Stephen Daisley

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.

Kate Forbes has called on the Scottish Government to accept Friday’s judgment on its controversial gender legislation. The Gender Recognition Reform Bill introduces ‘self-identification’, an approach which removes medical experts and other safeguards from the process, and lowers the age at which a person can change their legal sex to 16. It was passed overwhelmingly by the Scottish Parliament last December but blocked from becoming law by Scottish Secretary Alister Jack under a never-before-used power contained in the Scotland Act. Jack had received legal advice that the legislation would not only affect Scotland but equalities law across the UK.

There is no getting around the death of Barbara Rymell. When I read the Telegraph’s story about this 91-year-old who died while care home staff struggled to speak English to a 999 operator, it sounded too tailored to anti-immigrant prejudices. Surely this was nothing more than sensationalist reporting. Then I read the Regulation 28 report issued to the Home Office and the Department for Health and Social Care. The Coroners and Justice Act 2009 requires coroners to report any circumstances which they believe could create ‘a risk of other deaths’. The report in the Rymell case, prepared by the senior coroner for Somerset Samantha Marsh, does indeed raise concerns about the English language skills of care home staff and does so in fairly stark terms.

You know the Tories are worried about their core vote when they start talking tough on the BBC licence fee. Rishi Sunak took time out of his Cop28 jaunt to declare that the Corporation must ‘cut its cloth appropriately’. Meanwhile, Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer is against the planned £15 increase in the fee, which comes after a two-year freeze agreed between Auntie and the government. The new hike, set for April, will reflect the 12-month average of inflation, bringing the annual cost to television viewers to £173.30.  Frazer is concerned about any increase being ‘sustainable for families across the country’ and so she reportedly wants to use a different metric for inflation, the consumer price index as of September, which stood at 6.7 per cent.

Alistair Darling was one of the most consequential politicians of the past half-century but he had the misfortune to be a quiet, self-effacing man and so the scale of his contributions has never been recognised. He was not by nature a Westminster man, not someone who lived for briefings and gossip and the soap opera stuff. He courted journalists who had to be courted, met with City figures who had to be met, but it was never about the game for him, and not even the players, but about the results.  There was an austerity about his demeanour – to certain London commentators he was just another dour Scot – but this solemnity was a reflection of the seriousness of the work. In private, he was warm, witty, convivial, and generous with both his time and his claret.

If the NHS is the closest thing we have to a religion, as Nigel Lawson reckoned, then Paul Gray is not just a blasphemer but an apostate. Professor Gray has called the NHS in Scotland ‘unsustainable’ and urged a public conversation about reform, including the use of the private sector. His intervention is significant because professor Gray was between 2013 and 2019 the chief executive of NHS Scotland. He is, to be clear, not proposing privatisation, merely urging a debate about delivery and funding. But even that is scandalous to a political establishment that prides itself on having less private sector involvement than there is south of the border.

There has been much Tory huffing and puffing about the ONS revising 2022 net migration to 745,000, up from its previous estimate of 606,000. James Heale has documented their dismay. Conservative MPs are a journalist’s dream: they don’t do much but they’re always quick off the mark with a statement lamenting all the things they’ve not done.  You will have read this story before. The Conservatives pledge to crack down on immigration, immigration goes up, and the Tories announce that they’re jolly cross about it. Boy, just you wait till they get into government. Oh how things will be different then.  Every election the Conservative party has won in the last 40 years it has done so on a manifesto promising controlled or reduced immigration.

Charlie Taylor, the chief inspector of prisons, has issued an urgent notification to the justice secretary about HMP Bedford, a category B reception facility. It is the second such notification in five years. In his letter to Alex Chalk, Taylor – whose Spectator writings on prison conditions can be read here – outlines the findings of an unannounced inspection between 30 October and 9 November. The picture he paints is of conditions that are not merely shabby but sordid.  Safety: poor. Respect: poor. Purposeful activity: poor. Preparation for release: ‘not sufficiently good’. The use of force against prisoners was ‘very high’ and inspectors found ‘too many examples of excessive force’ and ‘unprofessional behaviour’ by staff.

