Stephen Daisley

The Scottish Labour party is a bit like cigarette-smoking or the Church of Scotland: it used to be everywhere you looked, but now you can’t remember the last time you saw it. We have been reminded of the party’s existence thanks to the abrupt exit of its leader Anas Sarwar, who was given a peerage and ministerial gig by Andy Burnham for reasons having absolutely nothing to do with his February statement calling on Keir Starmer to resign. That leaves a vacancy at the top of Scottish Labour, and today North East Scotland MSP Michael Marra has followed his Glasgow colleague Monica Lennon in announcing his candidacy.

The leadership of the Scottish Labour party isn’t worth the price of a cold cup of tea. Anas Sarwar has confirmed this by jumping ship to a seat in the Lords and a billeting in Andy Burnham’s new government, reportedly as a business minister. The appointment – no, let’s be candid: the promotion – will involve Sarwar quitting as Scottish Labour leader and giving up his seat at Holyrood.I doubt either will prompt from him much in the way of farewell tears. Westminster is always where he has wanted to be because Westminster is where the power is. His decade at Holyrood was preceded by five years as MP for Glasgow Central, a seat he inherited from his father Chaudhry Mohammad Sarwar, who renounced his British citizenship, returned to Pakistan and was elected governor of Punjab.

Israel’s foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar has raised eyebrows with a late-night tweet mocking England’s defeat in the World Cup semifinals. Even if we allow for the fact that Sa’ar’s father was from Argentina, his taunting X post is unlikely to be taught as an example of best practice on any training courses for diplomats. ‘How does the song go?’ he began. ‘It’s coming home. Yes it is. It’s coming home to Argentina. Vamos Argentina!’ This slur on England’s honour will be avenged. The next time Israel is knocked out of a World Cup, our great-great-grandchildren will troll them with something awful. While Sa’ar’s family background probably plays a part, his comments reflect a new diplomatic froideur between Jerusalem and London.

The death of Ann Widdecombe calls to mind the song of the same name by Victoria Wood. The festive ditty describes the then-shadow home secretary, as ‘our favourite Tory biddy’ with Wood, done up to resemble the no-nonsense Conservative, emerging from behind a curtain crooning: ‘Ann Widdecombe! Ann Widdecombe! I sing, I dance, I lean to the right/ I’m truculent, I’m succulent, I am a star.

There is so little substance to Andy Burnham that it seems almost churlish to attack the one area where he amounts to more than ambition, sentiment and unfathomable vanity, but his big policy idea happens to be one with which I have some familiarity. In his speech this week at the People's History Museum in Manchester, the soon-to-be prime minister pledged ‘new opportunities to extend devolution in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland’ and the devolution of employment support to mayors in England.

As the country prepares for its seventh prime minister in a decade, some are asking: is Britain ungovernable? I’d like to pose a parallel but meaningfully different question: is there a government that wishes to govern Britain?  Every government since at least 1979 has practised one form or another of this politics of abdication. Andy Burnham, if he does indeed become prime minister, will not break with this approach There can be no understanding of our governing crisis without a recognition that it has been in situ for more than half a century. In that time, successive governments have as a matter of policy outsourced decision-making, oftentimes in the name of better governance.

With all the attention concentrated on Makerfield, it was easy to forget that two other by-elections were taking place yesterday, both in Scotland. In Arbroath and Broughty Ferry, a six per cent swing in their favour allowed the SNP to retain the seat, while in Aberdeen South the Tories recorded a thonking 25 per cent swing to topple the Nationalists. The voters have spoken. God knows what they’re saying. Aberdeen, a city once swimming in oil wealth, had been battered by more than a decade of Net Zero fundamentalism Arbroath is a tale of contentment with the SNP, or rather a willingness on the part of the voters to settle for the devil they know.

Harold Shipman wasn’t as keen on bumping off vulnerable people as the average member of Britain’s euthanasia lobby. Not that I’m comparing assisted suicide supporters to a serial killer, though returning to the scene of the crime is textbook psycho behaviour. The lobby is going back to the Commons with the exact same bill that fell in April. Their objective is obvious: get MPs to pass the legislation a second time to neuter scrutiny from the Lords.  The upper house expressed doubts about the previous bill on the grounds that its sponsor was a simpleton and her safeguards were so shonky that even Anatoly Dyatlov would have raised an eyebrow.

Per Sir Humphrey Appleby: ‘A basic rule of government is never look into anything you don’t have to and never set up an inquiry unless you know in advance what its findings will be.’  It is in this spirit that John Swinney, Scottish First Minister and SNP leader, is resisting calls for a parliamentary inquiry into the SNP finances scandal. Peter Murrell, former chief executive of the Scottish Nationalists and estranged husband of Nicola Sturgeon, recently pleaded guilty to the embezzlement of £400,000 in party funds, which he spent on £2,000 pepper grinders, £4,000 pens, and most famously a £125,000 camper van.

