Stephen Daisley

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’.

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.