Politics

Has the merry-go-round of the global elite summit – epitomised by the World Economic Forum (WEF) at Davos, which concluded this weekend – had its day? As I saw at Davos when I was editor of the finance magazine Spear’s, the WEF has been out of touch for years. Its costs of attending are now so expensive that it is increasingly difficult to justify attending what is essentially a global-class corporate ego massage circus. The first problem with Davos as a platform to ‘improve the state of the world’ is that there are now plenty of other, smaller, and more exclusive global insider CEO ‘thought leadership’ conferences. There is the

Last year, marking the tenth anniversary of Scotland’s independence referendum, I wrote an article for The Spectator looking at the state of Scotland’s political conversation and the prospects for the cause of independence a decade on from defeat.   After setting out why I thought MSPs ought to pass a budget that crossed the nationalist-unionist divide, softening the intense tribalism that has become a hallmark of parliamentary exchange, I also cast an eye forward to next year’s Holyrood election, in which no party is likely to have overall control. Recent polling trends show that Reform UK are hoovering up support from disillusioned Conservative and Labour voters alike, with Nigel Farage’s party likely to

As Holocaust Remembrance Day comes round again, actual remembrance of the Holocaust seems fainter than ever. The arson attacks on synagogues in France and Australia, the mass-assault on Israeli football supporters in Holland last autumn, or the shocking recent scenes at the Oxford Union, where Jewish speakers were taunted, booed and sworn at by the audience, are a horrible echo from history, almost unimaginable a few decades ago. At Auschwitz, Primo Levi wrote, nothing was morally clearcut Much of this may be due to demographic change, as sworn enemies of Israel migrate in large numbers to the West. Yet as genuine survivors of the Holocaust die out – a year