Hunt far removed from political rude health with latest gaffes
Few Conservative Party conferences pass without an unscheduled outbreak of frankness from someone who is paid to know better. In the aftermath, the Prime Minister is usually to be found in a...
View ArticleHow Brown's welfare warning could play into SNP hands
By now, Gordon Brown must have staged more interventions than a celebrity psychiatrist. Whether the patients are responsive is, obviously, another matter. The man with the cure for whatever ails you...
View ArticleBake Off presents us with a kinder, better Britain. Pity it's a fiction
FOR the avoidance of doubt, let’s be clear: I don’t bake. I’m an expert onlooker. My unsought technical advice is, I think, second to none. I can pronounce the word “scone” as God intended. But I am...
View ArticleU-turn traps McDonnell in Osborne's austerity cul de sac
Anyone can make a mistake. Even politicians have a right to change their minds. It helps, though, if you reserve your errors for trivial matters. It helps a bit more, when the volte face becomes...
View ArticleHere is why the SNP power play will be in it for the long haul
In 1880, in the wake of the Midlothian campaign, the Liberals won 70.1 per cent of the vote and 52 of Scotland’s 58 parliamentary seats. In those days, it was no more than the party expected.
View ArticleThe right to choose is too important to be swept under the constitutional carpet
NO sooner was the general election out of the way than it became the Power They All Forgot. If it seemed the parties were ignoring abortion in their arguments over further devolution it was because,...
View ArticleThe hypocrisy in world-class grovelling to a brutal regime
Somewhere in darkest Cheltenham, confusion must surely reign. You might have thought the people in the GCHQ “Doughnut” would be used to handling mixed signals, but this is a tricky week for the...
View ArticleHow Cameron is seeking to divide and conquer
Strangely, I don’t hear many of the usual defenders of the Union exulting over English votes for English laws. People who generally have plenty to say have fallen silent. The only sound is the gentle...
View ArticleGeorge Osborne presides over another shambles
The word omnishambles, you might remember, was chosen by the Oxford English Dictionary as its Word of the Year in 2012. It is defined online as “a situation that has been comprehensively mismanaged,...
View ArticleIan Bell: Tackling poverty and inequality? Fairness matters more than ever
When Nicola Sturgeon delivered her inaugural speech as leader of the Scottish National Party a year ago, she made a promise. She said: “Tackling poverty and inequality – and ?improving opportunity for...
View ArticleIt only cost $7bn to be president in the Land of the Free
At the time of writing, there are 19 men and two women at large in the United States who think they could and should be president. Mostly they believe this because, thus far, they have persuaded their...
View ArticleCameron has no answers to the £61 billion defence question
When Britain’s political leaders decide to make an issue of defence, they sometimes boast that the United Kingdom remains the world’s fifth biggest military power. Whether you find the claim...
View ArticleDoctors, the NHS and a headache for Jeremy Hunt's prescription
On Thursday, the British Medical Association began to send out strike ballots to England’s 45,000 junior doctors. If you believe one online survey, 71.4 per cent of them would rather move abroad, take...
View ArticleIan Bell: Let's end the war on drugs by making them legal
IT could be a pub quiz question. What do Armenia and Argentina have in common? The Czech Republic and Chile? Paraguay and Poland? The answer isn’t football. Each has decided, in some fashion, that if...
View ArticleIan Bell: I look at Cameron's woeful EU tactics and despair
With the battle lines drawn, an old warhorse of a quotation can probably be trotted out. To paraphrase the apocryphal words of the Duke of Wellington, I don’t know what effect David Cameron will have...
View ArticleYou don't need a degree to know class matters when it comes to university access
There’s a chance that universities, like most things, have changed a bit since I was bluffing my way around Edinburgh’s George Square. It’s not clear that students work harder now, but there seems to...
View ArticleIan Bell: Doping isn't natural – but nor is sport
EVERY now and then the wonderful world of sport awakens to the astounding truth that people, being people, given half a chance, a few inducements and decent odds against being caught, will cheat.
View ArticleIan Bell: tricky home truths we have to tackle to defeat Islamic State
Vladimir Putin is probably right. You won’t often find those words in a sentence, but with 224 passengers of an A321 flight dead in Sinai, the Russian president’s words carry a certain authority when...
View ArticleIan Bell: Bombing doesn't work. Show me IS crumbling and I might think again
DRUMBEATS are no longer in vogue, but you can catch their echo even in a digital world. They say that a new era began in Paris on November 13, that Francois Hollande is right, that the world is at...
View ArticleIan Bell: Osborne's plans to eradicate budget deficit dissolve into puddle of...
War is the great distraction. Right or wrong, foolish or wise, it suspends all the usual political and economic rules. Suddenly a chancellor who has spent five and a half years telling us “there is no...
View ArticleThis moment is far too important for weary Left-Right Labour
If the bookies are right, Jeremy Corbyn is the political equivalent of a nice slice of wholemeal, browning fast. He’s toast. Smart money, supposedly superior to any opinion poll, says a Labour leader...
View ArticleIan Bell: Do the right thing, Prime Minister – don't bomb Syria
IN dark times, begin by giving the Prime Minister a bit of credit. Unlike a certain predecessor, David Cameron has accepted that there needs to be an honest, public argument over the case for an...
View ArticleIan Bell: a war that will leave us with a hellish mess
War, then. Another war. Still another war begun because the last guaranteed-conclusive war produced consequences that made one more shot in the dark inevitable. Intellectual and strategic failure is...
View ArticleWhat's the problem with city council and marking the Easter Rising?
Glasgow City Council has a keen sense, it seems, of what is or might be controversial. When the rest of us imagine that a handful of words to mark a long-distant historical event could never be more...
View ArticleIan Bell: The dismantling of Hilary Benn's empty war rhetoric
IT isn’t often that a rousing speech on socialist internationalism is rewarded with a full transcript in the Spectator. In fact, it never happens. The Tory Party’s newsletter is funny like that.
View ArticleIan Bell: heavy price paid for failing to meet climate change costs
If modern lives were measured in unprecedented weather events, we would all be 200 years old. Defences against floods that were supposed to happen every other century are being overtopped in the space...
View ArticleOne of Scotland's finest: read 12 of Ian Bell's best columns
Award-winning Herald and Sunday Herald columnist Ian Bell has died at the age of 59.
View ArticleThe voice that was a guide to our nation. Ian Bell in his own words.
Hilary Benn's speech
View ArticlePaying a heavy price for failing to meet the cost of climate change
If modern lives were measured in unprecedented weather events, we would all be 200 years old. Defences against floods that were supposed to happen every other century are being overtopped in the space...
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