Stephen Daisley | The Spectator columnists & writers

No, Scottish independence is not like the war in Ukraine

Perhaps it’s the absence of any oppression of their own country that compels Scottish nationalists to latch onto the oppression of others. On Monday, Michelle Thomson, an SNP MSP, retweeted news of Ukraine’s emergency application for EU membership, adding: ‘Delighted for Ukraine. It’s [sic] just goes to show what political will can achieve. Remember this Scotland!’ The SNP’s current position is for Scotland to secede from the UK then apply for membership of the EU, a process nationalists have previously suggested Brussels would fast-track. Thomson came in for a barrage of criticism and later deleted the tweet, admitting it was ‘insensitive’. She is taking all the flack but she’s hardly alone in dabbling in such rhetoric.

What is the point of the UN?

When all this is over, we will have to hold a grown-up and perhaps very difficult conversation about the United Nations. No institution is perfect, or has supernatural powers to stop war or despotism, and perhaps nothing could have dissuaded Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine. But the UN’s failure to prevent one fifth of its permanent security council from overrunning another member state should give us pause. There are the hard realities of realpolitik, of course, but there is also the question of endemic institutional failure. It may be that we will either have to change how we think about the UN or change the UN itself. In a session of the Security Council held overnight, António Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, made a direct plea to the Russian dictator in the way only a boomer could: ‘I have only one thing to say, from the bottom of my heart: President Putin, stop your troops from attacking Ukraine.

Putin must look at the West and laugh

Whatever the West’s response to Russia’s attack on Ukraine’s sovereignty, the crisis demonstrates the limitations of western politics and policy across the board. If Vladimir Putin understands any demographic better than the Russian people, it is the governing class of the West: that Harvard-Oxbridge-Sciences Po axis of toweringly smug and practically interchangeable global-liberals who weep for international norms they weren’t prepared to defend. Their ideas and their sanctions are tired because they are civilisationally tired. Putin knows this, but none of the rival ideologies aiming to replace liberalism have anything better to offer. The failure of the global-liberals comes on many fronts but two of the most significant have been on hard power and energy independence.

P.J. O’Rourke: the finest satirist of his generation

P.J. O’Rourke was the finest conservative satirist of his generation and therefore the finest of any political persuasion. Satire, an impertinent and mean-spirited attack on authority, is generally and perhaps even inherently a left-wing genre but O’Rourke came into his own in the wake of the 1960s, when the counterculture tried to overthrow authority but ended up replacing it instead. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan may have swept the ballot boxes but where real power lay — in the newsrooms and the entertainment industry, on the campuses and in the publishing houses — the radicals won in a landslide. This gave rise to a new culture in need of countering and O’Rourke, an ex-leftist, lampooned its neuroses and hypocrisies with an impish, outrageous heresy unmatched by writers more in political sympathy with the times.

In praise of Deborah Lipstadt

The United States Senate is not a body commonly associated with alacrity but its sluggishness in considering the nomination of Deborah Lipstadt has been noticeable. On Tuesday, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee finally heard from Dr Lipstadt, who has been nominated by President Biden to serve as the United States’ special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism. If confirmed Dr Lipstadt will be the first to hold the title since it was elevated to an ambassadorial position, a reflection of growing concern in Washington DC about rising levels of Jew-hatred within the United States and overseas. The ‘if’ hanging over Dr Lipstadt — and the slow pace of her confirmation — is down to Republican concerns about the non-partisan role going to an outspoken Democrat who has been critical of a Republican member of the committee.

Lock them up? Not in Sturgeon’s Scotland

One of the great disappointments of devolution has been the failure of the Scottish parliament to pursue novel ways of fixing political problems. Whether on educational attainment, health indicators, waiting times or economic development, it’s difficult to argue that Scotland under devolution is fundamentally different from how it would have looked had the country voted no in 1997. But one area where that observation is becoming harder to sustain is criminal justice: the SNP has grown in confidence in recent years and a more liberal — or at least a more nuanced — policy is taking shape. The SNP’s justice secretary Keith Brown set out the latest iteration of this policy in a speech to Holyrood on Tuesday, accompanied by a new strategy document which details a move away from over-reliance on prison sentences.

