Stephen Daisley is a Spectator regular and a columnist for the Scottish Daily Mail
Anyone outraged by Labour MP Tahir Ali calling on the government to introduce blasphemy laws has clearly not been paying attention, for there are already blasphemy laws in this country. All Ali wants to do is make them official. When he urges Sir Keir Starmer to prohibit the desecration of the Qur’an and other Abrahamic
The Scots have long been stereotyped as dour, miserable whingers, and we finally have proof that this is pure slander. Ailsa Henderson, a political scientist at Edinburgh University, has produced a presentation into political anger in the wake of the general election. She finds that the English are three times as angry about politics as
The arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant should be the last the International Criminal Court (ICC) issues. The ICC accuses the men, whose nation is embroiled in a multi-front war against enemies sworn to its destruction, of using ‘starvation as a method of warfare’, ‘murder, persecution and
One of the new cliches of American politics is that progressives need their own Joe Rogan. The comedian turned podcaster has an audience that is four-fifths male and 51 per cent aged 18-34, and it has not escaped the Democrats’ notice that, while women aged 18 to 29 voted overwhelmingly for Kamala Harris, men in
Since the scenes of Jews being hunted, beaten and kicked as they lay on the ground pleading for mercy in Amsterdam, antisemites have sought excuse, or that weaselly insinuator ‘context’, in the reported behaviour of a number of Maccabi Tel Aviv football hooligans, who are said to have attacked a taxi, tore down a Palestinian
Whenever Jews are killed or beaten, on 7 October or last night in Amsterdam, well-meaning sorts solemnly intone that this latest outrage must be a ‘wake-up call’ about the threat of anti-Semitism. Ah, the Wake-Up Call. Much vaunted, long awaited, never heard. There have been no shortage of wake-up calls. Off the top of my
One of the few western nations where public opinion was in favour of Donald Trump returning to the White House is Israel. Israelis trust him as the man who recognised Jerusalem as their capital, moved the US embassy there, recognised Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and said that settlement-building was not per se against
If there are two things new leaders of political parties dread, it’s unsolicited advice and Scotland. The advice because, even when it’s helpful, and it’s mostly not, it underscores the sheer volume of work that lies head. Scotland because, in recent years at least, its politics have been so volatile and unpredictable that anyone stepping
It was the early evening of 31 October and I was three years old, sitting in the living room with Mum, on the brink of bedtime, when I turned to the corner and a decorative wicker armchair. (It was the 1980s.) ‘Mum,’ I enquired sweetly, ‘who’s that man sitting there?’ Mum, suitably unnerved, asked me
When Russell Findlay stood to be Scottish Conservative leader, he talked the familiar language of ‘change’. I predicted that this would translate to a rightwards shift for the party and his first major speech in the job confirms it. Findlay is not entirely comfortable with the ‘right wing’ label – he is a Tory, after
There are three great makers of popular man-art working in Hollywood today – Michael Mann, Christopher Nolan and David Fincher – and all three work with broadly the same materials: male identity, its associated violence, and post-industrial societies with no place for either. Mann’s neon-noir aesthetic focuses on status, whether James Caan’s safecracker in Thief,
The SNP just can’t catch a break. The party is still reeling from a catastrophic general election result, a backlash over its decision to mimic Rachel Reeves’ cuts to winter fuel payments, and the ongoing police investigation into its finances. Now chief executive Murray Foote has cleared his desk just 14 months after taking up
You might have missed the news that the SNP has expelled one of its MSPs, announced as it was following the death of Alex Salmond. John Mason has represented the SNP almost continuously for a quarter-century, first as a Glasgow councillor, then as the MP who wrested away Labour heartland seat Glasgow East in a
When he lost his Gordon seat in the 2017 general election, Alex Salmond told his count and those watching – friend and foe – that ‘you’ve not seen the last o’ my bonnet and me’. The line comes from Sir Walter Scott’s Bonnie Dundee, an ode to John Graham, the 1st Viscount Dundee, who led
The thing about being holier than thou is that you actually have to be holier. Stephen Flynn, the SNP’s leader at Westminster, has made much of Sir Keir Starmer’s freebie woes. The SNP called for an investigation into Lord Alli’s donations to the Prime Minister and Flynn used a newspaper column to observe: ‘Of course,
A brief update from Agence France Presse underscores the shift in power in the Middle East. The report, citing a German source, tells us that Joe Biden ‘plans to meet the leaders of Germany, France and Britain in Berlin on Saturday to discuss the Middle East and Ukraine conflicts’. On Saturday. It doesn’t exactly scream
Ruth Cadbury is hard at work campaigning for Kamala Harris ahead of November’s presidential election. It’s what you might expect from a Democrat politician, except that Cadbury is British, a Labour MP, and New Hampshire falls a little outside the boundaries of her Brentford and Isleworth constituency. She’s not the only British politico heading Stateside
Iranian missiles are slicing through the evening sky over Tel Aviv as Tehran responds to the killing of Hezbollah leader and terrorist mastermind Hassan Nasrallah. Some reports on Israeli television put the number of missiles at 100, while the head of emergency medical organisation Magen David Adom has told Channel 12 that the number is
There is a satirical Israeli song from the Second Lebanon War, ‘Yalla Ya Nasrallah’, with the chorus: ‘Come on, oh Nasrallah/We will screw you, inshallah/we’ll send you back to Allah/with the rest of Hezbollah’. The lyrics are doggerel, but I mention it for two reasons. One, it’s an absolute banger of a tune and, two,
Israel has carried out a daring air strike against Hezbollah’s headquarters. The Islamist terror group’s underground command centre, located below civilian buildings in Dahieh, Beirut, was hit by what Israeli media are describing as ‘tens of tons of explosives’ on Friday night. There are unconfirmed reports that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was the target of
