Stephen Daisley

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 they consider harmful. For all the florid patter back in 1999, about how the Scottish parliament’s electoral system, working practices and even semi-circular chamber would fashion a more collegial politics, Holyrood has proved every bit as factional and partisan as the House of Commons. Yet, like the Commons, exposure and proximity to political foes engenders a grudging respect, even as it sharpens ideological differences.

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.) When it was launched in 2021, Alba made a splash with a promotional film in which an actor playing Robert the Bruce endorsed the party ahead of that spring’s Scottish parliament elections, the 13th century monarch having taken a surprising interest in the distribution of votes on the Mid Scotland and Fife regional list. Despite winning some defections from the SNP (MacAskill and Regan among them), Alba failed to make an impact with the electorate.

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 like Southside Central. But Anas Sarwar’s party has been rejected by the voters of this ward in favour of the SNP’s Mhairi Hunter. North East is another ward Labour ought to be winning. Once again, it’s Glasgow, home to high levels of social-rented housing, and contains Easterhouse, whose multiple deprivations and addiction problems famously shocked Iain Duncan Smith during a 2002 visit.

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 his deputy more competent than hers. Your opponents are either tethered to an unpopular Westminster government or distracted by a rival party. You stand a good chance of winning a fifth consecutive term in government. But you have a problem: you can’t attract talent. A striking number of incumbent MSPs want out. To date, 21 Nationalists have confirmed they will not seek re-election in 2026.

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 solicitor became Scotland’s deputy first minister at 36 after Alex Salmond invited her to stand as his deputy in the 2004 SNP leadership election. From there, she was handed the health portfolio, then put in charge of infrastructure, and became a household name during the independence referendum. When Salmond quit in the wake of that defeat, she was handed the leadership without a single member’s vote cast.

‘There are judges in Jerusalem,’ Menachem Begin is reputed to have proclaimed, following a court ruling which he believed vindicated one of his policy positions.  The phrase has been appropriated by critics of judicial reform and others keen to see Bagatz, the Israeli supreme court, remain a bulwark against illiberal overreach by the government. ‘There are judges in Jerusalem’ is a reassuring reminder that, whatever the designs of politicians, the law remains the supreme rule of the land.  There are judges in Washington DC, too.

The Trump-Zelensky summit is a geopolitical Rashomon. Some saw a lying, maniacal bully and his snarling sidekick berate a patriot for telling the truth about his nation’s attacker and refusing to surrender to him. Others witnessed a bratty ingrate haughtily shaking his begging bowl while dictating to his benefactors the terms on which he would accept their charity. Or you might, like me, have watched a medley of the two, a war-worn leader grown impatient with diplomacy and unwilling to tell the great despotic lump in front of him whatever he wanted to hear. It’s possible to sympathise with Volodymyr Zelensky’s desperate situation, and his nation’s larger cause, and still regret his tactlessness in handling a neuralgic personality.

Every time the Palestinians rebuff a peace proposal, commentators reach for an observation by the Israeli diplomat Abba Eban: ‘The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.’ It’s pithy, and depressingly accurate, but I’ve always been more struck by another Eban aphorism: ‘Men and nations behave wisely when they have exhausted all other resources.’ Not as witty, I’ll grant you, but it gets closer to the psychology at play in this conflict. The Palestinians have been able to miss one opportunity after another because doing so has brought no lasting diplomatic consequences.

There is a perception that Scotland is a socialist basket case where a mammoth public sector is showered with English money, and I’m here to tell you that this perception is racist, offensive and… not entirely without foundation. The latest Scottish budget analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) examines public sector pay north of the border and concludes that the burgeoning bill poses a ‘fiscal challenge’ to Scottish government finances. State employees now account for 22 per cent of the entire workforce, compared to 17 per cent in England, with an annual pay bill of £27 billion. Salaries for public sector workers, whose number has increased 11 per cent over the past seven years, represent more than half of all state spending in Scotland.

Sidney Low said that ‘government in England is government by amateurs’, and parliament seems to be doing its level best to vindicate that view. The Assisted Dying Bill being rushed through the Commons with sinister alacrity has exposed structural flaws in our legislative procedures, not least the vulnerability of private members’ bills to exploitation by those determined that proper parliamentary process not hinder their legislation’s path to the statute books. Whether through truncated debate, a stacked committee, a lopsided witness list, unreliable undertakings, or the resolute incuriosity of scrutineers unwilling to scrutinise, the bill reminds us that institutions are only as reliable as the fidelity of those who populate them to a common ethos.

In all the argle-bargle over Donald Trump’s proposal for Gaza, there have been countless questions about legality, morality and feasibility. Isn’t the population transfer he suggests tantamount to ethnic cleansing? On what legal basis would the United States assert sovereignty over Gaza and enter into contracts with developers and investors? How could a country that fought a revolutionary war in the same of self-determination tell Gazans they must leave territory on which their families have been settled for generations? How would a redeveloped Gaza be paid for, governed, policed and populated? Would the Palestinians themselves benefit from it?  There is another question, a practical one, that seems to have been overlooked in all this: what about Judea and Samaria?

Once you get beyond trade and maritime borders, you will find that much of international law is, pace Clausewitz, the continuation of policy by other means. The International Criminal Court (ICC) was continuing policy by other means when it issued arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant. The two stand accused of crimes against humanity and war crimes over Operation Swords of Iron, Jerusalem’s response to the Palestinian invasion of its territory and mass murder of its citizens on 7 October 2023.

Turning around a government that has lost its way is one of the trickiest feats in politics, all the more so if that government has enjoyed a long stretch of incumbency. The big beasts are gone, everyone who’s left is exhausted, the voter coalition is coming apart, and some begin to question the party’s purpose in power. ‘Time for a change’ is no longer just an opposition talking point: even insiders wonder if a spell out of office wouldn’t be for the best. A party veteran or a rising star steps forward, pledging renewal, a fresh direction and a fighting chance come the next election. That was the offer made by James Callaghan in 1976, Gordon Brown in 2007 and Rishi Sunak in 2022. They each failed and their parties went down to significant defeats.

Rachel from accounts is settling up. In a speech at Siemens Healthineers near Oxford, the Chancellor signalled her commitment to development by backing a third runway at Heathrow, placing her on a collision course with net-zeroers, Nimbys and the other forces of decline. The interests ranged against her are mighty and loud, but if she delivers she will draw crucial battle lines for the next general election: a Labour government that gets things done versus the party of inertia and stagnation. The UK spent 14 years in stasis under a succession of Tory governments that preferred the maintenance of office to the exercise of power.

Should the Southport killer swing? Lee Anderson thinks so. The Reform MP posted an image of a noose on X, with the words: ‘No apologies here. This is what is required!’ It’s not the first time Anderson has backed the return of the rope, and not the first time I’ve contended that he’s wrong, but there’s something I want to say before getting into the nitty gritty. Wanting Axel Rudakubana dead is a thoroughly mainstream and entirely understandable view. Among those who have children, I would go further and suggest that it is the natural response.

Coulter’s Law, named after its originator, the right-wing polemicist Ann Coulter, holds that the longer it takes the authorities or the news media to identify the suspect in a terrorist attack or other notorious incident the less likely that suspect is to be white. Allow me to propose a British corollary to this rule: the law of displaced culpability. Where the identity or motivation of the suspect in a major crime requires the British state to confront shortcomings in its established doctrines, such as multiculturalism, untrammelled immigration or autonomy-maximising liberalism, it will displace culpability onto another factor, one that is secondary or even irrelevant to the crime but which the authorities feel more comfortable talking about.