Politics

A friend of mine, once armed with impeccable progressive credentials, recently came out s a Conservative – much to the bemusement of his family and many of his friends. With Neill’s permission, here’s the explanation he published on his Facebook page. Sure, this is just one person’s story, but I wonder how many other people might have come to similar conclusions after 12 years of Labour government. Anyway, I think this a pretty persuasive critique of Labour in power: I grew up in a Tory-hating family in Thatcher’s Britain. In those divided times, we were definitely not “one of us” – Mum was a teacher, Dad brought up the kids

I doubt many Nationalists would welcome the comparison but facts are stubborn things and the fact is that the SNP and Mr Rove have quite a bit in common. Just as Rove orchestrated campaigns in 2002 and 2004 that portrayed the Democratic party as being, in some odd sense, fundamentally unpatriotic (principally for the crime of not being Republicans) so the SNP’s default presumption is that any opposition to any of their policies is somehow an attack on Scotland itself. They are the only patriots in town. No-one else really has the country’s best interests at heart. How can they, after all, when they’re in thrall to a “foreign” power

Someone needs to tell Tom Harris MP that the “Unionist” in the “Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party” referred to the Union with Ireland, not that between Scotland and England. Equally, the fact that the Conservatives (in London) and the SNP (in Edinburgh) sometimes seem to be reciting similar talking points should scarcely come as any great surprise: the Labour party is their common enemy. True, the Conservatives oppose the Nationalists north of the border but as far as the UK party is concerned that’s a secondary front and one, more particularly, on which there’s little need for a fresh offensive this year. If, as Alan Cochrane hints, the Scottish Tories

The National Gallery of Scotland needs to raise £50m to prevent the sale of Titian’s Diana and Actaeon from being sold. The painting, part of the Bridgewater Collection, has been loaned to the gallery for decades but is now being sold by its owner, the Duke of Sutherland. Well, £50m is quite a lot of money. Then again, it’s a pretty nifty painting (though my own tastes run a little later – to Caravaggio and Velazquez in particular). Anyway, it’s hard to imagine there being any discussion in France or Italy or Germany of the rights and wrongs of committing public money to the fund-raising effort. And while I have

There are times when it’s good to be away from the hurly-burly of American politics. Doubly so when the subject of gay marriage comes up. Here, for instance, is a story it is hard to imagine happening in the United States: Nick Herbert, the Conservative party’s Shadow Justice secretary has apparently become the second member of David Cameron’s Shadow Cabinet, to enter into a civil partnership. It’s hard to imagine too many senior gay Republicans feeling comfortable doing this, let alone doing so with the blessing of the party’s leader and their constituency assosciation. Then again, gay marriage in Britain has, generally speaking, been decoupled from religion. (Of course, some