Politics

After the Taliban took over Kabul and announced victory in Afghanistan, a scramble is underway by diplomats and many Afghans to flee the country. There are videos overnight of distressing scenes at Kabul airport where crowds have assembled in an attempt to get out. The US embassy has since issued an advisory to American citizens and Afghan nationals not to travel to the airport until notified. As the chaos unfolds – and both UK and US estimates on the likely speed of the Taliban advance prove embarrassingly wide of the mark – anger is building among MPs over the government's handling of the situation. Dominic Raab has flown back from his holiday early and Parliament will sit on Wednesday for an emergency session to debate the next move.

The speed of the Taliban’s advance in Afghanistan is remarkable. Even those who thought that the Trump / Biden policy of withdrawal was a folly, did not expect that Kabul would be surrounded before the end of August. Their only mistake was to believe our assurances about having an enduring commitment to the country What makes the whole situation, with all the suffering that ordinary Afghans will endure and the damage being done to the US’s reputation for being a reliable ally, so exasperating is that after years of failure the US and Nato had found a relatively low cost way of maintaining a form of stability in the country.

On Thursday, teachers planning residential trips were told that it may be just fine for teenagers of the opposite sex to share a room.  In 25 years of teaching, I have seen many daft ideas trickle down from government, but the Scottish government’s latest guidance, ‘Supporting Transgender Pupils In Schools’, takes the biscuit. Of course it promotes affirmation of transgender identities. This is Scotland, after all, where Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP seems to be in thrall to transgender ideology. The party previously enacted legislation that talked about people ‘becoming female’. But while that law took liberties with the rights of women, this latest guidance impacts the safeguarding of children.

After 20 years, 456 UK military deaths and £22 billion spent, Britain's involvement in Afghanistan is over. With the last American forces leaving within a month, news out of the war-torn nation has been predictably grim, with the Taliban sweeping the country amid reports of executions, evacuations and troops switching sides. The situation is now so dire that Boris Johnson has been forced to chair an emergency Cobra meeting this afternoon. British troops went into the country in October 2001 – four months after Johnson was first elected as an MP for Henley – with the subsequent two decades of fighting attracting much comment from the future Prime Minister during his rise from a backbencher and commentator to a minister climbing the greasy pole.

The antics of Scottish Covid advisor Devi Sridhar have been one of the few bright spots throughout the pandemic. During the last fifteen months, Sridhar has become something of a pin-up girl to the SNP's online army of so-called 'cybernats.' This has been due to her repeated jibes at the Westminster government, her demands for more power which Holyrood already had and her effusive praise for First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s ‘wise words’ and ‘strong leadership’. Not to mention of course her suggestion that an independent Scotland would have done better against Covid. More seriously, Sridhar has also been accused of spreading misinformation about the Oxford vaccine.