Stephen Daisley

There will not be another referendum on Scottish independence if the SNP wins a majority in May’s devolved elections. We can be certain of this because John Swinney has said there will be one and, as my old granny used to say, I wouldn’t believe a word he says if the Pope had just heard his confession. Keir Starmer will simply do what his predecessors did: tell the SNP to bog off The SNP leader was questioned on his independence strategy by ITV Border’s Kieran Andrews, who asked him to ‘guarantee 100 per cent’ his campaign rhetoric about a parliamentary majority for the Nationalists leading to another vote on breaking up Britain. Swinney told him: ‘Yes, because that’s what happened in 2011.

The government’s latest difficulties in the House of Lords over plans to surrender the Chagos islands is another humiliation for Keir Starmer, but it is also one last opportunity to avert a historic mistake. The Prime Minister proposes to hand over the Chagos to Mauritius, which has never exercised sovereignty over a cluster of Indian Ocean islands which have been British for two centuries. Starmer has agreed to pay Mauritius £101 million every year for 99 years to lease back one of the islands, Diego Garcia, which is home to a joint UK-US military base.  On Monday, peers outvoted the government on four key amendments.

The Vietnam war was the first Americans watched on their nightly TV news, the Gulf War the first that could be followed live on CNN, and the Global War on Terror the first documented online through the work of bloggers, citizen journalists and video-sharing sites like LiveLeak. Meme warfare is being used not only to humiliate the Venezuela regime but also domestic critics of the president’s actions The US invasion of Venezuela, Operation Absolute Resolve, marks another innovation: it is the first armed conflict in which the victor has simultaneously won a conventional military victory and a meme war.

The liberal state and its journalistic and academic outriders fret constantly about the radicalising influence of under-regulated social media, but they are overlooking an even more effective provocateur: themselves. I say this as someone who is in the process of being radicalised by them. With the decision to grant citizenship to Alaa Abd El-Fattah and recently to return him to Britain from Egypt, and for the Prime Minister to express his ‘delight’ at these arrangements, they’re practically force-feeding me red pills. Not so long ago, I was a happy warrior for liberal multiculturalism.

Why would anyone support this government? Keir Starmer has a near-invincible majority, a divided opposition and 14 years of Tory-managed decline against which to define his project. Problem is he doesn’t have a project, or a plan, or, at this rate, a policy.  Tim Shipman reveals that Labour will U-turn on inheritance tax changes which have been branded a ‘family farm tax’. The threshold will increase from £1 million to £2.5m, or £5m if there is a surviving spouse, which addresses many of the objections raised by farmers.  It joins a growing litany of policies jettisoned by a government that takes fright at public and especially backbench opposition.

Of the many political headaches Keir Starmer does not need right now, further American warnings that Britain is suppressing speech are pretty high on the list.  Unfortunately for the Prime Minister, another prominent US public official has voiced concerns about a crackdown on freedom of expression in the UK – and a Supreme Court justice no less.  Justice Amy Coney Barrett was interviewed on Sunday’s edition of Bishop Barron Presents, a podcast hosted by Catholic prelate and public intellectual Robert Barron, bishop of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester.

The Scottish parliament has voted in favour of allowing government ministers to mislead it. That is the effect of a vote at Holyrood yesterday afternoon. The Scottish parliament is a failed institution that lurches between national irrelevance and terrible law-making The background is this: the SNP-run Scottish government is doing everything in its power to avoid holding a Scotland-wide inquiry into child grooming gangs, both by pivoting to the pre-existing but scope-limited Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry and by running a strategic review group to coordinate a re-examination by several institutions (Police Scotland, the NHS, etc) of their handling of past allegations.

This one has everything: drag queens, swastikas, X and freedom of speech. Dr Anne Woodhouse is a clinical psychologist in Inverness who has just been cleared of misconduct charges by her regulatory body, the Health and Care Professions Tribunal Service (HCPTS). The accusation was that Dr Woodhouse’s ‘fitness to practise is impaired by reason of misconduct’ because of two posts and three ‘likes’ from an X account she co-owned. Woodhouse denied all charges against her. Dr Anne Woodhouse is a clinical psychologist in Inverness who has just been cleared of misconduct charges by her regulatory body Post one: ‘The majority of trans women are the result of men’s sexual fetishes, the rest are homosexuals who have chosen an alternative path.

Scotland’s NHS is in crisis and Scotland’s government is in denial. A new study by the former head of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow presents a grim diagnosis of the nation’s health and the services tasked with tending to it. Much of the reporting is focused on a steep increase in the time patients spend waiting for calls to be answered by NHS 24, the Scottish equivalent of NHS 111. The median phone waiting time has climbed from nine seconds in 2014 to 22.5 minutes today. Mike McKirdy, whose review was commissioned by Scottish Labour, describes that rise as ‘astonishing’. But other findings are, if anything, more alarming. McKirdy found an 88 per cent increase in waiting times for radiology over the last eight years.

