Stephen Daisley is a Spectator regular and a columnist for the Scottish Daily Mail
Tony Gilkes is a very English hero. The Middlesborough pensioner wanted nothing more than what all hungry Englishmen want: a hearty meat pie. Yet when he tried to procure pastries from his local Morrisons at 8.45am he was rebuffed; staff at the supermarket refused to serve him before 9am. So what did Gilkes do? He
The best that can be said for Jeremy Corbyn’s response to air strikes against the Assad regime is that he is at least consistent. Why did he assert that the smart cuff meted out last night risked ‘escalating further… an already devastating conflict’? Because in Corbyn’s worldview, it is the felling of chemical weapons factories, not the
I’m not one to say ‘I told you so’ but the thing is, I did. At the SNP’s mass-recruiting, concert-touring, swingometer-skelping zenith, I warned that the party’s failure to rein in its most fervent ideologues, not least the digital stormtroopers known as cybernats, would do it a mischief one day. Instead, the Nationalists not only
Not this again. How many new parties have been proposed now? Andrew Rawnsley says 34 have registered with the Electoral Commission since January. A political party is for life, not just for a twitterstorm. Still, the Tories’ annexation by Ukip and Labour’s transformation into some hideous fusion of CND and the BNP has left those of us
Here is a list of things that happened in Scotland this week. See if you can guess which caused the biggest political row: GDP statistics showed economic growth less than half the UK rate, the third consecutive year Scotland has lagged. One in 12 under-25s is now on a zero-hours contract. The chair of NHS
None of this is normal. It’s important that we cling to that. It’s not normal that British Jews are forced to protest for their fair treatment and safety. It’s not normal that four-fifths of the Labour Party think such protests are a political tactic or a Zionist plot. It’s not normal that the man who
A question for Labour’s moderates, however we define the term and assuming they are still sizeable enough to merit the plural: Do you want to see Jeremy Corbyn become Prime Minister? Specifically, do you think he possesses the character and temperament of a national leader? Does the prospect of a Corbyn-led Labour government fill you
‘The Scottish Conservatives aspire to lead the next government of Scotland,’ proclaims Ruth Davidson in a pamphlet setting out the party’s thinking. Could it really happen? Could the Tories go from wipeout in 1997 to triumph in 2021 – from resisting devolution to effectively running the show in a generation? Too long; didn’t read answer?
The Labour Party brings to mind any number of Yiddish expressions — most of them involving the performance of lavatorial functions — but none more so than the proverb Der mentsh trakht un Got lakht. Man plans and God laughs. The Almighty’s black humour is surely at work in the resignation of Christine Shawcroft, chair
We may be witnessing a #MeToo moment in Labour anti-Semitism. Britain’s Jews, so damn accommodating and willing to extend the benefit of the doubt, have finally snapped and said ‘enough is enough’. At 5.30pm tonight they will gather in Westminster to protest in the most British way imaginable by handing the Labour Party a strongly-worded
John Bolton – owner of the finest moustache in American politics since Teddy Roosevelt – has been appointed Donald Trump’s new national security adviser. He replaces the outgoing HR McMaster, a veritable survivor who managed to last 395 days at the White House. That’s two terms plus a recess appointment in MAGA years. Hysteria is
The SNP is a coalition that behaves like a megachurch and when the spirit is low, the congregation remembers its schisms. One such departure is defence, because, for all they appear a homogenous rabble of bomb-banners to unsympathetic outsiders, the Scottish Nationalists are quietly but keenly divided on security. The combination of their current political
Privately educated. Mother of Len McCluskey’s child. Close ally of Jeremy Corbyn. Jennie Formby’s appointment as Labour general secretary is a heartwarming tale of how one woman managed to overcome all her connections to make it to the top. More than that, it is confirmation that The Corbynite Takeover Of The Labour Party Is Now
There’s a book I’d like to send to Theresa May: ‘Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain’. The Prime Minister might not be minded to devour a left-wing journalist’s charge sheet against Tory Britain but she ought to. James Bloodworth, the author, took a series of zero-hours roles, from Amazon grunt to Uber driver, to see
Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society, was a red-baiter of such ferocity he made Joe McCarthy look like Julius Rosenberg. There was almost no one in 1950s America Welch did not accuse of allegiance to the Soviet Union. His crusade reached its apogee as only it could with a 1958 tract naming President
Munroe Bergdorf has resigned as Labour’s LGBT adviser after just one week in the job. Her appointment looked quite promising until it emerged she had deployed ‘butch lezza’ as an insult, joked that she’d like to ‘gay bash’ a TV character, and described gay Tory men as ‘a special kind of dickhead’. ‘Ever find that sometimes you’re just NOT
If your week was less than fun, spare a thought for Justin Trudeau. The Canadian Prime Minister’s seven-day visit to India went down like an undercooked biriyani on the subcontinent. When he landed in New Delhi last Saturday, Trudeau was greeted on the tarmac, not by the Prime Minister or Foreign Minister but by the
There are two competing theories about how the Soviet Union collapsed. One holds that Ronald Reagan’s moral leadership against communism and bolstering of US defences weakened Moscow’s will and buried them economically. The other contends that Mikhail Gorbachev’s domestic reforms and wise diplomacy brought down the Iron Curtain in spite of the cowboy in the
The SNP, you’ll be distressed to learn, are having a time of it. The party is embroiled in a deputy leadership contest that could have been designed by their worst enemies. Angus Robertson, who lost his Moray seat last June, has resigned, depriving the party of one of its most formidable and respectable advocates. His
Say what you like about Nicola Sturgeon but she’s consistent. Every autumn, when she sets out her programme for government, the First Minister makes the same pledge: ‘We will make it a priority to improve the educational outcomes of pupils in the most disadvantaged areas of Scotland… a targeted approach to attainment that will help
