Stephen Daisley is a Spectator regular and a columnist for the Scottish Daily Mail
Assisted suicide has cleared its first hurdle in the Scottish parliament, but there could be many more to come. On Tuesday evening, MSPs voted 70 to 56 to progress Liam McArthur’s Assisted Dying Bill. It would allow patients to request and be prescribed lethal drugs if they are diagnosed with an advanced, progressive and unrecoverable
Observers of the American film industry have been fretting about its prospects for almost as long as it has existed. They questioned its viability in the wake of television, bemoaned the impact of the studio system on creative freedom, lamented the rise of the blockbuster, wondered where the blockbuster had gone, and pronounced that streaming
The UK and India have finally inked a trade deal. This is, in principle, a good thing. Free trade can generate wealth, raise wages, and widen the skills market available to the signatories’ respective economies. As well as winners, however, free trade also creates losers. An obvious loser from this deal is the British worker. Fresh
The Scottish Parliament’s equalities committee has voted against removing Green MSP Maggie Chapman as deputy convenor following her attack on the Supreme Court. The fight might not be over At a rally in Aberdeen in the wake of the judgment in For Women Scotland Ltd v. The Scottish Ministers, in which Lord Hodge found for a unanimous
Keir Starmer thinks ‘this is the time now to lower the temperature’ on the gender debate. To ‘move forward’. To ‘conduct this debate with the care and compassion that it deserves’. That is what he said at Prime Minister’s Questions. What a shallow, hollow man he is. Now is the time to lower the temperature?
As the independent bar in Scotland, the Faculty of Advocates is by necessity a reserved and disinterested body. It does not issue letters like the one that has gone out this morning to Karen Adam, the convenor of Holyrood’s equalities, human rights and civil justice committee. The correspondence takes issue, in blistering terms, with the
Caryma Sa’d has captured the definitive image of the Canadian federal election. Over the weekend, the independent journalist posted a photograph from an event in Brantford, Ontario for Mark Carney, the former Bank of England governor who has replaced Justin Trudeau as Liberal leader and prime minister. The pic shows an older gentleman appearing to
The plight of Russell Findlay reveals a lot about how politics works. Findlay was elected leader of the Scottish Conservatives in September 2024, by which point the party’s vulnerability to Reform was already clear. The Holyrood Tories were not made for a populist era. They are a patrician party of the cosy centre, chiefly concerned
The Supreme Court ruling on the definition of ‘woman’ in the Equality Act is a victory for women, proper statutory interpretation and the reality-based community. It started with the Scottish government trying to take something away from women. The Gender Representation on Public Boards Act, passed by the Scottish Parliament in 2018, required 50 per
If there has been one constant in Hashem Abedi’s miserable life it has been the determined failure of the British state to protect its citizens from men like him. Abedi is accused of inflicting ‘life-threatening injuries’ on three prison officers in an attack at HMP Frankland on Saturday. Injuries are said to include ‘burns, scalds and stab
This week on Britain: The Decline Years, a firm of London solicitors has announced it is acting on behalf of Hamas in a legal challenge to the Islamist group’s inclusion on the UK government terror list. The paramilitary wing has been proscribed since 2001 and the political wing since 2021. It took the British political class
With the imperial pomposity of an old colonial governor, David Lammy has ‘made clear’ to the Israelis that denying entry to Labour MPs Abtisam Mohamed and Yuan Yang is ‘no way to treat British Parliamentarians’. Bloody natives, getting ideas above their station again. Any more of this nonsense, chaps, and you’ll be summoned to High Commissioner Lammy’s office for a jolly
Dubai-style chocolate, viral star of TikTok and Instagram, is so popular that Waitrose is limiting sales to two bars per customer. The upmarket supermarket chain has taken the move, the Times reports, ‘because we want everyone to have the chance to enjoy this delicious chocolate’. Some are sceptical. Steve Dresser, who heads up consultancy Grocery
Robert Jenrick’s victory over the Sentencing Council — James Heale is correct to call it that — is, more importantly, a victory for the new style of Toryism the shadow justice secretary is beginning to articulate. There’s no dressing it up: what the Sentencing Council proposed was the introduction of race-based differential treatment to England’s
A parliament is an odd place. It’s the arena where clashing worldviews come to cross swords and there’s low and ugly skullduggery. In most other workplaces, political differences are a topic to be avoided, but the job of a parliamentarian is to spend day after day with colleagues whose values they abhor and whose ideas
Kenny MacAskill has won the leadership of Alba and just to underscore how cursed that position is, he defeated his rival Ash Regan by 52 per cent to 48 per cent. Alba is the party founded by Alex Salmond following an exit from the SNP that wasn’t entirely amicable. (You might have read about it.)
Southside Central is the kind of ward Scottish Labour needs to be winning. It’s in Glasgow, home to significant pockets of deprivation within the Gorbals and Govanhill, and has a substantial population of Scots of Pakistani heritage. If there is a path to a Labour government after the 2026 Holyrood elections, it runs through communities
There are three thankless posts in a modern Labour government. There’s the Chancellor, who has to announce the tightening of belts and the hiking of taxes; the Home Secretary, who must busy themselves cracking down, banging up and throwing away the key; and the Work and Pensions Secretary, who is charged with Scroogeing every last
Here’s a political conundrum for you. You’re the SNP. You’ve been in power in Scotland since 2007. You’re 13 points ahead in the polls one year out from the next Holyrood election. You’ve been stumbling these past few years but you’ve finally found your feet again. Your leader is less divisive than his predecessors and
As Nicola Sturgeon announces that she is standing down from the Scottish parliament, it is worth reflecting on what a gilded political life she led – and how she managed to fritter it all away and leave frontline politics with no legacy, or at least none she’d care to be remembered by. The former Glasgow
