Politics

Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.

Thursday

29 Feb 2024

John Major urges Hunt to up defence spending, not cut taxes, in Budget

John Major has called on Chancellor Jeremy Hunt not to cut taxes in his Budget next week – but to spend more on defence instead. The former prime minister said that Russia’s war with Ukraine – as well as rising tensions in the Middle East – meant that it was vital Britain ensured it allocated proper resources to defence, rather than lower the tax burden on Brits. Asked whether defence spending should be Hunt’s priority, Major said: ‘That would be my choice. We face a real difficulty, both with defence and some public services. Usually when defence spending increases, it is because a threat is evident. There is a threat

Lara Prendergast

Plan Bibi: stalemate suits Netanyahu

48 min listen

Welcome to a slightly new format for the Edition podcast! Each week we will be talking about the magazine – as per usual – but trying to give a little more insight into the process behind putting The Spectator to bed each week. On the podcast this week: plan Bibi In the early hours of Friday morning, Benjamin Netanyahu leaked his ‘Day after Hamas’ plan for post-war Gaza. But the plan is not a plan, writes Anshel Pfeffer – it is just a set of vague principles that do not stand up to the slightest scrutiny. Its sole purpose is rather to keep the ministers of Netanyahu’s fragile cabinet together to ensure

Eliot Wilson

The speech that reveals the DUP’s radical shift

The Democratic Unionist Party is nothing if not intransigent. For many years, the DUP provided a masterclass in judging the past, and tying it round the neck of the future. Its founder, Ian Paisley, was best known for uttering the same word three times: ‘Never! Never! Never!’. But now that the party has once again started the hard yards of governing Northern Ireland with Emma Little-Pengelly as deputy first minister, there are signs that the DUP is radically changing. Donaldson has not gone soft on the Union It is still not quite four weeks since the Northern Ireland Executive was appointed after the devolved assembly at Stormont had sat idle

Steerpike

Watch: Penny Mordaunt slaps down Andrew Bridgen

Thursday morning in parliament brings with it Business Questions and the chance for Penny Mordaunt to slap down another opponent from the despatch box. Today though, her stand-out moment came not against her regular SNP opponents but rather a former colleague. Andrew Bridgen, the sage of North West Leicestershire, called for a debate on capital punishment in a not-so-subtle way of obtaining a clip for his vaccine-hating fan-base. He said to Mordaunt: I’ve always opposed capital punishment on the principle that it’s wrong to take a life so it can’t be right for the state to take a life in revenge. Events have caused me to reconsider my position. So,

Julie Bindel

Shame on the Met Police for hiring Wayne Couzens

Three years after the murder of Sarah Everard, the long-awaited Home Office-commissioned Angiolini Inquiry into Wayne Couzens has been published – and it is damning of the Metropolitan Police. Those who turned a blind eye, ignoring the attitudes and actions of the officer, should hang their heads in shame. Former Met Commissioner Cressida Dick’s description of him as a ‘bad apple’ is inappropriate; it would appear that the whole barrel is rotten. The country was shocked to the core when it was revealed that a serving police officer had abducted, raped and murdered 33-year-old Everard, before disposing of her body. To get her into his vehicle, Couzens used his warrant

Kate Andrews

Migration is too high, says party in charge of migration for 14 years

When Rishi Sunak made ‘stopping the boats’ one of his five priorities after entering No. 10, he ensured that immigration (legal and illegal) would become one of the big issues heading into an election. It seemed, for a while, that the government thought the emphasis on migration would work in its favour. It hasn’t exactly turned out that way. The migration crackdown announced by James Cleverly at the end of last year is designed to reduce the headline number of net migrants to the UK, after it was reported that in 2022 that net migration reached a record high of 745,000. The policy instruments announced by the Home Secretary to

Mark Galeotti

Putin’s nuclear doctrine has been revealed

Secret documents have been leaked that reveal Russian scenarios for war games involving simulated nuclear strikes. They shed light on Moscow’s military thinking and its nuclear planning in particular, but ultimately only reinforce one key factor: if nuclear weapons are ever used, it will be a wholly political move by Putin. The impressive 29 documents scooped by the Financial Times date back to the period of 2008 (when Vladimir Putin was technically just prime minister but still effectively in charge) to 2014 (after the sudden worsening in relations with the West following Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity and the annexation of Crimea). Although this means that they are a little dated,

Stephen Daisley

Something the Tories can learn from Canada’s conservatives

When contemplating the scale of the Tories’ expected drubbing in the coming general election, some commentators reach for the example of Canada’s Progressive Conservatives. The 1993 federal election saw the governing centre-right party, which had been in power since 1984, lose all but two of its seats in the House of Commons. It never recovered and became defunct within a decade. The comparison is particularly tempting given one of the factors behind the Progressive Conservatives’ demise was the emergence of a rival right-wing party called Reform. If the fate of the Progressive Conservatives is an object lesson in how even major political parties can die when they lose their way,

Jawad Iqbal

Why is a West End theatre putting on ‘black only’ performances?