Since the 7 October massacre, various institutions across the West have damaged their reputations when covering the murder of 1,200 Jews. Chief among them is the BBC which outdid itself in the early hours of Wednesday morning.   Around midnight, the Israel Defence Forces released a media statement announcing that it was launching an operation against Hamas in a part of Gaza’s Al Shifa Hospital, which the terrorist organisation uses as one of its command centres. The Reuters agency relayed the information via its news wire service, relied upon by journalists across the world.

Sacked ministers seldom have nice things to say about the boss but Suella Braverman’s letter to Rishi Sunak is a ferocious assault on the Prime Minister, his character and his style of leadership. If she’d taken a flamethrower to the man he’d have come away less severely burned. She claims they had a deal – a written agreement – that he would pursue certain policies in No. 10 in return for her backing him as leader following the Liz Truss debacle.

All political careers end in failure but few return to prove it a second time. David Cameron, forced to resign after his defeat in the EU referendum, has been brought back, given a peerage and appointed foreign secretary. His appointment followed the sacking of Suella Braverman as home secretary and James Cleverly’s sidewards move to replace her.  Expect Rishi Sunak’s stenographers in the press to gush over this masterstroke. A heavy-hitter in the cabinet. An experienced pair of hands at the Foreign Office. A return to serious, grown-up politics. Labour will be rattled now! Any such talk will be guff. This is not genius, it’s desperation. The Prime Minister wanted to spend his time in No.

This week, the Welsh parliament announced that it ‘condemns the Israeli Government’s indiscriminate attacks on Gaza’ and ‘calls on the international community to...bring pressure to bear on the Israeli Government to end the siege of Gaza which contravenes international law and the basic human rights of Palestinian civilians’. Those were the terms of a motion laid by Plaid Cymru and passed by Members of the Senedd by 24 to 19, with 13 abstentions. The motion was not entirely without merit: it condemned Hamas’s attacks on Israeli civilians and called for the hostages to be released. But this story nonetheless offers a signal from the devolution crisis that no one in Downing Street or Whitehall wants to acknowledge.

There can be few sins in politics graver than giving Suella Braverman a point. Yet that is exactly what the Home Secretary has in her Times op-ed when she writes: Unfortunately, there is a perception that senior police officers play favourites when it comes to protesters. During Covid, why was it that lockdown objectors were given no quarter by public order police yet Black Lives Matter demonstrators were enabled, allowed to break rules and even greeted with officers taking the knee? She’s not wrong, is she?

The Scottish government has launched another white paper on independence, this time on the subject of migration. It is the sixth paper in the ‘Building a New Scotland’ series setting out the SNP-Green administration’s vision for a post-UK Scotland. The substance of the document isn’t as important as the fact of its existence. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Scottish parliament cannot legislate for an independence referendum. The UK parliament shows no inclination to permit another referendum. So why is the Scottish government using public resources to promote a prospectus for a constitutional event that is opposed by Westminster and may never happen?

Three cheers for Suella Braverman, hammer of the left. The Home Secretary has provoked yet more howls of indignation from progressives after describing anti-Israel demonstrations as ‘hate marches’. Speaking after Monday’s Cobra meeting, Braverman said: ‘We’ve seen now tens of thousands of people take to the streets after the massacre of Jewish people, the single largest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust, chanting for the erasure of Israel from the map. To my mind there is only one way to describe those marches: they are hate marches.’ Suella Braverman’s right-wing philippics are her version of ‘build the wall’ Finally, someone willing to tell it like it is. That is, after all, what Braverman does.

Eight months ago, Ash Regan was a contender for the leadership of the SNP, alongside Kate Forbes and eventual winner Humza Yousaf. Today she quit the party, defected to Alex Salmond’s rival Alba, and becomes that outfit’s first ever MSP. In a statement posted on X, formerly Twitter, Regan said it had ‘become increasingly clear that the SNP has lost its focus on independence, the very foundation of its existence’. She added that she ‘could not, in good conscience, continue to be part of a party that has drifted from its path and its commitment to achieving independence as a matter of urgency’.  Regan won Edinburgh East under the SNP banner in 2016 but became increasingly disaffected by the party leadership under Nicola Sturgeon and her successor Yousaf.