Stephen Daisley

Spare a thought for Chris Coghlan, who has learned to his horror that not only is the Pope a Catholic, his own priest is one too. The Liberal Democrat MP, who voted to legalise assisted suicide, attends St Joseph’s Catholic Church in Dorking. He complains to the Observer that Father Ian Vane ‘publicly announced at Mass that he was… denying me Holy Communion as I had breached Canon Law’. Coghlan believes this represents a ‘completely inappropriate interference in democracy by religious authorities’. If you’re not a Catholic, at this point you’re thinking one of two things: ‘No thanks, I’ll leave the Papists to their internal disputes’, or ‘Canon Law would be a cracking name for a courtroom series about a priest turned barrister’.

A more gracious person would refrain from saying, ‘I told you so’, but I’m not a gracious person. So, as George Galloway announces his backing for another Scottish independence referendum, allow me to say – nay, crow – I told you so.  Galloway, leader of the Workers party, says he and his party ‘support the right of the Scots to self-determination’ and that ‘the time for another referendum is close’. He adds: ‘Speaking personally, I can no longer support the British state as presently constituted.

Stephen Fry has accused J.K. Rowling of being ‘inflammatory and contemptuous’, ‘mocking’ and adding to ‘a terribly distressing time for trans people’. Fry, who narrated the Harry Potter audiobooks, has damned their author for saying ‘cruel’ and ‘wrong’ things and for failing to ‘disavow some of the more revolting and truly horrible, destructive – violently destructive – things that people say’. He suspects that she’s been ‘radicalised by Terfs’, charged her with kicking up ‘a hornet's nest of transphobia which has been entirely destructive’, and dismissed her as ‘a lost cause’.

A small but not insignificant morsel of data on the state of education after 18 years of the SNP running Scotland. New figures show the gap between the poorest and wealthiest school leavers has widened to a five-year high. In the least deprived areas, just 3 per cent of school leavers fail to go to a ‘positive destination’, the Scottish Government’s term for higher or further education, training, employment or voluntary work. Yet in the most deprived areas, areas like the former Lanarkshire industrial town from which I’m writing this, more than one in ten children leave school to what is euphemistically called ‘other destinations’, i.e. unemployment.

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) John Swinney were discussed. The paper says 25 ‘senior’ figures gathered on Monday to consider the boss’s future after the SNP’s surprise defeat in last week’s by-election in Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse, a seat they had held uninterrupted since 2011.

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 the interests of public safety’, new MP Sarah Pochin undoubtedly spoke for a significant section of the party’s supporters. For that matter, polling has previously indicated the British public’s backing for a ban. For some, it is indeed a safety issue: presented with a stranger, covered head-to-foot, identifiable only by their eyes, how can we know who that person is, whether they ought to be there, and what their intentions are?

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 trouble devolutionists that one in three Scots would shutter the Scottish parliament tomorrow Eight years ago, I wrote about a poll showing one in five Scottish voters supported the abolition of the Scottish Parliament. Last year, it was a poll recording satisfaction with devolution at just 50 per cent, with 26 per cent of voters and 49 per cent of Unionist voters expressing disillusionment.

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 an election in Scotland, has come from nowhere to mount a credible challenge to the mainstream parties. The bookmakers have Nigel Farage’s outfit as second-favourite to win on Thursday, and inside Labour and the SNP there are some who fear a drop in turnout and an electorate scunnered with the major parties could hand a narrow victory to Reform.  The likeliest outcome is that the SNP retains the seat.

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 been ludicrous not so long ago and is still hard to fathom today. A Reform victory here in Lanarkshire would be a historic upset and would give credence to a series of polls which suggest the party is on course to make gains in next year’s Holyrood elections.

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 make much political sense. In exchange for being gifted territory that has never been under its sovereignty, the Republic of Mauritius has agreed to lease the Diego Garcia military base to the UK for the modest sum of £101 million a year for the next 99 years. The UK government has arranged for Britain to lose land and gain a landlord.

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.