Stephen Daisley

Nigel Farage is the most misunderstood politician in Britain. Vilified by the liberal media as ‘far right’ and mistaken by nationalists as a kindred spirit, the Reform party leader doesn’t fully comport with the pub bore caricature sketched by his enemies nor with the blokey everyman persona lapped up by his admirers. He is a wilier, more elusive beast, as his comments on the French elections remind us. Speaking to UnHerd ahead of the first results, Farage warned that victory for the RN would be a ‘disaster’, saying the party would be ‘even worse for the economy than the current lot’.  Dis-moi que ce n’est pas vrai, Nigel! It’s a statement sure to have friend and foe alike twisting themselves into political pretzels.

David Tennant’s acceptance speech at the British LGBT Awards was replete with all the telltale signs of ‘Celebrity Activist Syndrome’. He didn’t feel he deserved an award; his views were just ‘common sense’ and ‘human decency’. He has found a cause that just happens to confirm that he is a really great guy, which is the best kind of cause if you ask me. The cause in question is gender identity ideology, for which Tennant has become a prominent activist, though his activism mostly seems to involve wearing a variety of T-shirts with surly slogans. And while trans lives matter, it seems others don’t, for Tennant also used his gong show gushfest to say that such awards would be necessary ‘until we wake up and Kemi Badenoch doesn’t exist anymore’.

One need not cast around for signs that Britain is no longer a serious country, but the indulgence with which Just Stop Oil is treated stands out more than most. The doomsday cult has now sprayed Stonehenge in orange cornflour to protest our failure to shutter every industry in the land and relocate the entire population to a cave. Apologists for these insufferable toerags wave away objections, sighing that it’s just cornflour and no long-term damage has been done. Don’t mistake these excuse-makers for libertarians. The Venn diagram of people who are relaxed about Just Stop Oil’s methods and would also be relaxed if a group called Just Stop Immigration were using the same methods is two circles that will never intersect.

The Labour manifesto commits the party to recognising a Palestinian state. It frames this as ‘a contribution to a renewed peace process’. This rationale is as dishonest as the commitment is foolhardy. It is a reminder that progressives will not learn from history if the lesson offends their political sensibilities.  The manifesto claims that statehood is ‘the inalienable right of the Palestinian people’. Is this true? An international law scholar would tell you that oppressed peoples or those living under military occupation have a right to self-determination. But does self-determination necessarily equal statehood? Could it be achieved by a different model, such as political autonomy in confederation with an Arab state?

Douglas Ross was not a game-changing leader of the Scottish Conservatives in the way Ruth Davidson was but he announces his resignation as the game is being turned on its head. North of the border the Tories are seeing their vote hold up even as the electoral fortunes of their Sassenach brethren implode. They could come out of this election with more seats than the six they went into it with. But they are not captains of their own fate and Ross’s departure will only call attention to that.  Ross has had a tenure that at times seemed cursed and at others lucky. He had to handle the Scottish blowback from Boris Johnson and partygate, Liz Truss’s mini-Budget and mini-premiership, and Rishi Sunak’s unpopularity with Scots.

Full disclosure: I went into the ITV election debate wanting and expecting Sir Keir Starmer to walk all over Rishi Sunak, but from my sofa the Prime Minister looked like the clear winner. How so? He kept it simple: he would cut taxes, Sir Keir would hike them up by £2,000; he would stick illegal migrants on a plane, Sir Keir would spring them onto a high street near you; he wouldn’t force you to make expensive green upgrades to your house, Sir Keir would rip out your boiler with his own bare hands then hand you a bill. It was ruthless, fear-mongering stuff, but I suspect it will have resonated with some viewers.  The Prime Minster was especially adept – read: shamelessly sly – about turning his failings into doubts about his opponent.

