Stephen Daisley

The Scottish nationalists are aggrieved. What’s new, I hear you ask. Well, a diplomatic row, one which has prompted some decidedly undiplomatic language. The Scottish establishment is worked up after it emerged that Angus Robertson, the Scottish government’s pretendy foreign secretary, met with Daniela Grudsky. Who’s she? Why, Israel’s deputy ambassador to the United Kingdom. Their confab took place on 8 August but word has only just got out.  The pair discussed fairly routine and low-level matters like cultural cooperation and renewables. To hear the howls from politicos and activists, you’d think Robertson leapt into a tank and rolled into Gaza.

Britain’s antisemitism problem continues to grow. A report from the Community Security Trust (CST), a charity that monitors racist attacks and abuse against British Jews, documents 1,978 incidents in the first six months of 2024. That is the highest figure ever recorded for the first half of any year and a 105 per cent increase on the same period in 2023. It is no coincidence that this comes after the October 7 attack, in which Palestinian terrorists invaded Israel, killed 1,200 people, raped women and took 250 hostages. As the CST noted in a previous report, October 7 occasioned an outbreak of antisemitic activity in the UK long before any Israeli military response was under way.

With just 24 hours until nominations open in the Scottish Conservative leadership contest, Murdo Fraser has stuck his hand up. That makes six contenders so far to replace outgoing leader Douglas Ross. Fraser has stood for the post before, in 2011, but lost out to Ruth Davidson. Perhaps the pivotal reason for Fraser’s defeat was his radical proposal to scrap the Scottish Tories and set up a new centre-right party separate from the UK Tories but sitting alongside them in government and opposition. The sort of long-running coalition seen between the CSU and the CDU in Germany or the National Party and the Liberals in Australia.

The slaughter of 12 children on an Israeli soccer pitch was awful, of course, but it’s important not to overreact to these things. That is the takeaway from the Majdal Shams attack for United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres. Via his spokesperson, Guterres condemned the killings but called for ‘maximum restraint’ to avoid ‘any further escalation’ and urged all parties to ‘recommit to the full implementation of Security Council resolution 1701’ and ‘a cessation of hostilities’. Wise words indeed, and I’m sure we all hope that Hezbollah will heed them. It was the Lebanon-based Islamist organisation that carried out the attack using an Iranian-made Falaq-1 rocket. It’s fair to say dropping 110lbs of explosives on children shows only minimum restraint.

Foreign policy will have been low on Donald Trump’s list of considerations when deciding to anoint JD Vance as his running mate. The Ohio senator, a former detractor turned loyalist of the Republican nominee, is now close with Team Trump, and Team Trump rewards loyalty above all else. Vance is also a populist and speaks to the very voters (white, non-graduate, rust belt) Trump must attract if he is to return to the Oval Office. Vance’s relationship with Trumpism has been a complicated one but his selection can be seen as a legacy pick that consolidates the Maga agenda’s hold on the Republican party for several more election cycles.

Since its launch in Scotland in 2014, the National newspaper has made a name for itself for several reasons, none of them particularly good. It is not merely partisan in the way many British newspapers are, strongly supportive of one party and editorialising thunderously from the front page through to the opinion pages. At the height of Nicola Sturgeon’s premiership, the National was closer to a hymnal such was the reverence with which the SNP leader, her government and its policies were recorded. Back then, it was hard to distinguish the paper’s news articles from SNP press releases, except that press releases were slightly less sycophantic. And less Photoshopped, since for the first few years of its existence the paper was known for its unique splashes.

One of the defining themes of the new government will be devolution. Sir Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner’s plan, according to the Labour manifesto, is to ‘transfer power out of Westminster, and into our communities.’ It’s a signal of the priority they place on these reforms that the Prime Minister and his deputy hosted English regional mayors at Number 10 this morning to discuss how this power transfer will take place.  The new government should be holding out central government as the mechanism for delivering the changes it has promised The manifesto pledged to ‘deepen’ devolution settlements for combined authorities while ‘encouraging’ councils to merge and assume additional powers.

Scottish Labour has won 37 of the 57 seats north of the border, an increase of 36 on the 2019 result. This is the party’s best showing in Scotland since 2010 and comes nine years after losing all but one of their seats to the SNP. Labour will be sending its most impressive crop of Scottish MPs to Westminster in a generation. Leading the pack is Douglas Alexander, the new MP for Lothian East. A protege of Gordon Brown, he was MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire South from 1997 to 2015, serving as transport and later Scottish secretary under Tony Blair and international development secretary under Brown.

Nigel Farage is the most misunderstood politician in Britain. Vilified by the liberal media as ‘far right’ and mistaken by nationalists as a kindred spirit, the Reform party leader doesn’t fully comport with the pub bore caricature sketched by his enemies nor with the blokey everyman persona lapped up by his admirers. He is a wilier, more elusive beast, as his comments on the French elections remind us. Speaking to UnHerd ahead of the first results, Farage warned that victory for the RN would be a ‘disaster’, saying the party would be ‘even worse for the economy than the current lot’.  Dis-moi que ce n’est pas vrai, Nigel! It’s a statement sure to have friend and foe alike twisting themselves into political pretzels.

David Tennant’s acceptance speech at the British LGBT Awards was replete with all the telltale signs of ‘Celebrity Activist Syndrome’. He didn’t feel he deserved an award; his views were just ‘common sense’ and ‘human decency’. He has found a cause that just happens to confirm that he is a really great guy, which is the best kind of cause if you ask me. The cause in question is gender identity ideology, for which Tennant has become a prominent activist, though his activism mostly seems to involve wearing a variety of T-shirts with surly slogans. And while trans lives matter, it seems others don’t, for Tennant also used his gong show gushfest to say that such awards would be necessary ‘until we wake up and Kemi Badenoch doesn’t exist anymore’.

One need not cast around for signs that Britain is no longer a serious country, but the indulgence with which Just Stop Oil is treated stands out more than most. The doomsday cult has now sprayed Stonehenge in orange cornflour to protest our failure to shutter every industry in the land and relocate the entire population to a cave. Apologists for these insufferable toerags wave away objections, sighing that it’s just cornflour and no long-term damage has been done. Don’t mistake these excuse-makers for libertarians. The Venn diagram of people who are relaxed about Just Stop Oil’s methods and would also be relaxed if a group called Just Stop Immigration were using the same methods is two circles that will never intersect.

The Labour manifesto commits the party to recognising a Palestinian state. It frames this as ‘a contribution to a renewed peace process’. This rationale is as dishonest as the commitment is foolhardy. It is a reminder that progressives will not learn from history if the lesson offends their political sensibilities.  The manifesto claims that statehood is ‘the inalienable right of the Palestinian people’. Is this true? An international law scholar would tell you that oppressed peoples or those living under military occupation have a right to self-determination. But does self-determination necessarily equal statehood? Could it be achieved by a different model, such as political autonomy in confederation with an Arab state?

Douglas Ross was not a game-changing leader of the Scottish Conservatives in the way Ruth Davidson was but he announces his resignation as the game is being turned on its head. North of the border the Tories are seeing their vote hold up even as the electoral fortunes of their Sassenach brethren implode. They could come out of this election with more seats than the six they went into it with. But they are not captains of their own fate and Ross’s departure will only call attention to that.  Ross has had a tenure that at times seemed cursed and at others lucky. He had to handle the Scottish blowback from Boris Johnson and partygate, Liz Truss’s mini-Budget and mini-premiership, and Rishi Sunak’s unpopularity with Scots.