Stephen Daisley is a Spectator regular and a columnist for the Scottish Daily Mail
The Easter Sunday massacre in Sri Lanka, which targeted churches and hotels, has so far claimed 310 lives and left a further 500 people injured. National Thowheed Jamath, a local Islamist group, has been implicated but authorities believe it received support from an international terrorist organisation. Colombo has declared a state of emergency and rounded up 40 suspects but the government’s swift response belies its behaviour before the atrocity.
It was once said that every Jewish holiday could be summed up with the same nine words: ‘They tried to kill us. They failed. Let’s eat’. Now it only takes eight: ‘A Labour spokesperson apologised for any offence caused’. On Friday, the Labour party tweeted warm wishes to Jews celebrating Passover. At this stage, most Jews are glad to receive any communication from Corbyn supporters that doesn’t ask where the Rothschilds were on 9/11, but the well-meaning post contained a blunder: the accompanying graphic showed the Star of David, a cup of wine and... a loaf of bread. Under halakha — Jewish religious law — bread is the ultimate forbidden food during Pesach.
‘He’s a magician,’ the crowd chanted as Benjamin Netanyahu took the stage at Likud’s victory party. The man now on course to become Israel’s longest-serving prime minister had, as has become customary, pulled off a seemingly impossible eleventh-hour win. Despite the centre-left coalescing to form Kahol Lavan, an anti-Bibi alliance, Netanyahu held onto the crown by pandering to right-wing voters on territory. In the dying days of the campaign, with polls putting Kahol Lavan on top, Bibi pledged to assert sovereignty over the settlements, a bewitching incantation for Israel’s national-religious sector.
Benjamin Netanyahu, facing defeat in today’s Israeli elections, has made a final pitch to his right-wing base. Over the weekend, the Likud leader said that, if re-elected, he would apply Israeli sovereignty to both the settlement blocs and isolated communities deeper inside Judea and Samaria. ‘From my perspective, each of those settlement points is Israeli,’ he said. ‘I don’t uproot any, and I won’t transfer them to the sovereignty of the Palestinians.
Like Mother Teresa on a message grid, Nicola Sturgeon loves nothing more than going among the poor and downtrodden with a hug, some hope, and an embargoed press release. EU nationals are the latest beneficiaries of the First Minister's ministrations. The SNP leader has penned an open letter to EU citizens resident north of the border as part of her ‘Stay in Scotland’ scheme to help them secure settled status. The language is as meticulously neutral as it always is in taxpayer-funded Scottish Government initiatives: ‘As EU citizens in the UK you have had to endure years of careless indecision on what the future holds for your lives, your careers and your families...
The vote of no confidence in Dominic Grieve shows the Tories are, like Labour, vulnerable to bolshiness in their own local associations. In fact, the Conservatives might turn out to be more effective at purging MPs because, for all of the noise, the Corbynites have not done much. And if Jeremy Corbyn ends up in No10 after a snap general election, he may soon wish that he had done more. Two polls in the past 24 hours have been pretty good for Labour. Opinium has them level-pegging with the Tories on 35 per cent while Delta gives them a five-point lead (though this falls to three points when respondents are given the option of Change UK). On these polls, Labour would form the largest party in the Commons - but it would not have a majority.
There is a terrible Adam Sandler movie called 50 First Dates. There are many terrible Adam Sandler movies, but this one is a right honker. Sandler falls in love with Drew Barrymore, who suffers from anterograde amnesia — an inability to retain new memories. He tries to help her remember but she keeps forgetting. Eventually, he makes a video explaining everything, shows her it each morning, and they live happily ever after. This, I kid you not, made $200 million. Someone needs to make a video for Labour supporters to combat their Corbynesia. At Prime Minister’s Questions, Theresa May talked up the many areas where she and Jeremy Corbyn agree on Brexit, ahead of a meeting to reach a cross-party consensus and get her withdrawal agreement passed.
He may be infallible in matters apostolic but the Pope continues to err on matters temporal. Francis is both an extraordinarily humble pontiff and one given to superfluous, non-doctrinal pronouncements that elevate his personal worldview. His ‘Jerusalem proclamation’, signed on Sunday with Moroccan king Mohammed VI, is another example of the slender line between pontificating and politicking. On the face of it, this is a bland document, something to announce as the Pope continues his admirable work to strengthen relations with other religions. Earlier during his two-day visit to Rabat, the Holy Father spoke of the importance of religious liberty and exhorted believers to ‘live as brothers’ and ‘oppose fanaticism’.
The vote of no confidence in Dominic Grieve shows the Tories are, like Labour, vulnerable to bolshiness in their own local associations. In fact, the Conservatives might turn out to be more effective at purging MPs because, for all of the noise, the Corbynites have not done much. And if Jeremy Corbyn ends up in No10 after a snap general election, he may soon wish that he had done more. Two polls in the past 24 hours have been pretty good for Labour. Opinium has them level-pegging with the Tories on 35 per cent while Delta gives them a five-point lead (though this falls to three points when respondents are given the option of Change UK). On these polls, Labour would form the largest party in the Commons - but it would not have a majority.
‘Do you think LGBT rights should be taught in schools?’ Women’s Hour has got itself into a spot of bother by trailing a discussion on same-sex education with this tease. The objection is to the question mark, which hints sinisterly at a debate. We are at very real risk of a debate on relationships education and same-sex equality thanks to a noisy coalition of religious parents. The backlash began at Parkfield Community School, an academy primary with more than 700 pupils in Hodge Hill, the most deprived constituency in Birmingham. The roll is almost exclusively ethnic minority and a majority of pupils are of Pakistani origin; the ‘vast majority’ of the children speak English as an additional language.
