Politics

When you’re interviewing an expert, it never hurts to come prepared. But when Al Jazeera journalist Jane Dutton quizzed Douglas Murray on the conflict in the Middle East, the unsuspecting interviewer quickly became the interviewee in a rather humiliating twist… ‘You’ve got to inform your viewers of the facts, and you just misled them,’ Murray told Dutton during a heated debate about the Israel-Gaza conflict. First discussing the definition of genocide, the Al Jazeera reporter quickly moved on to state that there was an illegal occupation of Gaza by Israel, adding that ‘Israel is internationally recognised as an occupying state’. ‘No, no, it’s not at all. That’s your view,’ Murray

Scotland’s First Minister Humza Yousaf has plenty to worry about right now with the imminent implementation of his much-criticised Hate Crime crackdown. But there is mounting anxiety within the SNP about something else: the progress, or lack of it, of the police probe into the party’s finances. Activists always put two and two together and come up with Unionist Perfidy It is nearly a year now since Nicola Sturgeon’s home was raided by police, as part of Operation Branchform, their investigation into what happened to £660,000 of donations for a referendum campaign that never took place. The nation was agog last April as stony-faced officers descended on the former first minister’s home

What should we do when there’s no cell space left in our disordered jails? The prison population figures published yesterday show a small drop compared to last week, with nearly 87,900 currently incarcerated. There’s precious little room for manoeuvre. We are perilously close to a time I can remember back in the mid-90s when governors refused to take convicted prisoners from court because there was no cell space left in their establishments. While numbers at the top fluctuate week by week, the trend only ever goes up, driven by courts getting rid of their backlogs and our tendency to sentence more offenders to longer spells in custody that only make

Leo Varadkar, who resigned yesterday, has certainly earned his place in the history of Anglo-Irish relations as one of the most consequential taoiseachs of all time. His role in Anglo-Irish relations was defined by Brexit, and Ireland’s remarkable role in shaping its outcome. The marked contrast with John Bruton – a previous Fine Gael taoiseach of the 1990s, who died last month – could not be greater. Bruton was also a militant Europhile, but he rarely sought to fan the flames of Anglophobia in the Irish Republic. Varadkar, by contrast, sought to ride that tiger relentlessly.  The UK caved to the EU/Irish demands. Dublin could hardly believe it Varadkar became taoiseach just as the

Levelling up the housing market, it is fair to say, is not quite going according to plan. Rents in the year to February, the Office for National Statistics (ONS), reveals today increased by 9 per cent – the largest rise since the ONS started its rental price index. In some cases, tenants have been complaining of far steeper increases as landlords seek to recover rising mortgage costs. They have been able to get away with jacking up rents because the withdrawal of many landlords from the market has led to a fall in properties available to rent. Over the past year, according to the National Residential Landlords Association (NRLA), 21