Alex Massie is Scotland Editor of The Spectator.
Here we go again. It’s time for an English parliament! Actually, it’s time for a new Act of Union! Says who? Says Michael Fabricant in today’s Telegraph. Mark Wallace at ConservativeHome agrees. English votes for English laws! Well, fine. It’s a respectable, even laudable, view. But, as we shall see, it is not a very conservative view at all. It may be
Say this for George Galloway: every time you think he cannot sink any lower he finds new ways to surprise you. His latest contribution to Press TV, Iran’s propaganda station, speaks for itself. Parody is pointless. Given his history and his paymasters, we would expect him to defend the Assad regime in Syria. Even so,
I have never quite understood Ed Miliband’s appeal. He always reminds me of Cuthbert Cringeworthy from The Bash Street Kids. I find it hard to imagine him becoming Prime Minister. Something just feels wrong about that. I’m not alone in wondering about this. Brian Wilson, the former energy minister, wrote yesterday that Miliband still has a
Of the many certainties those Scots in favour of independence hold to be self-evident two in particular stand out. First that Scotland and England are fundamentally different places whose political cultures are so divergent they can no longer sensibly be expected to live together. Secondly that the British state is moribund and impervious to practical
The problem is less that the state is malevolent but that it is stupid. And that stupidity means that a lack of malevolence may be a matter of luck, not policy. Or, if you wish to be more generous, the state has the power to crush liberties and its failure to do so on a
David McLetchie, who died this week aged only 61, was a politician who, in style and manner, rebuked those cynics who presume – lazily – that politicians go into politics to advance causes that have nothing to do with the public good. This may seem ironic given that his own stewardship of the Scottish Conservative
Emile Simpson’s War from the Ground Up, hailed by no less an authority than Michael Howard (the historian, not the politician) as a Clausewitz-for-our-times, is on my “to read” list. So I was interested to discover that he’s the latest subject of the Financial Times’s reliably excellent “Lunch with the FT” feature. The whole article merits attention but among
Thumping Australia is grand; thumping Australia without playing well almost feels like cheating. But in a good way. This is where England find themselves today. The Ashes are safe for another few months and England have not had to be very good to keep them. Which is just as well, frankly, since even though they
Nate Silver, in Edinburgh to punt his new book, appears to have annoyed some Scottish nationalists today. The “polling guru” (according to all newspapers everywhere) has told the Scotsman that he thinks Alex Salmond’s merry bunch of nationalists have ‘no chance’ of prevailing in next September’s independence referendum. It is true that Scottish politics is not Mr Silver’s area
Scottish teenagers received their exam results this week and, for the seventh consecutive year, the pass-rate for Highers increased. So did the pass-rates for all other exams: the Advanced Highers success rate marched past 82 per cent while a scarcely credible 98.9 per cent of all Standard Grade exams were passed. Cue the annual debate over grade
Jonathan Bernstein objects to the notion that it’s Chris Christie’s supposed ability to speak like an “average Joe” than makes him a strong candidate to win the Republican party’s 2016 presidential nomination. Specifically he objects to a Chris Cilizza post in which he writes that: Christie has one thing that no other candidate — not
Blimey, George Osborne has got something right! Astonishing scenes. Suppose the government thought it a good idea for us to eat more bananas and, recognising that bananas have become extremely expensive, offered those of us struggling to afford bananas a modest subsidy to make it easier to purchase bananas. We might reasonably object to this
So it has come to this. The Washington Post, paper of Bradlee and Woodward and Bernstein and all the rest, has been sold to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. For $250m. That, apparently, is roughly the daily fluctuation in the value of Bezos’s Amazon shares. For a man worth more than $20bn, buying the Post is a bit like the
An old Washington cliche has it that a gaffe is what happens when a politician inadvertently blurts out the truth or, in a variation on the theme, reveals what he really thinks. Enter Lord Howell. In ordinary circumstances Peer Says Something Daft might be thought as newsworthy as Friday Follows Thursday but Lord Howell is not some backwoods eccentric. He’s
Jura, George Orwell wrote, is “an extremely ungetable place”. It is easier, but only modestly so, to reach Jura now than it was when Orwell lived on the island. Unless you have your own boat or take, in summer, the small passenger ferry it still requires two ferry trips. But for Orwell, who disliked “big
There are many Scotlands and they’re all dreadful. That at any rate seems to be the message from the Scottish government’s anti-sectarianism ‘taskforce’. We’re all in denial about sectarianism and the shadow it casts over Scottish society. Of course it’s hardly surprising that those people who spend their lives ferreting for evidence of sectarian behaviour
Four months ago I wondered if this might be the worst Australian side in history. Previous contenders for that badge of shame were weakened by political disputes at home. Michael Clarke’s XI is the best available or, rather, the best available in the view of the Australian selectors. There are no excuses. No Packer disruption,
Another of this blog’s occasional hobby-horses is the increasing use by police of Tasers (see here, here and here, for instance). It is remarkable how often these “non-lethal” weapons turn out to be pretty damn lethal. Last week Jordan Begley, a 23 year old with a heart condition, died after being tasered by Greater Manchester Police. As
Another summer, another reminder of the consequences of our drug laws: A man has been arrested in connection with the death of an 18-year-old who had taken fake ecstasy tablets. The woman died in Alexandria, West Dunbartonshire, on Tuesday. She and three friends had taken green tablets with a Rolex Crown logo on them. Similar
Tony Blair has welcomed Ed Miliband’s “big speech” on reforming Labour’s relationship with its Trade Union backers. And so has Len McCluskey, chief potentate at Unite, the Union whose allegedly nefarious activities in Falkirk have prodded Miliband towards reform. Blair expects Miliband’s proposals to change everything; McCluskey, presumably, is confident any changes will prove largely
