Stephen Daisley

Full disclosure: I went into the ITV election debate wanting and expecting Sir Keir Starmer to walk all over Rishi Sunak, but from my sofa the Prime Minister looked like the clear winner. How so? He kept it simple: he would cut taxes, Sir Keir would hike them up by £2,000; he would stick illegal migrants on a plane, Sir Keir would spring them onto a high street near you; he wouldn’t force you to make expensive green upgrades to your house, Sir Keir would rip out your boiler with his own bare hands then hand you a bill. It was ruthless, fear-mongering stuff, but I suspect it will have resonated with some viewers.  The Prime Minster was especially adept – read: shamelessly sly – about turning his failings into doubts about his opponent.

Today we are witnessing a significant failure of the UK state. This morning, the personal finance campaigner Martin Lewis reported that around 30 per cent of families had not received their latest child benefit payment. HMRC, which administers the payments, said it was ‘working to resolve the issue’ and advising claimants to ‘continue to check your bank account throughout the day’. This evening, HMRC said that 500,000 claimants had been affected. Child Benefit is worth £24 per week for the eldest child and £15.90 for every child thereafter. These sums will seem trivial to those with means but to poor and low-paid families they are a financial lifeline.

The Scottish parliament has voted to suspend former SNP cabinet minister Michael Matheson for 27 sitting days and dock his salary for 54 calendar days. It comes after Matheson was found to have broken the MSP code of conduct on expenses and use of parliamentary resources. Matheson ran up an £11,000 mobile data bill during a family holiday in Morocco and tried to have the taxpayer pick up the tab. Despite initially claiming no knowledge of how such a large bill was incurred, he later said that his sons had run up the charges while using the device’s hotspotting function to stream Celtic football matches.  The vote broke down 64 in favour of sanctioning Matheson, with 63 abstaining.

Writing about the impact on children of having a parent in prison, you always hit the same brick wall: no one knows how many children have a parent in prison, including the Ministry of Justice. The MoJ estimates that ‘approximately 200,000 children’ have a parent in or heading to prison. Ministers have commissioned a review which is due to provide an updated figure on 13 June. The charity Prison Advice and Care Trust, pulling together various strands of MoJ statistics, suggested something in the ballpark of 100,000, though they only counted male prisoners. Meanwhile, Crest Advisory, a criminal justice consultancy, puts the figure much higher, at 312,000.

The application for arrest warrants against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defence minister Yoav Gallant is an act of lawfare. In seeking the detention of Israel’s political and military leadership during its war against Hamas, Karim Ahmad Khan, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), is inviting that body to intervene in the conflict. Granting these warrants would require ICC signatory countries such as the UK to arrest the men if they set foot in their territory and hand them over. The likely effect of their arrest would be to cripple Israel’s war effort and throw the country into political chaos.

As the edifice of gender identity ideology continues to crumble, along comes another example of an institution not only captured but utterly distorted by this regressive and harmful theory. Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC) has lost an employment tribunal case brought by a former staff member whose work life was made a living hell because she thought rape victims should be told whether the support worker assigned to them was male or female. Roz Adams was employed as a counselling support worker between 2021 and 2023, when she resigned after having been put through a gruelling disciplinary process over her belief in biological sex.

Scottish nationalists are not happy. What’s new, I hear you ask. Did they lose another leader? Has Sainsbury’s been selling Somerset strawberries in Stornoway supermarkets? Nothing quite so grave, but they are displeased nonetheless. The cause is Rishi Sunak, who has offended them with his Big Serious Speech at Policy Exchange on Monday. It was just a single reference, but that is the most Sunak has done to confront the SNP since he entered No. 10.

John Swinney, Scotland’s new first minister, has appointed his inaugural cabinet – and it’s almost unaltered from the team headed by Humza Yousaf. The only real change is the appointment of former leadership hopeful Kate Forbes as deputy first minister. She was promised a ‘significant’ role and in addition to the office of DFM she will hold the economy portfolio.   Forbes’s return will be welcome news to those keen on healing internal rifts but will displease SNP progressives, who revile Forbes for her orthodox Christian views on same-sex marriage and gender identity ideology. She has called her new appointment ‘a moment of extraordinary privilege’ while Swinney has described her as ‘an immensely talented politician’.

There are a number of very good reasons that Kate Forbes is not standing for SNP leader. Chief amongst them is that she’d lose again. John Swinney is not Humza Yousaf. He has been an MP or MSP continuously since 1997, led the party through four difficult years in the early 2000s, and spent seven years as Alex Salmond’s right-hand man then eight at the side of Nicola Sturgeon. He is liked across the factions and respected for his decades of service to the party. There is probably no one who could beat him. Another calculation that Forbes will have considered is that her party is careening towards a general election in which it is expected to lose a sizeable number of seats.

A while back, Lee Anderson got himself into trouble for claiming Islamists had ‘got control’ of Sadiq Khan. Levelling said charge at London's Mayor was said to be ‘Islamophobic’ but surely more important is that it was wrong. Khan is neither an Islamist nor under their sway. He is a standard-issue identity-politics progressive, and with that comes a toxic farrago of communalism, victimhood narratives and offence opportunism. It is Khan’s identity-politics progressivism that was on display when he implied that comments by Sir Ephraim Mirvis were motivated by anti-Muslim prejudice.

After two and a half years in government together, Humza Yousaf has terminated the SNP’s governing pact with the Scottish Greens. The decision was rubber stamped at a hastily arranged meeting of the Scottish cabinet on Thursday morning. It preempts a vote by rank-and-file Green members on whether to walk away from Yousaf’s government after he ditched a key climate target. It means their party’s co-leaders, Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater, will lose their ministerial posts and the SNP will lose its overall majority in the Scottish parliament. The Bute House Agreement, which the Greens originally signed with Nicola Sturgeon, has been a source of consternation inside the SNP right from the start. It brought into government a party with a raft of extremist views.

Questions of power bedevil radical politics. Is entry into government the only way to force change? Do the opportunities of power sufficiently compensate for the trade-offs required to obtain it? Where is the line between compromise and co-option, between pragmatism and power for power’s sake? The Scottish Greens are confronted with these questions in the wake of the Scottish Government’s decision to drop a key interim target towards achieving Net Zero. On Thursday, Màiri McAllan, Holyrood’s Cabinet Secretary for Wellbeing Economy, Net Zero and Energy, confirmed that the devolved administration would not manage to reduce emissions by 75 per cent by 2030. McAllan said the target, oft-touted by the SNP-led government, was now ‘out of reach’.

Iran’s drone and missile attack on Israel is an escalation from the fiery but ultimately empty rhetoric we are used to from Tehran. In different times and with a different prime minister in Jerusalem than the gun-shy Benjamin Netanyahu, it is the kind of inflammatory move that could have provoked a much graver Israeli response than last night’s events are likely to. However, Israel can neither afford nor does the current leadership particularly want a hot war with Iran at this point. Of course, it is already in such a war, indirectly at least, since the Islamic Republic was the guiding hand behind the October 7 massacre. But there is a larger consideration to the north, in the form of another Iran proxy, Hezbollah, which is more heavily armed than Hamas on several orders of magnitude.

The Cass Review may prove to be a tipping point in radical gender ideology’s march through mainstream politics, institutions and civil society. It certainly appears to spell the end of routinely sending children who express confusion about their bodies or their identities down the transition path. The political responses to the report, especially from those who were until recently fully signed on to this ideology, suggest that under what remains of this government and the next Labour government there will be a more cautious approach.