Stephen Daisley

The people’s flag is even deeper red in Scottish Labour, where the daggers are plunging in all directions amid a bloody leadership battle.  Interim leader Alex Rowley has been secretly recorded admitting he backs left-wing candidate Richard Leonard, despite promising to remain neutral in the contest. It comes barely a week after Rowley’s turn as Fife’s answer to Mark Antony at First Minister’s Questions, where a jeremiad against millionaires was widely interpreted as a veiled denunciation of Anas Sarwar, the centrist candidate and a chap with a bob or two million to spare.  The Rowley tape also contains a reference to ‘private discussions’ on the future of Kezia Dugdale, who has since departed as leader.

The SNP's Fiona Hyslop is not an obvious candidate to lead a cultural revolution. The Scottish Government's Cabinet Secretary for Culture, Tourism and External Affairs is more Nicola Murray than Nicola Sturgeon. Hyslop has a permanent look of terror that someone might ask her a question but she’s harmless enough. Stick a few flags and a bowl of borscht in her office and tell her she’s at the UN and she’d be happy enough. Yes, she’s a bit clueless, pretty forgettable and has achieved almost nothing in eight years but it could be worse; she could be Mike Russell.  That’s why I’m not terribly worried about the latest tussle between the notions in her head and the outside world. To be sure, there is a chilling ring to the words.

A report suggesting that the £414m Scottish Parliament building could reach the end of its 'useful life' by 2060 - after just 45 years - provides the perfect metaphor for the state of devolution in 2017: a parliament that has been noticeably reluctant to use its powers in the last decade slapped with a ‘use by’ date. Irony can be awfully cutesy at times. The Scottish Parliament's problems don't begin and end with its building though. A poll by Panelbase gave voters an opportunity to declare themselves scunnered with the whole enterprise of devolution. Asked if, instead of independence or the status quo, they would rather shutter Holyrood tomorrow, 19 per cent of Scots said they are up for a return to direct rule from Westminster.

Twenty-nine years ago this month, the Vote Leave campaign got underway. Nigel Farage was still making his anti-establishment way as a City broker and a young Michael Gove was heading northwards to work on the Aberdeen Press and Journal. Instead, it was the founder of the movement who did the honours. Margaret Thatcher travelled to Bruges, to the College of Europe, the Europhile madrassa that has radicalised generations of youth to the cause of ever closer union. There in the belly of the beast she smartly explained why Britain was marvellous and wouldn’t it be better all round if the Continent was more like Blighty.

It is the gripe of every end-of-the-bar bigot you meet. ‘Look, I’m not saying there isn’t any racism but there can’t be as much as they claim. They exaggerate it. This isn’t me saying this, by the way. I know loads of black lads who say the same. They’re just milking it. It stands to reason.’ Place that paragraph before almost any Labour member and they would know exactly what they were looking at. They would call it textbook racism. The throat-clearing at the outset. The downplaying of the problem. The some-of-my-best-strawmen-are-black rhetorical device.

Say what you like about the Tories but cutting immigration by 100,000 in a single day is impressive. To think Jeremy Corbyn says this government isn't delivering. Until now, official figures put the number of students overstaying their visa in the UK at 100,000. An update from the Office for National Statistics confirms critics’ suspicions that that total was flawed. In fact, the Home Office notes, last year only three percent of foreign students were unaccounted for. That means roughly 3,000 overstayed. Skim-readers and those out for a political fight have branded this a ‘blunder’ but the facts are more complex. Access to emigration data in this area has only been available since the introduction of exit checks.

Nicola Sturgeon, SNP leader and occasional first minister of Scotland, has come to a jarring realisation. After 31 years as a member of the SNP and three as the party’s leader, she has announced that she is not comfortable with the name 'Scottish National Party'. At the Edinburgh Festival, Sturgeon told Turkish novelist Elif Shafak:  'If I could turn the clock back, what 90 years, to the establishment of my party, and chose its name all over again, I wouldn't choose the name it has got just now. I would call it something other than the Scottish National Party.'  The problem for Sturgeon, it seems, was the worldwide upsurge in populist nationalism. This was causing confusion about the SNP's mission and motivations.

