Stephen Daisley

And with that, what was once racist is now allowed to be said. What was yesterday a conspiracy theory is today a legitimate observation. In the wake of the Gorton and Denton by-election, which the Greens won handsomely with an ethnic sectarian campaign designed to maximise the Pakistani-heritage vote, the Labour establishment is abuzz with ominous talk of ‘family voting’ and the role of this practice, in which men decide the votes of all eligible electors in their household, in securing victory for Hannah Spencer. An outfit calling itself ‘Democracy Volunteers’ put out a report last night, something the group admits it ‘rarely’ does, claiming ‘extremely high’ levels of family voting, with the practice reported at 15 of 22 polling stations observed.

Progressivism is politics as fashion. The product is status and provocation the marketing strategy. The socialist, the liberal and the conservative all address themselves to material circumstances, and aim to transform them radically, gradually, or as little as possible, but the progressive is concerned with the intangibles of life: identity, meaning and self-expression. His radicalism is mostly aesthetic, to be found in the symbol, the signal and the strut, and while it often gloms onto more substantive political programmes it is always concerned chiefly with ideological style. Prime example: Zack Polanski. The Green leader is a political fashionista, displaying not a skerrick of principle nor attachment to anything except what is modish in the moment.

It wouldn’t be Scottish politics if there wasn’t an abstruse scandal that requires a half-hour of background information to explain. So, here goes: Dorothy Bain KC is the Lord Advocate, the title given to the head of the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service. In addition to being the chief prosecutor north of the border, she is also a minister in the SNP-run Scottish Government, where she serves as the top legal adviser. Bain was summoned to the Scottish Parliament on Wednesday to answer questions about a minute she emailed to John Swinney, who is first minister and therefore head of the ministry in which Bain sits, as well as the leader of the SNP. The memo concerned the upcoming trial of Peter Murrell.

I don’t know if ‘gaun yersel, yer excellency’ translates into Japanese but the salutation is on the lips of many a Glaswegian after Hiroshi Suzuki’s visit to the city. Japan’s ambassador to the Court of St James’s has been love-bombing the United Kingdom since his appointment in 2024, making his way around the country with his little Paddington Bear stuffed toy, visiting British landmarks, sampling regional delicacies and even treating us to some sing-songs. Suzuki has captured hearts and headlines in one of the most effective public diplomacy campaigns we’ve seen in a long time On paper, that is what ambassadors are supposed to do, but as Suzuki’s visit to Glasgow illustrates, this is an emissary who goes far beyond diplomatic formalities.

Want to know what kind of country you live in? You live in a country in which there are more than 300 antisemitic incidents a month. Three-hundred. Every month. Last year, there were 80 incidents on Yom Kippur alone, including the Islamist attack on Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester which resulted in the deaths of Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby. Anyone who still needs a wake-up call about antisemitism is in a civilisational coma On a day Jews spend in fasting and prayer to ask God’s forgiveness for their sins, a day when you would be hard-pressed to encounter a Jew, still the murder and the libels and the intimidation flow. Antisemites never take a day off; they are the most productive sector of the British economy.

There is a 1953 Warner Bros short, Zipping Along, in which Wile E. Coyote, frustrated with the failure of his elaborate schemes to kill the Road Runner, opts for a simpler method. He acquires a grenade, pulls the pin with his teeth, and chucks the explosive at the infernal Californian cuckoo. Only he does it the wrong way round, chomping down on the body, lobbing the safety pin at the Road Runner and promptly blowing himself up.  Anas Sarwar has done much the same with his statement calling for Keir Starmer to resign as prime minister over the Peter Mandelson/Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Addressing journalists in Glasgow, he said Scots were ‘crying out for competent government’ and that ‘the situation in Downing Street is not good enough; there have been too many mistakes.

The most reliable sign that Reform is doing well in Scotland is the refusal of the lanyard class to engage with the subject. In the latest poll, Reform has cut the SNP’s lead to five points on the regional list, the second, more proportional ballot that offers smaller and newer parties their best chance of winning seats. For the past six months or so, Reform has been jostling with Labour for second place; if its Scottish leader, Malcolm Offord, can sustain this momentum through to May, there is a good chance that Reform will leap from a solitary ex-Tory MSP to the main opposition party. An extraordinary feat for a relatively new party that, until recently, was a skeleton operation.

