Stephen Daisley is a Spectator regular and a columnist for the Scottish Daily Mail
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Israel’s overnight strikes on the Islamic Republic of Iran represent the initial salvo of what Jerusalem is calling Operation Rising Lion. In Genesis 49, Jacob tells his sons: ‘Judah is a lion’s cub/ from the prey, my son, you rise up/ He lies down and crouches like a lion/ like a lioness — who dares
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For those who feel Scottish politics has become a little dull of late, fear not: a rebel faction within the SNP is plotting to make things very interesting again. Today’s Glasgow Herald brings the news of a secret summit of top SNP insiders at which plans to remove incumbent party leader (and Holyrood first minister)
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Nadiya Hussain’s recipes have become staples in households across the country and acquired for the TV presenter and cookery writer the status of national treasure. However, her reaction to the BBC’s decision not to commission a new series from her leaves a bitter taste and prompts the thought that her secret ingredient all along might
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If the problem with Labour is that it believes in nothing, the problem with Reform is that it believes in everything. The dispute over the burqa is only the latest example. Few things unite supporters of Reform like opposition to benefits for anyone other than themselves In pushing Keir Starmer to ban the burqa ‘in
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For some time now, I’ve been documenting a growing devoscepticism in Scotland, only to be assured, variously, that voters are not sceptical of devolution, that some are but their number isn’t growing, and that some are and their number is growing but it’s all just boomers and so it doesn’t matter anyway. It ought to
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In less than 72 hours, the polls will open in Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse for a Scottish by-election like no other in recent memory. The Holyrood seat is located in the Central Belt, once unshakeably Labour and now firmly SNP. What makes this by-election so extraordinary is that Reform, a party which has never won
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Nigel Farage’s party is taking heat for a Meta ad it has run as part of the Hamilton, Larkhall & Stonehouse by-election. (The incumbent MSP, the SNP’s Christina McKelvie, died from breast cancer in March.) Reform is pushing its candidate, local councillor Ross Lambie, and claims it stands a chance of capturing the seat, which would have
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Broadly speaking, there are two responses to Keir Starmer’s surrender of the Chagos Islands. The first is indignation. This is sovereign British territory and yet the Prime Minister has handed it over to a foreign country. The constitutional scholar Yuan Yi Zhu asserts that this decision ‘cannot be defended on any authoritative legal grounds’, and nor does it
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‘Globalise the intifada,’ they chanted. This is what that looks like. Two Israeli embassy staffers gunned down as they left the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington DC. Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgram had been attending an event for young Jews working in foreign policy organised by the American Jewish Committee. One of the focuses
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Eurovision is an annual celebration of the gaudy and the garish – but I suppose someone should come to its defence amid the backlash. This year’s contest has provoked a fit of fury not about the naff music, simpering performers, or style choices that make Lady Gaga seem demure, but about the fact that Yuval
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Reform continues to rise in Scotland and the Scottish political and media class continue either to ignore it or hold panicked summits on countering the ‘far right’. Thursday’s council by-election for Clydebank Waterfront, in West Dunbartonshire, saw Reform come second despite never having contested this ward before. The SNP proved the eventual victor in the seventh
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When Blackburn MP Adnan Hussain complains about an opponent believing ‘free speech means protecting the right to offend Muslims’, you feel an instinctive response gathering in your throat. You’re damn right it does. It means the right to burn the Qur’an, mock the Hadith and doodle cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed performing in a rainbow-flag hijab
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Assisted suicide has cleared its first hurdle in the Scottish parliament, but there could be many more to come. On Tuesday evening, MSPs voted 70 to 56 to progress Liam McArthur’s Assisted Dying Bill. It would allow patients to request and be prescribed lethal drugs if they are diagnosed with an advanced, progressive and unrecoverable
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Observers of the American film industry have been fretting about its prospects for almost as long as it has existed. They questioned its viability in the wake of television, bemoaned the impact of the studio system on creative freedom, lamented the rise of the blockbuster, wondered where the blockbuster had gone, and pronounced that streaming
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The UK and India have finally inked a trade deal. This is, in principle, a good thing. Free trade can generate wealth, raise wages, and widen the skills market available to the signatories’ respective economies. As well as winners, however, free trade also creates losers. An obvious loser from this deal is the British worker. Fresh
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The Scottish Parliament’s equalities committee has voted against removing Green MSP Maggie Chapman as deputy convenor following her attack on the Supreme Court. The fight might not be over At a rally in Aberdeen in the wake of the judgment in For Women Scotland Ltd v. The Scottish Ministers, in which Lord Hodge found for a unanimous
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Keir Starmer thinks ‘this is the time now to lower the temperature’ on the gender debate. To ‘move forward’. To ‘conduct this debate with the care and compassion that it deserves’. That is what he said at Prime Minister’s Questions. What a shallow, hollow man he is. Now is the time to lower the temperature?
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As the independent bar in Scotland, the Faculty of Advocates is by necessity a reserved and disinterested body. It does not issue letters like the one that has gone out this morning to Karen Adam, the convenor of Holyrood’s equalities, human rights and civil justice committee. The correspondence takes issue, in blistering terms, with the
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Caryma Sa’d has captured the definitive image of the Canadian federal election. Over the weekend, the independent journalist posted a photograph from an event in Brantford, Ontario for Mark Carney, the former Bank of England governor who has replaced Justin Trudeau as Liberal leader and prime minister. The pic shows an older gentleman appearing to
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The plight of Russell Findlay reveals a lot about how politics works. Findlay was elected leader of the Scottish Conservatives in September 2024, by which point the party’s vulnerability to Reform was already clear. The Holyrood Tories were not made for a populist era. They are a patrician party of the cosy centre, chiefly concerned
