Stephen Daisley is a Spectator regular and a columnist for the Scottish Daily Mail
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When they come to write the history of the Union’s demise, there will be three guilty men. Tony Blair was a transformative prime minister, but he nodded through devolution after allowing himself to be convinced that it was an administrative change, rather than an unravelling of the United Kingdom. Many believe Iraq to be the
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The numbers have seldom been better for Nicola Sturgeon. Ten months from the next Holyrood election, the SNP is polling 55 per cent on the constituency ballot and 50 per cent on the regional vote. Support for Scexit has swung into the majority. Almost three-quarters of Scots say she has handled the Covid-19 pandemic well,
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The BBC is losing me. It’s a sudden estrangement and an unwelcome one but I can’t seem to shake it off. The cause is the Corporation’s coverage of this thing that is happening that we still don’t have a name for but definitely should not call a ‘moment’. The butterfly effect from George Floyd’s killing
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What will you be doing next Sunday at 8pm? If you live north of the border, the ideologically correct answer is clapping for ‘Oor Nicola’. Nicola Sturgeon is turning 50 and several thousand of her more enthusiastic admirers are planning to hold a clap in her honour. The news was reported, amazingly enough, not in
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One of the rare upsides of living in a country run by nationalists is that nationalists are not great at hiding their true feelings. When you’ve got a superiority complex, it’s hard to prevent it from bursting out, often at the most inopportune times. Efforts to explain to outsiders that the SNP isn’t actually a
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Boris Johnson’s statement that ‘there is no such thing as a border between England and Scotland’ is born of ignorance and neglect. In a legal sense, there is and always has been a jurisdictional boundary separating the two nations. It is what has made a separate legal system possible and the divergent laws and regulations
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The best thing I can say about Boris Johnson is that he’s not a real Tory. The Prime Minister belongs instead to the popular liberal right, though he seems to get less popular by the day. His appeal to right-wing voters is based on his promise to ‘get Brexit done’ and the demented, 30-tweet-thread rage-pain
Does liberalism make you immune to cancel culture?
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What has followed the killing of George Floyd did not begin with the death of a man under the knee of a police officer. The rioting and the statue-toppling, the shunnings and the firings, the institutional genuflections and the gleeful marching through newly conquered territory are the fruits of ideas and impulses long in germination.
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Scenes of disorder in Glasgow city centre on Wednesday may be a glimpse of the future as the radical right grows emboldened by recent race-related unrest. So far six men have been arrested on suspicion of what Police Scotland described as ‘minor public order offences’ and Scotland’s justice minister Humza Yousaf has described the behaviour as
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There is a crisis brewing in Scottish education. Not the long-running crisis of attainment gaps, falling exam performance and limited external oversight. The emerging crisis is about getting children inside the classroom in the first place. Scotland’s schools have been closed for 90 days now in response to the Covid-19 pandemic and are not due
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Let’s play spot the difference. Here is a tweet posted on Tuesday afternoon by Professor Devi Sridhar, a member of the Scottish Government’s Covid-19 Advisory Group: Now, here is a tweeted posted by Professor Sridhar on Wednesday morning: The tweets are separated by 15 hours. What happened in that time to prompt Edinburgh University’s Chair
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The New York Times doesn’t much like the United Kingdom. By that, I mean the dystopian fantasy United Kingdom the Grey Lady has confected to explain Brexit and Boris Johnson’s electoral triumph in December. Objectively observed, Britain today is further to the left on public spending, equalities legislation and social attitudes than just a decade
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Amazon is suspending police use of its face-recognition software, HBO Max has pulled Gone With the Wind and Paramount Network announced the cancelling of long-running series COPS. These and a steady stream of other corporate giants have taken unambiguous political stances in the wake of George Floyd’s killing and the protests that followed. It is
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It doesn’t matter how good your intentions are, it’s your process that counts. The push to topple a statue of Edward Colston did not begin at the spur of the moment this weekend. Campaigners have argued for years that the Bristolian slave trader was not a man to be lionised. You don’t have to be
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Fifty-three years ago today, Israel was fighting for its survival. In a larger sense, that doesn’t make it all that different from any day in the preceding 19 years or the 53 that have followed. The Six-Day War was different, however, because it not only saw the tiny nation’s improbable victory over three Arab powers
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The twin temptations of American liberalism are to radical excess and conservative stasis. Because liberalism is a practical philosophy of government, given its most comprehensive expression in the Democrat party, it sometimes lists left and other times right. The Minneapolis moment is different in that it sees liberalism lean in two directions at once and
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It may be the ultimate Kissinger Dilemma: Donald Trump versus the platform that helped make Donald Trump president. Contemplating war between Iraq and Iran, Henry Kissinger is said to have mused: ‘It’s a pity they can’t both lose.’ It’s a pity Trump and Twitter can’t both lose their current skirmish. On Wednesday, the social media
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What is really going on here? The via dolorosa Boris Johnson is trudging along is about more than Dominic Cummings’s actions and the Prime Minister’s refusal to acknowledge they were wrong, let alone ask the bloke for his ticket. The government’s Covid-19 messaging has been eviscerated, health guidance undermined, public goodwill forfeited and political capital
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Boris Johnson is not the only one catching flack from his parliamentary party over Dominic Cummings. Scottish Conservative MSPs are ‘in despair’ at Jackson Carlaw’s leadership on the row and believe he is currying favour with Downing Street in hopes of securing a peerage down the line. On Sunday, the Scottish Tory press office released
