Stephen Daisley

Stephen Daisley

Stephen Daisley is a Spectator regular and a columnist for the Scottish Daily Mail

The UN should be ashamed of its anti-Israel boycott list

I knew if we waited long enough, the United Nations would make itself useful. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has produced a handy catalogue of companies that supporters of Israel can give their business to. Of course, this was not Michelle Bachelet’s intention. Bachelet is the commissioner and before that

Will Boris come to regret his Treasury power grab?

Has Boris Johnson made the first major error of his premiership? Choosing his adviser over his Chancellor could be seen as a bold gamble of the sort that won him a sweeping election victory and got the UK out of the European Union. We of little faith in the commentariat have often misread this prime

Lisa Nandy is the best of a bad bunch

If Labour had chosen Liz Kendall instead of Jeremy Corbyn in 2015, she’d be prime minister by now. She was young. She had ideas. Inevitably, she got 4.5 per cent of the vote. It is therefore my solemn duty to inform Lisa Nandy that I consider her the best candidate for Labour leader. On balance,

Boris’s leaked tax plans suggest a truly radical Toryism

‘You want the dowry, but you don’t like the bride’ is how Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol summed up his colleagues’ wish to keep Judea and Samaria but not the Arabs living there. I feel much the same about right-wingers losing their shizzle over a report in the Sunday Telegraph about new taxes being mulled

Labour’s Richard Burgon problem

Richard Burgon is an idiot. Yes, I know you subscribe to The Spectator expecting more high-brow invective but I believe in being direct. Now, ordinarily I’d be in favour of leaving such a simple creature to his own devices, but this is the Labour Party we’re talking about, so Daisley’s First Law applies: The worst

Boris Johnson must start taking Scexit seriously

Polls come and go and the YouGov survey showing support for Scottish independence at 51 per cent should be read with that in mind. The Nationalists have been ahead before and have fallen behind again. What Downing Street cannot take in its stride is this: five years since the Scottish referendum, and with the SNP

British universities are a modern-day racket

One of the great myths of Scottish higher education is that it’s free. Outside observers can be forgiven for making this error because Nicola Sturgeon asserts it so very often. She has boasted that ‘one of this government’s proudest achievements is the restoration of free higher education’, claimed to ‘stand for universal services, such as…

Taking the Lords out of London should be just the start

The proposal to relocate the House of Lords to York is harmless enough, though residents of York might disagree. The idea of an upper chamber of philosopher kings to check democratic excitability is sound in principle but when your definition of a philosopher king extends to John Prescott, you begin to question the merits of

The necessary case for Ian Murray as Labour’s deputy leader

Ian Murray is standing for a post last won by a Scot 88 years ago. Since its creation in 1922, the deputy leadership of the Labour Party has been filled by five Londoners, four Welshmen, three Yorkshiremen, two Lancastrians, one Cumbrian, one Plymothian and William Graham, the solitary Scot. Graham was also an Edinburgh MP,

Boris must correct the mistakes of Scottish devolution

Boris Johnson’s refusal to grant a second independence referendum is a source of relief rather than joy for Scottish unionists. Unionists won decisively in 2014 but their opponents’ failure to accept the referendum result has held Scotland in constitutional limbo ever since. Five years on a permanent campaign has been as healthy for the body

Can anyone stop the SNP’s drive for independence?

Nicola Sturgeon’s reshuffle of her Westminster team is more than a post-election shake-up of the Nationalist front bench. For one thing, it represents a shift to the next generation. Mhairi Black (25), who became something of a political superstar upon her election in 2015, has been promoted to Scotland spokeswoman; freshly elected Stephen Flynn (31)

Labour’s defeat has not ended anti-Semitism

The defeat of Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party has afforded little respite to British Jews. Residents of Hampstead and Belsize Park woke on Sunday to storefronts and a synagogue daubed in the Star of David and ‘9/11’, apparently invoking the conspiracy theory that Jews were behind the September 11 attacks. December has been sweeps

On foreign policy, Boris can be the great disruptor

Much of the post-election attention has gone on the next stage of Brexit and the government’s attempts to set down a domestic reform agenda that works for the Tories’ new northern constituencies. As such, the Integrated Security, Defence and Foreign Policy Review, briefed as ‘the deepest review of Britain’s security, defence, and foreign policy since

Has Nicola Sturgeon pulled off a second historic victory?

It’s just an exit poll. They can be wrong. They were, substantially, in 1992 and lowballed the Tory result in 2015. Those caveats stated, we have to address that number for the SNP. Fifty-five seats, every seat but four north of the border, would represent the Nationalists’ best result since 2015. Before polls closed, SNP

Nicola Sturgeon’s failings are catching up with her

Nicola Sturgeon has had a change of heart. Gone are the ultimatums, the stridency and the self-righteous rhetoric. In an interview with today’s Daily Record, we see Sturgeon the Introspective: ‘Brexit gave me an insight, maybe that I didn’t have before, of how No voters would have felt had the referendum on independence gone the

Take it from this expert: Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite

‘Racists are racists are racists and Jeremy Corbyn is a racist.’  Yair Lapid is not mincing his words. One of the leaders of Israel’s main centre-left party broke with protocol this morning at a conference in Jerusalem to urge British voters not to elect Jeremy Corbyn.  He said the Labour leader was an anti-Semite, but