Shona Craven

1 month ago | thenational.scot | Shona Craven

A casual listener to Keir Starmer’s speech yesterday morning might have thought he’d had a lightbulb moment over the weekend. Perhaps he had reassessed his party’s priorities and decided to stop dancing to the Reform UK tune. Alas, no. The chapter to which he was referring was 2019-23, when – under the Conservative government that had steered through Brexit – net migration quadrupled. Take back control? Hardly, says Starmer. The people who deployed that slogan did nothing of the sort.

1 month ago | thenational.scot | Shona Craven

YOU know discussions with the European Union aren’t going to plan when the UK Government tetchily declares that it is “not providing a running commentary” on those discussions. It’s hardly reassuring to be told that the UK Government will “always act in the national interest to secure the best outcomes for the UK”. What else would it be trying to do – deliberately screw us all over?

2 months ago | thenational.scot | Shona Craven

Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing details disturbing allegations. Photograph: Sophie Fergi/Netflix IT’S been 16 years since the US reality show Toddlers & Tiaras was first broadcast, to the grim fascination of viewers around the globe. It pulled back the curtain on child beauty pageants in which infants paraded around on stage in full make-up and few clothes.

2 months ago | thenational.scot | Shona Craven

ONE of my favourite free activities in London is eavesdropping – although the ear-blasting volume at which so many people speak makes me question if it qualifies as such. On the edge of Parliament Square on Saturday, I was trying to find a phone signal when I overheard two strangers – a young English man and a middle-aged American woman – discussing the Supreme Court judgment, and the women who had fought for it. It was unfathomable, they agreed.

2 months ago | thenational.scot | Shona Craven

Tomorrow’s judgment should be followed by a period of calm reflection and policy problem-solving (Image: PA) IT’S been nearly eight years since I first wrote in these pages about the gradual erasure of “woman” as a sex category, and the dangerous consequences of that erasure. Now, after years of legal wrangling, we are finally to learn what the terms “woman” and “man” mean for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010.