Stephen Daisley

Questions of power bedevil radical politics. Is entry into government the only way to force change? Do the opportunities of power sufficiently compensate for the trade-offs required to obtain it? Where is the line between compromise and co-option, between pragmatism and power for power’s sake? The Scottish Greens are confronted with these questions in the

Iran’s drone and missile attack on Israel is an escalation from the fiery but ultimately empty rhetoric we are used to from Tehran. In different times and with a different prime minister in Jerusalem than the gun-shy Benjamin Netanyahu, it is the kind of inflammatory move that could have provoked a much graver Israeli response

The Cass Review may prove to be a tipping point in radical gender ideology’s march through mainstream politics, institutions and civil society. It certainly appears to spell the end of routinely sending children who express confusion about their bodies or their identities down the transition path. The political responses to the report, especially from those

Police Scotland, who are responsible for enforcing Humza Yousaf’s Hate Crime Act, have found no criminality in a series of tweets posted by JK Rowling. On Monday, the day the Scottish law came into effect, the author, a gender-critical feminist, tweeted about a number of men who call themselves women – and insisted they were still men.

Humza Yousaf’s illiberal Hate Crime Act is now in force and its first day has been a doozy. The SNP’s minister for victims and community safety Siobhian Brown admitted on the Today programme that Scots could be investigated by the police for ‘misgendering’ trans people. It was revealed that one-third of police officers has still

The Covid Inquiry’s recent Scottish sojourn brought several weeks of bad headlines for the SNP. One revelation got less attention than others but struck me as more significant than most, so I wrote about it for Coffee House. That revelation was an email chain dug up by the inquiry dating from the first summer of

Scotland’s climate goals are ‘no longer credible’ and there is ‘no comprehensive strategy’ to move away from carbon to Net Zero. That is the noxious assessment issued today by the Climate Change Committee (CCC), the statutory body set up in Scotland to advise national and regional government on emissions policies. Underscoring the gap between rhetoric

Few things get the British quite as worked up as private schools. To the left, they are factories of inequality that turn scions of privilege into the elite of tomorrow. To the right, they are an expression of parental choice and part of Britain’s schooling heritage. To ambitious mothers and fathers, they are a way

Everyone wants an end to the fighting in Gaza. The United States backs ‘an immediate and sustained ceasefire’. The European Commission urges ‘an agreement on a ceasefire rapidly’. The Brits demand ‘an immediate pause in fighting, then progress towards a sustainable ceasefire’. So eager is the Biden regime for a cessation in hostilities that the

The decision by NHS England to end the prescription of puberty blockers to minors at gender identity clinics will be a source of relief to those who have fought a long, hard and unpopular campaign against this practice. When these people, including whistle-blowing clinicians, feminists, gay rights activists and concerned parents, first stuck their heads

Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, the super-progressive congresswoman, was leaving the Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn with her fiancé when she was confronted by pro-Palestinian activists. Their charge, essentially, was that the vociferously anti-Israel congresswoman wasn’t quite anti-Israel enough.  In a video apparently posted by the activists, AOC can be seen telling them: ‘I need you to understand that

Britain’s prisons brim with vulnerable people but perhaps the most vulnerable are children. At 30 September 2023, there were 301 children in prison in England and Wales alone. Wetherby Young Offender Institution in Yorkshire is home to 165 of them and a new report from His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons makes for troubling reading about

When contemplating the scale of the Tories’ expected drubbing in the coming general election, some commentators reach for the example of Canada’s Progressive Conservatives. The 1993 federal election saw the governing centre-right party, which had been in power since 1984, lose all but two of its seats in the House of Commons. It never recovered

The government and the SNP are furious at the Speaker over his parliamentary jiggery-pokery on the Gaza vote. In calling Labour’s amendment to an SNP ceasefire motion alongside the government’s amendment, it meant there was no vote on the Nationalists’ original resolution. It was an SNP opposition day in parliament, but the Speaker handed it

It’s not about Jews, it’s about Zionism. It’s not anti-Semitism, it’s pro-Palestinianism. It’s not racism, it’s social justice.  These are the mantras and all must accept them. To do otherwise is to ‘weaponise’ anti-Semitism, to level false allegations to ‘silence’ critics of Israel. To demean, they say with the gall of the concern troll, ‘real

Finally, Rishi Sunak has put a half-decent Cameron in the House of Lords. In raising Donald Cameron to the peerage and appointing him parliamentary under-secretary of state for Scotland, the Prime Minister has poached one of the sharpest minds in the Scottish Parliament. Cameron has been an MSP for Highlands and Islands for the past

When Javier Milei visited Israel and announced that he would be moving Argentina’s embassy to Jerusalem, I suppose that was terribly ‘populist’ of him. Try as I might, I can’t find it in me to be appalled by Milei’s pronouncement, and not because he already floated it during his election campaign. For one thing, it must be