Sending a mean tweet about Captain Tom shouldn’t be a crime

Captain Tom Moore captured the nation’s hearts during the pandemic. The World War II officer completed 100 lengths of his garden at the age of 99 to raise money for NHS-related charities, attracting more than £30 million in donations and being knighted by the Queen. When he died last February, aged 100, the fond tributes and outpouring of sadness were universal. Well, almost. Glaswegian Joseph Kelly marked Captain Tom’s passing by tweeting a photograph of the veteran and the words: ‘The only good brit soldier is a deed one, burn auld fella, buuuuurn’. Undoubtedly these words were offensive: to British soldiers, the memory of Captain Tom, and the English language. Kelly, who tweeted under the name 'Saor Alba' (Gaelic for ‘Free Scotland’), was being an idiot and deserved to be told so.

The Tories have abandoned the young

Tories who tried to convince Number 10 and Number 11 to delay the hike in National Insurance have had their hopes comprehensively dashed this morning. The Sunday Times carries a joint op-ed by the Prime Minister and the Chancellor which confirms the NI rise is going ahead as planned. Raising tax on workers is estimated to bring in an additional £12bn and will see those on £20,000 paying an extra £89, those on £30,000 stung for £214 and earners on £50,000 forced to hand over a further £464. Higher earners will see sharper increases: £839 on £80,000 and £1,089 on £100,000. Boris and Rishi try to placate backbench Tories by using their Sunday Times piece to declare themselves ‘Thatcherites’ but at least some of those backbenchers grasp just how toxic pressing ahead with tax rises could prove with traditionally Conservative-sympathetic voters, especially given public sentiment towards the PM at the moment.

Asking about male inmates in women’s jails isn’t transphobic

One of the joys of living through a period of cultural revolution is watching all the new moralities arrive and declare themselves eternal truths. John Mason is learning this the hard way. Mason is the SNP MSP for Glasgow Shettleston, a Bible-believing Christian, something of a social conservative, and known for his mercurial views on evolution, the IRA, and his conviction that the island of Skye is not really an island. This time Mason is in trouble for more mainstream opinions, which is to say opinions that are mainstream among the general public and therefore hate crimes in the eyes of the governing class. On Wednesday, Mason used a ministerial question time in the Scottish parliament to ask the SNP justice secretary Keith Brown about biologically male prisoners being held in women’s jails.

No one should celebrate the decline of America

Sex, trans rights and the Scottish census

It takes some doing to make a census interesting. So congratulations to the National Records of Scotland (NRS). NRS, which administers the decennial survey, is facing a judicial review over its guidance on the document. On the question of sex, it states that 'if you are transgender the answer you give can be different from what is on your birth certificate'. That is, something other than your legal sex. Feminist group Fair Play For Women will challenge this guidance at the Court of Session on 2 February. If this sounds familiar, it’s because similar guidance for last year’s census in England and Wales was challenged at the High Court and found to be unlawful. In response, the Official for National Statistics went ahead with a binary question on sex and an optional question on 'gender identity'.

Rishi, it’s not the 1980s anymore

The stench of death clings to Boris Johnson. Bury South MP Christian Wakeford has crossed the floor to join Labour. David Davis has told him to resign ‘in the name of God’. Tory MPs reportedly continue to hand in letters of no confidence to the 1922 Committee. Once they reach 54, there will be a vote of confidence. Fresh polling on the Red Wall, conducted by JL Partners for Channel 4, puts Labour at 48 per cent and 37 per cent for the Tories, a near inversion of the 2019 election result. Sir Graham Brady — and Sir Keir — should expect some more knocks on their doors. The revelation that Downing Street held lockdown-breaking parties, while the rest of the country was banned from being next to dying loved ones, is anathema to Red Wall voters.

Why are Tories still loyal to Boris Johnson?

