Columnists From Scotland

"[There is] no reason Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe should be in prison in Iran so far as any of us know"

"[I will] make Brexit work not just for citizens but for the animals we love and cherish too"

"Animals are sentient beings who feel pain and suffering, so we are writing that principle into law and ensuring that we protect their welfare. Our plans will also increase sentences for those who commit the most heinous acts of animal cruelty to five years in jail. We are a nation of animal lovers so we will make Brexit work not just for citizens but for the animals we love and cherish too."

"I am deeply concerned about your unpatriotic attitude towards cheese"

"We have a great future outside the European Union and we should be embracing that"

"The new law will reaffirm the UK's global leadership on this critical issue, demonstrating our belief that the abhorrent ivory trade should become a thing of the past. Ivory should never be seen as a commodity for financial gain or a status symbol."

"My view is that what is emblematic of Britain is the welcome that we gave the Windrush generation, the welcome we gave people fleeing Idi Amin in the 1970s, the welcome that we continue to give those fleeing persecution. And now the fact that outside the European Union we can have a truly colour-blind migration policy that, if the British people want to, treats people from the Bahamas in the same way as we treat people from Bulgaria."

"[Brexit was motivated by a desire to] restore faith in our democratic institutions"

"one of the things we can do is continue to ensure that trees are allowed to survive - rather than by being chopped down by a council which is in thrall to its own officers"

"The creation of national parks almost 70 years ago changed the way we view our precious landscapes - helping us all access and enjoy our natural world. We want to make sure they are not only conserved, but enhanced for the next generation. Are we properly supporting all those who live in, work in, or want to visit these magnificent places? Should we indeed be extending our areas of designated land?"

"In all the important areas where an independent country chooses to exercise sovereignty, the UK will be able to do so and, in so doing, respect the referendum result and the mandate we were given,"

"A future prime minister could always choose to alter the relationship between Britain and the European Union. But the Chequers approach is the right one for now because we have got to make sure that we respect that vote and take advantage of the opportunities of being outside the European Union."

"[I continue to believe Mrs May has the right formula for leaving the EU.] I think the prime minister is doing a great job. I think it is really important that we unite as a party."

"We don't want to stay in the EU. We voted very clearly, 17.4 million people sent a clear message that we want to leave the European Union, and that means also leaving the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice"

"No-one can be blithe or blase about the real impact on food producers in this country of leaving without a deal."

"It will not be the case that we will have zero-rate tariffs on food products. There will be protections for sensitive sections of agriculture and food production."

"[If it] finally comes to a decision between no deal and no Brexit, I will choose no deal"

"I took drugs on several occasions at social events more than 20 years ago. At the time I was a young journalist. It was a mistake. I look back and I think I wish I hadn't done that. I think all politicians have lives before politics. Certainly when I was working as a journalist I didn't imagine I would go into politics or public service. I didn't act with an eye to that. The question now is that people should look at my record as a politician and ask themselves, 'Is this person we see ready to lead now?' I have seen the damage drugs can do to others and that is why I deeply regret the decisions I took,"

"The point that I made in the article is that if any of us lapse sometimes from standards that we uphold, that is human. The thing to do is not necessarily then to say that the standards should be lowered. It should be to reflect on the lapse and to seek to do better in the future."

"[It is] not enough to believe in Brexit you've also got to be able to deliver it"

"Full stop to the [Irish border] backstop"

"we must not rule out no deal."

"The so-called citizen journalism is the spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night. It is fantastic at times but it is not going to replace journalism. ... Most of the blogging is too angry and too abusive. Terrible things are said online because they are anonymous. People say things online that they wouldn't dream of saying in person."

"Business never rests."

"In history, the arrival of a small man in a big hat is rarely good news."

"I'd very rarely quote George Galloway as an authority, but when he describes Rochdale as "tinder dry, waiting for a spark" I am afraid – very much afraid – he isn't wrong."

"As the night wore on, it became clearer this was not just a simple Tories-out, Labour-in story. The more we look in detail, the more this seems like the night of the great insurgency – a multi-sided protest and revolt against politics as usual. The British public was sending the political class, Labour included, a message which could be summed up as: we, not you, are the masters now, and for a very long time to come."

"A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed young men sitting in their mother's basements and ranting. They are very angry people."

"Galloway says he abhors antisemitism, which makes it rotten luck that one of his aides was exposed as a Holocaust denier. Hard to imagine what might have drawn such a person to an avowed anti-racist, but there we are. When the Galloway travelling circus comes to town, it always brings the same trouble, pitting communities against each other, stirring up fear and loathing."

