Stephen Daisley

I think it was when she described Margo MacDonald as ‘just magic’ that I fell in love with Mhairi Black. As summations of pivotal political figures go, it’s akin to a first-time Labour parliamentary candidate calling Nye Bevan an absolute mad lad. This is how Black speaks, assessing political history as if she’s talking about that time Architects played the Cathouse. It’s not what you might expect from a middle-class lassie from Ralston, but it’s nothing so cynical as an act. Glasgow zillennial patter is a rhetorical mix of  imported American sitcoms and a self-consciously Scottish tone. It’s like someone remade The Big Bang Theory with an all-Weegie cast.

The campaign for Scottish independence is at an impasse. Humza Yousaf used the SNP’s conference in Dundee to set out his party’s latest strategy for achieving statehood for Scotland. That strategy isn’t all that different from what the party faithful has heard before: keep winning elections, keep up the pressure on Westminster, and sooner or later something will happen.  The problem with this tartan Micawberism is that something has been going to happen for rather a long time. Here is a list, by no means exhaustive, of events that were supposed to shift the dial on independence: the SNP’s commanding wins in the 2015 and 2019 general elections; its victories at Holyrood in 2016 and 2021; the UK’s vote for Brexit; the arrival of Boris Johnson in No.

Icon. Legend. Pioneer. None of the descriptions we have heard since the news of her passing are fitting for Winnie Ewing. She was an iconic figure in Scottish nationalism, to be sure – her victory in the 1967 Hamilton by-election heralding a new political consciousness north of the border. She did take on a legendary quality, not least after she was dubbed ‘Madame Ecosse’ and became a symbol for an outward-looking Scottish Europeanism. She was a pioneer, the first female SNP MP at a time when both her party and parliament were the domain of men.  Yet Ewing’s foremost contributions were not symbolic but tangible and practical.

Big businesses are increasingly torn between activist leadership and a customer base that just wants to stump up its cash and be on its way. Customers’ patience is wearing thin. The latest company seemingly eager to pick a fight with its clientele is DIY chain Wickes. A video dug up by campaigner James Esses shows the shop's chief operating officer Fraser Longden taking part in a panel at PinkNews’s Trans+ Summit. The discussion, which took place last month, was entitled ‘The Role of Senior Leaders in Trans+ Inclusion’. So far, so corporate. At least it was until Longden was asked whether Wickes had received any backlash for its stance.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, a 44-year-old woman, Carla Foster, unlawfully aborted her unborn baby. She procured the necessary drugs from the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) by leading them to believe her pregnancy was just over seven weeks in. In fact, she understood herself to be either 28 or 30 weeks in gestation. A post-mortem on her otherwise healthy baby girl, Lily, indicated the pregnancy was somewhere between 32 and 34 weeks.  The Abortion Act 1967, as amended in 1990, sets 24 weeks as the upper time limit for lawfully obtaining an abortion in Great Britain, with exceptions where the woman is at risk of death or significant harm, or where serious foetal abnormalities are detected.

Nicola Sturgeon’s arrest by police investigating the SNP’s finances would seem to be a gift to her opponents and those of her party. Labour, in particular, saw the weekend begin with the resignation of Boris Johnson, the man who drubbed them so thoroughly in 2019, and ended with police questioning the woman who seized almost all their Scottish seats in 2015.  Sir Keir Starmer is certainly having a remarkable streak of good fortune, though mostly because his rivals are seemingly bent on electoral self-destruction. Even so, it is unclear whether the woes beleaguering the Scots Nats will lead them into a similar political death spiral as that engulfing the Conservatives.

Tucker Carlson is many things but stupid is not one of them. So when he describes Ukraine’s Jewish president (‘a man called Zelensky’) as ‘sweaty and rat-like’, ‘a persecutor of Christians’ and ‘our shifty, dead-eyed Ukrainian friend’, I suspect he knows exactly what he’s doing.  Carlson made the remarks in a monologue on his new show, Tucker on Twitter. Elon Musk’s social media platform signed up the populist broadcaster after his ousting at Fox News. The first episode of Tucker on Twitter has been viewed 111 million times. (Twitter counts a view as a video playing for two or more seconds while 50 per cent or more of the video element is on-screen.

