Stephen Daisley

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.

The Guardian thinks of itself as Britain’s fearless liberal conscience, trigger-sensitive to racist ‘dog whistles’ in the language and editorial judgements of everyone except itself. It takes a special interest in cartoons published by right-of-centre newspapers which are accused of bigotry.  When the Murdoch-owned Herald Sun ran a cartoon depicting Serena Williams throwing a tantrum, the Guardian reported that News Corp had ‘come under global condemnation for publishing a racist, sexist cartoon’, supplementing multiple news stories with several condemnatory op-eds.

Israel is marking 75 years of its existence in one of the most difficult peacetime periods the country has ever seen. Peacetime is a relative concept in the Middle East but the past six months have been extraordinarily trying for Israelis and their friends overseas. Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power 16 months after being ousted by an improbable coalition of left and right, secular and Islamist – everyone except the voters. But his comeback was only possible by doing a deal with the devil and bringing the far right into his government. Unsavoury allies like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, the Laurel and Hardy of Israeli ultranationalism, have proved comically inept in ministerial office but have also become more extreme with power.

The Foreign Office has seven ministers, 16,000 employees, an £11bn credit card and one of these days it might get itself a foreign policy. If the trailed excerpts of James Cleverly’s speech to the Lord Mayor’s Easter Banquet are to be believed, the Foreign Secretary will articulate the government’s pivot back towards Beijing. Cleverly will reportedly declare that ‘no significant problem… can be solved without China’. He will say that while ‘it would be clear and easy – perhaps satisfying – for me to declare a new cold war and say that our goal is to isolate China’, it would be ‘wrong’, ‘a betrayal of our national interest’ and even a ‘wilful misunderstanding of the modern world’.  This pro-China tilt does not come out of the blue.

All political careers end in failure but Humza Yousaf has managed to begin his there. Three weeks ago, he clinched the leadership of the SNP in a 52-48 per cent photo finish. Since then, he has deepened divisions within his party by shunning MSPs who failed to support his leadership bid, launched a legal challenge to Westminster to restart his government’s unpopular gender reforms, and watched as police raided Nicola Sturgeon’s home and arrested Peter Murrell, her husband and the SNP’s former chief executive, amid a probe of party finances.   Tuesday was supposed to mark a ‘reset’, because Yousaf’s leadership is in such dire straits that, less than a month in, it already needs resetting.

Humza Yousaf's decision to challenge the British government in court over Scottish gender laws is a tactical play. And yet it confirms just how little the new First Minister knows about tactics. Yousaf is having a terrible old time of it. Almost half of SNP members voted against him becoming leader. He has stuffed his government with loyalists: just one of his 27 ministers endorsed his leadership rival. The SNP’s finances are under police investigation, former chief executive Peter Murrell was arrested, the home he shares with Nicola Sturgeon raided by officers, and Yousaf only just learned that his party’s auditors quit months ago. (Neither Murrell nor anyone else has been charged with any offence.

Humza Yousaf’s government will be defined by two legacies, Nicola Sturgeon’s and his own as health secretary. The Sturgeon legacy can only be understood by looking at the distance between the previous first minister’s rhetoric and her record. Sturgeon was always heavy on mission statements but light on delivery. During the leadership election, Yousaf initially embraced his designation as the ‘continuity candidate’ then pivoted to reject the label. That ambivalence reflects not only the shifting tactics of a troubled campaign but the political realities that the victor would inherit.