Stephen Daisley is a Spectator regular and a columnist for the Scottish Daily Mail
Every time I re-read the SNP’s Hate Crime Bill, I become more convinced that its author, Humza Yousaf, is trying his hand at a Titania McGrath style satire of wokeness. Scotland’s justice secretary is woke but his draft legislation is such a smash-’n’-grab of every item on the wishlist of coercive progressivism that he can’t
Douglas Ross is the new leader of the Scottish Conservatives and since his predecessor lasted all of 167 days, best of luck might be more in order than congratulations. The Moray MP was awarded the position unopposed after Jackson Carlaw resigned entirely of his own volition and without any input from Downing Street. Ross inherits
There can be a hallucinatory quality to the progressive mind, a tendency to see enemies in allies and demons in opponents, to imagine a public consensus for niche propositions and to experience even mild-mannered political disagreements as near-physical attacks. One or more of these behaviours can be found across the spectrum — lefties hate other
It’s not often that feminists threaten legal action over plans to increase women’s representation on public boards, so the Scottish Government has managed something of a feat. ‘For Women Scotland’, a volunteer-funded gender-critical lobby group, isn’t against the principle of the Gender Representation on Public Boards Act. It’s the Scottish Government’s definition of ‘women’ they
The Scottish Conservatives are now in crisis. Jackson Carlaw has resigned six months into his leadership and less than a year on from Ruth Davidson’s departure. The party is polling 35 points behind the SNP with another Scottish Parliament election due next May and a string of polls have shown a majority of Scots are
I ❤ JK Rowling. There, now I’m a hate-monger, too. A digital advert reading just that — ‘I ❤ JK Rowling’ — has been removed from Edinburgh Waverley station, the city’s main rail terminus. The ad was taken out by Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, a women’s rights campaigner better known as Posie Parker, who paid for a
Nicola Sturgeon is fond of telling Scots that the prevalence of Covid-19 is ‘five times lower’ in Scotland than in England. Or at least she was, until the Office for Statistics Regulation released a statement calling her data source ‘unclear’ and adding that ‘we do not yet have evidence to support the validity of these
The Russia report was supposed to prove once and for all that the Kremlin rigged the EU referendum, Boris Johnson is an FSB asset and Dominic Cummings a bot operated from Saint Petersburg. Anything but the glum reality that the Leave campaign was more effective than its rival. That is not to say Vladimir Putin’s
In 1944, Slovak rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandl sent the US government a 30-page report detailing an extermination facility in Poland where Jews were being murdered en masse. The document included maps pin-pointing the exact locations of gas chambers and crematoria. Rabbi Weissmandl pleaded: ‘We ask that the crematoria of Auschwitz be bombed from the air… Such
When they come to write the history of the Union’s demise, there will be three guilty men. Tony Blair was a transformative prime minister, but he nodded through devolution after allowing himself to be convinced that it was an administrative change, rather than an unravelling of the United Kingdom. Many believe Iraq to be the
The numbers have seldom been better for Nicola Sturgeon. Ten months from the next Holyrood election, the SNP is polling 55 per cent on the constituency ballot and 50 per cent on the regional vote. Support for Scexit has swung into the majority. Almost three-quarters of Scots say she has handled the Covid-19 pandemic well,
The BBC is losing me. It’s a sudden estrangement and an unwelcome one but I can’t seem to shake it off. The cause is the Corporation’s coverage of this thing that is happening that we still don’t have a name for but definitely should not call a ‘moment’. The butterfly effect from George Floyd’s killing
What will you be doing next Sunday at 8pm? If you live north of the border, the ideologically correct answer is clapping for ‘Oor Nicola’. Nicola Sturgeon is turning 50 and several thousand of her more enthusiastic admirers are planning to hold a clap in her honour. The news was reported, amazingly enough, not in
One of the rare upsides of living in a country run by nationalists is that nationalists are not great at hiding their true feelings. When you’ve got a superiority complex, it’s hard to prevent it from bursting out, often at the most inopportune times. Efforts to explain to outsiders that the SNP isn’t actually a
Boris Johnson’s statement that ‘there is no such thing as a border between England and Scotland’ is born of ignorance and neglect. In a legal sense, there is and always has been a jurisdictional boundary separating the two nations. It is what has made a separate legal system possible and the divergent laws and regulations
The best thing I can say about Boris Johnson is that he’s not a real Tory. The Prime Minister belongs instead to the popular liberal right, though he seems to get less popular by the day. His appeal to right-wing voters is based on his promise to ‘get Brexit done’ and the demented, 30-tweet-thread rage-pain
What has followed the killing of George Floyd did not begin with the death of a man under the knee of a police officer. The rioting and the statue-toppling, the shunnings and the firings, the institutional genuflections and the gleeful marching through newly conquered territory are the fruits of ideas and impulses long in germination.
Scenes of disorder in Glasgow city centre on Wednesday may be a glimpse of the future as the radical right grows emboldened by recent race-related unrest. So far six men have been arrested on suspicion of what Police Scotland described as ‘minor public order offences’ and Scotland’s justice minister Humza Yousaf has described the behaviour as
There is a crisis brewing in Scottish education. Not the long-running crisis of attainment gaps, falling exam performance and limited external oversight. The emerging crisis is about getting children inside the classroom in the first place. Scotland’s schools have been closed for 90 days now in response to the Covid-19 pandemic and are not due
Let’s play spot the difference. Here is a tweet posted on Tuesday afternoon by Professor Devi Sridhar, a member of the Scottish Government’s Covid-19 Advisory Group: Now, here is a tweeted posted by Professor Sridhar on Wednesday morning: The tweets are separated by 15 hours. What happened in that time to prompt Edinburgh University’s Chair