To determine the proper response to the murder of Henry Nowak we must first dismiss those courses of action that would be in error. The establishment line, the one voiced by the government, the media and the political left, is that Nowak’s death is about knife crime. New policies or fresh legislation are required as well as interventions to divert young men from ‘toxic masculinity’. This we will call the Adolescence strategy, for like the Netflix-series-cum-moral-panic this perspective can confront a social controversy only by denuding it of those elements that make it controversial, in this case by forgoing discussion of the role of anti-racist policing in the decision of responding officers to handcuff a dying teenager on the strength of a false accusation of racism.

Everyone else is thinking it, so I’m just going to say it: we need Tony Blair back in Downing Street. I don’t know by what mechanism and I don’t especially care. A by-election would be ideal, I suppose. They’re all the rage these days. Sedgefield is now known as Newton Aycliffe and Spennymoor (ugh) and Alan Strickland should do the decent thing and step down in the national interest. If for some reason this didn’t work out, there’s always the Lords. I’ve never been keen on this modern convention that prime ministers cannot lead from the upper house. The last PM who did so was, of course, the Marquess of Salisbury. He left office for the third and final time in 1902, and it’s been all downhill ever since.

Peter Murrell’s £400,000 spending spree is the biggest, and certainly the most entertaining, political scandal to hit Scotland in years. The former SNP chief executive pleaded guilty to embezzlement at Edinburgh’s High Court on Monday after more than a decade of dipping into party funds to bankroll his fondness for the finer things.  Headline purchases included a succession of vehicles (Niesmann and Bischoff motorhome at £124,550; Jaguar I-Pace at £57,500; Volkswagen Golf at £16,489), coffee machines (Jura GIGA 5 at £3,232; Jura Z8 at £2,595; Jura Bean to Coffee Machine at £1,866), and luxury watches (Bremont Alt-1 in black at £4,795; Bremont Alt-1 in white at £4,555).

Can Andy Burnham define ‘a woman’? The correct answer is ‘an adult human female’, though I would also accept ‘someone with no chance of being elected leader of the Labour party’. Burnham’s position on gender is under scrutiny after the resurfacing of an exchange from 2022 in which he was asked about men who self-identify as women using female toilets. Ordinarily, I dislike this kind of journalism. The formulation ‘after past comments resurfaced’ is usually a dead giveaway that a news story isn’t news. The journalist who wrote it, or the editor who commissioned it, wants it to be news, often because they have an axe to grind. I make an exception in this case because Burnham’s answer undercuts his fatuous branding as a salt-of-the-earth, plain-speaking northerner.

Mind your language if you want to speak in the Scottish Parliament. Newly elected presiding officer Kenny Gibson has told an interviewer that MSPs must refer to other members using their preferred gender pronouns. Scotland’s devolved elections, held on 7 May alongside England’s local elections, returned two MSPs who express a gender identity at odds with their male sex. Iris Duane considers himself a woman and says his pronouns are she/her. Q Manivannan identifies as ‘non-binary’ and says his pronouns are they/them.

If you believe as I do that political stupidity deserves to be punished, you might take satisfaction from the election results in Scotland. But first, a little history. Almost three decades ago Labour set up the Scottish parliament, promising voters that ‘the Union will be strengthened and the threat of separatism removed’. Just eight years into the devolution experiment, the once seemingly invincible Scottish Labour lost control of its parliament to the SNP. That was in 2007 and the Nationalists have been in power ever since, relegating Labour to the fringes of Scottish politics.  Then, in 2010, the Conservatives came to power.

A telling exchange from Tuesday night’s televised debate for the Scottish Parliament elections.  Malcolm Offord, businessman and Tory peer turned Reform’s leader north of the border, confronted Ross Greer, co-leader of the Scottish Greens and quite possibly the next deputy first minister of the devolved government. Reform is promising to cut voters’ taxes while the Greens are practically giddy at the prospect of raising them on ‘the super rich’, which would include Offord himself.  After detailing his background (Greenock tenement, local grammar, Edinburgh Uni) and his rocky entrepreneurial beginnings (he arrived in London 40 years ago, two grand in the red), Offord said: ‘Today, I own six houses, five cars, and six boats.

Here is a lesson in power. One year ago today, the Supreme Court handed down its judgment in For Women Scotland v. the Scottish Ministers, concluding that for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010 ‘sex’ referred to biological sex and not ‘certificated’ sex. That is, a woman is someone who was born a woman and legal rights and protections specific to women (e.g. single-sex spaces) cannot be opted into by men who ‘identify’ as women. The judgment was, I wrote on Coffee House that day, ‘a victory for women’. But was it? One year on, policy and practice have yet to catch up with the law. True, there has been progress, such as Girlguiding remembering the first syllable in its name, but these victories stand out because they are uncommon.

The Scottish Greens’ manifesto for Holyrood 2026 proposes the most far-reaching overhaul of the economy north of the border. I’ve been urging the party’s critics, of which I am one, to understand its growing support in the opinion polls as a reflection of Generation Rent, educated professionals and semi-professionals under the age of 40 who are stuck renting in the private sector. The Green manifesto, unveiled on Tuesday, is an unapologetic pitch to these voters, with pledges on housing, health, childcare, and workers’ rights to address their key concerns. Tenants would get the right to withhold rent where landlords fail to keep up with repairs and safety standards and would be entitled to four months’ notice before eviction.