Stephen Daisley

Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, the super-progressive congresswoman, was leaving the Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn with her fiancé when she was confronted by pro-Palestinian activists. Their charge, essentially, was that the vociferously anti-Israel congresswoman wasn’t quite anti-Israel enough.  In a video apparently posted by the activists, AOC can be seen telling them: ‘I need you to understand that this is not okay.’ One of her accosters replies: ‘It’s not okay that there’s a genocide happening and you’re not actively against it.’  ‘You’re lying,’ she shoots back.  The protestors accuse her of failing to describe Israel’s military operation against Hamas in Gaza as a ‘genocide’.

Britain’s prisons brim with vulnerable people but perhaps the most vulnerable are children. At 30 September 2023, there were 301 children in prison in England and Wales alone. Wetherby Young Offender Institution in Yorkshire is home to 165 of them and a new report from His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons makes for troubling reading about the conditions inside. There are the usual observations, familiar to regular readers of these write-ups, about broken heating systems and smashed windows, faulty electrics and insufficient time out of cells. But then there is this: ‘We had considerable concerns about the use of all-male teams to cut the clothes of vulnerable girls under restraint and place them in anti-ligature clothing.

When contemplating the scale of the Tories’ expected drubbing in the coming general election, some commentators reach for the example of Canada’s Progressive Conservatives. The 1993 federal election saw the governing centre-right party, which had been in power since 1984, lose all but two of its seats in the House of Commons. It never recovered and became defunct within a decade. The comparison is particularly tempting given one of the factors behind the Progressive Conservatives’ demise was the emergence of a rival right-wing party called Reform.

The government and the SNP are furious at the Speaker over his parliamentary jiggery-pokery on the Gaza vote. In calling Labour’s amendment to an SNP ceasefire motion alongside the government’s amendment, it meant there was no vote on the Nationalists’ original resolution. It was an SNP opposition day in parliament, but the Speaker handed it to Labour instead. Lindsay Hoyle’s actions prompted SNP and Conservative MPs to walk out in protest. So far 51 members have signed an early day motion expressing no confidence in the Speaker. Absent a dramatic turnaround in Conservative and SNP feelings about his actions, it is difficult to see how he can remain in office. Yet in many ways, this is the least outrageous explanation for what happened yesterday.

It’s not about Jews, it’s about Zionism. It’s not anti-Semitism, it’s pro-Palestinianism. It’s not racism, it’s social justice.  These are the mantras and all must accept them. To do otherwise is to ‘weaponise’ anti-Semitism, to level false allegations to ‘silence’ critics of Israel. To demean, they say with the gall of the concern troll, ‘real anti-Semitism’.  So we know that the defacing of the Amy Winehouse statue in Camden Market, that saw the late singer’s Star of David necklace covered up with a Palestinian flag sticker, is a perfectly legitimate protest against Israel’s military operation in Gaza.

Finally, Rishi Sunak has put a half-decent Cameron in the House of Lords. In raising Donald Cameron to the peerage and appointing him parliamentary under-secretary of state for Scotland, the Prime Minister has poached one of the sharpest minds in the Scottish Parliament. Cameron has been an MSP for Highlands and Islands for the past eight years and distinguished himself with forensic speeches dissecting SNP government legislation, drawing on his experience as an advocate (a Scottish barrister). Even opponents struggle for a bad word to say about him, an uncommon state of affairs in the bitter and tribal world of Scottish politics. Cameron’s style is patrician and so are his politics. He is, as far as I can tell, the only member of the government to head up his own Scottish clan.

When Javier Milei visited Israel and announced that he would be moving Argentina’s embassy to Jerusalem, I suppose that was terribly ‘populist’ of him. Try as I might, I can’t find it in me to be appalled by Milei’s pronouncement, and not because he already floated it during his election campaign. For one thing, it must be nice to have a government that decides its own foreign policy rather than contracting out such matters to the European Commission, the US State Department and the NGO sector. For another, Argentina’s president is taking a stand that Britain ought to have taken long ago.

Nothing will change in the wake of Mike Freer’s decision to stand down. That a Member of Parliament says he is leaving politics because of intimidation from Islamists is troubling enough, but Freer is a government minister. If the state cannot protect him, can it protect any of us? In a letter to his local constituency association, the Conservative MP says he has received ‘several serious threats to my personal safety’ during his 14 years representing Finchley and Golders Green. He cited ‘attacks by Muslims Against Crusades, Ali Harbi Ali and the recent arson attack (where the motives remain unclear)’ for motivating his decision.

The definition of madness, commonly attributed to Albert Einstein, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. In all likelihood, Einstein never said this, but the formulation is useful for understanding not only madness but western policy in the Middle East. (Admittedly, there is substantial overlap.) One idea that fixates foreign policy elites, so much so that we must persevere with it despite all evidence, is the creation of a Palestinian state.