As an outsider looking in, it is curious to note just how loyal some remain to Boris Johnson. Not the payroll vote or even the backbenchers keeping their heads down, but the grassroots, the rank-and-file members and Tory voters both lifelong and more recent. Boris is a man who has never given loyalty and has no grounds to claim it from others. This is also a party storied for its ruthless despatching of even beloved leaders when they become electoral liabilities. So what gives? I have a couple of theories. One is that, closing in on 12 years in power, the party has grown tired and listless, no longer sure why it’s in government or to what end. Let’s not forget the past decade has been politically hyperactive, from the Tory-Lib Dem coalition and austerity to riots and terror attacks, from the UK quitting the EU and Scotland almost quitting the UK to efforts to block the former and re-litigate the latter.

To save the Union, ignore Gordon Brown

As he blasts his way through the remaining support beams of the UK constitution, Gordon Brown is doing more to deliver Scottish independence than the SNP. The former Prime Minister is reportedly poised to recommend that Labour adopt ‘devo max’ as a policy, which would see the SNP-run Scottish parliament handed yet another tranche of powers. Only defence and foreign policy would remain in the hands of Westminster: everything else would be at the whim of Nicola Sturgeon. The theory is that by increasing the powers of Holyrood, the Scots' appetite for independence will be sated. But is no evidence for this, and 23 years of evidence against it. From the opening of the Scottish parliament in 1999, it took just eight years for the SNP to gain control of the institution and its grip has remained iron tight ever since.

Will the human rights industries finally stand up for Christians?

A Christian-owned bakery harried through the courts for refusing to produce a cake endorsing same-sex marriage and a nurse driven out of her job for wearing a small cross. The two are apparently unconnected but have found themselves in the same news cycle this week. The ‘gay cake case’, as it’s invariably billed, has been trundling along since 2014, when gay rights activist Gareth Lee commissioned Belfast-based Ashers Baking Company to produce a cake featuring the slogan ‘Support Gay Marriage’, the logo of the organisation QueerSpace, and Bert and Ernie, two Sesame Street characters ‘shipped’ as gay by some fans of the children’s TV series. Ashers, whose owners are Christian, said it would be unable to complete the order because the message was at odds with their religious convictions.

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Twitter ban is nothing to celebrate

Marjorie Taylor Greene is nuttier than M&M World. Not your garden-variety conservative, or even a conservative at all, but a conspiracy theorist who rode these febrile times into a seat in Congress. She describes American Airlines Flight 77 as ‘the so-called plane that crashed into the Pentagon’ on 9/11, remarking that ‘it’s odd there's never any evidence shown for a plane in the Pentagon’. She suspects the 2018 California wildfires were started by a Rothschild-funded ‘laser beam or light beam coming down to Earth’ in order to help Democrats build a high-speed rail project. Her Facebook account has liked a post proposing ‘a bullet to the head’ for Nancy Pelosi. All things considered, she’s lucky to have escaped with just a Twitter ban.

Tony Blair’s knighthood is long overdue

Arise Sir Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter. Yes, that should give a fair few people a more punishing than usual New Year’s Day hangover. Britain’s most successful Labour leader, despised by all the worst aspects of the British character, honoured at last. Blair made three great mistakes as prime minister: he introduced devolution, he set a target for 50 per cent of young people to attend university, and he didn’t sack Gordon Brown. For some these will render him unworthy of his knighthood. For others it will be his decision to join the United States in overthrowing Saddam Hussein, who, it transpired, no longer had stockpiles of WMDs. There is a small thinking that afflicts Blair’s haters — a man like him doesn’t attract mere critics — and it undermines reasonable cases against him.

The pure cynicism of David Lammy

David Lammy says he regrets nominating Jeremy Corbyn for Labour leader. We are meant, presumably, to be impressed by this admission. Given that it was delivered at Limmud, a Jewish festival of ideas, it sounds perilously close to an expression of contrition. Lammy has every reason to be contrite given the part he played in the Corbyn catastrophe. The guilty men of the Corbyn era typically belong to one of four categories. There were the True Believers — the pensionable Bennites and millenarian millennials with righteous faith in the leader and the (never properly defined) ideology he represented. There were the Fellow Travellers — the spineless soft-leftists (but I repeat myself) who knew the man was bad news yet were the loudest voices in the chorus of ‘Oh Jeremy Corbyn’ the minute it looked like he might not be a total electoral duffer.

