Stephen Daisley

Nicola Sturgeon is resigning as First Minister of Scotland. We don’t yet know when — or why. After eight years in the role, unchallenged the whole time, she has hit troubles recently over gender law reform, the placement of Isla Bryson, a rapist, in a women’s prison and Sturgeon’s failure to deliver a promised second

Lee Anderson has changed my mind. I’ve always been an opponent of capital punishment but the Tory deputy chairman makes an irrefutable point: ‘Nobody has ever committed a crime after being executed.’ I could make a number of objections. I could say the death penalty violates the sanctity of human life. I could say it is vulnerable to wrongful conviction and

The philosopher and sociologist Jean Baudrillard famously claimed in a 1991 book that The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Baudrillard wasn’t suggesting that Desert Storm literally did not occur. Rather, he proposed that, in both its battlefield prosecution and the mediation of events through CNN, the conflict was a simulacrum of a war, the work of

Watching Alex Salmond rail against Nicola Sturgeon for sidetracking the Scottish independence movement with gender identity ideology is both uncanny and oddly nostalgic. Salmond was Sturgeon’s mentor and is largely responsible for putting her in the post she now holds. For ten magical years between 2004 and 2014, they were the dream team of Scottish

The safety of women in prisons cannot be allowed to plummet back down the news agenda after the latest Sturgeon saga is over. Not least because today has seen the publication of a report into one women’s prison in Gloucestershire that makes for troubling reading. HMP Eastwood Park, which holds 348 women, was the subject of an

Nicola Sturgeon is going nowhere. Some of her more excitable critics reckon the complete implosion of her policy on transgender prisoners could finish off her premiership. Not least since it comes just as she was planning a fightback against the UK government’s decision to block her Gender Recognition Reform (GRR) Bill. The SNP leader has

Millennials and Generation Z pride themselves on being ‘anti-racist’. We might, then, expect that remembering the Holocaust properly would be important to them – it was the largest act of racial hatred in modern history. The truth is very different and more troubling. New research commissioned by the Claims Conference finds Dutch millennials and Gen Z are

Will no one think of the middle classes? It’s not the most stirring call to arms. When Scottish Labour MSP Michael Marra complained that ‘the doors are closed’ at universities to ‘Scottish pupils from ordinary families and an average school’, Nicola Sturgeon quipped that she ‘used to be regularly criticised for the fact that too

‘Flower of Scotland’ is the unofficial national anthem north of the border but soon enough we may never hear its like again. Jim Telfer, one of the country’s most celebrated rugby coaches, has called for the song to be dropped at sporting events in favour of an alternative that ‘shows us standing for something rather

Nicola Sturgeon is angry. The UK government has confirmed it will block her party’s controversial gender Bill, which removes key safeguards from the process by which someone can have their preferred gender rather than their biological sex recognised in law. Opponents, critics and legal commentators warned during the Bill’s passage before Christmas that it could

Ministers will come under increased pressure to block Nicola Sturgeon’s gender legislation with the publication of a new Policy Exchange paper today. This examination of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill concludes it will have serious impacts on the rest of the UK. The Bill removes the safeguards involved in obtaining a gender recognition certificate, the means by which a man

The Scottish parliament returned from its Christmas recess today and held its first debate of 2023. Take a guess what it was about.  Yes, independence. Holyrood occasionally touches on other matters – the NHS, the educational attainment gap – but these are mere throat-clearings in a never-ending dialogue between the SNP government and its hardline

I spend a lot of my time fantasising about the death of the Conservative Party. I like to picture election night 2024 and Huw Edwards struggling to keep up with the mounting Tory defeats: ‘Labour gains Chingford from Iain Duncan Smith, former leader of — Wait, I’m being told Labour has also gained Chipping Barnet.

The Tories are finally coming to see what has long been plain to the rest of us: Rishi Sunak is a dud. He’s not a walking catastrophe like Liz Truss but he’s hopelessly out of touch, helplessly out of his depth and has no plan for turning things around. His conversation with a homeless man

The UK government’s threat to block Nicola Sturgeon’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill took many by surprise. The powers, under Section 35 of the Scotland Act, have never been used before. The assumption from some observers, this one included, was that this was a negotiating tactic ahead of inter-governmental discussions on the Bill’s implementation and cross-border

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