A member of the current SNP leadership once said that they “would live in a cave” if it meant Scotland could be independent. This somewhat extreme position, still shared on the party’s more eccentric fringes, is one of the reasons it has failed to persuade normal, house-dwelling, centrally heated Scots to back its ultimate ambition. The analysis, backed by most credible economists, that an independent Scotland’s economy would face a pretty dismal first decade or so is another – and perhaps the main – reason the nation remains part of the Union. It was interesting, therefore, to hear the SNP leadership candidate Kate Forbes say in a debate this week that she would not “trade poverty for independence”. In presentational terms at ...

If you are an avid consumer of viral tweets, you might believe there is every reason to censure Fiona Bruce, the host of BBC One’s Question Time. On last week’s episode (9 March) there was a discussion about the prospect of Stanley Johnson being awarded a knighthood in the resignation honours of his son, Boris Johnson. One of the panellists, the journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, referring to an incident in which Stanley Johnson broke his wife’s nose, called him “a wife-beater… on record”. Many tweets since have centred around Bruce then appearing to defend Johnson, saying “it was a one-off”. When referring to domestic violence, “it was a one-off” is the sort of phrase that makes you wince, not least when issued ...

Until recently, to find music as sped up as 130 beats per minute, you’d have to don a black T-shirt and a serious expression and hit a techno club. Now you just need to turn on the radio: Calvin Harris and Ellie Goulding’s new single, "Miracle", is vying for UK number one in the charts and is a 143 BPM track, transporting us back to the 1990s. It is, also, a trance anthem. Trance is techno’s cheerful sister, quantitatively similar but qualitatively worlds apart. Both are electronic, with four beats to a bar, with all beats hit (think "boom boom boom boom") – so fast there’s no time to think. Both feature breakdowns, building anticipation and then drops – a return to ...

How could Hugh Grant’s agent have made such a terrible mistake? There was Hugh, thinking he was on his way to the Hay Literary Festival to speak on psychic structure in the novels of William Thackeray, when he suddenly found himself on the red carpet at the Oscars, of all places, facing banal questions of the sort usually put to actors. The first sign that the vox pop interviewer was well below postdoc standards was when she mistook Hugh’s jovial reference to Vanity Fair, the 1848 novel, for a reference to Vanity Fair, the magazine that happened to be part-sponsoring the event they were both at. Hugh looked at her in absolute astonishment. Toto, we are not in Oxbridge any more. Things only ...

Say what you like about Peter Thiel – but luck has generally been on the Silicon Valley venture capitalist’s side. He is, after all, a co-founder of PayPal – which he sold for $1.5bn four years after its launch. He was the first person whom a young entrepreneur named Mark Zuckerberg approached in 2004, asking for investment for his new idea, the Facebook. He was also the man whose venture capital fund, Founder’s Fund, happened to notice payment problems when dealing with Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) last week – spurring him to withdraw all of its funds from the bank by Thursday (9 March), just as the $42bn bank run that caused the second-biggest bank failure in US history kicked off, ...

The Gary Lineker saga is the political equivalent of the dress that went viral in 2015 because people couldn’t decide what colour it was. Blue and black or white and gold? Shameless politicking by the Beeb’s highest-paid presenter or a Conservative attack on the right of a beloved former footballer to criticise an abhorrent government policy? Your preconceptions will determine which stance you take. It is clear that Lineker, who has hosted Match of the Day since 1999, owes much of his current fame and 8.8 million Twitter followers to the position the BBC has given him. This, according to the dozens of Tory MPs who have written to Tim Davie, the BBC director-general, to demand an apology and independent investigation, ...

“Show apartments in Elephant and Castle! Who thought this up?!” hams Alan Carr in not-quite-mock bafflement. “All I remember is that massive roundabout!” This is the only flicker of introspection in the first episode of the latest series of Interior Design Masters, the BBC’s popular design contest show now in its fourth run (think Bake Off, but with untreated plywood where the warmth should be). Elephant and Castle, a ring road-centric neighbourhood of Southwark, south London, has in recent years been picked up, turned upside down and shaken for its zone one square footage. Once a nucleus of postwar municipal planning, all Ernö Goldfinger blocks and optimistic council housing, its gentrification of late has been quick and dirty. Gone is the shabby Sixties ...

Is Britain becoming a fascist totalitarian ethno-state? That depends, apparently, on who you ask. Gary Lineker drew such a conclusion recently. He was joined by figures on Twitter such as Alastair Campbell and Tanja Bueltmann, a professor of migration, who suggested that Britain under the Conservatives shares more than a passing similarity with the Nazi state of the 1930s. Is the government of Suella Braverman, Greg Hands and Penny Mordaunt really comparable to that of Martin Bormann, Heinrich Himmler and Heinrich Müller? If there is an intelligent comparison to be made – which is doubtful – it’s not likely to be found in tweets from Campbell and Bueltmann, which are high on condemnation and low on facts. But they raise an ...