No, Steve Baker, voters don’t want Thatcher again

Steve Baker’s decision to boot Nadine Dorries out of a group chat of Conservative MPs has captured the attention of the Sunday papers, though it’s difficult to know where our sympathies are supposed to lie. Anyone who joins a group chat with either Baker or Dorries deserves all they get. The Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport got shown the door for defending the Prime Minister, a minority pursuit among Tory MPs these days. Her comments, which described Boris Johnson as a ‘hero’ who ‘won an 83 majority and delivered Brexit’, were spurred by an earlier post by Marcus Fysh, the MP for Yeovil and a staunch Brexiteer. Fysh wrote: The whole point of Brexit is radical supply side reform and moving away from the EU model, yet ministers are happy just to give hard won power put in their hands to achieve this to officials who will do the opposite.

Brexiteers will sorely miss Lord Frost

Lord Frost’s resignation is bad news for Boris Johnson, though that’s a side matter. Prime ministers come and go, what matters is policy. Lord Frost represented the most assertive face of the government on Northern Ireland and whether the UK or the EU ultimately decides that country’s fate. No one who replaces him is going to be as committed to his position on British sovereignty. No one who replaces him will be as prepared to have unpleasant meetings with Brussels (and Dublin). Be they major or minor, spectacular or subtle, concessions are coming. One of the flaws in the ‘Get Brexit Done’ slogan — the slogan upon which Johnson won an 80-seat majority — is that Brexit is a process rather than an event. It wasn’t enough to win the referendum, Brexiteers then had to fight and ultimately throw out a parliament that refused to implement the result of the 2016 vote.

How the Met failed the victims of Stephen Port

The names Anthony Walgate, Gabriel Kovari, Daniel Whitworth and Jack Taylor will not be familiar to most but they represent one of the most damning cases of Metropolitan police incompetence in living memory. On Friday, a jury at Barking Town Hall found that officers’ failure to properly investigate Anthony’s murder contributed to the subsequent murders of Gabriel, Daniel and Jack. While the men and women tasked by the coroner with weighing up nine weeks of evidence in the inquest accepted that police were burdened with a ‘heavy workload’, they concluded there were ‘fundamental failings in these investigations from the beginning’ which ‘cannot be overlooked’. It would be impossible to overlook the failings considering how many there were, the egregiousness of their nature, and how they allowed a serial killer to get away with murder again and again.

China is right to laugh at the west

Signs of the enervating weakness of the west’s governing elites aren’t that hard to find but the case of the Winter Olympics may be the most demeaning. The UK and Canada have followed the US and Australia in announcing a diplomatic boycott of February’s games in Beijing over China’s human rights record. It’s a crushing blow to the communist dictatorship: Xi Jinping has been unable to sleep or dress himself since learning that the deputy head of the British mission will be skipping the mixed doubles luge final. The UK’s boycott may not even be a boycott, with Boris Johnson saying ‘we do not support sporting boycotts but there are certainly no plans for ministers to attend the Winter Olympics’, then confirming there would be ‘effectively a diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympics in Beijing’, and thereafter stating: ‘I do not think that sporting boycotts are sensible and that remains the policy of the government’.

Keir’s Centrist Dad reshuffle is the sign of a decadent party

Sir Keir Starmer has rarely enjoyed such good press as he’s received for overhauling his frontbench. His Centrist Dad reshuffle saw promotions for soft-left pin-ups like Yvette Cooper, David Lammy, Wes Streeting and Lucy Powell, while Corbynista Cat Smith got told to clear her desk. It was a pitch-perfect signal to Labour moderates that they were getting their party back — not least the crucial newspaper columnist demographic — who got to see all their princes return across the water at once. Well, almost. If Sir Keir had really wanted to earn some sweet, sweet commentariat love he'd have arranged a by-election and the first available flight from JFK to Heathrow for David Miliband. There is undoubtedly a need for more robust opposition to Boris Johnson's government and an alternative administration to offer the voters at the next election.

