Stephen Daisley is a Spectator regular and a columnist for the Scottish Daily Mail
A cardinal error in politics is hating your opponents so much you cannot understand them. If you know no one who supports Reform or the Greens, you have a limited social circle. If you cannot conceive of a reasonable person who might do so, you have a limited political imagination. A useful reminder comes in
Liberals don’t realise it yet, and perhaps they never will, but Reform has just done them a massive favour. Nigel Farage’s party has announced that a Reform government would deny visas to nationals of any country seeking slavery reparations from the UK. The party’s home affairs spokesman, Zia Yusuf, says those countries which try to
Sometimes it’s a wonder Israel can stand with all the self-inflicted gunshot wounds in its feet. Israeli police placed their country in the eye of a diplomatic and religious storm by accosting their most senior Catholic clergymen as they made their way to pray at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Religious gatherings have been
Leaving aside those who have parted with a right old wodge of dosh over the years, there are mainly two kinds of life peer: those who are no longer a threat to their party’s leader, and those who still are. For the former, the House of Lords is a retirement home; for the latter, the
At this point there is only one way to salvage Reform’s Scottish Parliament election campaign. Granted it’s unorthodox and, well, illegal, but hear me out: arrange to have Malcolm Offord kidnapped. Not long-term or anything, just until 7 May and the Holyrood elections in which Reform Scotland is set to make sizeable gains. Or at
Have we just witnessed an Iranian attack on British soil? Overnight, four ambulances were burned on the premises of Hatzola, a Jewish charity in Golders Green that operates a fleet of medical response vehicles in north London. The vans were parked beside Machzike Hadath synagogue on Highfield Road. The Metropolitan Police are said to be
Nothing good has ever followed the words ‘we need to talk’, ‘terms of service update’, or ‘by Jonathan Liew’, and the evidence is really piling up on the third one. The Guardian columnist has written a piece about Gail’s, the bougie coffee shop and bakery chain, and it vents hostility from every sentence like steam
The Scottish Parliament is on the brink of passing a bill that would see Catholic hospitals and care homes shut down. The Bishops’ Conference of Scotland says it is ‘deeply disappointed’ by the rejection of an amendment to the Assisted Dying Bill that would have given institutions a right of conscientious objection. If the bill
Farewell, then, Alba, the little party that tried to take on the Scottish political establishment and learned, as others had before it, that the establishment always wins. You can join it but you can never beat it. When Salmond went, so did Alba’s soul Just to rub salt into the wound, the party has imploded
If you were a teenager anywhere in the vicinity of the late 1990s, the opening bars of Paula Cole’s ‘I Don’t Want to Wait’ will only ever mean one thing: Dawson’s Creek. Airing on The WB from 1998 to 2003, and broadcast in the UK on Channel 4’s teen-oriented T4 block, the adolescent angst fest starred James Van Der
Ian Huntley’s graveside will be a lonely one. Few will mourn a man who lurked in the darkest shadows of every parent’s imagination, occupying the same space that Ian Brady did for an earlier generation. You could raise your children in loving, stable homes; in quiet, leafy villages; teach them about stranger danger, give them
The higher the failings of multiculturalism pile up, the greater the effort required to ignore the fetid mound of societal consequences. But most of the political and commentary class is prepared to put in the shift. So Kemi Badenoch’s latest speech was a crisp break from the omerta that binds together our gutless establishment. Multiculturalism
Liberal supporters of the US-Israeli killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei are straining to parry the charge that Operation Epic Fury is illegal. They say that Washington and Jerusalem are returning fire in a continuing war initiated by Iran, which has funded proxy terror organisations to target Americans and Israelis. It’s a good try but once
And with that, what was once racist is now allowed to be said. What was yesterday a conspiracy theory is today a legitimate observation. In the wake of the Gorton and Denton by-election, which the Greens won handsomely with an ethnic sectarian campaign designed to maximise the Pakistani-heritage vote, the Labour establishment is abuzz with
Progressivism is politics as fashion. The product is status and provocation the marketing strategy. The socialist, the liberal and the conservative all address themselves to material circumstances, and aim to transform them radically, gradually, or as little as possible, but the progressive is concerned with the intangibles of life: identity, meaning and self-expression. His radicalism
It wouldn’t be Scottish politics if there wasn’t an abstruse scandal that requires a half-hour of background information to explain. So, here goes: Dorothy Bain KC is the Lord Advocate, the title given to the head of the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service. In addition to being the chief prosecutor north of the border,
What’s in a name? Quite a bit if you’re the British Museum and the P-word is involved: ‘Palestine’. Pro-Palestinian activists are outraged – it is Monday, after all – because the museum has altered its terminology. Representatives of UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) objected to displays in the British taxpayer-funded institution giving the name ‘Palestine’ to the historical land
I don’t know if ‘gaun yersel, yer excellency’ translates into Japanese but the salutation is on the lips of many a Glaswegian after Hiroshi Suzuki’s visit to the city. Japan’s ambassador to the Court of St James’s has been love-bombing the United Kingdom since his appointment in 2024, making his way around the country with
Want to know what kind of country you live in? You live in a country in which there are more than 300 antisemitic incidents a month. Three-hundred. Every month. Last year, there were 80 incidents on Yom Kippur alone, including the Islamist attack on Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester which resulted in the deaths of
Of all the ways in which Reform is upending the rules of British politics, the most fascinating is its reliance on the support of a single demographic. Nigel Farage seems to address himself exclusively to pensioners. The audience for his speech in Birmingham on Monday told its own story: row upon row of retirees. And
