Stephen Daisley

One of the great myths of Scottish higher education is that it’s free. Outside observers can be forgiven for making this error because Nicola Sturgeon asserts it so very often. She has boasted that ‘one of this government’s proudest achievements is the restoration of free higher education’, claimed to ‘stand for universal services, such as... free education’, and argued, naturally, that independence is ‘the only way to protect the advances that Scotland has made with devolution through the social contract, which has delivered vital universal benefits such as free university education’.

Going viral is ordinarily pay-dirt for a small website: new readers, more subscribers, and a bigger slice of that sweet, sweet Google Ads revenue pie. Unfortunately for satirical Christian news-site the Babylon Bee, it went viral in the wrong way: it made fun of Democrats. Last week, its spoof story 'Democrats Call For Flags To Be Flown At Half-Mast To Grieve Death Of Soleimani' attracted 750,000 shares on social media. The headline and the body of the text are patently absurd and obviously satirical. Of course Democrats didn’t call for the flag to be flown at half-mast for Soleimani. It’s not like he was Osama bin Laden or anything. Donie O’Sullivan, who covers ‘disinformation, politics and technology’ for CNN, saw darker forces at work.

Two weeks ago, I asked what kind of prime minister Boris Johnson might be and whether he could be ‘the great disruptor’ on foreign policy, defying standard practices and elite assumptions as Donald Trump has. I think I might have my answer. On Trump’s decision to take out Iranian terrorist-in-chief Qasem Soleimani, the Prime Minister was silent for two days. When he finally spoke, it was hardly worth it. Of course Johnson was right to say, given the Quds Force head’s role in the killing of thousands of civilians, ‘we will not lament his death’. He was right too to warn Tehran against escalation.

The defeat of Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party has afforded little respite to British Jews. Residents of Hampstead and Belsize Park woke on Sunday to storefronts and a synagogue daubed in the Star of David and ‘9/11’, apparently invoking the conspiracy theory that Jews were behind the September 11 attacks. December has been sweeps month for anti-Semitism across Europe. Two teenagers were charged after allegedly beating a rabbi in Stamford Hill while shouting ‘kill Jews’. A man was arrested on suspicion of racially or religiously aggravated assault after a United Synagogue official was attacked near his east London home. An Israeli student was assaulted on the Paris Metro for speaking Hebrew.

Much of the post-election attention has gone on the next stage of Brexit and the government’s attempts to set down a domestic reform agenda that works for the Tories’ new northern constituencies. As such, the Integrated Security, Defence and Foreign Policy Review, briefed as ‘the deepest review of Britain's security, defence, and foreign policy since the end of the Cold War’, has so far been somewhat overlooked. Yet, as the terms of both the Queen’s Speech and Downing Street’s briefing underscore, this review will ‘reassess the nation’s place in the world’, a pretty significant remit. The Sovereign committed her ministers to ‘promot[ing] the United Kingdom’s interests...

Thursday was a routing for Labour but the reckoning is still to come. Four years into the Corbyn project, and two years after it should have happened, the country crushed the Labour party for embracing the most extreme and dangerous figure in mainstream British politics since Oswald Mosley. For British Jews, who have been put through intolerable torment since 2015, this past weekend marked the first Shabbat dinner at which Jeremy Corbyn’s name could be raised in something other than anger or exasperation or dread. In a break with much of Jewish history, Gentiles were on the right side for once. And while it is naive to assume anti-Semitism was the decisive factor for most voters, for some it was and for others it was swimming around in the broth.

It’s just an exit poll. They can be wrong. They were, substantially, in 1992 and lowballed the Tory result in 2015. Those caveats stated, we have to address that number for the SNP. Fifty-five seats, every seat but four north of the border, would represent the Nationalists’ best result since 2015. Before polls closed, SNP insiders were nervous they might lose some marginal seats to a combination of the Tories and Labour. If the exit poll is broadly accurate, Nicola Sturgeon has pulled off a second historic victory. Since she placed Brexit and Scexit at the centre of her campaign — stopping the former and securing a second referendum on the latter — we can expect her to say the result establishes a mandate for just that.

Nicola Sturgeon has had a change of heart. Gone are the ultimatums, the stridency and the self-righteous rhetoric. In an interview with today’s Daily Record, we see Sturgeon the Introspective: ‘Brexit gave me an insight, maybe that I didn’t have before, of how No voters would have felt had the referendum on independence gone the other way.’ We see Sturgeon the Pluralist: ‘Scotland belongs to those who oppose independence just as much as it belongs to those who support independence.’ There is even Sturgeon the Collegial.

‘Racists are racists are racists and Jeremy Corbyn is a racist.’  Yair Lapid is not mincing his words. One of the leaders of Israel’s main centre-left party broke with protocol this morning at a conference in Jerusalem to urge British voters not to elect Jeremy Corbyn.  He said the Labour leader was an anti-Semite, but that his anti-Semitism was not the ‘new anti-Semitism’ seen in recent decades as a result of the ‘black and red coalition’ of traditional fascists and leftists. ‘This is old-school, plain anti-Semitism,’ he said. Lapid, a former television presenter, entered politics in 2012 with a new liberal party, Yesh Atid.

For at least a generation — something we define loosely up here — Scottish hacks have been trying to interest London newsdesks in Scotland’s role in general elections. Then, in 2015, we had the good fortune of Scotland deciding to up and turn into a one-party state overnight. Then, in 2017, we revised our arrangements to a one-and-a-bit-party state when Ruth Davidson’s Conservatives liberated 12 seats from Nationalist control. Scotland may end up being the main story of this election too, if, as Eeyore types like me have been warning, the Tories do not romp home on December 12.

The decline of the Liberal Democrats continues to give Labour a boost and rattle Tory nerves. Middle class Remainers who dislike Jeremy Corbyn are nonetheless deciding that he is their last best chance to thwart Brexit. Electing an anti-Semitic government so you don’t need to show a passport at Paris Charles de Gaulle is quite the ethical choice but there you go. It’s also a pretty big gamble. We know that Corbyn is a Brexiteer who believes freedom of movement drives down workers’ wages because he has told us as much. Voting for him to stop a hard Brexit isn’t so much holding your nose as poking your own eye, but Remainers know Labour backbenchers will hold him to his promises on a second referendum. Right?