Stephen Daisley

There may be worse times to slash international development spending than the middle of a pandemic but it’s got to at least be in the top five. The reduction from 0.7 per cent of GDP to 0.5 represents a drop of £4 billion in investment. As Katy Balls notes, the current level was not only a manifesto

Sir Keir Starmer was having such a good year. He broke cover early on to attack the government’s handling of Covid-19 and did so by speaking explicitly to traditional Tory voters. He repeatedly bested Boris Johnson at Prime Minister’s Questions and gave a good first conference speech in the job. He brought his party’s poll

Boris Johnson says devolution has been a ‘disaster’. This has the rare quality for a Boris statement of being true but he, or rather the Scottish Tories, will be made to pay a political price for it. Barely had the contents of the Prime Minister’s remarks in a Zoom chat with northern MPs been reported

There it is, in black and white. For almost five years, Jews warned, nudged, reported, complained, pleaded and protested that there was a culture of anti-Semitism in the Labour party. For the most part, the party ignored them, although others assailed them, denounced them as fifth columnists, accused them of orchestrating a ‘smear’ campaign, of

Scottish nationalists have never been keen on Orwell. For decades, his ‘Notes on Nationalism’ has been quoted at them, with its description of their tendency as ‘power-hunger tempered by self-deception’ and the observation that ‘all nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts’. Not to mention, at risk of getting

The Scottish Tories are decidedly unenthusiastic about suggestions Westminster devolve further powers to the Scottish Parliament. A proposal to stave off independence by giving Holyrood additional financial powers and control over immigration, contained in a strategy memo leaked earlier this week, has been met with a chilly response from the party. I asked if they

Robert Conquest’s third law (which may not have been his third law) says that the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation is most easily explained if one assumes it has been captured by enemy secret agents. This maxim often comes to mind when I read about the UK government’s latest wheeze to ‘save the Union’. Ministers’ new

Whenever a new poll on Scottish independence is published, my phone begins buzzing so frantically it starts to register on the Richter scale. London-based editors want to know what it means. London-based politicians want to know what can be done to stop it meaning what they fear it means. The polls are not great for

Broadly speaking, there are two ways to respond to Communist China’s national security law. First, there is the Tony Chung way. Chung, a 19-year-old activist, set up a pro-independence movement and became the first person arrested under the repressive legislation, imposed on Hong Kong by Beijing’s dictators earlier this year. Then there is the Lord

Douglas Ross’s speech to the Conservative and Unionist Party conference was uncanny for being both conservative and unionist. The Scottish Tory leader pitched up to his podium and launched into an awkward conversation with colleagues south of the border. His theme was ‘putting an end to defeatism and disinterest’ and both he blamed on the

The first rule of Scottish politics is: the SNP always wins, even when it loses. If you’re wondering why the Nationalists were so swift to remove the whip from Margaret Ferrier — once the story that she had travelled on a train after testing positive for Covid became public, that is — be under no illusion that

Everyone forgets the third article of impeachment. The charge sheet against Richard Nixon, adopted by the House judiciary committee following the Watergate burglary and a conspiracy to impede its investigation, famously accused the president, first, of obstruction of justice and, second, of violating citizens’ constitutional rights. Thirteen days later, on August 9, 1974, and with

Peter Murrell is the most powerful man in Scotland but almost no one has heard of him. The SNP chief executive shuns the spotlight but he is one half of Scotland’s ruling class: he is the husband of Nicola Sturgeon. The Sturgeon-Murrell reign has gone largely unchallenged in the ultra-disciplined SNP — but that is

There are two kinds of people in this life: people who say Gavin Williamson is the least capable member of the Cabinet and people who have heard of Ben Wallace. The Secretary of State for Defence, in an intemperate answer in the Commons, claimed the UK waged ‘illegal wars’ under Labour.  Wallace was speaking during