Today we are witnessing a significant failure of the UK state. This morning, the personal finance campaigner Martin Lewis reported that around 30 per cent of families had not received their latest child benefit payment. HMRC, which administers the payments, said it was ‘working to resolve the issue’ and advising claimants to ‘continue to check your bank account throughout the day’. This evening, HMRC said that 500,000 claimants had been affected. Child Benefit is worth £24 per week for the eldest child and £15.90 for every child thereafter. These sums will seem trivial to those with means but to poor and low-paid families they are a financial lifeline.

The Scottish parliament has voted to suspend former SNP cabinet minister Michael Matheson for 27 sitting days and dock his salary for 54 calendar days. It comes after Matheson was found to have broken the MSP code of conduct on expenses and use of parliamentary resources. Matheson ran up an £11,000 mobile data bill during a family holiday in Morocco and tried to have the taxpayer pick up the tab. Despite initially claiming no knowledge of how such a large bill was incurred, he later said that his sons had run up the charges while using the device’s hotspotting function to stream Celtic football matches.  The vote broke down 64 in favour of sanctioning Matheson, with 63 abstaining.

Writing about the impact on children of having a parent in prison, you always hit the same brick wall: no one knows how many children have a parent in prison, including the Ministry of Justice. The MoJ estimates that ‘approximately 200,000 children’ have a parent in or heading to prison. Ministers have commissioned a review which is due to provide an updated figure on 13 June. The charity Prison Advice and Care Trust, pulling together various strands of MoJ statistics, suggested something in the ballpark of 100,000, though they only counted male prisoners. Meanwhile, Crest Advisory, a criminal justice consultancy, puts the figure much higher, at 312,000.

The application for arrest warrants against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defence minister Yoav Gallant is an act of lawfare. In seeking the detention of Israel’s political and military leadership during its war against Hamas, Karim Ahmad Khan, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), is inviting that body to intervene in the conflict. Granting these warrants would require ICC signatory countries such as the UK to arrest the men if they set foot in their territory and hand them over. The likely effect of their arrest would be to cripple Israel’s war effort and throw the country into political chaos.

As the edifice of gender identity ideology continues to crumble, along comes another example of an institution not only captured but utterly distorted by this regressive and harmful theory. Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC) has lost an employment tribunal case brought by a former staff member whose work life was made a living hell because she thought rape victims should be told whether the support worker assigned to them was male or female. Roz Adams was employed as a counselling support worker between 2021 and 2023, when she resigned after having been put through a gruelling disciplinary process over her belief in biological sex.

Scottish nationalists are not happy. What’s new, I hear you ask. Did they lose another leader? Has Sainsbury’s been selling Somerset strawberries in Stornoway supermarkets? Nothing quite so grave, but they are displeased nonetheless. The cause is Rishi Sunak, who has offended them with his Big Serious Speech at Policy Exchange on Monday. It was just a single reference, but that is the most Sunak has done to confront the SNP since he entered No. 10.

John Swinney, Scotland’s new first minister, has appointed his inaugural cabinet – and it’s almost unaltered from the team headed by Humza Yousaf. The only real change is the appointment of former leadership hopeful Kate Forbes as deputy first minister. She was promised a ‘significant’ role and in addition to the office of DFM she will hold the economy portfolio.   Forbes’s return will be welcome news to those keen on healing internal rifts but will displease SNP progressives, who revile Forbes for her orthodox Christian views on same-sex marriage and gender identity ideology. She has called her new appointment ‘a moment of extraordinary privilege’ while Swinney has described her as ‘an immensely talented politician’.

There are a number of very good reasons that Kate Forbes is not standing for SNP leader. Chief amongst them is that she’d lose again. John Swinney is not Humza Yousaf. He has been an MP or MSP continuously since 1997, led the party through four difficult years in the early 2000s, and spent seven years as Alex Salmond’s right-hand man then eight at the side of Nicola Sturgeon. He is liked across the factions and respected for his decades of service to the party. There is probably no one who could beat him. Another calculation that Forbes will have considered is that her party is careening towards a general election in which it is expected to lose a sizeable number of seats.