The Irish are in many ways the ideal neighbours. They’re quiet, industrious, peaceful, send their best talents to London, and turn out poets and playwrights we can pass off as English to gullible Americans. There are, unfortunately, one or two character flaws. They never tire of reminding you that your forefathers shot their forefathers, a reasonable complaint somewhat undermined by their fondness for ditties about their forefathers bombing your forefathers. Then there’s the, well, you know… the J-E-W thing. It’s raised its head again in a proposal before Dublin City Council to rename Herzog Park, which in 1995 was dedicated in honour of Chaim Herzog, who was born in Belfast but raised in Dublin.

This week Catherine Connolly, the newly elected President of Ireland, welcomed John Swinney, First Minister of Scotland, to the Áras an Uachtaráin, official residence of the republic’s head of state. Her government X account posted some photographs of the meeting and described Swinney, who leads Scotland’s secessionist Scottish National party, as ‘the first foreign head of government received by President Connolly’. This was a statement of fact, but feelings don’t care about your facts, and so Connolly has found herself scolded on both sides of the Irish Sea. She has been told with the invincible confidence of the ignorant that she has insulted the UK’s Prime Minister. After all, Keir Starmer is the head of government in the UK.

With his viral video explaining debt-to-GDP ratio through the medium of biscuits, Gordon McKee is putting the ‘nom’ into economics. Since his election to the Commons last year, the Glasgow South MP has established himself as the Labour politician with the best social media game, a sort of Robert Jenrick of the left. His latest video sees McKee, mug of tea in hand, build a 3D graph of international debt-to-GDP ratios using custard creams and bourbon biscuits. Custard creams equal national wealth; Bourbons, government debt. The 31-year-old stacks up bickie after bickie as he recounts the key points at which debt rose: Gordon Brown’s bank bailout; 14 years of the Tories; ‘some guy eats a bat in Wuhan and now nobody can go to work’.

It is the 9/11 of the blue ticks, the Hindenburg of the grifters, the dotcom bubble of the slop-peddlers. The influencer industry has been left reeling by a new function on X which allows readers to see the location from which any given account is operating. The latest update makes it possible to establish when and where an X account was set up and whether it has changed its name since then. A sensible measure, you might think, but not if X is where you make your living and do so by inserting yourself into other countries’ internal politics. There are no firm figures on how many earn a crust this way but even the most cursory glance through the Hellsite Formerly Known as Twitter will tell you the number isn’t insignificant.

Schools in Northern Ireland which teach pupils that Christianity is true are breaking the law. That is the ruling of the Supreme Court, which finds that religious education lessons and collective worship which aren’t ‘objective, critical and pluralistic’ are a form of ‘indoctrination’. It also finds that allowing parents to withdraw their children from these activities, which is already a statutory right, is not enough because doing so might place an ‘undue burden’ on parents or stigmatise the child.

None of Shabana Mahmood’s asylum reforms is as radical as the terms in which she is talking about this issue. In an op-ed teeing up Monday’s announcement, she writes: ‘Unless we act, we risk losing popular consent for having an asylum system at all.’ I cannot remember the last time a Home Secretary made such a clear-headed statement of the facts: asylum policies, like everything else government does, is contingent on the consent of the governed. Mahmood’s plans might sit firmly to the right of the parliamentary Labour party but they represent the leftmost asylum policy the British public would be willing to tolerate When it comes to border security, migration and asylum, too many in the decision-making classes associate democracy with demagogy.

By now you’ll know all about the crisis at the BBC, especially if you watch or read or listen to the BBC, which seems to be reporting on little else. There is nothing that exercises the corporation quite like the opportunity to talk about its specialist subject. You know the resignation of director general Tim Davie is a big story because BBC News has broken into its 24-hour coverage of Celebrity Traitors to bring us updates. On-air talent is muttering darkly about political campaigns and the corporation being ‘under attack’, the standard metaphor for occasions when a media empire funded by a legally-enforced, universal TV tax is subjected to scrutiny.

Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York City has prompted triumphalism in his supporters and despondency among his detractors. Depending on your political proclivities, the Big Apple is about to become one of two things: a revolutionary utopia where New Yorkers City-Bike from their socialised studio apartments to their worker-owned creativity pods, stopping off in Times Square to catch the latest proceedings of the People’s Tribunal on Landlordism and Transphobia, or an Islamo-Marxist caliphate in which Wall Street is nationalised, the Statue of Liberty draped in a burqa and the NYPD merged with Hezbollah.