As my friend Euan McColm rather brilliantly puts it, the problem with trying to turn a bottle return scheme into a major constitutional crisis is that it’s a bottle return scheme. This minor flaw in the Scottish government’s calculations hasn’t stopped the SNP-Green coalition from trying to do just that, of course. In the fight for national liberation everything is a weapon, whether it’s a sword or a soiled nappy. If baby Holyrood has a problem, it’s always mother Westminster’s fault. Speaking of weapons, the politician in charge of the project, Lorna Slater, the circular economy minister and Green MSP, is somehow still in post despite her startling incompetence and the long trail of chaos left in her wake. There is ...

The net migration figure for the calendar year 2022 was 606,000, and 488,000 the year before. Though the methodologies were different, it was just 260,000 in the 12 months up to June 2014. “But I thought we voted Leave,” cry the Faragistas. Net migration today is largely driven by non-EU arrivals. (Net migration from the EU is in the negative.) Remarkably, voters appear unbothered by this. The UK is less opposed to immigration today than it was ten years ago and less keen on closing Britain’s borders entirely. The proportion wanting cuts to the number of immigrants has fallen from 67 per cent in February 2015 to 43 per cent last year. Most agree migration is a net benefit, both to ...

How much is Nadine Dorries being paid for her weekly show on TalkTV? The Chatterer is frustrated to report that we still don’t know. The former culture secretary first appeared as a host on the Rupert Murdoch-owned channel last October as a temporary fill-in for Piers Morgan, whose salary is rumoured to be around £15m a year for his TalkTV show and Sun column. Dorries landed her own Friday night show on the channel in February. The first episode, you might recall, featured an interview with her former boss (hero?) Boris Johnson. And yet, as of early June, there have been no entries in the MPs’ register of interests. We still don’t know her TalkTV salary, or even how much she was paid for her week’s work ...

Humans have long sought the elixir of youth, so it is not surprising that even non-scientists closely follow the latest research into ageing. But is the ageing process, which most people simply consider a fact of life, actually a disease that can be conquered? Or is there some insurmountable limit to the lifespan of human bodies? Of course almost everyone, as they get older, yearns for at least a moderate extension of their lifespan – provided that they retain their health and faculties. If we could be kept alive only with the help of extreme measures, many of us would opt instead for non-resuscitation and solely palliative treatment. We might also find comfort in having the option of assisted dying as ...

The government has until 4pm today to decide whether to hand over government communications sent during the pandemic or face down the Covid inquiry in court. It’s a sign of things to come. First-hand accounts of the government’s response to the pandemic have so far taken the form of Isabel Oakeshott’s leaking to the Telegraph of Matt Hancock’s text messages, and some belligerent blogging from Dominic Cummings. The Covid inquiry is an opportunity to find out what actually happened in a more systematic way. Whether the inquiry condemns the government’s pandemic response or not will be key to the reputation of the Conservative Party. Either way, the inquiry is likely to keep the Tories, and by extension Boris Johnson’s premiership, locked in a debate ...

What we’re calling the “cost-of-living crisis” contains something far more sinister. The surge in prices over the past 18 months has been largely due to the aftershocks of Covid-19 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Both pushed up the cost of energy and – because Russia and Ukraine are two of the world’s largest agricultural exporters – the war also inflated food prices. But, increasingly, what we are seeing is the impact of climate change. We are experiencing this most directly as higher prices, though actual shortages are also occurring. We are being forced to adapt, chaotically, to a world undergoing severe ecological stress. This is not a cost-of-living crisis but a cost-of-adaptation crisis. Spain, for instance, is currently suffering a drought ...

Everyone has bad gigs. The connection between crowd and performer will always have an element of the uncanny; they are psychically linked one night, utterly at odds the next. It’s a weird alchemy, an art, not a science. Professionals know this, and they soldier on. It’s just what you do. What you don’t do, what you should never do, is have a temper tantrum and blame the audience. It’s a note that Mike Kerr, front man of the rock duo Royal Blood, could learn. Kerr spent his band’s set at Radio 1's Big Weekend in Dundee berating the audience for not clapping enough, not responding properly and ultimately not showing him and his band mates the respect he felt they deserved. ...

We could all die. I don’t just mean at the end of our lives. I mean as a species. That’s the threat posed by artificial intelligence, according to more than 350 scientists and industry leaders who have written a joint statement. It reads, in full: "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." It’s at times like these that people turn to their government for some reassurance. Surely, they’ve got it covered? The British government is keenly light touch. In March it said it would pursue a “pro-innovation” approach to regulation. In practice, this means it’s cautious about putting industry rules on a statutory footing – ie, giving ...