It’s seldom hard to distinguish between a liberal and a display of humility and the Mueller report isn’t going to change that. Former FBI director Robert Mueller was tasked with investigating allegations that Donald Trump’s campaign colluded with the Russian government to win the 2016 presidential election. After 22 months, 2,800 subpoenas, 500 search warrants, and 500 witnesses interviewed, the special counsel has completed his report. The full document has not been published and may never be — federal law restricts disclosure of certain material in relation to grand juries — but attorney general Bill Barr has provided Congress with a four-page précis.
‘Remember, lads: Subscribe to PewDiePie.’ With these words, the killer began broadcasting his slaughter of 50 worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, live on the internet — and a new form of terrorism was born. For those unfamiliar with internet subculture, PewDiePie is a Brighton-based videogames blogger whose YouTube channel, the largest in the world, is known for its politically incorrect humour. His crown is about to be snatched by T-Series, a Bollywood music channel.
Diane Abbott knows what’s behind the spate of fatal stabbings plaguing the capital. The shadow Home Secretary told an interviewer that video games and hardcore pornography may be a contributing factor because they ‘desensitise’ the young to violence. Abbott opined to The House magazine: ‘You’ve got your smartphone, you can see stuff you could have never have seen at that age. Normally, you would have had to have gone into a news agency and they would have said, “I’m not selling you that, you’re only eight, go away”. There is an argument that exposure to hardcore pornography is connected with violence. I wouldn’t say that’s the main thing. That’s a thread and it’s something that’s there.
He struck at dawn, 25 years ago this week. As Jews marked Purim and Muslims Ramadan, Baruch Goldstein walked unchallenged into Yitzhak Hall in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. Here the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Jewish people are buried and here Muslims worship in what they call the Ibrahimi Mosque. Surveying the Muslims praying the Fajr, Goldstein opened fire, emptying his Israeli-made Galil of three and a half magazines in two minutes, a rate of almost one round per second. When his rifle jammed on bullet number 112, the Palestinians took their chance and overpowered the gunman, beating him to death with a fire extinguisher. Twenty-nine Palestinians lay dead and their murderer a few feet away.
Ian Austin has become the ninth MP to quit Labour, blaming the party's culture of anti-Semitism. He tells the Express and Star: ‘The Labour Party has been my life, so this has been the hardest decision I have ever had to take, but I have to be honest and the truth is that I have become ashamed of the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn.’ He continues: ‘I am appalled at the offence and distress Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party have caused to Jewish people. It is terrible that a culture of extremism, anti-Semitism and intolerance is driving out good MPs and decent people who have committed their life to mainstream politics. The hard truth is that the party is tougher on the people complaining about anti-Semitism than it is on the anti-Semites.
And then there were eleven. The Independent Group has been enlarged today by the defection of moderate Tories Anna Soubry, Sarah Wollaston and Heidi Allen, who gave as their reason the Brexification of the Conservative Party. ConservativeHome's executive editor Mark Wallace and others might dispute many of the charges, but the splitters describe a mood in the Tory Party that many will recognise, and that mood was set by the unchecked belligerence of Brexit ultras. TIG is no longer solely about Labour anti-Semitism but a lurch from the post-1997 centre ground by both main parties. The latest YouGov poll puts TIG in third place on 14 per cent.
Manny Shinwell knew how to deal with anti-Semites. Born in London’s East End, reared in Glasgow, and once jailed for inciting a riot on Red Clydeside, the pipe-smoking pugilist was a tough, proud Jew. During a debate in parliament in 1938, Shinwell (then Labour MP for Seaham) was jabbing at the government when Tory MP Robert Bower heckled: ‘Go back to Poland’. Shinwell got up, crossed the floor and thumped Bower clean in the face, then turned to the Speaker and said: ‘May I make a personal explanation?’. Eight decades later, his great-niece has delivered another bloody nose to the face of anti-Semitism.
The thousands of children across the UK on ‘strike’ from school today to protest climate change are admirable. They’re part of a movement, Fridays for Future, which wants more aggressive measures to reduce emissions. It seems clear to me that climate change is real, man-made and requires action. If these kids can do their bit to make this point, good luck to them. Okay, some might just fancy bunking off from double maths or be dabbling in fashionable politics for its shareability on social media. Either way, what these children can’t expect is special treatment. There are calls from adults — almost exclusively those who agree with the aims of the walkout — for schools to show leniency to the strikers.
It’s been a busy old week in Scottish politics. The SNP government is suffering a public backlash over plans to allow councils to levy a tax on workplace car parks. There has been a fatal infection outbreak at another hospital. MSPs are angry that the nationalists have installed one of their own as chair of the parliamentary inquiry into the government’s handling of the Alex Salmond affair. Best of all, the Scottish Government’s headquarters opened its first gender-neutral toilets. Nicola Sturgeon, though, has missed it all. The First Minister is on a trade mission ‘promoting Scotland in North America’, according to the Scottish government. Scots have been settling Canada and the United States since the mid-17th century.
Is there a name for the moment something objectionable becomes so mainstream that those responsible can solemnly lament it as a fact of life? I propose that we call it the Formby Point. This week, Labour’s general secretary Jennie Formby reportedly told a parliamentary party meeting that it was ‘impossible to eradicate anti-Semitism and it would be dishonest to claim to be able to do so’. Note the sly wording, the subtle distancing; you can almost hear the affected sigh of resignation. The woman who runs an institutionally racist party that refuses to challenge its institutional racism can, with a straight face, regret the inevitability of racism. As a matter of fact, it is possible to eradicate anti-Semitism from a membership-based organisation.