Politicians are like bad boys: never fall in love with them, they’ll always hurt you in the end. But try as I might, and I have tried mightily, I can’t fight it anymore. I’ve fallen head over heels for the junior senator from Pennsylvania. Friday night tipped it for me. John Fetterman was at home in Braddock, a rundown Pittsburgh suburb where he lives with his wife and three children, when an anti-Israel mob gathered outside and began chanting: ‘Fetterman, Fetterman, you can’t hide; you’re supporting genocide!’ Another Democrat might have requested a police evacuation or issued a cuckish statement of solidarity with the demonstrators in the hopes they would leave him alone, but Fetterman took a rather different approach.

Sir Simon Clarke’s call to replace Rishi Sunak leans heavily on Tory MPs being in denial about the scale of defeat that could be heading their way. He quotes Alan Clark on the ‘defence mechanism of the psyche’ that allowed Conservatives to disbelieve the landslide thumping forecast ahead of the 1997 election, even though ‘every single device for measuring popular opinion was pointing consistently in the same direction’. Sir Simon points out that Sunak trails Sir Keir Starmer in almost 500 constituencies and warns his colleagues that the price of failing to move against the prime minister will be far greater than the headlines that would come from yet another Tory regicide.

In voting through the government’s Rwanda Bill, Conservative MPs have made a declaration: they want to reduce illegal immigration but they don’t want to take any of the hard choices required to do so. The final version of the Bill is the worst of both worlds, tailored to the sensitivities of the Tory left and yet still wide open to legal challenge. The chances that anything more than a token number of illegal immigrants are transferred to Rwanda between now and the election, whenever that is, are extremely slim. Those who faithfully parrot the Number 10 line will regard the Bill’s passage as a political victory for Rishi Sunak. He has seen off the dastardly right-wing rebels and stuck a thumb in the eye of the open-borders left, all in one fell swoop.

There is not a crumb of comfort for the Conservatives in the YouGov poll splashed across the front of this morning’s Daily Telegraph. It forecasts that the Tories will lose 196 seats in the coming general election, a bigger slump than the party suffered in 1997, 1945 or 1929. This would represent the second-worst defeat in the party’s history, after Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s Liberal landslide in 1906. Sir Keir Starmer would be looking at a majority of around 120. The poll suggests election night, whenever it comes, will serve up a steady stream of Portillo moments, with Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, Defence Secretary Grant Shapps, Education Secretary Gillian Keegan, and Leader of the House Penny Mordaunt all set to lose their seats.

The Sun’s reporting on Sir Keir Starmer’s legal activities is strident and therefore curious. The paper reports, in thunderous terms, on a number of convicted murderers in Commonwealth countries whom Starmer saved from the noose. It notes that, as these cases took place abroad, the former barrister was not bound by the cab rank rule to take on any case for which he was competent and available, without reference to the client or crime. The implication is that Starmer was a do-good lefty lawyer so keen to keep sadistic killers from their appointment with the gallows that he flew all over to do so.  The paper’s angle is all the more intriguing when you consider that the Sun opposes the return of capital punishment in the UK.

What exactly does the Reform party stand for? Helpfully, its leader Richard Tice gave a press conference on Wednesday at which he sketched out some of his party’s principles and policies. The millionaire businessman described the Tories and Labour as ‘two sides of the same socialist coin’, citing in evidence ‘record high taxes’, ‘record high wasteful government spending’, ‘record nanny state regulations’, and ‘mass, uncontrolled immigration on a scale this country has never seen before’.  Sir Keir Starmer, or ‘Starmergeddon’ as he branded the leader of the opposition, was no better than Rishi Sunak. By contrast, Reform had the solutions to the problems bedevilling the country. These solutions were familiar fare.

On Saturday, according to the Daily Telegraph, pro-Palestinian protestors ‘brought Oxford Street to a standstill on one of the busiest shopping days of the Christmas period’. The organisers, Sisters Uncut, declared that ‘Christmas is cancelled’ while placards read ‘no shopping while bombs are dropping’ – a reference to Israel’s military response to the 7 October massacre in which Palestinian terrorists murdered 1,200 Jewish men, women and children. The Telegraph recorded that the marchers had ‘walked slowly’ along Oxford Street and ‘forced fashion retailers Zara and Puma to temporarily lock their doors’. They wrote that the demonstrators ‘made their way from Soho Square towards Oxford Circus, holding up buses and taxis’.

For those who still believe in that old-fashioned thing called the British constitution, there has come a glimmer of hope from an unlikely source. Lord Cameron has threatened to withdraw Foreign Office support for overseas visits by Scottish government ministers if the SNP continues to disregard protocol on international jaunts. Humza Yousaf raised eyebrows during COP28 when he shook hands and chatted with Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The SNP leader, who was at the event in his capacity as first minister of the Scottish government, tweeted out a photograph of the meeting and said they had discussed the situation in Gaza. In the same tweet, Yousaf called for an ‘immediate and permanent ceasefire’, which is at odds with the UK government’s position.