movement. Even the PM and the Home Secretary have uttered the words on the floor of the House of Commons. But actions speak louder than words and if we want to know just how much Black, and other minority ethnic, lives matter in Tory Britain, we need to take a long hard look at the impact of Tory policies on BAME lives. 

Anyone who watched “Sitting in Limbo”, Monday night’s BBC One dramatisation of the experiences of a member of the Windrush generation, could be left in little doubt that Theresa May’s flagship policy – the Hostile Environment – is a policy in which Black lives most definitely do not matter. 

The word 'unprecedented' should really be banned from all utterances for the rest of 2020.  But where the SNP is now as a party really is without much precedent. A party in its third term of government, riding high in the polls, with a leader whose approval ratings eclipse the other UK party leaders, never mind the Scottish ones who frankly don’t even rank. 

However, the SNP cannot afford to be complacent.  The question for us now is what to do with this dominance? Especially in the lead up to the 2021 Scottish elections, less than 12 months away. 

Unlike other political parties in the UK the SNP exists not just to win elections and form governments but to achieve major structural change.  The structures we seek to change are socio-economic as well as constitutional. We want to win independence for Scotland, not just as an end in itself but to make sure that the vital decisions about how we run our economy and our society are taken closer to home so that we can do things differently and better.  

This week, like most MPs I have been inundated with emails from constituents complaining about the behaviour of Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson’s failure to sack him.  Ian Blackford convened a meeting of opposition leaders on Tuesday night and they were right to identify that the main problem has been the undermining of trust and confidence in public health advice. However serious questions also arise about this UK Government’s respect for the rule of law. 

It’s a fundamental principle of the rule of law that the law should apply equally to all. In England this principle can be traced back to the Magna Carta, a 13th century charter of rights that occupies much the same position of reverence in England as the Declaration of Arbroath does in Scotland.  

Before Brexit became the primary focus of the Tories anti-European zeal they were obsessed with repealing the Human Rights Act (HRA) which, in 1998, incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) into the domestic law of the UK. At the same time, the ECHR was hard-wired into the devolution settlement in the Scotland Act. 

The UK had ratified the ECHR in 1951 but the importance of the Human Rights Act and the Scotland Act was that they ensured UK citizens could access these rights directly through the domestic courts of the UK rather than having to go to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, which was both costly and time-consuming.

In 2015 the SNP played a leading role in the successful cross-party campaign to save the HRA.