Why Israel is set to invade Gaza
If reports this evening are correct, Israel is stepping up its ground operations in Gaza. The Jerusalem Post quotes IDF…
Britain needs to rethink devolution
Scotland is stuck. This week has only confirmed it. SNP leader Humza Yousaf used his party conference in Aberdeen to…
What Britain should do about Hamas
London is, at last, beaming Israeli flags onto its most recognisable buildings. This is an improvement on how some of…
Israel declares war on Hamas
Some 5,000 rockets have rained down on Israeli civilians in an attack co-ordinated from land, sea and air by Gaza-based…
We should all care about the dire state of our prisons
Charlie Taylor is not so much the canary in the coal mine of prison conditions as the British Gas engineer…
Who polices our armed officers?
When is it acceptable for the police to kill? How do we regulate their use of lethal force? What is…
The Union is in trouble, however this week’s trans ruling goes
Up before the Court of Session in Edinburgh today is a legal question: was Scottish Secretary Alister Jack’s decision to…
Prisons aren’t working
Will we learn the lessons of Daniel Khalife? It depends what those lessons are. If they revolve solely around prison…
Scotland is right to try drug consumption rooms
Scotland is the drug deaths capital of Europe. Last year saw 1,051 drug misuse fatalities, a rate 2.7 times higher…
Bring in the Gen X politicians!
American politics has become a tug-of-war between two generations. Boomers (and those older) dominate positions of power even as their…
The rise of America’s anti-corporate populists
They are the Odd Couple of the United States Senate. She is a progressive Democrat and senior senator from true-blue…
GERS Day isn’t great for the Union
For a decade or so, GERS Day has been something of an annual gloatfest for opponents of Scottish independence. The…
Oliver Anthony and the snobbery of American conservatives
If there is a right-wing cultural aesthetic in America, it is low-brow resentment. The old liberal-conservative tradition prized truth, beauty…
Arise! Scottish nationalists could soon have their first Lord
It’s not every day a supporter of Scottish independence is in the running for a peerage, least of all from…
Locking up shoplifters won’t solve Britain’s crime problem
The Conservative party has had an idea. It’s not a very good idea, but it’s an idea and those are…
Robin Harper is right: the Scottish Greens have ‘lost the plot’
Robin Harper, the first Green parliamentarian elected in the UK, has resigned from the Scottish Greens, saying his former party has ‘lost…
Tories shouldn’t deceive themselves over their Uxbridge win
Some Conservatives are going to take heart from the by-election results. They may have lost Somerset and Frome to the…
The liberal case for Nigel Farage
After ‘it’s not happening’, ‘it may be happening, but for different reasons’, and ‘would it be such a bad thing…
I’m proud of my rip-off degree
Whenever the right gets itself in a froth over ‘Mickey Mouse’ degrees, I keep my head down. You see, I…
It’s time the SNP was honest about EU membership
There’s a school of thought that, since Scotland isn’t likely to become independent anytime soon, interrogating the SNP’s claims about…
Who’s to blame for Scottish drug deaths?
Scotland is the drug deaths capital of Europe and changing that is going to take something radical. The Scottish government…
Humza Yousaf’s leadership isn’t dead yet
If you just ignore the opinion polls, Humza Yousaf’s first 100 days as First Minister have been an unqualified disaster.…
The French Connection and the trouble with streaming censorship
We are ten minutes into William Friedkin’s The French Connection and we’ve just seen our two heroes beat the shit out of…
Emmanuel Macron should sink more pints
Civilisation’s last line of defence runs through the Élysée Palace. Emmanuel Macron has been lambasted by his opponents for necking…
Is this Wickes’s Gerald Ratner moment?
Big businesses are increasingly torn between activist leadership and a customer base that just wants to stump up its cash…
