Stephen Daisley

Livestreaming the execution of mass murderer Nidal Malik Hasan is a moral outrage but no one can explain quite why. Hasan’s crime was heinous. The US Army psychiatrist opened fire on unarmed soldiers at a medical unit in Fort Hood, Texas in 2009, killing 13 including a pregnant woman and injuring 32 others. As he gunned them down, the Palestinian-American major shouted ‘Allahu akbar’. It was later revealed that Hasan had been in correspondence with radical imam and al-Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki. He was court-martialled and sentenced to death in 2013.

A Spectator reader and Kemi Badenoch enthusiast gets in touch occasionally to remind me of my brief flirtation with Robert Jenrick as a preferable Tory leader to the woman Isabel Hardman has christened ‘the Iron Dame’. Each time, I offer the same defence: it was a mistake, it was a one-time thing, he meant nothing to me. After reading reports that Badenoch would consider removing powers from the Scottish Parliament and restoring them to Westminster, I feel even more ashamed of my infidelity. If he wants to win me back at this point, Bobby J would have to bulldoze Holyrood, bring back Taggart, and make refusing Scottish banknotes a capital offence.

The Green party’s open declaration of war on Britain’s Jews is not really about the Green party or Britain’s Jews for that matter. The party is just a vessel for a form of politics and Jews are a perennial scapegoat for that politics. The Greens have adopted a resolution declaring Zionism to be a form of racism – a ploy originally devised by the propagandists of the Soviet Union – while rejecting an amendment that said Jewish party members should not be targeted for attending synagogue, the vast majority of synagogues naturally being Zionist in orientation.  The effect, and perhaps even the purpose, of the motion is to establish an institutional home for the Islamist-leftist alliance which can be traced back to the Salman Rushdie affair.

Should you be in the market for scorn towards Andy Burnham’s conference speech, there is plenty of it out there, including – shameless plug – my op-ed in the Daily Mail on the Prime Minister’s wish to make the state a vehicle for sentimentalism. But there are a few points largely overlooked in the Right’s response that should be kept in mind. The first is that, while his speech was essentially a reheat of the speeches he gave during his 2015 leadership campaign, the perspective sketched out will sound new to voters who have only ever known cautious, triangulating, managerial Blairism of both the Labour and Tory varieties.

Is it possible to report the government to Prevent? I ask because I swear they’re trying to radicalise me. In the past few days we’ve learned that in 2015 Theresa May’s Home Office granted asylum and citizenship to a bodyguard of the late Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and – this is going to shock you – the terror chief’s hired muscle is now accused of plotting an attack on German Jews on the second anniversary of 7 October.  That’s what you call soft power: Britain has established such a reputation for Islamism that Europe is sourcing its alleged jihadis from us. And to think they said Brexit would leave us isolated. We are belatedly hearing about the allegations thanks to reporting in the Sunday Times.

Watching the proceedings of the Scottish Parliament, a thought often occurs: if these people won elections, imagine the runners up. The runner-up to the SNP’s Collette Stevenson in East Kilbride was Joe Fagan, and while the Labour man ultimately got in via the regional list – truly the participation trophy of Holyrood’s proportional voting system – he must return to those vote tallies every now and then and wonder what he did wrong.  Yesterday, Holyrood’s transport committee was scrutinising plans by the SNP government to restructure Transport Scotland. Without getting too deep into the weeds of devolved administration, Transport Scotland is an executive agency, a self-contained government body that answers to ministers but isn’t integrated into the transport department.

The slow demise of the United Kingdom is suddenly gaining speed. The proximate cause is Andy Burnham’s statement last Wednesday that Scotland and Northern Ireland are in ‘exactly the same’ constitutional situation and that majority public support was sufficient for either to secure a border poll. However, longer trends brought us here, from historical population movements to the decline of Empire to the dawn of devolution. We’ll set aside the first two because plenty has been written about them already and focus instead on the third.

Ever since the Supreme Court ruled in November 2022 that the Scottish Parliament could not hold a unilateral referendum on breaking up Britain, Scottish independence has been dead in the water. Nicola Sturgeon went, Humza Yousaf came (and went not too long after), the party lost all but a handful of its Commons seats in the general election, and John Swinney, a man with the personality of a pedestrian crossing, limped home in May’s devolved elections on the SNP’s lowest vote share in two decades. Beset by headlines about women banged up with rapists, missing ferries, and embezzled camper vans, the Nationalists just couldn’t catch a break. Until now.  Prime Minister’s Questions is a minefield.