Before Trump or Farage, before Wilders or Marine Le Pen, there was Pauline. Pauline Hanson was the original rabble-rouser who disrupted the pieties of liberal multiculturalism. Along came this copper-topped fish ’n’ chip shop owner with her screechy, strangled sentences and her gut prejudices about immigrants, welfare wasters and Aborigines. Unexpectedly elected to Parliament in 1996, Hanson stunned her fellow MPs and much of the country by declaring in her maiden speech that Australia was in danger of being ‘swamped by Asians’. She is back in the news after wearing then tearing off a burqa in the Australian Senate. Senator Hanson, who leads the hard-right One Nation party, has made the veil her signature issue. It is a security threat. A public order concern.

There is a strain of wickedness so contagious that it infects every pore of the places it touches. It can be found in the failed human beings who snatch at glory by the mass slaughter of children; they have changed forever the towns of Dunblane, Newton and Columbine. New York and Paris have emerged from the violent fantasies of terrorists but Utøya, Enniskillen and Ma’alot likely never will. Charlottesville joins the grim roster of cities that stand as metonyms for racial hatred and intolerance. The Virginian municipality has been here before — it was ground zero of the Stanley Plan — but it is the arresting display, in 2017, of white supremacism that will forever bracket it with Selma and Birmingham. Evil can sometimes be terribly useful.

When Nicola Sturgeon’s indyref2 gamble backfired and the SNP got slapped around in the election, it was only a matter of time before the Nats turned on each other. But few expected things to blow up quite so quickly. Anger and anguish, division and recriminations - Scotland's separatists have spent the past few months afflicting their movement with the rancour they visited on the country for five years. Scottish nationalism is going through a nervous breakdown. Its bloggers are in open warfare. Nicola Sturgeon is under fire from one of her former MPs for throwing her under the bus after a raft of bad headlines. The pro-independence National newspaper has been derided by an MSP as comical.

The Pride Wars are now a fixed feature of LGBT politics. Lefties attack the event for being too corporate and apolitical. Tories, not always made welcome by other marchers, complain it’s too political and not inclusive of ideological diversity. You could perform a few stonings beside the Queers for Palestine stall and still be more welcome than Jews waving Stars of David. Intolerance never went away, it just rebranded as intersectionality. Emma Little-Pengelly, the MP for Belfast South, sent a tweet to coincide with Belfast Pride on Saturday: 'Best wishes to all my friends & constituents celebrating today - all should be able to live a proud life free from hate, abuse or persecution.' So... what’s the big deal? Very progressive statement; more of this, please.

When Tony Blair was selling out the Labour Party by introducing a minimum wage, paid holiday leave and free nursery education, the hard left reckoned it had his measure. Semi-Trots and leftover Bennites, since decamped to one of the many exciting acronyms British Leninism has to offer, filled monochrome magazines and academish journals with tracts denouncing Blair as a Tory, a Thatcherite and both a neoliberal and a neocon. The charge sheet was echoed with righteous indignation by proud purists on the backbenches and in the columns of the Guardian and the Independent. New Labour was so far to the right it was indistinguishable from the Conservatives. What was the point, they asked, of a Labour Party that simply aped the policies of its opponents?

The BBC is our other national religion and like the NHS it inspires a devotional intensity that can be a little creepy. The disclosure of star salaries over £150,000 certainly brought out the worst in the Corporation's self-styled defenders. Their argument could have been designed to annoy: market dogmatists wanted to destroy the BBC because it's too successful, they say. But not so successful that it could survive without the Licence Fee - which by the way isn't a tax and at £147 is actually great value for money. If anything, we should be grateful the BBC deigns to broadcast to us.