Stephen Daisley

At this point there is only one way to salvage Reform’s Scottish Parliament election campaign. Granted it’s unorthodox and, well, illegal, but hear me out: arrange to have Malcolm Offord kidnapped. Not long-term or anything, just until 7 May and the Holyrood elections in which Reform Scotland is set to make sizeable gains. Or at least it was until mid-January, when the party was hit by a leadership crisis, that crisis being Offord’s appointment to the leadership. Offord has broken the cardinal rule of elections: don’t hand your opponents free ammunition Without a leader, Reform was climbing up the polls. With Offord as leader, it’s going back down again. I might be in some very small way to blame for this.

Have we just witnessed an Iranian attack on British soil? Overnight, four ambulances were burned on the premises of Hatzola, a Jewish charity in Golders Green that operates a fleet of medical response vehicles in north London. The vans were parked beside Machzike Hadath synagogue on Highfield Road. The Metropolitan Police are said to be investigating the incident as an anti-Semitic hate crime. It might well be yet another example of the post-October 7 globalisation of the intifada and Britain’s domestic anti-Semitism problem. Research from the Community Security Trust records more than 300 anti-Semitic incidents every month in the UK, including attacks on Jewish-owned businesses, vandalism at synagogues and even desecration of Jewish cemeteries.

The Scottish Parliament is on the brink of passing a bill that would see Catholic hospitals and care homes shut down. The Bishops’ Conference of Scotland says it is ‘deeply disappointed’ by the rejection of an amendment to the Assisted Dying Bill that would have given institutions a right of conscientious objection. If the bill becomes law, it will mean that a Catholic hospice or care home would have no right to exempt itself from participation in the assisted suicide of one of its residents. The bishops state that assisted suicide is ‘fundamentally incompatible’ with the ‘guiding values’ of Catholic institutions, and raise the prospect of hospices and nursing homes having to ‘decide between acting contrary to their foundational values or closing’.

Farewell, then, Alba, the little party that tried to take on the Scottish political establishment and learned, as others had before it, that the establishment always wins. You can join it but you can never beat it. When Salmond went, so did Alba’s soul Just to rub salt into the wound, the party has imploded only two months before the Scottish Parliament elections. And that was Alba’s only real purpose: to contribute to a pro-independence majority at Holyrood which, so the notion went, would then notify Westminster that Scotland was leaving. This was the plan set out by the late Alex Salmond in which he would have played the part of Moses, Keir Starmer Pharaoh, and the Scots the Israelites: ‘Let ma people go!

Ian Huntley’s graveside will be a lonely one. Few will mourn a man who lurked in the darkest shadows of every parent’s imagination, occupying the same space that Ian Brady did for an earlier generation. You could raise your children in loving, stable homes; in quiet, leafy villages; teach them about stranger danger, give them mobile phones, tell them to walk in pairs – and none of it was enough, because the Devil always finds a way.  There will be little sympathy for this particular devil and some will take satisfaction in his death and the suffering that preceded it There will be little sympathy for this particular devil and some will take satisfaction in his death and the suffering that preceded it. If anyone had it coming, it was Ian Huntley.

The higher the failings of multiculturalism pile up, the greater the effort required to ignore the fetid mound of societal consequences. But most of the political and commentary class is prepared to put in the shift. So Kemi Badenoch’s latest speech was a crisp break from the omerta that binds together our gutless establishment. Multiculturalism is the enemy of multiracialism Her words were not incendiary for the sake of it; this was a clinical, clear-sighted analysis of how a confluence of uncontrolled immigration, non-integration, state multiculturalism, and asymmetric tolerance turned Britain into a fractured, fearful, increasingly harder to govern nation.

And with that, what was once racist is now allowed to be said. What was yesterday a conspiracy theory is today a legitimate observation. In the wake of the Gorton and Denton by-election, which the Greens won handsomely with an ethnic sectarian campaign designed to maximise the Pakistani-heritage vote, the Labour establishment is abuzz with ominous talk of ‘family voting’ and the role of this practice, in which men decide the votes of all eligible electors in their household, in securing victory for Hannah Spencer. An outfit calling itself ‘Democracy Volunteers’ put out a report last night, something the group admits it ‘rarely’ does, claiming ‘extremely high’ levels of family voting, with the practice reported at 15 of 22 polling stations observed.

