In our age of outrage, identity is a much used but little understood idea. Online and increasingly in the streets of Britain and beyond, people are put in narrow categories of sex, race, age or some other “protected characteristic” that defines us. Identities are either individualised or reduced to exclusive groups – ethno-religious tribes such as Hamas or ethno-nationalist parties like the Sweden Democrats and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France. The irony is that identitarian groups are little more than individuals writ large. They extol the "virtue of nationalism” (in the words of Yoram Hazony, often seen as the founder of the National Conservative movement) and autonomy. But they simultaneously claim entitlement to absolute rights and pit each group ...

Today’s nervously anticipated televised speech by Hezbollah’s leader was touted ahead of time as a potentially decisive – and destructive – moment. Would the Iran-backed militant group open a new front in the Israel-Hamas war? Were we about to see a conflagration across the Middle East? But, ultimately, Hassan Nasrallah promised only more of the same: vague uncertainty. Over the course of his wide-ranging address Nasrallah, 63, alternated between denying advance knowledge of his ally Hamas’s 7 October attack while also praising it; denouncing Israel’s bombing of Gaza while also mocking its forces for having “not been able to make any achievement” after weeks of war; and casting blame on the US. “The United States is totally responsible for the war ...

Earlier this week it was reported that the value of Twitter / X has more than halved since Elon Musk paid $44bn for the company a year ago. That’s not entirely true. Multiply the value of the stock recently distributed to X employees as part of their compensation up to the total value of the company and yes, you get $19bn. What this means, however, is that Twitter would now be worth $25bn less to someone else. To Elon Musk, its use value has increased, as we saw last night. Musk’s ownership of the platform secured him not only a seat among world leaders at the first multinational agreement on AI but a fawning, softball interview with our prime minister, conducted ...

Keir Starmer yesterday (31 October) delivered the most extensive defence yet of his decision not to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. The brewing dissent in Labour since conference ended meant that any change in his position would have been portrayed as a capitulation. As Andrew writes, “in his first big foreign affairs crisis, he would have suffered a kind of humiliation”. Instead Starmer chose to stay his course. His argument rested on the premise that a ceasefire in Gaza was not practical because it “would leave Hamas with the infrastructure and the capability to carry out the sort of attack we saw on 7 October”. Why it took so long for Starmer to explain his position in full when his ...

The SNP has deservedly gained a reputation for playing fast and loose with important information that might in time cause it embarrassment. During the Alex Salmond saga, Nicola Sturgeon was criticised for failing to keep a record of meetings and phone calls with her predecessor. Sturgeon claimed the conversations were a party matter, but although she was eventually cleared of breaching the ministerial code, it was still ruled that these had been government business.  Her administration was accused on several occasions of delaying or withholding official documents from parliamentary inquiries. There have been concerns over missing papers around the ongoing ferries scandal, too. The latest case involves the alleged deletion of WhatsApp messages relating to the Covid-19 pandemic. Sturgeon and other senior government ...

On Tuesday 31 October, Dominic Cummings returned as if from the dead for his usual performance. He was giving evidence on the 15th day of the Covid inquiry into how government decisions were made during the pandemic. This is what he does now, and has done for more than two years – on the BBC, in front of MPs, and on his own Substack: he runs over an increasingly distant past in a bid to restore a long-destroyed reputation. At the Covid inquiry, held in an unremarkable building in Paddington, he faced his least sympathetic interlocutor yet: Hugo Keith KC. The pair presented two models of a man. Cummings was, as ever, unkempt, slumped in his chair in a crumpled white ...

Keir Starmer’s speech on the Middle East today (31 October) followed the most significant internal revolt since he became Labour leader in 2020. More than 60 MPs, including 15 front-benchers, as well as Sadiq Khan, Andy Burnham and the Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar have backed a ceasefire in Gaza in defiance of the leadership’s position.  Starmer, who has supported “humanitarian pauses” in the fighting, said: “While I understand calls for a ceasefire at this stage, I do not believe that it is the correct position now.” He argued that an immediate cessation in hostilities would hand Hamas the opportunity to attack Israel again. “Hamas would be emboldened and would start preparing for future violence immediately,” he said. “It is of course ...

Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is a broad church. This might come as a surprise given the ruthless capture of its operation and messaging by Starmer’s team in recent years, but that’s the line the leadership has now taken in the context of 13 frontbenchers defying collective responsibility over his policy on Gaza by calling for a ceasefire. It is a measure of the dissent that the leadership has acquiesced so easily compared with other occasions when Starmer’s edict has not been carried out to the letter (the invasion of Ukraine, for instance). “It’s right and proper that individual MPs represent their individual constituencies in Westminster,” was how Darren Jones, the shadow chief Treasury secretary, put it. Peter Kyle, a Starmer ...