These are tricky times to be a Scottish Conservative. To be fair, that’s not an unusual situation. But 2025 would seem to present a particularly thorny challenge. There are a good few reasons for this. One can be seen in the relative invisibility of the party over recent months. This is not due to a lack of effort on the part of its new leader Russell Findlay. He is an able parliamentary performer, an energetic campaigner, and makes a robust and consistent argument for “common sense” conservatism, albeit with many of the details yet to be filled in. But that is not enough. Findlay’s problem is that there is only room for so many narratives in politics at once. During the 2000s, ...

On the evening of the 2019 general election, as it became clear that Boris Johnson had triumphed, Nigel Farage declared: “This victory for Boris was hugely helped by us and is far better than the Marxist Corbyn and a second referendum”. The description used of Corbyn was a revealing one. Though the former Labour leader is a far less obviously Marxist figure than John McDonnell (once confessing that he had not read “as much of Marx as I should have done”), Farage was happy to place him in this category for political purposes. It signified that his principal objection to Corbyn was his hostility to capitalism. Five years on, Farage is playing a rather different tune. In an interview with PoliticsJOE this week, the Reform leader ...

In 2016 there was a Trump Bump: a boost for left- and right-wing media from US audiences either repelled or enraptured by their new president. This time it’s a Trump Jump, with media owners vaulting over each other to win favour in the run-up to the inauguration. (I was going to say Trump Hump, which while perhaps more accurate just sounds a bit gross.) A stream of the biggest players in US media has made a festive-season pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago bearing gifts. Billionaire Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s owner and publisher of the Washington Post, brought offerings including a $1m donation to the inauguration fund, another $1m in-kind contribution and a new Amazon documentary about Melania Trump made by Brett Ratner, who hasn’t ...

What is Labour’s biggest headache this week? You might think the answer is the world’s richest man taking digital potshots at Keir Starmer. But there’s an alternative contender: the bond markets. Yesterday’s debt auction saw the government pay interest of 5.2 per cent on 30-year bonds – the highest level since May 1998. That reflects a number of factors: stubbornly high inflation (which has slowed interest rate cuts), weak UK economic growth, and anxieties over a second Donald Trump presidency. The primary cause is less important than the effect: higher debt interest costs (which already stood at 3.9 per cent of GDP). The more Rachel Reeves spends on servicing government borrowing the less she has for everything else. That’s a serious problem ...

At Reform's East England Conference on Saturday, held at Chelmsford City Racecourse, Nigel Farage considered the growing support for right-wing politics among young men: “Something big is going on” he said, “we're seeing it in France... Italy... [a little bit] in Germany” and, of course, in the United States: “Who would have thought that Trump would have got 44% of the under 30 vote." (Exit polls has this figure closer to 43%.) This youth swell, he concluded, seemed to be evident “today, here in Chelmsford” too. Pause. Citation needed here. Is any of this true? First, Reform's weakest demographic in Britain is young people. Recently Zia Yusuf, Reform's chairman, appeared to reveal via some screenshots that young members (under 25s) accounted for only ...

Elon Musk has had a busy fortnight. On 20 December 2024, he posted on X: “Only the AfD can save Germany.” His endorsement of the Alternative for Germany was accompanied by an all-out conspiratorial monologue from 24-year-old Naomi Seibt, the German hard-right darling often caricatured as “anti-Greta”. A few days later, he even invited the AfD’s co-leader Alice Weidel to appear as a guest on a Space on X. What began as another questionable shift by Musk towards European politics before Christmas has now escalated dramatically. He unleashed an all-out tirade against the Labour government on X, leaping upon the grooming gangs scandal, demanding an immediate election, calling for Jess Phillips to be imprisoned and insisting that Nigel Farage be removed ...

Labour starts 2025 as that rare thing: a stable centre-left government. Look elsewhere: the US Democrats have been routed and progressives in Germany, Canada and Australia are facing defeat this year. Why, then, does Keir Starmer’s administration feel precarious? In part because of this global Great Moving Right Show – and the belief that the UK will be the next domino to fall. For the past month, Westminster has been absorbed by the notion that Elon Musk will make Nigel Farage prime minister (a theory that has not aged well). A hyperactive media has yet to adjust to the reality of a government with a three-figure majority – a degree of parliamentary strength not seen since Tony Blair two decades ago. But ...

It’s a Friday in early January and someone on 4chan has invented a new philosophical doctrine: “esoteric Kantianism”. “You must not take Kant’s words at face value,” the anonymous user warns – readers who do so will only take away shallow insights about the half-blind “normie mind”. “You must read between the lines.” A reading revolution is taking place on this notorious message board, most famous for alt-right memes, anything-goes chatter, and large-scale coordinated pranks (several hoax bomb threats organised by the site have led to arrests and mass evacuations). Users operate under total anonymity and are subject to bare-bones moderation. Most of the ideological avenues offered in /pol/, its politics forum, would leave you estranged from polite society and ...