Progressivism is politics as fashion. The product is status and provocation the marketing strategy. The socialist, the liberal and the conservative all address themselves to material circumstances, and aim to transform them radically, gradually, or as little as possible, but the progressive is concerned with the intangibles of life: identity, meaning and self-expression. His radicalism is mostly aesthetic, to be found in the symbol, the signal and the strut, and while it often gloms onto more substantive political programmes it is always concerned chiefly with ideological style. Prime example: Zack Polanski. The Green leader is a political fashionista, displaying not a skerrick of principle nor attachment to anything except what is modish in the moment.

It wouldn’t be Scottish politics if there wasn’t an abstruse scandal that requires a half-hour of background information to explain. So, here goes: Dorothy Bain KC is the Lord Advocate, the title given to the head of the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service. In addition to being the chief prosecutor north of the border, she is also a minister in the SNP-run Scottish Government, where she serves as the top legal adviser. Bain was summoned to the Scottish Parliament on Wednesday to answer questions about a minute she emailed to John Swinney, who is first minister and therefore head of the ministry in which Bain sits, as well as the leader of the SNP. The memo concerned the upcoming trial of Peter Murrell.

I don’t know if ‘gaun yersel, yer excellency’ translates into Japanese but the salutation is on the lips of many a Glaswegian after Hiroshi Suzuki’s visit to the city. Japan’s ambassador to the Court of St James’s has been love-bombing the United Kingdom since his appointment in 2024, making his way around the country with his little Paddington Bear stuffed toy, visiting British landmarks, sampling regional delicacies and even treating us to some sing-songs. Suzuki has captured hearts and headlines in one of the most effective public diplomacy campaigns we’ve seen in a long time On paper, that is what ambassadors are supposed to do, but as Suzuki’s visit to Glasgow illustrates, this is an emissary who goes far beyond diplomatic formalities.

Want to know what kind of country you live in? You live in a country in which there are more than 300 antisemitic incidents a month. Three-hundred. Every month. Last year, there were 80 incidents on Yom Kippur alone, including the Islamist attack on Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester which resulted in the deaths of Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby. Anyone who still needs a wake-up call about antisemitism is in a civilisational coma On a day Jews spend in fasting and prayer to ask God’s forgiveness for their sins, a day when you would be hard-pressed to encounter a Jew, still the murder and the libels and the intimidation flow. Antisemites never take a day off; they are the most productive sector of the British economy.

There is a 1953 Warner Bros short, Zipping Along, in which Wile E. Coyote, frustrated with the failure of his elaborate schemes to kill the Road Runner, opts for a simpler method. He acquires a grenade, pulls the pin with his teeth, and chucks the explosive at the infernal Californian cuckoo. Only he does it the wrong way round, chomping down on the body, lobbing the safety pin at the Road Runner and promptly blowing himself up.  Anas Sarwar has done much the same with his statement calling for Keir Starmer to resign as prime minister over the Peter Mandelson/Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Addressing journalists in Glasgow, he said Scots were ‘crying out for competent government’ and that ‘the situation in Downing Street is not good enough; there have been too many mistakes.

The most reliable sign that Reform is doing well in Scotland is the refusal of the lanyard class to engage with the subject. In the latest poll, Reform has cut the SNP’s lead to five points on the regional list, the second, more proportional ballot that offers smaller and newer parties their best chance of winning seats. For the past six months or so, Reform has been jostling with Labour for second place; if its Scottish leader, Malcolm Offord, can sustain this momentum through to May, there is a good chance that Reform will leap from a solitary ex-Tory MSP to the main opposition party. An extraordinary feat for a relatively new party that, until recently, was a skeleton operation.

Labour MPs want shot of Keir Starmer over the Peter Mandelson scandal. There is nothing new in that sentence until the mention of the former ambassador. Mandelson’s reported disclosure of government information to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is the latest pretext, but before that it was because he rebuffed the Waspi women, and before that because Andy Burnham wanted the job, and before that because he’s sunk Labour’s chances ahead of May’s Scottish elections, and if you keep going back there was Gaza and gender and the winter fuel payment debacle. The experience of government is not what Labour MPs expected.

The women are at it again. For Women Scotland (FWS), specifically. They’re the pressure group who took on the Scottish government, which believes men are women if they say so, and secured a Supreme Court judgment that ‘sex’ in the Equality Act refers to biological rather than ‘certificated’ sex. Now they’re back in court taking on the same government over its policy of allowing some male prisoners who identify as trans to be held in the female estate. Aidan O’Neill KC, who is representing FWS, suggested to the Court of Session on Tuesday morning that the Scottish government was doubling down as ‘a political calculation’ and that women locked up with men were being ‘used by the Scottish government in this case to be traded as pawns for political gain’.