Labour grandee has waltzed into another publicly funded non-job.

She has a terrible track record when it comes to the oppressed and the victimised.

In the 1970s , a civil-liberties campaign group where she worked as a legal officer allowed the Paedophile Information Exchange (the clue’s in the name) to become an affiliate member.

She allegedly suggested that a pornographic photo or film of a child should not be considered indecent unless it could be shown that the subject had suffered.

Not long before she was handed the envoy job, she was granted a peerage.

Her colleague, Patricia Hewitt , general secretary of the NCCL from 1974 to 1983, at least had the belated decency to say in 2014 that she got it wrong on PIE .

Nicola Sturgeon will not seek re-election as a MSP at next May ’s Holyrood elections.

Her departure seems a good time to consider what she did and the imprint she has left on the recent history and future trajectory of her country.

An introvert with down-to-earth charm, she was and still is among many in the SNP and the wider Scottish public adored, a progressive ally and advocate.

Sturgeon proved it was possible to govern in an entirely different tone of voice from the Tory bombast at Westminster .

Her legacy is as much in what she made visible and normal in Scotland .

For now, Sturgeon’s Instagram followers can see her enjoying the ordinary stuff that most people take for granted’.

Canada ’s Liberal Party selected central banker Mark Carney to lead the country as prime minister.

Julian Zelizer : Carney is the most recent iteration of the World Economic Forum’s standard operating procedure for captured governments.

Zelizer says whenever possible, put bankers in charge of those pesky territorial designations nostalgically known as nation-states.

Klaus Schwab’s globalists are good at rebranding Ukraine , but it's not our fault that we humans can be programmed so easily.

For the jet-set crowd of Davos elites, preserving other people's freedom is of no concern.

War is first and foremost about making money and expanding power.

John Avlon : Donald Trump returned Winston Churchill's bust to the Oval Office .

Avlon says it's not a surprise that Churchill , a champion of Western civilization, doesn't hold much appeal for modern Democrats .

He says Churchill warned of an external threat while Vance was warning of an internal threat of tyranny in Europe .

The U.S. has been a partner with most of Europe from its founding values to individual liberty and individual liberty.

American companies sell lots of products in Europe and vice versa, but as is seen by American trade with China , we don’t have to share values in order to trade.

Europe is becoming a giant police state where insulting politicians, praying at home, sharing memes, reporting facts or calling someone fat can get you arrested or thrown in jail.

Europe 's self-loathing Europe is finding itself willingly—at least from the perspective of the elites—overrun by armies of largely military-aged men from third world dystopias.

The West is purportedly undergoing a “political realignment,” and numerous thinkers from the political right have attempted to reassess the meaning of conservatism.

Terrence Casey's new book on Margaret Thatcher ’s rise during that decade is most welcome and timely.

To learn lessons from Mrs. Thatcher and the “neoliberal era” one could turn to her Downing Street Years, both empirically and autobiographically.

The Winter of Discontent ( 1978/1979 ) created the space in which Thatcher could achieve her historic victory.

Thatcher was not at her personal best during her time as the Leader of Conservative Party in Opposition.

She had to sell a fudge that can be seen in the party’s policy documents, The Right Approach to the Economy.

She restrained the power of the trade unions, freed the City of London with deregulation and the freeing of exchange controls.

Thatcher 's policies were aimed at solving the “British Disease” and reducing trade union power , which were problems of her time.

Conservatives need to address the cultural and social problems of today and not fight the economic problems of the past.

Government and business need each other not just to drive investment but to transform how we deliver services, infrastructure and innovation.

The key to unlocking growth is complex across investment, infrastructure, energy and more, there are a multitude of issues where a new model of engaging with business could unleash Britain ’s full potential.

Traditional model of public-private engagement has been transactional defined by rigid contracts and short-term cost efficiency.

To achieve sustainable growth, we need to shift towards genuine partnership models where the public and private sectors co-invest in solutions.

This means embedding private sector expertise into government transformation programmes, infrastructure projects, and national capability-building.

Labour had no recipe book and few raw ingredients for growth were in place.

With growth being the government’s primary mission, the absence of a growth plan has taken many of us by surprise.

This black hole, rather than the fiscal one left by the Tories , has mattered most.

Labour productivity growth the very foundation for growth in the GDP has been on the wane in the UK since the mid 1960s .

It’s been hovering around zero for most of the last decade .

To all intents and purposes, we are already living in a post-growth world.

We dismantle our net-zero ambitions. We renege on our legal commitment to overseas aid. We hand over the provision of basic services to equity financiers who suppress wages, offshore profits, pollute our environment and undermine quality. We actively welcome investments from industries that systematically damage us. And in the process we wrack up enormous hidden costs. Costs to the climate, costs to our health.

Sir Keir Starmer claims to be haunted by the blockers, checkers, regulators, bloaters.

Cuts on a scale mooted this week by Starmer , of NHS England and 25% in the administrative costs of regulation for businesses, have been achieved only once in modern times.

But nothing Starmer is proposing can come near the bureaucratic explosion planned by his deputy, Angela Rayner .

Such costly upheavals must be the last thing local councils need just now, with about half of councils in England reportedly near to bankruptcy. The superficial appeal of the Musk moment is that by breaking things it leaves room for renewal. That may be. But a civilised democracy subjects it to checks and balances. Dismantling the geography of English local government removes that check and replaces it with Whitehall. All Starmer ’s chainsaw will slash is democracy. - Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist.

Mona Charen rushed to the aid of the Columbia U.S. Hamas activist being deported, with the missive Mahmoud Khalil has rights, dammit.

Khalil is accused of circulating pro-Hamas pamphlets.

Mona ended her diatribe furious about Pres. Trump starting an EO investigation of Perkins Coie law firm.

Donald Trump has issued a blitzkrieg of executive orders in his first week in office.

One of the most pernicious effects of a bully’s intimidation is making victims afraid of being true to themselves.

Cheryl Edwards , a visual artist and curator based in Washington DC , had been working on an exhibition titled Before the Americas .

For undocumented artists who are undocumented, this administration has sought to normalize living in fear.

Some artists now forgo being paid for their work for fear of having their means of remuneration traced.

To protect themselves some artists go “ zero social” by taking down their websites and social media pages.

Arleene Correa Valencia , a formerly undocumented artist living in Napa , California , understands this dread.