Stephen Daisley

One of the fundamental flaws in the Scottish devolution settlement set up by Labour and radically expanded by the Tories is the ability for policy divergence in Scotland to impact on the rest of the UK. The Gender Recognition Reform Bill, on the cusp of being passed by the Scottish parliament, might prove an object

The Scottish parliament will today consider final amendments to the Gender Recognition Reform Bill. The Bill, a key priority of Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP-Green government, will update the Gender Recognition Act 2004, the legislation governing the acquisition of a gender recognition certificate (GRC). Once a person obtains a GRC, ‘the law will recognise them as having all the

No matter how heavily it snows today nothing will be as frosty as Pete Wishart’s resignation letter. The senior SNP MP has exited the front bench following the coup that replaced Ian Blackford with relative newcomer Stephen Flynn.  Blackford is an ally of Nicola Sturgeon and discontent had grown in the party’s Westminster group of MPs about

Nicola Sturgeon did not want Stephen Flynn to be the new leader of the SNP at Westminster. His victory represents not only a generational shift – Flynn is 34 and his deputy Mhairi Black is 28 – but a sharp left turn in political sensibilities. Where outgoing Commons leader Ian Blackford was cautious and loyal

The Scottish parliament does not have the power to legislate for a referendum on independence. The Supreme Court has made that clear and it is a rare piece of good news for Scotland’s embattled Unionists. What, though, of the other side? Not Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP; Iain Macwhirter has written insightfully about that elsewhere on Coffee

BBC Scotland’s news department has issued what must be one of the strangest clarifications in the Corporation’s history. It’s not a correction of a factual error or a retraction of an inaccurate or misleading item. It’s a statement justifying their journalists’ decision to report a major news story to the public, accurately and with all

If I had to give one piece of advice to Britons under 30 it would be this: go. Leave. Skedaddle. Get one of those work visas for New Zealand or Canada and start a new life. Fret not over the details. Those can be worked out once you’re there. Don’t make excuses, don’t defer, don’t delay. Trust me, you’ll

The Supreme Court will hand down its judgment in the Scottish independence referendum case next Wednesday. This is the reference brought by the Lord Advocate, Scotland’s most senior law officer, over Nicola Sturgeon’s proposed Scottish Independence Referendum Bill. Downing Street has refused to grant a re-run of the 2014 referendum, in which Scots voted to

When Liz Truss’s premiership came to an abrupt end, it appeared to spell doom for a historic policy shift raised in her leadership campaign. In a break from a widely held but diplomatically fruitless consensus, Truss stood on a platform of reviewing the location of the British embassy in Israel.  That legation is still based

Ash Regan’s decision to resign as Nicola Sturgeon’s community safety minister will not have been taken lightly. The Scottish parliament has today passed stage one of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, legislation championed by Sturgeon which will make it easier to access a gender recognition certificate, remove medical experts from the process and lower the

Rishi Sunak’s first order of business will be restoring stability to the government and, thereafter, regaining the confidence of the markets. But the incoming prime minister will eventually have to confront a looming threat of even greater import: Scottish independence. Lawyers for the UK and Scottish governments are currently battling over the matter before the

Penny Mordaunt’s entry into the Tory leadership race was widely predicted and she has now become the first to throw her hat into the bin fire. I’m totally impartial in this contest. I think any Tory MP would be just as hopeless as the next. But there’s a point worth underscoring: if Mordaunt were to

Liz Truss needs an exit strategy. Unless she can eke past Canning’s 119 days, the Prime Minister will go down in history as Britain’s shortest-serving premier. That ignominy will only be compounded by the absence of a legacy. Nothing is going to overshadow a fleeting and calamitous spell in No. 10, but there are scraps

The National Gallery is home to Van Gogh’s still life Sunflowers. It’s an oil on canvas that, according to the Times, has been valued at £75 million. It is a cherished work of modern European art and one of the most important to come from the post-impressionist movement. This morning, two activists from Just Stop

Ye is the rapper formerly known as Kanye West. Even more formerly, he was known as Yeezus, back when he was dropping tracks like ‘I Am A God’. But Kanye is not the messiah; he’s an extremely naughty boy.  This week he appeared on US television show Tucker Carlson Tonight to attack Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner’s role

The Ruth Davidson era is over. It has been three years since the now Baroness Davidson stood down as leader of the Scottish Tories, but the last decade of opposition politics has belonged to her. It was Davidson who parlayed opposition to independence into tactical support for the Scottish Conservatives, convincing a section of older,

Should Tories already be feeling buyer’s remorse over their new leader? It has been only 20 days since Boris Johnson, a liberal who pretended to be a populist, was replaced by Liz Truss, a liberal who doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a liberal. Whereas Johnson’s was a patrician liberalism with a keen sense

Lost amid much of the commentary on Kwasi Kwarteng’s income tax and stamp duty cuts is that they will not apply to Scotland. Income tax is largely devolved to Holyrood, as is stamp duty, or land and buildings transaction tax as it is now known north of the border. The Barnett formula, the fiscal mechanism