Politics

When Putin attacked Ukraine and sent global gas prices soaring, Boris Johnson set out a plan to make Britain energy secure. It included a target to quadruple the amount of power Britain gets from nuclear. Instead of one plant every decade (if you’re lucky), Britain would start building a new plant every year just as we did in the 50s and 60s. This plan relied not only on building ‘giga-scale’ plants like Hinkley Point C (at £42 billion now the most expensive plant in the history of the world), but also new small modular reactors (SMRs) built off-site in factories and deployed in fleets. This should, at least in theory,

While Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying bill makes its way through the UK parliament, in Scotland a separate assisted dying bill will be voted on next week. Scottish Liberal Democrat Liam McArthur has put forward legislation that would allow those deemed terminally ill north of the border to take their own lives, with MSPs allowed a free vote on the issue on 13 May. The decision to back the bill is a matter of conscience for parliamentarians. But now, less than a week before decision day, both First Minister John Swinney and his predecessor Humza Yousaf have announced that they will vote against it. First Minister John Swinney and his predecessor

We now live in a country where, once more, it appears to be a crime to commit blasphemy. This is the inevitable and justifiable conclusion many have made following the news yesterday that a man who burnt a copy of the Koran was charged with ‘harassment, alarm or distress’ against ‘the religious institution of Islam’. The National Secular Society has been volubly alarmed at the case The charge made against Hamit Coskun, who allegedly performed the act outside the Turkish Consulate in London in February, is thought to be the first time anybody has been prosecuted for harassing an ‘institution’, in the form of Islam, under the Public Order Act. Following a