All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
If the Scottish Greens are good at anything, it’s making every issue about themselves. While the First Minister of Scotland faces two votes of no confidence next week — one in his own leadership and another in the SNP government — his party’s former coalition partners continue to vent their anger at the breakdown of
Today it was announced that, after a very positive response to his treatment for cancer, King Charles will resume public-facing duties next week. The statement went on to say that both he and the Queen will be making a joint visit to a cancer treatment centre next Tuesday, in a conscious nod to the help
A while back, Lee Anderson got himself into trouble for claiming Islamists had ‘got control’ of Sadiq Khan. Levelling said charge at London’s Mayor was said to be ‘Islamophobic’ but surely more important is that it was wrong. Khan is neither an Islamist nor under their sway. He is a standard-issue identity-politics progressive, and with
As the German AfD’s European election campaign kicks off tomorrow, the far-right party’s leadership could be forgiven for counting down to polling day in June with dread. This campaign launch marks the end of a torrid fortnight for the party that is threatening to jeopardise the AfD’s future in Brussels. Two of the party’s top
Our universities are not safe from the messy realities of spies and geopolitical competition. The most infamous Soviet spy ring in history – the Cambridge Five – was recruited from, obviously, Cambridge University, back in the 1930s. Kim Philby and co. went on to share all sorts of damaging secret information with Britain’s Cold War adversary.
The BBC has struck upon a new wheeze to make the Proms accessible and inclusive: it has booked famously ‘non-binary’ singer Sam Smith. The pop star, best known for cavorting on stage in ill-fitting outfits, is joined in this year’s line up by Florence Welch. A disco prom will also take place, which for those of us of a certain age immediately
Dogs bark, cows moo and Sadiq Khan puts his foot in it again. With a week to go until polling day in the capital, you might have thought that the Mayor of London would try to avoid any bad headlines. But there he is, giving another ill-judged interview to Mehdi Hasan. In it, the Mayor implied
Labour’s plan to renationalise the railways is not much of a plan at all. Rather, it is a list of goals: to eliminate ‘fragmentation, waste, bureaucracy’, to ‘bring down costs for taxpayers’ and to ‘drive-up standards for passengers’. All lofty ambitions, all lacking a strategy. What little detail we do have points to significantly more
Humza Yousaf is facing the biggest crisis of his leadership after the First Minister axed his party’s power-sharing deal with the Scottish Greens. Since that decision on Thursday morning, events have spiralled in a way that few in the SNP believe Yousaf was prepared for. The SNP leader has this morning cancelled a speech he
The Northern Territory News, Darwin’s daily paper, is known worldwide for its front pages with headlines so cleverly lurid that they outshine the efforts of the Sun’s Kelvin McKenzie in his editorial heyday. Over the years, the newspaper has run front pages highlighting everything from UFO and mythical beast sightings to the bizarre behaviour of
‘When in doubt, blame Britain’ has, since Brexit, become something of an iron law of Irish politics. So it came as no surprise yesterday to see Michael Martin, Ireland’s deputy prime minister, attribute Ireland’s mounting migration crisis to Britain’s Rwanda scheme. There’s an obvious appeal for the Irish government to blame the Rwanda scheme, when it is
Britons should be fearful of Tony Blair’s call to the Labour party to ‘reset’ relations with the EU. The former prime minister has advised Keir Starmer that if he wins the general election he must build a closer political partnership with Brussels. Blair told the Sunday Times this was vital in order for the UK
Gillian Keegan has declared that she will no longer use the slogan, ‘trans women are women’ because, as she explains, her understanding of the issue has ‘evolved’. Good for her; it is far better that politicians develop their positions than dig their heels in and refuse to countenance the concept that they were ever wrong.