"[Galloway] has fought even more seats than he's had wives."

"Galloway filed a High Court action in Dublin against Twitter in May for defamation as the social media platform labelled his account "Russian state-affiliated media." He denies the label as he no longer presents his show on any Russian-linked channel. He said the "unjust” link by Twitter is "a daily stab to the heart of who I am and what I am.""

"There is nobody in the current parliament who can speak as well as Galloway. He will make a number of flamboyant interventions which will transfix the media and be most unpleasant for the Labour leader. The BBC will give him a regular platform. The Palestinian cause will have a leader with real profile and one many British Jews loathe."

"And it's beyond alarming that last night, the Rochdale by-election returned a candidate that dismisses the horror of what happened on October 7, who glorifies Hezbollah and is endorsed by Nick Griffin, the racist former leader of the BNP."

"And indeed in Bradford some of his appeal to the voters was couched in sectional and religious language unprecedented in the past 60 years of British politics. One of his leaflets began thus: "God KNOWS who is a Muslim. And he KNOWS who is not. Instinctively, so do you. Let me point out to all the Muslim brothers and sisters what I stand for."... I should just add that almost no Galloway event or pronouncement is now complete without several invocations of "Allah" in one form or another."

"I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is that Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns. I met him to try and bring about an end to sanctions, suffering and war, and on the second of the two occasions, I met him to try and persuade him to let Dr Hans Blix and the United Nations weapons inspectors back into the country - a rather better use of two meetings with Saddam Hussein than your own Secretary of State for Defense made of his."

"I am speaking for tens of millions, and maybe more, around the world, who know the truth about Iraq. Who know that the real criminals are in Washington. Not in the United Nations. The real criminals are in the White House, not in the Elysee Palace. The real criminals are in the Congress, not in the anti-war movement."

"Bush, and Blair, and the prime minister of Japan, and Berlusconi, these people are criminals, and they are responsible for mass murder in the world, for the war, and for the occupation, through their support for Israel, and through their support for a globalized capitalist economic system, which is the biggest killer the world has ever known. It has killed far more people than Adolf Hitler."

"I can't mention, I'm sorry to say, any Arab leader... Where is the... Nasser? Where is the Arab leader who will stand up and tell these people the truth? This is what we are waiting for."

"We want to make reparation to the Palestinian people for the crimes of Balfour which were committed in the building behind me, when one person, on behalf of one country, promised a second people the lands of a third people - the Palestinians."

"We are determined that we should stop the privatization of basic services of the British people. We are determined to defend the liberty of the British people which is being taken away day by day under the name of anti-terrorism. Ancient freedoms, which we had for hundreds of years, are being taken away from us under the name of the war on terror, when the real big terrorists are the governments of Britain and the United States."

"We have worked without rest to remove the causes of such violence from our world. We argued, as did the security services in this country, that the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq would increase the threat of terrorist attack in Britain. Tragically Londoners have now paid the price of the Government ignoring such warnings."

"Two of your beautiful daughters are in the hands of foreigners - Jerusalem and Baghdad. The foreigners are doing to your daughters as they will."

"The daughters are crying for help, and the Arab world is silent. And some of them are collaborating with the rape of these two beautiful Arab daughters."

"[I]t can be said that the Iraqi resistance is not just defending Iraq. They are defending all the Arabs and they are defending all the people of the world from American hegemony."

"Some believe that those aeroplanes on September 11 came out of a clear blue sky. I believe they came out of a swamp of hatred created by us. I believe that because the total, complete unending and bottomless support for General Sharon’s crimes against the Palestinian people."

"You know, Mr Hitchens, you are a court jester - not in Camelot like other miserable liberals before you, but in the court of the Bourbon Bushes. You start off being the liberal mouthpiece for one of the most reactionary governments this country has ever known and you end up a mouthpiece and apologist for these miserable malevolent incompetents who cannot even pick up the bodies of their own citizens in New Orleans."

"People like Mr Hitchens are willing to fight to the last drop of other people’s blood...How I wish he would put on a tin hat and pick up a gun and go and fight himself."

"Mr Hitchens's policy has succeeded in making 10,000 new Bin Ladens."

"What you have witnessed [since Christopher Hitchens’s opposition to the 1991 invasion of Iraq] is something unique in natural history: the first ever metamorphosis of a butterfly into a slug."

"I think we have generated as much light as we are going to...And as much heat as we ought to."