Labour MPs want shot of Keir Starmer over the Peter Mandelson scandal. There is nothing new in that sentence until the mention of the former ambassador. Mandelson’s reported disclosure of government information to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is the latest pretext, but before that it was because he rebuffed the Waspi women, and before that because Andy Burnham wanted the job, and before that because he’s sunk Labour’s chances ahead of May’s Scottish elections, and if you keep going back there was Gaza and gender and the winter fuel payment debacle. The experience of government is not what Labour MPs expected.

The women are at it again. For Women Scotland (FWS), specifically. They’re the pressure group who took on the Scottish government, which believes men are women if they say so, and secured a Supreme Court judgment that ‘sex’ in the Equality Act refers to biological rather than ‘certificated’ sex. Now they’re back in court taking on the same government over its policy of allowing some male prisoners who identify as trans to be held in the female estate. Aidan O’Neill KC, who is representing FWS, suggested to the Court of Session on Tuesday morning that the Scottish government was doubling down as ‘a political calculation’ and that women locked up with men were being ‘used by the Scottish government in this case to be traded as pawns for political gain’.

You’re the SNP. You’ve been in government in Scotland for 19 years on the trot. You have nothing to show for it besides ferries that can’t sail and blokes in women’s jails. Your leader has the personality of a gas bill and you go to the polls in May to ask for another five years. What do you? Apparently, you tell voters that they’re voting on whether to remove Keir Starmer from Downing Street. I’m not making that up. They are, but I’m not. The nationalists have unveiled their re-election campaign with a poster of Starmer and the words ‘Gone in 100 Days?’ 100? Amateurs! Andy Burnham will have found a way to remove him long before then.

Is the Scottish government above the law? The SNP-run devolved administration is being taken to court after it refused to comply with freedom of information legislation. While that might sound dry and technical, it is anything but: the information it refuses to disclose is evidence from the notorious – and notoriously messy – Alex Salmond inquiries.

The biggest beneficiary of Robert Jenrick’s defenestration and defection was neither Kemi Badenoch nor Nigel Farage but Malcolm Offord. He is the former Tory peer whose unveiling as Reform’s Scottish leader was in progress when the purring notifications orchestra struck up among the assembled reporters and Reform staffers. The news of Jenrick’s ouster dominated the remainder of the proceedings, which was fortunate for Offord because his first media event as leader was a handy reminder of his shortcomings. Reform is trying to have it both ways with Offord, selling him as a political outsider and a safe pair of hands with experience in parliament and government. If he truly were a political outsider, it might mitigate some of his unimpressive responses to media questions.

Are ‘buffer zones’ becoming the latest weapon in the political establishment’s clampdown on dissent? Scottish First Minister John Swinney says he will consider a buffer zone to ban protests outside migrant hotels. It comes after angry scenes at the Radisson Blu in Perth on Saturday, which saw competing pro- and anti-migration demonstrations. Anti-migration activists reportedly rushed up to the hotel and banged on the windows, though no arrests were made. Local MP Pete Wishart has described the actions of the anti-migration protesters as ‘disgraceful’ and called for ‘buffer zones’ around migrant accommodation.

Ruth Wisse defines anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism as ‘the organisation of politics against the Jews’, and in Britain it is striking just how openly the organisers operate. During his remarks to Sunday’s Jewish Labour Movement conference, Communities Secretary Steve Reed revealed that a Jewish colleague was ‘banned’ from visiting a school in his constituency ‘in case his presence inflames the teachers’. Reed described this as ‘an absolute outrage’. Peruse the social media output of politicians and commentators otherwise agitated about threats to democracy and the targeting of MPs.

If you don’t want your kids joining the jihad, don’t send them to a British university. That is the view of the United Arab Emirates, which has removed the UK from its list of scholarship-eligible student destinations. The programme subsidises Emirati youngsters to attend university overseas, with favoured locations including the United States, Israel and France – and, until recently, Britain. The FT reports that the decision to drop the UK from the scholarship list is ‘linked to anxiety in the UAE over what it sees as the risk of Islamist radicalisation on UK campuses’, and quotes a source saying Emiratis ‘don’t want their kids to be radicalised on campus’.