Stephen Daisley

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 cent of non-executive appointments to public boards to be women. But the act defined ‘woman’ to include ‘a person who has the protected characteristic of gender reassignment’ provided that person was ‘living as a woman’ and intended to undergo ‘a process… of becoming female’.

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 wounds’, with Abedi reported to have scalded the guards with hot cooking oil and stabbed them with improvised weapons. Two men remain in hospital as of writing. Abedi was jailed for a minimum of 55 years after being found guilty on 22 counts of murder for his role in the Manchester Arena attack. Hashem helped his brother Salman obtain the chemicals to produce triacetone triperoxide (TATP).

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 20 years to establish a link between the Hamas department that calls for the Jews to be blown up and the department that does the blowing up. This was in the days before streaming services, so Netflix couldn’t make a drama explaining the connection. Riverway Law will lodge a 106-page application with the Home Office to have Hamas delisted. The application is signed by Mousa Abu Marzouk, the head of the terror group’s foreign relations office.

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 good talking to.  The MPs were travelling to Judea and Samiria – or the West Bank – which is ultimately under Israeli military control, but were denied entry by the Population and Immigration Authority. Mohamed and Yang say they were ‘astounded’, British MPs being unfamiliar with the concept of a country that enforces its borders.

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 criminal justice system. Its new guidelines, suspended pending government legislation to render this aspect of them unlawful, state that a pre-sentence report (PSR) ‘will normally be considered necessary’ where a convict comes ‘from an ethnic minority, cultural minority, and/or faith minority community’. PSRs can lead to a less severe or non-custodial sentence, though this is not guaranteed.

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.