I seem to have been somewhat ahead of the curve regarding Kate Forbes, her religion, her politics and the future of the SNP. Almost a week ago I asked here on the New Statesman website whether active membership of the Free Church of Scotland, a strictly Calvinist body that rejects even mainstream Presbyterianism, would allow Forbes to fully represent the people of Scotland, particularly given her opposition to same-sex marriage. Since then a predictable divide has emerged, and both sides seem to have missed the point. It's not that Forbes’s views disqualify her from public office, but that she doesn't receive a free pass on them simply because they're allegedly a product of her faith. There are, for example, many atheists ...

I thought I knew all I needed to about the self-styled “king of toxic masculinity”, Andrew Tate, the former kickboxer and reality TV personality who has built up a huge online following among disaffected men and boys. The Vice News journalist Matt Shea, whose documentary The Dangerous Rise of Andrew Tate is now available on BBC Three, proved me wrong. Shea was ahead of the story: he had already begun filming when Tate’s social media accounts were suspended in August 2022 over his misogyny (Elon Musk has since allowed him to return to Twitter, where he has over five million followers). In December Tate and his brother were arrested by Romanian police as part of an investigation into human trafficking ...

The Conservative minister Lee Rowley unsuccessfully alleviated fears about mass electoral disenfranchisement yesterday (21 February). He kindly reassured MPs that it didn't matter that up to two million people couldn't vote in the May local elections because they lack photo identification, which is now necessary to vote. Why? Because lots of them weren't going to vote anyway. The local government minister told the House of Commons to stop repeating the figure, because "of those two million people, which is an estimate, a large number of those will not have elections in their area this year". Besides, "of that group a number will choose not to vote – much as we would like them to do so". Unfortunately for Rowley, that number ...

Hours after Vladimir Putin’s state of the nation speech in Moscow on 21 February, the US president Joe Biden delivered his own remarks in Warsaw, Poland. Twenty-four hours earlier, he had secretly travelled to Kyiv to meet Volodymyr Zelensky, where the two leaders strolled through the city centre as the air-raid sirens wailed. The next day, standing in front of the Royal Castle in the Polish capital, which was lit up in the blue and gold colours of the Ukrainian flag, Biden reflected on how Zelensky, and his nation, had defied the world’s expectations over the past year.  “One year ago the world was bracing for the fall of Kyiv,” Biden said. “Well, I have just come from a visit to ...

No-fault evictions are a bit like that purely decorative radiator, proudly frozen against your bedroom wall, that your landlord promised would be fixed a winter ago. Except your landlord was Theresa May, and a winter ago was April 2019. In announcement after reannouncement, the government has pledged for four years to scrap no-fault evictions in England, but has yet to deliver. There are all sorts of reasons for this – cycling through 35 housing ministers in the last ten minutes doesn’t help – but one in particular intrigued me when I spotted it in a new report by the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Select Committee. No-fault evictions keep the strain off an “already struggling” courts system, the MPs say in their ...

On one of the most important issues facing the nation, British politics seems to be limbo. Among policymakers, the media and the younger generations of activists, housing is emerging as possibly the single most vital challenge to address. That doesn't mean everyone agrees on how to solve the crisis – and there remain those on both the left and the right who try to play it down, or even deny it outright. But there is nonetheless at least growing recognition that something has gone badly wrong. At the level of elected politics, on the other hand, housing is the dog that doesn’t bark. The Conservatives seem content to have abandoned any serious effort towards major planning reform, despite the catastrophic long-term effects ...

A year ago Vladimir Putin delivered the speech that made it clear he had decided to go to war against Ukraine. In the Russian president’s almost hour-long tirade on 21 February 2022 he claimed that Ukraine had no history of “genuine statehood”, that it had been reduced to a “colony with a puppet regime”, and that it was being transformed into a “springboard” for the West to attack Russia. He accused the government in Kyiv of perpetrating “genocide” against the Russian-speaking citizens of eastern Ukraine and claimed that he had been left with no choice but to act. Three days later he began his full-scale assault. When Putin returned to the podium to deliver his state of the nation address in ...

Every morning, I turn on the radio in the vain hope that I might be able to listen to it for more than a few minutes before my five-year-old son walks into the room. Usually, I manage less than a minute before the airwaves fill the room with stories of genocide, rape or murder and I’m forced to turn it off. The same thing happens on the car journey to school. The radio comes on and within seconds I’m lunging for the off button before some barely pubescent popstar can sing in candied-tones, and between orgasmic exhales, about “feeling sexual”. I tell you this not because I want to launch into a pearl-clutching plea to censor the radio – ultimately, as ...