Pauline McNeill is an impeccable left-winger. The Scottish Labour MSP is a socialist, a feminist, and a devolutionist. All her pros (rent controls, Palestine, gay rights) and antis (inequality, war, western imperialism) line up as you would expect. Yet the Scotsman reports that she has been forced to pull out of a meeting with some lawyers and feminists after Scottish Labour received a complaint.  Why would anyone object to such a thing? Come on, let’s not be coy. We all know why. The event, scheduled to take place at Holyrood next week, is titled ‘The Meaning of Sex Under the Equality Act 2010’. There is plenty to discuss. There’s the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which would remove medical experts from the gender transition process in favour of self-identification.

I was in my fondly forgotten twenties when I made it to 53 Christopher Street, site of the 1969 Stonewall riots and, since 1994, the second most historic address in Greenwich Village. (The apartment building from Friends is three blocks over.) The Stonewall Inn that stands there now is only the latest establishment to bear that name, the premises having served as a stables, then a bakery, and later a speakeasy before the mafia relaunched it as a gay bar in the late Sixties. There were no fire doors and no running water; the walls were painted black to cover up past fire damage. It was no Studio 54. In the small hours of 28 June 1969, police carried out a routine raid but this time were met by resistance from patrons in an uprising that lasted six nights.

For some time now, critics of the Tories’ strategy of soaking millennials to buy votes from boomers have been pointing out its fatal flaw: a generation with nothing to conserve will have no reason to vote Conservative. This argument has typically been waved away with some bromide about how everyone becomes more conservative as they get older. And with that, the Tories returned to over-taxing young workers, preventing them from owning a home and taking away their freedom of movement.  How is this approach working out? A mega-poll of 8,000 voters aged 25 to 40 finds that 72 per cent believe the country is heading in the wrong direction. Six in ten say the Conservatives ‘deserve to lose the next election’, with 45 per cent already resolved to vote Labour.

Conservatives are once again doing what they do best: whining. By ‘conservatives’, I don’t mean conservatives in any meaningful sense, but conservatives in perhaps the least meaningful sense: members and supporters of the Conservative Party. The latest grist for their self-pity mill is their conviction that the government is being undermined by the Civil Service. Specifically, that politically motivated civil servants are targeting right-wingers deemed too effective at advancing conservative principles or resisting progressive causes inside government.  Victims of this vast left-wing conspiracy are said to include Suella Braverman.

Nat Con is the talk of Twitter, a dubious accomplishment for any movement seeking popular relevance. Progressives are having a grand old time taking offence at every tweet out of the event while others are gleeful at the prospect of the Tory party heading down an electoral dead end. Some right-wingers appear to share that fear while others are unimpressed by the lack of philosophic coherence at a conference mish-mashing natcons, tradcons, Brexit populists and some of the more hard-headed market liberals.  There is some legitimacy in all these critiques but none of them touch on a more fundamental problem. Allow me to sum it up with my take on NatCon: boy, these conservatives have a lot of ideas – just wait till they get into power!

The former prime minister Sir John Major has suggested the UK need not be banging up quite so many people. Lamenting the highest incarceration rates in western Europe, Sir John said he found it ‘hard to believe we British are uniquely criminal’. Of particular concern, he argued, was the sheer volume of non-violent offenders who end up behind bars: of the 43,000 people imprisoned between 2021 and 2022, more than 60 per cent had committed crimes with no element of violence. Sir John questioned whether custody was the correct disposal in all of those cases.  An estimated 17,000 children in the UK have a mother in prison It’s easy to criticise the elder statesman as bleeding-heart and out-of-touch.

Well, that didn’t take long. Barely had the ink dried on a lawyer’s letter from Joanna Cherry than The Stand comedy club performed a screeching U-turn on its decision to cancel an event featuring the SNP MP. Cherry had been due to appear in an ‘In conversation with…’ interview at the Edinburgh Fringe in August. However, The Stand nixed the function last week, saying ‘a number of The Stand’s key operational staff, including venue management and box office personnel, are unwilling to work on this event’. Cherry has become persona non grata among progressives for raising concerns about the interaction of legal gender reform and the rights of women and girls.

I would like to go back to disagreeing with Joanna Cherry, thank you very much. Not so long ago, it was easy enough. She was an SNP MP, beloved by the party’s grassroots, and one of the most articulate advocates for Scottish independence. She was also a lawyer, and I really don’t think that sort of thing should be encouraged.   Then something happened: she started to talk out of turn about transgender ideology and its impact on women’s rights. In doing so, this left-leaning lesbian has been vilified as a bigot, shunned within her party, and subjected to appalling online abuse. Her latest punishment has been the cancellation of her ‘In conversation with…’ event at the Edinburgh Fringe.