Priti Patel and the progressive language police

There was an exchange in the House of Commons on Thursday afternoon that ought to be a scandal but won’t. It ought to be a scandal because it involves a Cabinet minister undertaking to do something that, in any other context, would bring waves of condemnation from across the House. It won’t because the scandalous thing the minister pledged to do is endorsed by Good People with Good Intentions and could only be decried by Bad People with Bad Intentions. The minister was Priti Patel and she was being questioned about the deaths of 27 migrants who attempted to enter Britain via the English Channel. The SNP's Brendan O’Hara said he tuned into Wednesday’s 10 o’clock news on the BBC and had been ‘absolutely appalled when a presenter informed me that around 30 “migrants” had drowned’.

Priti Patel’s Hamas ban doesn’t go far enough

It’s been a rough old week for Hamas. The UK announced plans to proscribe the organisation, Justin Bieber ignored its call to cancel his 2022 concert in Tel Aviv, and even the recently friendly Labour party has vowed that it ‘does not and will not support BDS’. One minute, you’re going about your business, trying to drive the Jews into the sea, and the next you’re being treated like you’re the bad guy. Priti Patel’s decision to add Hamas to the Home Office list of terrorist organisations corrects a 20-year-old error which saw the Izz al-Din al-Qassem Brigades — Hamas’s paramilitary wing — outlawed in 2001 but the rest of the organisation unaffected. Sajid Javid closed a similar loophole with Hezbollah and Patel’s amendment underscores the absurdity involved in pretending an organisation with a terrorist wing isn’t a terrorist organisation.

There’s nothing dodgy about Douglas Ross’s three jobs

At the risk of talking down a good, old-fashioned political scandal, suggestions that Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross has become embroiled in the Westminster sleaze row deserve a sizeable question mark over them. The Moray MP referred himself to the parliamentary standards commissioner after failing to declare income. Given the scrutiny that other Tory MPs are coming under, it is only natural that this news would be greeted with glee by opponents and journalists — and no doubt some sharp eyebrow-raising by the electors of Moray. Alas, the details are pretty mundane. As well as an MP, Ross is also an MSP at Holyrood and a part-time linesman for the Scottish Football Association. (A Tory, a referee and two politicians walk into a bar and they’re all the most unpopular man in Scotland.

It’s time for Boris to turn back the Channel migrant boats

There is a sentence in the latest BBC report on English Channel migrant crossings that is just exquisite. Thursday saw 1,000 people arrive in Britain unauthorised — a new record — and the story on the Corporation’s website explains how UK Border Force boats, as well as lifeboats, ferried the arrivals to Dover. However, it added: ‘A Whitehall source accused France of losing control of the situation.’ It’s a line worthy of Swift. Britain is seeing record levels of illegal migration, the Home Office is running a maritime Uber service, and somehow it’s all the French’s fault. Some wonder why the Boris Johnson era hasn’t produced any great political satire but who could take the competition? This may be the first government that satirises itself.

The persecution of Marion Millar and Kathleen Stock

Marion Millar’s nightmare is over. The Scottish accountant facing prosecution for ‘transphobic’ tweets has been told the Crown is discontinuing its case against her. Millar stood accused of acting in a threatening or abusive manner and in a way aggravated by prejudice relating to sexual orientation and transgender identity. At issue were a series of tweets which, it was claimed, were of a ‘homophobic and transphobic nature’. Millar, a member of the women’s rights group For Women Scotland, has been involved in the debate over reform of the Gender Recognition Act in Scotland, where Nicola Sturgeon’s devolved government is firmly aligned with trans rights organisations and their efforts to prize gender identity over biological sex in law, public policy and even the census.

Sunak backs the Union with cash, not love-bombs

Devolution has done so much to fracture the UK that, in Scotland, Rishi Sunak's Budget is an event of the second order. Scottish interest in Budget day is typically limited to whisky duty, support for North Sea industries and the Barnett formula: the additional spending Scotland gets when the Chancellor splurges on England. Today’s Budget was for all of Britain. Not just Scotland, but Wales and Northern Ireland were weaved throughout Rishi Sunak’s speech. Quite apart from the fiscal or economic merits of the policies announced, the Chancellor’s speech was good politics. Not long after Sunak was promoted to the Treasury, I was told Scotland was a weak spot for him and he was not particularly up-to-speed on the intricacies of Scottish politics.

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