It’s never lost on me, as 8 March ticks around and every brand gets their social assets polished up in pink, that International Women’s Day (IWD) was born if not from the loins then the sweat of female socialists. And look how much it, and we, have grown! Yes, the very same Conservative Party that last year tweeted its "record of empowering women to fulfil their potential" (with the hashtag #IWD2022, obviously) was earlier this year dead keen to suppress the right of working women to strike for proper pay and working conditions. (You know, like those women did at the turn of the 20th century. The very ones who prompted the empty day of celebration we all now mark!) I’m being ...

The SNP has “lost its way”, according to Ash Regan. “More of the same is not a manifesto, it’s an acceptance of mediocrity,” said Kate Forbes. Nicola Sturgeon is “the finest politician on these islands”, argued Humza Yousaf. Clearly, they can’t all be right, but then there was a fair amount of disagreement during Tuesday night’s first televised debate between the three candidates running to become SNP leader and Scotland’s first minister. That only one of them is an out-and-out Sturgeon fan proves something has gone very wrong in Natland. Such is Yousaf’s explicit commitment to continuing the Sturgeon agenda – he constantly spouts vacuous phrases such as “wellbeing economy” and “progressive agenda” – that sources tell me people extremely close to ...

Much of the discussion about the Illegal Immigration Bill has focused on whether the legislation is compliant with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and consistent with the 1951 Refugees Convention. As others have asked, is it the immigration that is illegal or the bill? Trying to assess this when the Home Secretary Suella Braverman made her statement was not as straightforward as it might have been because, notwithstanding the general commotion over the bill, the government had not published a draft of it. Its lawyers, the House of Commons was told, were still working on it. This is unusual. It is customary when launching a new bill that there is a new bill to launch. The legislation was finally ...

The appointment of a chief of staff to an opposition party 20 points ahead in the polls only 18 months before an expected general election was always going to be newsworthy. But no one was expecting an appointment quite so newsworthy as this. In selecting Sue Gray, Keir Starmer detonated a bomb. Perhaps intentionally. Because surely he and his team must have calculated the uproarious backlash that would follow bringing Gray, the partygate "inquisitor", into the opposition?  There are two issues here for Starmer. Firstly, as we saw during "beergate", the Labour leader is keen to polish his credentials as an honest, rules-based operator. With Rishi Sunak developing some claim to competent government – though who knows if it will survive next ...

Not so long ago, it was clear that Germany was the main brake on the West sending Ukraine the battle tanks it needs for the next stage of its resistance to Russia’s invasion. As I wrote on 20 January after the failure to establish a “tank coalition” at a summit of defence minsters at the Ramstein Air Base, “Germany has become the roadblock at the heart of Europe”. There was justice in this accusation. Kyiv needed Leopard 2 tanks (present in large numbers in European militaries, well-suited to battle conditions in Ukraine and relatively easy to supply and repair). The Leopards are a German make of tank. Berlin controls their export. Here, finally, was a chance for it to live ...

Starmer Derangement Syndrome is real. If you want proof of how the leader of the Labour Party’s public image has driven sections of the very online left round the bend, look no further than the furious reaction to a graphic released by the party.  The image – featuring the generic slogan “build a better Britain” over a Union Jack border – drove parts of the Corbynite left into a frenzy. A political party using national symbols is “literally the basis of fascism”, one person with a nuanced grasp of twentieth-century history informed me. The graphic “feels like a hate crime”, was another’s contribution.  The charitable explanation of why moderate displays of the UK’s national flag drive the crank fringe of the progressive ...

It’s hardly surprising that Boris Johnson appears to be pushing the boundaries of propriety with a resignation honours list that is reported to include a knighthood for his father and ennoblement for some of his closest lackeys. The former prime minister has never been one to follow convention, generally treating rules, whether written or unwritten, as a matter for other people. Among all Johnson's scandals, the honours seem almost minor. His father has rendered service to the nation as an MEP and international bureaucrat, making him nominally worthy of an honour. At least, were it not for the allegations of domestic violence (Stanley Johnson is said to have broken his first wife Charlotte's nose during an argument; he has said he ...

One day in March 2016 Tanveer Ahmed got in his car and drove four hours from Bradford to Glasgow to stab a shopkeeper, Asad Shah, to death. When police arrived, Ahmed told them: “I respect what you do and have nothing against you.. I have broken the law.” Ahmed is sometimes described as an Islamist, but this doesn’t make much sense: Islamist extremists don’t tend to recognise man-made law, or go down without a fight. It was an early symptom of an emerging trend that connects the murder to the Batley teacher forced into hiding for showing a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad in a lesson, The Lady of Heaven being pulled from cinemas and, most recently, the Wakefield Quran scuffing ...