In your briefing today:

📣 Scotland has lost a “good and principled man”, says First Minister John Swinney, with the death of former deputy first minister Jim Wallace, 71, of complications following surgery.

His wife Rosie said: “The family are very shocked by Jim’s death. It was all so sudden. He was still incredibly active in a whole host of areas.”

From across the political spectrum, Lord Wallace is remembered as one of the architects of modern Scotland. Scottish Lib Dem leader Alex Cole-Hamilton said he was “one of the finest liberals our party has ever produced”.

His life was remarkable: he served three times as acting First Minister, held ministerial roles in Scotland and - later - as a life peer in London, five years as Advocate General for Scotland. He was also moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland from 2021 to 2022. (The Scotsman) (BBC)

📣 Did politicians apply pressure to rush the opening of the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital before the 2015 general election?

Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar produced a document at yesterday’s First Minister’s Questions which he claimed proved hospital bosses were pressured to take patients, with the reporting concluding “no consideration” was given to delaying the opening despite problems with its completion.

SNP ministers insist they did not lean on Glasgow’s NHS board to get patients into the hospital before it was safe.

But Kimberly Darroch, mother of ten-year-old leukaemia patient Milly Main, who died in the hospital, said families had been “lied to”. (Mail) (BBC)

📣 Donald Trump has warned it is “very dangerous” for the UK to do business with China, only hours after Keir Starmer hailed closer ties between the countries during his visit to Beijing.

Starmer told a UK-China Business Forum in Beijing that the UK’s relationship with China was in a “good, strong place”, and that his meetings had provided “just the level of engagement that we hoped for”.

But Trump’s comments, made in response to Starmer’s attempts for an “economic reset” with the superpower, will raise concerns about his possible reaction to closer ties, despite the UK making the US aware of the trip, and the UK’s objectives. (Guardian)

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📣 Reform UK has surged ahead of Scottish Labour in a new poll, which has also found only one in ten Scots approve of Sir Keir Starmer’s record in office. (🎁 Times - gift link)

📣 Edinburgh’s south suburban railway could become a third tram line in the city, according to a map of a possible future network unveiled by the city’s council. (Scotsman)

📣 Volunteers restoring a Cold War bunker in Edinburgh have raised health and safety concerns about the site, claiming faulty equipment, fire hazards, and emu attacks make the site dangerous. The Barton Bunker Preservation Society has branded the claims “inaccurate, misleading, historic or lacking wider context”. (BBC)

📣 Two serving British Army officers will face a court martial over the handling of the case of sexual assault of teenage soldier Jaysley Beck, who later took her own life. (BBC)

📣 Up to 3.8 million “Waspi women” have been told, again, they won’t get compensation for the way changes to their state pension age were communicated. (Independent)

📣 Robert Hardman says the Manchester seat of Gorton and Denton - which faces a by-election - will “expose just how frighteningly polarised Britain has become”. (Mail)

📣 The US faces a partial government shutdown tonight as Democrats demand restrictions on federal immigration raids across the US. (AP)

📣 Boxer Anthony Joshua has spoken in detail for the first time about the car crash which killed two of his close friends. (Mirror)

⚽️ Celtic got off to a barnstorming start against Utrecht and eventually ran out 4-2 winners but, as Michael Gannon points out, “it was a had more stressful” than it needed to be. The Glasgow club is now through to the Europa League play-off phase. (Daily Record) (🎥 Highlights)

⚽️ Rangers also made a bright start in their dead rubber against Porto, but Porto eventually eased into a 3-1 win, pouncing on defensive mistakes to end Rangers eight-game unbeaten streak. (Daily Record) (🎥 Highlights)

🗣️ Podcaster and broadcaster Emily Maitlis hangs out with a plane-spotter in Minneapolis. It’s much more interesting than it sounds.

He’d noticed that deportation flights out of the city’s airports had vanished from public records… and then became a lot more frequent last summer. “The flight we are awaiting today, Nick calculates, will be his 27th flight in January alone,” writes Maitlis.

“It sounds a lot. But I’m not here to get dewy-eyed. Barack Obama oversaw more deportations than any other US president – north of 3 million. I’m wary of falling into the liberal trap.

“‘You mean criminals, right?’ I say.

“Nick pauses. ‘The government would say that they’re ‘the worst of the worst’. In my experience doing community observation these are grandmas and grandpas. And from the statistics the DHS has sent out, most of them do not have criminal convictions.’” (The New European)

🗣️The Spectator mounts a defence of Brexit, 10 years on: “The consensus remains that Brexit was a mistake,” it notes in a leader. “Ministers compete to see who can flirt most openly with re-entry, despite their party manifesto pledges not to rejoin the single market or customs union, or to reintroduce freedom of movement.”

“But reversing Brexit, however stealthily, would be a mistake – a denial of democracy as egregious as any cancelled council election,” says the magazine.

“The past decade has proved that just leaving the EU is not enough,” says the magazine. “We require leaders who want to embrace the opportunities of our restored sovereignty, rather than dance a perpetual hokey-cokey around EU membership.” (The Spectator (£))

🗣️ Paul Ovenden would likely agree with that verdict on rejoining Europe. Writing in the New Statesman, he says Britain needs “a Gaullist leader”. “In March 1945,” he writes, “De Gaulle stood before the French Assembly and declared that his country had to choose between ‘the sweet shadow of decline and the harsh light of renewal’.

“The choice for Britain today could hardly be expressed better: do we as a country, a people and a government have the stomach for national renewal – or are we content to drift?

“A modern Gaullist response to this moment would be to take on the frailty of our position and the smallness of our politics by acting bigger. It would be to give people a clear sense of what the sacrifices and the collective effort are all in aid of.” (The New Statesman)

🗣️Is America’s President building his own paramilitary militia, in the camouflaged and tactical gear-clad form of ICE? The tl;dr answer is: quite possibly. And it’s important that those opposed to the prospect stand up and stop it happening, the newspaper says.

ICE does have a reason to be in American cities: Trump has a mandate to deport illegal immgrants. But his enforcers are - as noted earlier - not (only) doing that. “Recently, only 5% of those detained have been people convicted of violent crimes.

“Instead, ICE’s brutal means indicate ends that are darker than immigration control,” it says - means that are unchecked by law and the constitution, and ends which cover a very broad and often political agenda.

“The most disturbing possibility is that the president is creating a militia which answers only to himself,” says the newspaper.

Widespread revulsion at ICE and its tactics, which has now swept the nation, show “Americans woke up to a grave threat this week,” it says. But now it’s time for Congress and other “guardians of America’s institutions” not to relax, but force change. (Economist)

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