Stephen Daisley

‘I think the village of Huwara needs to be wiped out. I think the State of Israel should do it.’  I have read those words and read them again – and again. I have checked various news sources to be sure there was no error in translation or transcription. I have tried to parse the

Alister Jack may be about to take another stand against reckless policy-making at Holyrood. According to reports, the Scottish Secretary may deny the Scottish government’s deposit return scheme (DRS) a trading exemption under the UK Internal Market Act (UKIMA). The DRS will see 20p added to every single-use packaged drink sold in Scotland, with consumers able

Luciana Berger’s return to the Labour party is not only a restoration but a supreme act of forgiveness. The former MP was hounded out of the party in 2019 because she was Jewish at a point where the whole rotten institution had become infested with antisemites. Berger fought to hold on to her party, not

Kate Forbes’ campaign to succeed Nicola Sturgeon has been largely written off by political rivals and the media. Her Christian faith is said to make her unsuitable to lead a progressive party like the SNP and to be the First Minister of a modern Scotland. Not least her admission that, while she doesn’t seek to

Kate Forbes’s religious views remain the only thing anyone wants to talk about in the contest to replace Nicola Sturgeon. I expected as much. Forbes, a member of the Free Church of Scotland, has come under fire for saying that she wouldn’t have voted for same-sex marriage and that she believes children should be born within wedlock.

The SNP leadership contest should not be about Kate Forbes’ religious faith but that issue has quickly come to dominate. The 32-year-old is a member of the Free Church of Scotland, a small outfit that hews to Scripture on the sanctity of marriage and life. Now that she is running for SNP leader, she is

Humza Yousaf, the frontrunner to succeed Nicola Sturgeon, formally entered the race this morning. The venue was humble: Clydebank Town Hall. The town once took pride of place in the British shipbuilding industry, but was hit hard by the closure of the yards. Although it has benefited from regeneration in recent decades, deprivation remains a

Whenever a governing party changes leader midway through a parliament, it’s interesting to note what the main opposition makes of the contest. Specifically, which candidate they would be more comfortable to see win — and which they dread the most.  So, as the SNP begins choosing Nicola Sturgeon’s replacement as party leader and first minister,

The Daily Record has reported that Humza Yousaf, currently the Scottish health secretary, will stand for election to succeed Nicola Sturgeon as leader of the SNP and First Minister of Scotland. The 37-year-old Sturgeon ally is said to believe he can unite the party and a source tells the paper he has ‘a lot of support from

The contest to replace Nicola Sturgeon really shouldn’t be a contest at all. The obvious successor is Kate Forbes, the Scottish finance secretary. She is young at 32 but she was even younger three years ago when she stepped in to deliver the Scottish budget just 12 hours after finance minister Derek Mackay was forced by scandal

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