Politics

Once, Sir Keir Starmer liked to claim that the Welsh Labour government was the ‘blueprint’ the UK. Yet now, like so much else, he has u-turned even on that, declining to repeat the promise when asked repeatedly three months ago. And perhaps that’s no surprise when one considers the record of Mark Drakeford’s ragtime regime in Cardiff Bay, running an economy which grows slower than the cars on the Welsh 20mph-roads. With his country’s NHS in crisis, the First Minister this week offered a revealing insight into his own priorities when grilled in the Senedd chamber. Drakeford will shortly be standing down from office, amid suggestions that he was ‘squeezed

Humza Yousaf has just executed an embarrassing U-turn and effectively banned XL Bully dogs in line with England and Wales. This has inevitably unleashed a pack of bad canine puns about the SNP making a dog’s breakfast of devolution. We always thought Humza Yousaf was barking, now we know. Boom boom.  This episode is another botched exercise in cross-border grievance mongering Laughter aside, this episode is another botched exercise in cross-border grievance mongering, something at which the SNP used to be so adept. When the UK government announced last September that there was to be a ban selling or breeding these aggressive animals, following a spate of attacks on people, Mr

About a month ago, a regional brigade of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the militia that undergirds the power in the Islamic Republic of Iran, held a political conference in the port city of Bushehr on the Persian Gulf. The keynote speaker was a surprise for most attendees: Salim al-Montasser, an envoy of Yemen’s Houthis, who the UK and the US targeted in airstrikes last night. The Houthis are a Shia militia that holds power in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, and is regarded as the sovereign Yemeni government by Tehran (but not by the Arab League or the international community). Al-Montasser was profuse in his endorsement of Iran’s Supreme Leader