Did Humza Yousaf think it through? When he decided, late on Wednesday night, to pull the plug on the Green-SNP coalition arrangement, did he game-out the consequences? That is the question political Scotland is asking this morning as Yousaf’s job hangs, by common agreement, in the balance 24 hours after he unilaterally ended the Bute House cooperation
Oh dear. Poor Chris Philp has done it again. Fronting up the broadcast brief last night, the policing minister was wheeled out on Question Time to sell the government’s migration mission. But the Home Office minister appeared to make a bit of a blunder when asked a question about the Rwanda scheme. One audience member
The Prime Minister’s announcement this week of an increase in UK defence spending from 2 per cent to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2030 was unexpected. Debate continues on whether this is indeed, as Sunak claimed in Poland, ‘historic’, or sufficient for the UK to ‘re-arm’ in the face of ‘real risks to the United Kingdom’s security and prosperity’. All
Oh dear. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is no stranger to poor poll outcomes – but a new survey may cut a little closer to the bone. Over 500 GB News loyalists were quizzed on their political attitudes in the lead up to the next general election and the results are now in. Amongst the channel’s
‘What is Civilisation? I don’t know. I can’t definite it in abstract terms – yet. But I think I can recognise it when I see it; and I am looking at it now.’ So suggested Kenneth Clark, looking towards Notre Dame at the start of Civilisation, his magisterial televisual guide through Western art, architecture, and
First, a word of warning. If you donate money to Greenpeace, you might think you’re helping save the whales or the rainforests. But in reality, you may be complicit in a crime against humanity. Last week, Greenpeace Southeast Asia and several other NGOs managed to stop the cultivation and use of vitamin A-enhanced rice in
The target of Wednesday’s dawn raid has been on the radar of western security services for some time. There has been growing concern that Nuctech, which manufactures airport baggage scanners for European airports and ports, poses a potentially serious risk to national security. But the European Union officials who raided the Warsaw and Rotterdam offices
Rebecca, a British friend who taught theatre studies at a celebrated English public school before she was brutally sacked during the pandemic, moved to France and looked for a job. After putting out feelers, she got a phone call from the director of a lycée (high school) in a socially challenging neighbourhood of Béziers, a city in the
Scottish politics may be about to enter the abyss following the disintegration of the Green-SNP coalition. The Scottish Conservatives have tabled a vote of no confidence in First Minister Humza Yousaf and he might very well lose it, now the Greens are out of the government. They only have 63 MSPs since the former community
If last week wasn’t bad enough for hapless Humza Yousaf, this week has brought him even more turbulence. Now the Scottish government’s SNP-Green coalition has collapsed leaving the SNP to field a minority government and some rather, er, furious Greens in opposition. And to add insult to injury, Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross delivered a
It will write your WhatsApp messages for you. It will post a cute picture of your cat on Instagram, even if you don’t actually have a cat. And it will put some enhanced memories up for you on Facebook, while cheerfully making connections with people you don’t know and who may well not actually exist…
More bad times at the BBC. The Corporation is in hot water yet again following last week’s episode of Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg. During a discussion on whether extreme weather events are caused by carbon emissions, TV eco-warrior Chris Packham launched into one of his patented rants when asked by businessman Luke Johnson to provide
The Conservatives can crow all they like about the benefits of privatisation – and make whatever claims they like about tickets being more expensive, and services worse, were the railways to be brought back under public ownership. But there is little getting away from the fact that Labour’s policy of progressive renationalisation of train services by
After two and a half years in government together, Humza Yousaf has terminated the SNP’s governing pact with the Scottish Greens. The decision was rubber stamped at a hastily arranged meeting of the Scottish cabinet on Thursday morning. It preempts a vote by rank-and-file Green members on whether to walk away from Yousaf’s government after
If Humza Yousaf last week suffered his ‘worst week’ in office, then the same can be said this week for Patrick Harvie, the co-leader of the Scottish Greens. On Monday, it looked like his party had the upper hand on the future of the Scottish government. But today, just before an emergency 8.30 a.m Cabinet
Fifty years ago today, on 25 April 1974, Europe was stunned by an almost bloodless military coup that removed the continent’s most durable dictatorship: Portugal’s authoritarian ‘New State’ that had held the country in an iron grip since 1926. Military coups have an evil reputation in Europe. We associate them with ham-fisted juntas, arbitrary arrests,
