Stephen Daisley is a Spectator regular and a columnist for the Scottish Daily Mail
There is a problem with Sir Keir Starmer’s reported plan to expel 1,000 Labour members associated with ‘poisonous’ groups, and not just that there are way more than a thousand poisonous people in the Labour party. The problem – and it’s a common error – is that Sir Keir exaggerates the role played by the
A new leaflet from the SNP says another referendum on independence is ‘an issue of basic democracy’ and that Boris Johnson ‘is seeking to block the democratic right of the people of Scotland to decide our own future’. The eight-page missive, which I understand is being distributed initially to party members, is entitled ‘A Referendum
Willie Rennie’s resignation — announced, as only he could, via a self-shot video while climbing Benarty Hill in western Fife — means there’s now a vacancy at the top of the Scottish Liberal Democrats. Given the party holds just four seats at Holyrood and four at Westminster, the summit of Benarty enjoys a more elevated
My name is Stephen and I am a Bad Scot. At least that’s how I feel. For the past week Italian flags have been popping up all over Scotland ahead of tonight’s Euro 2020 final. Music station Pure Radio Scotland rebranded itself ‘Pure Radio Italy’ for the weekend. A shopper in Glasgow complained that Tesco
Like Walter Kurtz, Dominic Cummings had immense plans but was tripped on the threshold of greatness by the weaknesses of his superiors. Now he holds court from his fortress temple of Substack where, in the fashion of Martin Sheen’s Captain Willard, subscribers receive his glum musings on Covid strategy, systems management and judicial review. Cummings
Awarding the George Cross to the NHS seems a bit much, though in keeping with our devotion to the aspirin-dispensing national religion. The health service has been bestowed the highest civilian gallantry medal for its public service and its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s not that health professionals don’t deserve recognition. They do, though
While Labour’s narrow victory in Batley and Spen will mostly be analysed through the prism of Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership, a more compelling fault line is the apparent estrangement of some Muslim voters from a party that has until now been able to rely on their support. Labour may have held on but it also
The news that a Scottish woman died from cancer after being among more than 400 wrongly told they did not need to undergo cervical screening is unspeakably grim. Worse is the confirmation that the records of a further 500 women, which pre-date 1997, have yet to be accessed, meaning many more could be affected. The
No doubt Michael Gove is satisfied with how his latest comments on Scottish independence have gone down. The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, de facto minister for the Union (even though that’s meant to be someone else’s job), told the Telegraph he couldn’t see any circumstances under which the PM would allow Nicola Sturgeon
Labour’s candidate in Batley and Spen, Kim Leadbeater, reportedly pulled out of a hustings featuring George Galloway over the weekend. This makes sense. Not only is Galloway a master of bluster whose pompous bombast has a steamroller quality in a debate, but Leadbeater would have been debating the person of whom she is currently doing
GB News is the most interesting experiment in British television news since Sky in 1989. The brainchild of Andrew Neil (who is also chairman of The Spectator), the channel is pinning its hopes on there being an audience for something different. The thinking goes that the mainstream broadcasters reflect the progressive pieties of London rather
Chancellor Rishi Sunak agreed to sit down with Andrew Neil on GB News last night for what turned out to be a fairly brutal grilling. The Chancellor floundered under interrogation on the pensions triple-lock, the cost of climate-friendly policies and the Tories’ big-government instincts. However, one of the more uncomfortable moments came when Neil pressed
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
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
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
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: If enacted, the proposed constituency names for England would be the longest and
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
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
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
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.
