Stephen Daisley is a Spectator regular and a columnist for the Scottish Daily Mail
The Scottish parliament returned from its Christmas recess today and held its first debate of 2023. Take a guess what it was about. Yes, independence. Holyrood occasionally touches on other matters – the NHS, the educational attainment gap – but these are mere throat-clearings in a never-ending dialogue between the SNP government and its hardline
One of the functions of the honours system is to articulate our principles and priorities. Amid the cringe cronyism and inexplicable baubles for even more inexplicable mainstays of public life (Sir Chris Bryant, Lord preserve us), there are the nods to good people doing good work, whether in their community, the charity sector, industry, research or
I spend a lot of my time fantasising about the death of the Conservative Party. I like to picture election night 2024 and Huw Edwards struggling to keep up with the mounting Tory defeats: ‘Labour gains Chingford from Iain Duncan Smith, former leader of — Wait, I’m being told Labour has also gained Chipping Barnet.
The Tories are finally coming to see what has long been plain to the rest of us: Rishi Sunak is a dud. He’s not a walking catastrophe like Liz Truss but he’s hopelessly out of touch, helplessly out of his depth and has no plan for turning things around. His conversation with a homeless man
The UK government’s threat to block Nicola Sturgeon’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill took many by surprise. The powers, under Section 35 of the Scotland Act, have never been used before. The assumption from some observers, this one included, was that this was a negotiating tactic ahead of inter-governmental discussions on the Bill’s implementation and cross-border
One of the fundamental flaws in the Scottish devolution settlement set up by Labour and radically expanded by the Tories is the ability for policy divergence in Scotland to impact on the rest of the UK. The Gender Recognition Reform Bill, on the cusp of being passed by the Scottish parliament, might prove an object
The Scottish parliament will today consider final amendments to the Gender Recognition Reform Bill. The Bill, a key priority of Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP-Green government, will update the Gender Recognition Act 2004, the legislation governing the acquisition of a gender recognition certificate (GRC). Once a person obtains a GRC, ‘the law will recognise them as having all the
No matter how heavily it snows today nothing will be as frosty as Pete Wishart’s resignation letter. The senior SNP MP has exited the front bench following the coup that replaced Ian Blackford with relative newcomer Stephen Flynn. Blackford is an ally of Nicola Sturgeon and discontent had grown in the party’s Westminster group of MPs about
Nicola Sturgeon did not want Stephen Flynn to be the new leader of the SNP at Westminster. His victory represents not only a generational shift – Flynn is 34 and his deputy Mhairi Black is 28 – but a sharp left turn in political sensibilities. Where outgoing Commons leader Ian Blackford was cautious and loyal
Gordon Brown needs a hobby. Golf, perhaps, or jazzercise. Anything but meddling in the constitution. He means well but his answer is always the same: make things worse but in a way that sounds really clever to Westminster types. To a hammer everything is a nail and to Gordon Brown there isn’t a problem in
The Scottish parliament does not have the power to legislate for a referendum on independence. The Supreme Court has made that clear and it is a rare piece of good news for Scotland’s embattled Unionists. What, though, of the other side? Not Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP; Iain Macwhirter has written insightfully about that elsewhere on Coffee
BBC Scotland’s news department has issued what must be one of the strangest clarifications in the Corporation’s history. It’s not a correction of a factual error or a retraction of an inaccurate or misleading item. It’s a statement justifying their journalists’ decision to report a major news story to the public, accurately and with all
If I had to give one piece of advice to Britons under 30 it would be this: go. Leave. Skedaddle. Get one of those work visas for New Zealand or Canada and start a new life. Fret not over the details. Those can be worked out once you’re there. Don’t make excuses, don’t defer, don’t delay. Trust me, you’ll
The Supreme Court will hand down its judgment in the Scottish independence referendum case next Wednesday. This is the reference brought by the Lord Advocate, Scotland’s most senior law officer, over Nicola Sturgeon’s proposed Scottish Independence Referendum Bill. Downing Street has refused to grant a re-run of the 2014 referendum, in which Scots voted to
When Liz Truss’s premiership came to an abrupt end, it appeared to spell doom for a historic policy shift raised in her leadership campaign. In a break from a widely held but diplomatically fruitless consensus, Truss stood on a platform of reviewing the location of the British embassy in Israel. That legation is still based
Ash Regan’s decision to resign as Nicola Sturgeon’s community safety minister will not have been taken lightly. The Scottish parliament has today passed stage one of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, legislation championed by Sturgeon which will make it easier to access a gender recognition certificate, remove medical experts from the process and lower the
Rishi Sunak’s first order of business will be restoring stability to the government and, thereafter, regaining the confidence of the markets. But the incoming prime minister will eventually have to confront a looming threat of even greater import: Scottish independence. Lawyers for the UK and Scottish governments are currently battling over the matter before the
One of the quaint superstitions of the moment is a belief that our political dysfunction has a ready solution. The government stumbles from one crisis to another but things will pick up once Liz Truss is gone. Rishi Sunak warned that she would fail and so he is best placed to succeed her. He will
Penny Mordaunt’s entry into the Tory leadership race was widely predicted and she has now become the first to throw her hat into the bin fire. I’m totally impartial in this contest. I think any Tory MP would be just as hopeless as the next. But there’s a point worth underscoring: if Mordaunt were to
Liz Truss needs an exit strategy. Unless she can eke past Canning’s 119 days, the Prime Minister will go down in history as Britain’s shortest-serving premier. That ignominy will only be compounded by the absence of a legacy. Nothing is going to overshadow a fleeting and calamitous spell in No. 10, but there are scraps
