Over the Christmas week, CapX is republishing its favourite pieces from the past year. You can find the full list here. History seldom repeats itself, but it often moves elliptically, creating situations strongly analogous to past experiences. Today we are witnessing such a moment. The impotent and obsolescent European Union is going through death throes […]
It’s another seismic non-event in British broadcasting. With the publication today of the government’s White Paper on the future of the BBC, headline writers are dusting off all the classic clichés – “shake-up”, “government crackdown” – to dramatise the drab reality that the most sclerotic institution in Britain since the demise of British Rail has […]
“Historic victory” was the BBC’s headline for the SNP performance in the Scottish elections, a mantra constantly repeated on-air by its acolytes. Er… What kind of historic victory do they mean? Oh, right, one where the nationalists progressed from 69 MSPs and an overall majority at the last election to 63 MSPs and minority government […]
If mention of the Scottish elections being held this Thursday sends you to sleep with excitement then you accurately reflect the sentiments of the Holyrood electorate. No election north of the Border has previously been conducted in so apathetic a climate. Election posters are virtually non-existent, with rows of blank windows proclaiming a contest to […]
Here is a question it would have seemed incredible to pose as recently as five years ago: are the liberal elites on the wrong side of history? Are they about to succumb to that favourite feature of university examination papers “a historical watershed”? Consider the accumulating evidence. Last weekend, in the first round of the […]
Sanctimony has always been a key ingredient of Scottish politics, second only to self-interest. It has a long pedigree, dating back to John Knox and his godly Reformers, down through the Covenanters, Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign of tub-thumping self-righteousness and the temperance movement that defeated Winston Churchill for the parliamentary seat of Dundee, to the pro-devolution […]
Yesterday’s referendum in the Netherlands, in which a sweeping majority of 61 per cent of voters rejected the proposed EU-Ukraine association agreement, dealt yet another blow to the imploding European project. The plebiscite was generally viewed as a vote on the credibility of the EU, for which the outcome is a further humiliation in the […]
In politics, conventional wisdom has a shelf life as fragile as that embodied in the axiom that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. In the context of the Donald Trump phenomenon, however, the process has become accelerated so that Sunday’s conventional wisdom looks like egg-on-face dumb stupidity by Friday. The experience of […]
The climax of every post-primary victory speech by Hillary Clinton is a passionate appeal to supporters to “secure the Supreme Court for progress for a generation” – meaning they must ensure the appointment of a liberal judge to replace the late Antonin Scalia. Yet now that Barack Obama has nominated Merrick Garland, Clinton refuses to […]
The current tactic of the Remain camp in the referendum campaign appears to be to generate one major menace every 24 hours. Last Saturday David Cameron, launching the scare du jour, targeted the farming community with the threat it would lose £300m if Britain left the EU. “If we left this single market and, as […]
Tomorrow the Supreme Court will begin hearing a Judicial Review challenging the Scottish government’s scheme to impose a ‘Named Person’ as state guardian of every child in Scotland, with authority legally superseding that of parents. There is no comparable intrusion into family life in any other Western country. Two previous hearings in Scotland’s Court of […]
The most striking aspect of the rise of Donald Trump is its rebuttal of the universally accepted axiom that it could not happen. Just months ago the conventional wisdom every Monday was that he would crash and burn by Thursday. Then, as the opinion polls mysteriously moved in his favour, his political demise was postponed […]
With apologies to Robert Browning I ladled out syrup to Boris and he Said “Golly,” Gove quibbled, we quarrelled all three. “No deal!” said the mayor with a cavalier wave, As he mounted the saddle and left me to save This mad sceptic isle from a leap in the dark (A vote-winning phrase that I […]
There is a new dimension emerging in the EU referendum. It is arguable that the biggest single issue now is no longer sovereignty, nor immigration, nor the economic arguments, though all of these remain important. It is the dawning awareness of what an appalling insult David Cameron’s sham negotiations are to the intelligence of the […]
So, after Hillary Clinton won Iowa by a hairsbreadth margin of 0.3 per cent and was trounced in New Hampshire by 22 per cent, she must be trailing in the number of delegates crucial to securing nomination at the Democratic convention, right? Wrong. Hillary Clinton garnered the same number of delegates in New Hampshire – […]
On the face of it, the pollsters and commentators called New Hampshire accurately. They said Trump would win and he did. They forecast Hillary Clinton would take a beating and that happened too. But the underlying reality, in a situation that it is no exaggeration to describe as revolutionary, is that the American electorate is […]
A report from Barclays on the consequences of Brexit claims British departure would be more disastrous for the EU than for the UK. It also explodes the myth that Brexit would lead to Scottish independence, concluding that such would be the disintegrating effect of Brexit on the EU that Britain would be seen as a […]
History seldom repeats itself, but it often moves elliptically, creating situations strongly analogous to past experiences. Today we are witnessing such a moment. The impotent and obsolescent European Union is going through death throes strikingly similar to the last years of the Soviet Union. The USSR withered from the periphery inwards. So it is with […]
With less than four months to go until the Scottish parliamentary elections it is time to take stock of the political situation north of the Border. The Scottish scene is not easy to interpret, but it is important to try to analyse the prospects for the Union without succumbing to either exaggerated optimism or pessimism. […]
America is belatedly waking up to the debilitating effects of the worm that is burrowing into her soul. Intolerant scenes of intimidation this Autumn at US universities, including UCLA, Wesleyan, Yale and, most notoriously, Missouri where students incited by academics combined to prevent free speech on campus have finally alerted Americans to the erosion of […]
