Stephen Daisley is a Spectator regular and a columnist for the Scottish Daily Mail
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
One of the quaint superstitions of the moment is a belief that our political dysfunction has a ready solution. The government stumbles from one crisis to another but things will pick up once Liz Truss is gone. Rishi Sunak warned that she would fail and so he is best placed to succeed her. He will
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
The death of Elizabeth II has reacquainted Britain with all the cherished irrationalities that make us who we are. Hereditary monarchy. Unfathomable pageantry. Democratic grief. The joy taken in queuing. There’s no understanding these customs; tradition exists to be followed, not deduced. To love the British, you have to love, or at least accept, their
Liz Truss’s plans for a two-year energy bill freeze, estimated to cost £100 billion, underscore three points. One, the incoming Prime Minister expects the energy crisis to be with us for more than one winter. Two, she grasps how lethal it will be to the Tories’ hopes of re-election if the Treasury doesn’t intervene in a
Unless Her Majesty throws us all a curveball, Liz Truss will be the next prime minister. So let’s knock something on the head here and now: she is under no obligation to call an election before January 2025. The replacement of one prime minister with another in the middle of a parliamentary term is not
As someone who has been banging the drum for Westminster to legislate to secure the Union, it might seem churlish to gripe when legislation is proposed. In my defence, I am Scottish: churlishness is my birthright and griping my national pastime. So allow me to explain my grievances with the referendum act, which the Sunday Times
When a nationalist mob descended on the Tory leadership hustings in Perth recently, those of us who criticise the SNP’s degrading of Scottish political discourse seized on the ugly scenes as another example. However, extremism is not limited to one side of Scotland’s constitutional divide. Last week, as she was attending an event at the
Lord Frost is tipped to head up the Cabinet Office under Liz Truss, making him the Prime Minister’s point man on the constitution. Is he the right man for the job? It’s hard to tell. He was willing to say what others wouldn’t about the Northern Ireland Protocol and the government has been nowhere on
Despite its name, Gers Day is not an annual celebration of the Ibrox side that makes up one half of Glasgow’s notorious Old Firm. If only it were that uncontentious. In fact, Gers stands for ‘Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland’, the Scottish government’s yearly report on public finances. In a normal country, the publication of
Yesterday, 1,295 people arrived in the UK by crossing the Channel in small boats. That is the highest daily total since current records began being kept in 2018. More than 6,000 people entered the country this way in the first three weeks of August and more than 22,500 in the first eight months of the