Scottish politics has all the dynamism of day-old porridge. Nothing ever changes, except for the worse. The latest results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), covering educational performance among 15-year-olds across 91 developed countries and territories, place England in the top ten for maths, science and reading. Scotland is not in the top ten for any of the three. In maths, the nation of John Napier lags England by 25 points. In science, the country that gave the world James Clerk Maxwell trails England, again, by 25 points. Reading is the runaway success story, where Walter Scott’s homeland is a mere nine points behind its southern brethren.

The Programme for Government – picture a dour, cheapo version of the King’s Speech – is an annual statement by the Scottish First Minister outlining his legislative plans for the coming year. SNP leader John Swinney delivered his latest PfG (even the acronym is soulless) on Tuesday and the word of the day was ‘reform’. Swinney proposed to scrap 12 health boards, redraw local council boundaries, reduce the number of public bodies, and generally make government more streamlined and responsive to the needs of service users.

The Scots language advocate Billy Kay has caused a richt stooshie wi’ his thochts on Unionists and their lawte tae the kintra. The writer and broadcaster mused on a podcast from The National: ‘One strand that has practically disappeared, I think, is Unionists who were patriotic Scots…Because of the rise of modern nationalism I think that brand of Unionism almost has died a death. I don't know anyone like that nowadays. I knew people personally from some of the old Tory families that I came across when I was interviewing people. They were all very patriotically Scottish, but they were Scottish Unionists, and they belonged to a tradition.

The result in Clacton is more evidence for my thesis that voters are so entrenched in their attitudes towards Nigel Farage that his chances of reaching No. 10 are slim. Reform is spinning the 17 per cent jump in its leader’s vote share as a triumph – and it might have been if it weren’t for the circumstances. This is a man we’re told wants to be the next prime minister, but just look at that result for Count Binface, the alleged comedy candidate.  A vote share of 27 per cent for an establishment progressive in Clacton of all places is a pretty significant data point. It’s no good blaming the other parties for dingying the contest or the media for being out to get Farage.

The great civic crisis of our times is state capacity. When policies favoured by voters are repeatedly met with a bureaucratic 403 error – the action you requested is forbidden by our servers – dissatisfaction with the established order grows, as does the appeal of those outside the mainstream who wish to topple that order.

Whatever happened to the Democrats? Party of FDR, Kennedy and Clinton. Idealistic, moderate, gave a vague impression of actually liking the United States. That pragmatic, patriotic party is scarcely discernible from the hideous creature that stands before us. The far left has hollowed out the Democrats and now parades in their freshly flayed skin, like a keffiyeh-clad Buffalo Bill.  Overnight results from the Michigan senate primary are still coming in, but Congresswoman Haley Stevens, a mainstream liberal, is trailing Abdul El-Sayed, an epidemiologist and part of the leftist insurgency taking over the Democratic party.

No. 10 (North and South alike) will be heartened by polling suggesting that the more the British public sees of Andy Burnham, the more they like him. Leader approval research by More in Common shows Burnham on a rating of plus 19 after just over a week in the job – almost double Keir Starmer’s high point at the end of 2024. That these numbers are soft should not need saying. The metric that matters is not the public mood during the Prime Minister’s honeymoon but what they think of him once he’s a known quantity, has had to make hard decisions, and is asking for another five years in his own right. That is when we will learn how much of an electoral asset Burnham is to the Labour party.  I write here to make another point entirely: just look at those Nigel Farage numbers.

The Scottish Labour party is a bit like cigarette-smoking or the Church of Scotland: it used to be everywhere you looked, but now you can’t remember the last time you saw it. We have been reminded of the party’s existence thanks to the abrupt exit of its leader Anas Sarwar, who was given a peerage and ministerial gig by Andy Burnham for reasons having absolutely nothing to do with his February statement calling on Keir Starmer to resign. That leaves a vacancy at the top of Scottish Labour, and today North East Scotland MSP Michael Marra has followed his Glasgow colleague Monica Lennon in announcing his candidacy.