Stephen Daisley

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 Raphael came first in the popular vote. I probably don’t need to tell you which country she was representing. It was, inevitably, Israel, under whose flag she sang the pop number ‘New Day Will Rise’. Twenty-four-year-old Raphael is a survivor of the Nova music festival massacre on 7 October 2023. After Palestinian terrorists shot up the shelter she and her friends had fled to, Raphael spent eight hours lying alongside their bodies pretending to be dead.

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 round of counting – Scottish local elections are conducted using single transferrable vote – but Reform narrowly beat Labour into third place. They used to weigh the votes for Labour in Clydebank, a town once synonymous with the socialist radicalism of Red Clydeside.

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 condition which ‘can reasonably be expected to cause their premature death’. The patient would have to be 16 or older and mentally competent and, unlike Kim Leadbeater’s Commons bill, which is limited to those with no more than six months to live, McArthur’s Bill would not require that the patient be in the final stages of their life.

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 from having his employer’s national insurance contributions (NICs) hiked, and perhaps out of a job as a result, he will now have to compete in the labour market with Indians who will be exempted from personal and employer NICs for three years. If Candidate A, a UK national, and Candidate B, an Indian migrant, go for the same job, with the same skills, same qualifications, and same length of experience, it will be cheaper to hire Candidate B.

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 panel that the term ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 referred to biological sex, Chapman, an outspoken advocate of gender ideology, decried ‘bigotry, prejudice and hatred that we see coming from the Supreme Court’. This prompted the Faculty of Advocates to call for Chapman’s resignation as deputy convenor of the Holyrood committee responsible for equalities legislation, human rights and civil justice.

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? Not when women’s meetings were being cancelled, their proceedings disrupted, and their attendees attacked? Not when Kathleen Stock was being hounded out of Sussex University, Maya Forstater lost her employment contract, or Jo Phoenix was unfairly constructively dismissed from the Open University?

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 conduct of Adam’s deputy, Maggie Chapman, a Green MSP and one of the most vocal proponents of gender identity ideology in Scotland. In a video shared widely on social media, Chapman addressed a rally in response to the Supreme Court’s judgment in For Women Scotland vs The Scottish Ministers, which ruled that the definition of ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act refers to biological sex.

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 with the Union, taxes and crime, and so Findlay’s populist style has not been welcomed by some of his MSPs. One of them, Jamie Greene, has defected to the Liberal Democrats and, whether any of his former colleagues join him, there are several who no longer seem at home in the Tory Party.

The Supreme Court ruling on the definition of ‘woman’ in the Equality Act is a victory for women, proper statutory interpretation and the reality-based community. It started with the Scottish government trying to take something away from women. The Gender Representation on Public Boards Act, passed by the Scottish Parliament in 2018, required 50 per cent of non-executive appointments to public boards to be women. But the act defined ‘woman’ to include ‘a person who has the protected characteristic of gender reassignment’ provided that person was ‘living as a woman’ and intended to undergo ‘a process… of becoming female’.

If there has been one constant in Hashem Abedi’s miserable life it has been the determined failure of the British state to protect its citizens from men like him. Abedi is accused of inflicting ‘life-threatening injuries’ on three prison officers in an attack at HMP Frankland on Saturday. Injuries are said to include ‘burns, scalds and stab wounds’, with Abedi reported to have scalded the guards with hot cooking oil and stabbed them with improvised weapons. Two men remain in hospital as of writing. Abedi was jailed for a minimum of 55 years after being found guilty on 22 counts of murder for his role in the Manchester Arena attack. Hashem helped his brother Salman obtain the chemicals to produce triacetone triperoxide (TATP).

This week on Britain: The Decline Years, a firm of London solicitors has announced it is acting on behalf of Hamas in a legal challenge to the Islamist group’s inclusion on the UK government terror list. The paramilitary wing has been proscribed since 2001 and the political wing since 2021. It took the British political class 20 years to establish a link between the Hamas department that calls for the Jews to be blown up and the department that does the blowing up. This was in the days before streaming services, so Netflix couldn’t make a drama explaining the connection. Riverway Law will lodge a 106-page application with the Home Office to have Hamas delisted. The application is signed by Mousa Abu Marzouk, the head of the terror group’s foreign relations office.

With the imperial pomposity of an old colonial governor, David Lammy has ‘made clear’ to the Israelis that denying entry to Labour MPs Abtisam Mohamed and Yuan Yang is ‘no way to treat British Parliamentarians’. Bloody natives, getting ideas above their station again. Any more of this nonsense, chaps, and you’ll be summoned to High Commissioner Lammy’s office for a jolly good talking to.  The MPs were travelling to Judea and Samiria – or the West Bank – which is ultimately under Israeli military control, but were denied entry by the Population and Immigration Authority. Mohamed and Yang say they were ‘astounded’, British MPs being unfamiliar with the concept of a country that enforces its borders.

Robert Jenrick’s victory over the Sentencing Council — James Heale is correct to call it that — is, more importantly, a victory for the new style of Toryism the shadow justice secretary is beginning to articulate. There’s no dressing it up: what the Sentencing Council proposed was the introduction of race-based differential treatment to England’s criminal justice system. Its new guidelines, suspended pending government legislation to render this aspect of them unlawful, state that a pre-sentence report (PSR) ‘will normally be considered necessary’ where a convict comes ‘from an ethnic minority, cultural minority, and/or faith minority community’. PSRs can lead to a less severe or non-custodial sentence, though this is not guaranteed.

A parliament is an odd place. It’s the arena where clashing worldviews come to cross swords and there’s low and ugly skullduggery. In most other workplaces, political differences are a topic to be avoided, but the job of a parliamentarian is to spend day after day with colleagues whose values they abhor and whose ideas they consider harmful. For all the florid patter back in 1999, about how the Scottish parliament’s electoral system, working practices and even semi-circular chamber would fashion a more collegial politics, Holyrood has proved every bit as factional and partisan as the House of Commons. Yet, like the Commons, exposure and proximity to political foes engenders a grudging respect, even as it sharpens ideological differences.

Kenny MacAskill has won the leadership of Alba and just to underscore how cursed that position is, he defeated his rival Ash Regan by 52 per cent to 48 per cent. Alba is the party founded by Alex Salmond following an exit from the SNP that wasn’t entirely amicable. (You might have read about it.) When it was launched in 2021, Alba made a splash with a promotional film in which an actor playing Robert the Bruce endorsed the party ahead of that spring’s Scottish parliament elections, the 13th century monarch having taken a surprising interest in the distribution of votes on the Mid Scotland and Fife regional list. Despite winning some defections from the SNP (MacAskill and Regan among them), Alba failed to make an impact with the electorate.