Stephen Daisley is a Spectator regular and a columnist for the Scottish Daily Mail
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One of the benefits of devolution has been giving Scots their own parliament in which the great issues of the day can be discussed. Issues that might not otherwise make it onto the political agenda. Now the Scottish parliament has posed a question that can be avoided no longer: are buses racist? James Dornan is
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Israel’s new government is a daring, possibly doomed but nonetheless fascinating experiment. Headed by tech millionaire turned nationalist figurehead Naftali Bennett and TV journalist turned voice of centrism Yair Lapid, Jerusalem’s 36th government is an ideological hydra. Bennett’s right-wing national-religious Yamina party is joined by the secular liberals of Lapid’s Yesh Atid, along with Kahol
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There are two ways to look at Sir Keir Starmer’s call for the Prime Minister ‘to press for a renewed international agreement to finally recognise the State of Palestine’ at the G7 summit. The first is cynical: that the intended audience was not the government benches or the international community, but the voters of Batley
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The real story of the proposed boundary changes is not which MPs might end up seatless or whether the new boundaries help Labour or the Tories, but what it means for ever-lengthening constituency names. Queen Mary university politics professor Philip Cowley says: Professor Cowley points out that the mean number of characters in a constituency
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Opponents of the new racial extremism typically object that it vilifies white people in much the same way that classical racism does black people or other minorities. While this ideology does retail racist theories about white people (collective racial privilege, heritable racial guilt), when progressives want to get really racist, they invariably turn to another
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The five most frustrating words a journalist can hear are: ‘This is not a story’. Over the years, I have heard that warding charm invoked by press officers governmental and party, private sector and charitable. Every time, it guaranteed I would work doubly hard to ensure the story in question made it into print. Political
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The BBC is still investigating one of its journalists almost one week after it emerged she had tweeted ‘Hitler was right’. Tala Halawa, who is based in the West Bank city of Ramallah, is the ‘Palestine specialist’ for BBC Monitoring and was part of the reporting team which covered the recent fighting between Israel and
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It is so rare to see a Conservative push back against devolution creep that I didn’t believe my eyes at first. Stephen Kerr, newly elected to the Scottish parliament as a list member for Central Scotland, highlighted this week the £2 million per year the Scottish government spends on a Brussels office with 17 staff members.
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The Conservatives will be relieved that an independent investigation has not found the party to be institutionally racist, though relief is about all they can feel. Professor Swaran Singh’s report, which has taken two years to arrive, paints a picture of a party at best complacent about how its members talk about Muslims. Professor Singh
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The tale of Tala Halawa has an ever-mounting horror to it: each sentence is more disturbing than the last. First we learn that this BBC journalist proclaimed during the 2014 Israel-Gaza war that ‘Israel is more Nazi than Hitler’ and that ‘Hitler was right’. Then we encounter her assertion that ‘ur media is controlled by
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It’s a tale worthy of Kafka. Dr Pete Newbon, a lecturer in humanities at Northumbria University, is being investigated by his employer for making fun of Jeremy Corbyn. Dr Newbon tweeted a picture of the former Labour leader reading to a group of schoolchildren from Michael Rosen’s We’re Going on a Bear Hunt. Only the
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Politics tends to attract people who consider themselves and their every mundane word and deed an example of great bravery. Like journalism and entertainment, it is an industry constructed around the pleasing myth that, whatever level you’re working at, you are engaged in the business of saving the world. Yet few politicians say much today
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Nicola Sturgeon’s cabinet reshuffle is an object lesson in making a very limited talent pool go a long way. John Swinney, who has been education secretary since 2016, has been shifted into a new brief in charge of the Covid recovery. Swinney’s tenure at education won’t be fondly remembered, presiding as he did over the
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No, not this time, Boris. The Prime Minister’s ‘both sides’ response to the terrorist attacks on Israel underscores how Western political elites — left, right and centre — lose all critical reasoning when it comes to one tiny strip of land in the Middle East. Israel is under assault from Hamas, the Islamist mafia that
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Douglas Ross’s first Holyrood election as Scottish Tory leader ended with the party losing two constituencies but its overall seat tally remaining at 31. The Moray MP was not a hit on the campaign trail. Robotic, shouty, angry — pick your well-worn adjective. He was eviscerated daily by a hostile press and any number of
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Tom Bradby got them started. On Friday night, the News at Ten anchor opined that ‘if the SNP can assemble a pro-independence majority’, he couldn’t see ‘how it would be credible to deny them another referendum’. In fact, ‘it would make an absolute mockery of the principle of democratic devolution’. We can expect much more
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13 min listen
Scotland will have a pro-independence majority at Holyrood, but the SNP has fallen short of an overall majority. What does this mean for the party, its leader Nicola Sturgeon, and the campaign for a second independence referendum? Katy Balls speaks to James Forsyth and Stephen Daisley. James Forsyth: ‘In a way, this is why this
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It’s a funny old business, politics. The SNP’s number one target in the Holyrood election was Scotland’s most marginal seat, Dumbarton. Held by Labour in 2016 by just 109 votes, the Nationalists put everything into unseating the incumbent Jackie Baillie. It is no exaggeration to say Baillie is a hate-figure for Scottish nationalism. She is moderate Labour, staunchly
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You know those elections where some cold comfort can be harvested by the losing side in gains made here and there? The Holyrood vote isn’t one of them. The full results won’t be in until tomorrow but based on what we’ve seen so far, the SNP is home clear and dry. An outright majority seems
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Scotland goes to the polls today to vote for 129 members of the Scottish Parliament. Polls forecast victory for the ruling SNP but there are a string of seats where the result last time was close enough to inject some unpredictability into proceedings. SNP targets Dumbarton Incumbent: Jackie Baillie (Labour) Majority: 109 This is the
