Either Labour are about to demolish the SNP’s long Scottish hegemony at this general election, or the nationalists will remain the largest party. Both outcomes cannot be true. Both have been predicted by recent polls. At the weekend, an MRP poll by Survation suggested the SNP would win 37 of the 59 Westminster seats on 4 July, putting them comfortably ahead of Scottish Labour and dealing a severe blow to Anas Sarwar’s hopes of becoming first minister in 2026. However, the eight other polls by seven different companies taken since the election campaign began, using the uniform national swing (UNS) model, have more commonly put Labour in front.  The party certainly believes it is winning, with sources suggesting this week that it ...

The dissolution of Benjamin Netanyahu’s officially sanctioned War Cabinet on Monday (17 June) has felt inevitable since the resignation of his political rival Benny Gantz earlier this month. This does not mean that the long-anticipated collapse of Netanyahu’s government has finally arrived, or at least not just yet. But it does demonstrate the extent of distrust and cynicism at the height of Israeli politics – and the delicate nature of Netanyahu’s faltering grip on power.  Despite the absence of Gantz and fellow National Unity MP Gadi Eisenkot, the emergency unity government, formed after Hamas’s 7 October attack, is still in place. It is believed that Bibi will replace the War Cabinet with an informal advisory forum to consist of Netanyahu, Defence ...

While hosting the G7 summit last week, Giorgia Meloni confirmed one key tenet of her foreign policy platform: her strong support for Ukraine. It is not exactly a position that she tries to hide or downplay, either to a foreign or domestic audience. This is despite the fact that support for Ukraine is lukewarm in Italy, compared to other European countries. Whether you are looking at support for military assistance, sanctions, attribution of responsibility, or the desired outcome of any peace negotiations, it is similar. Italians tend to be less pro-Ukraine than other large European countries. In Italian politics, there are also no shortage of options for those who are unhappy with this. Matteo Salvini and Giuseppe Conte in particular have ...

The pro-EU campaign group Best for Britain yesterday published its guide for how to vote tactically to have the best chance of ousting the Tories in any given constituency. What exactly tactical voting might mean for the fate of the Conservative Party is worth considering at this stage of the campaign – postal votes land on doorsteps today, and the deadline to register to vote is coming up fast (11.59 tonight, Tuesday 18 June). With the latest polls showing the gap between the Conservatives and Labour widening rather than narrowing as expected (why this narrowing without much evidence to support it was expected is a question for another day), it’s not as though tactical voting will play a defining role ...

Voting has begun in the 2024 general election. This isn’t a piece from the future: postal ballots started landing on doormats last week. Research suggests that most voters return them within 48 hours (and around 20 per cent use this method). The Conservatives’ problem isn’t just that polls suggest they will lose the election; it’s that they show they are losing it.  For the Tories, 4 July will mark the end of a long electoral advance. They have increased their share of the vote at every general election since 2010 (yes, including under Theresa May in 2017). But this achievement – going from 36.1 per cent to 43.6 per cent – has depended as much on fear as on hope.  At the ...

Welcome to the first Gen Z election. Because, whatever else 2024 might be said to symbolise, for many of those (like me) born between 1997 and 2012 it is a moment of maturity. Eight million of us are now eligible to vote: Gen Z makes up 15 per cent of the voting population. We enter the political arena freighted with bizarre and contradictory stereotypes. Can our generation be living through an unprecedented period of sexual drought, and also represent a new species of bed-hopping polyamorists, kinked to the gills? The less said about our chronic laziness or teetotal neuroticism the better. But in a few weeks, rather than being defined by moral panic or media slander, we’ll be voting en ...

The European Championships are upon us. The travel bans have been issued, the plastic chairs have been bolted down, the hot takes about nationalist semantics are in the X drafts. Spirits among some groups of fans are high: some Munich bars reportedly ran out of beer earlier this week after Scottish supporters descended on the city. And yet, south of the border, the mood around the tournament feels a long way from what it was before the 2021 Euros, or even the 2018 World Cup. For a start, distracting your more politically engaged fan is a general election campaign that is inching its way to a predictable, inevitable conclusion. But, occupying the rest of their eyeline, another attempt at footballing ...

It is telling that the most radical bit of the housing section in Labour's manifesto is pitched as quietly conservative. “Under the Conservatives, greenbelt land is regularly released for development but haphazardly and often for speculative housebuilding,” the document notes. Labour, apparently, would do the same but better, prioritising “grey belt” (essentially: bits of green belt that actually suck, of which there are many), and introducing “golden rules, to ensure development benefits communities and nature”. What those rules are or how they’d work is unclear – but it shows a commitment to reframing the debate, to make it possible to release more land for housing, while maintaining protections for genuinely nice bits of greenery (the often misleading label “green belt” has ...