Scotland is a constituent country of the United Kingdom, governed through a devolved parliament at Holyrood. The Scottish National Party (SNP) has run the Scottish government since 2007.
Most of Scotland's budget (roughly £60bn a year) comes via a block grant from Westminster. This redistributive system gives Scotland a quarter more funding per person than it gives England. The Scottish government can use its tax and borrowing powers to adjust its budget, though Westminster imposes a total cap on debt of £3bn. So far Scotland has borrowed only from the British government, which lends at a rate 0.11 percentage points above the gilt yield.
Scotland has two national languages besides English. Scottish Gaelic, rooted in Old Irish, was spoken by people in mountainous western Scotland but was in effect banned after the Battle of Culloden in 1746, when the British army crushed the Jacobite rising. Thanks to government funding it is now spoken by nearly 70,000 people—a rise of over 20% since 2011. Scots, descended from Old English and brought to the Lowlands by Anglo-Saxons, is spoken by 1.5m people but is quietly declining; the number of speakers fell by almost 30,000 between 2011 and 2022. In 2025 just ten pupils in their penultimate year of secondary school studied Scots, compared with 70 who took Gaelic. The SNP allocated £950,000 ($1.3m) to Scots initiatives in the 2026 budget—just 3% of the £31m for Gaelic.
John Swinney, Scotland's first minister, wants another vote on independence by 2028. In 2014 Scots voted to stay in the union in a "once-in-a-generation" referendum allowed by Westminster. In 2022 the SNP asked the Supreme Court if Scotland could bypass London's consent to hold another referendum; the answer was no. The Scotland Act of 2016 subsequently devolved more powers from Westminster. Polls say Scots are split on independence, but voters' stated priorities are the economy and the NHS; independence ranks sixth.
The Alba Party, which Alex Salmond championed, folded in March 2026 after struggling without its founder, who died in 2024. Donald Dewar became Scotland's inaugural first minister in 1999; his statue stands on Buchanan Street in Glasgow.
The SNP plans to begin borrowing directly in the private market, issuing bonds dubbed "kilts"—a nod to British government "gilts". Analysts reckon the bond market will charge roughly 0.3 percentage points more for kilts than for gilts. The SNP's own analysis shows that raising £1.5bn over five years would cost £90m more (in 2024-25 prices) than borrowing from the British government, driven by administration fees and the likely premium on kilts over gilts. Moody's and S&P Global gave the Scottish government the same credit ratings for kilts as for gilts in 2025, though both agencies explicitly based their ratings on Westminster's backing. S&P has already said it could lower Scotland's rating if the country "took material steps towards independence".
In a museum in Havana, there are two skulls of Christopher Columbus, "one when he was a boy and one when he was a man."