Why would the producers of a new West End play think it a good idea to put on select performances for all-black audiences, effectively telling white theatregoers they’re not welcome on those nights? The idea of Black Out nights (as they have become known) amounts to segregation by race and skin colour. Yet this is exactly what will take place when Slave Play, written by American playwright Jeremy O Harris, starts its run at the Noël Coward Theatre this summer. Is he suggesting black people can only feel safe with other black people? Two nights – 17 July and 17 September – have been allocated to all-black audiences to watch

John Oxley

The Tories have no excuse to whine about The Blob

The last few weeks have served as a reminder of the sort of conspiratorial, self-excusing hole the Conservative party could well go down in opposition. Speaking in the United States, Liz Truss blamed her premiership collapsing on the ‘wokenomics’ of the ‘deep state’, giving succour once more to the idea that the Tory party could have done what it wanted, could have governed better, were it not for The Blob. It’s a seductive argument, but a dubious and self-defeating one if the party wants to gain power again. Blaming the levers of government for a lack of change is a poor argument that makes the party weak and pointless When

Ross Clark

The farce of Drax’s wood pellets

When is the government going to stop pretending that chopping down trees in North American forests and shipping them across the Atlantic to burn them in UK power stations is a zero-carbon form of energy? The environmental-friendliness of Drax power station in North Yorkshire has been called into question yet again this week after BBC Panaroma investigation reported that some of the woodchips being burned there have allegedly been sourced from established ‘old growth’ forests in Canada rather than recent plantations. Drax has not commented on those specific allegations, but the investigation has thrown the issue back into the spotlight. How and where the wood is sourced has a dramatic

Jake Wallis Simons

The Rochdale by-election has exposed the worst of British politics

If the by-election in Rochdale, one of the poorest constituencies in the country, is about anything other than Gaza, it is about the Labour party. After all, it is being contested by three former members of the faithful who went, each in his own inimitable way, off the rails. George Galloway, the bookies’ favourite, was booted out of Labour after railing against ‘Tony Blair’s lie machine’ and calling on British troops to disobey orders in Iraq. His subsequent career has burrowed ever deeper into the cesspit of Muslim-adjacent firebrand posturing, expressed in regular appearances on Iranian and Russian state television (and once in the Big Brother House where he pretended

Ben Domenech

Who will replace Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell?

The announcement by Mitch McConnell, Minority Leader of the United States Senate, that he will step down in November came in anticipation that he would be bounced from his role regardless of the outcome of the 2024 election. Either Donald Trump’s victory would be deemed by populists as a chance to remake the Republican party, or Trump’s failure would be laid at the feet of an intransigent establishment that McConnell has come to symbolise, in every way imaginable, deserved or not. McConnell is hated by many, but also respected. He is a man with a significant legacy, borne from the before Trump times, of maintaining a position just to the

Anshel Pfeffer

Permanent stalemate in Gaza suits Netanyahu

Jerusalem After midnight on Thursday is dead-time for the Israeli media. The weekend editions have gone to print (newspapers don’t come out on Shabbat) and the Friday night TV news shows have been pre-recorded. The country’s journalists are yearning for respite from a long week covering the war. Benjamin Netanyahu chose that black hole of news, 2 a.m. last Friday, to leak his ‘Day after Hamas’ plan for post-war Gaza. There was no speech. No briefings. Just a page and a bit, double-spaced, presented to his cabinet for discussion. The plan has not been designed to end the war in Gaza. It is about Netanyahu’s own political survival But the plan

Katy Balls

The Trumpification of the Tory party

Anthony Scaramucci, Donald Trump’s former director of communications, has a phrase that sums up his old boss’s effect on political debate: ‘the universe bends towards him’. In the US, discussion about this year’s election is all about Trump. But he is exerting the same gravitational pull in Britain, both on the Tories as they face opposition, and Labour as it mulls the likely dilemmas of government. Trump is resentful of those who have been ‘nasty’ about him: this includes nearly everyone in the Labour party Theresa May offers a case study in how not to deal with Trump. She hoped to befriend him and acquire some kind of post-Brexit trade

Wednesday

28 Feb 2024

Steerpike

Watch: Lord Forsyth warns of foreign states owning British newspapers

All eyes were on the House of Lords this afternoon where it is the second reading of the Media Bill. Lord Forsyth, the former Scotland Secretary, has tabled what is known as a ‘motion to regret’ – a device which allows peers to express their opposition to legislation without stopping it. Forsyth’s ire had been sparked by the failure of the Bill to include a motion banning the ownership and control by foreign governments of British newspapers. It comes as the Emirati government is seeking to buy both the Daily Telegraph and The Spectator, via an investment vehicle called Redbird IMI. In his speech this afternoon, Forsyth criticised those who suggested that the

Oscar Edmondson

We need to talk about Truss

15 min listen

Liz Truss continues to haunt Rishi Sunak. Labour leader Keir Starmer took aim at her recent exploits at CPAC in the US during prime minister’s questions today. Starmer called on the prime minister to remove the whip after Truss claimed that her premiership was sabotaged by the ‘deep state’. What’s Truss up to this time? Also on the podcast, chancellor Jeremy Hunt will deliver his budget next week. We expect that he will have made his final decision on the March 6th budget by the end of the week. What do we know so far? Oscar Edmondson speaks to Katy Balls and Kate Andrews. Produced by Oscar Edmondson.

Graham Watts

What drives Ukraine’s fighting spirit?

Judging by the welcome uplift in commentary around the second anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the popular western view appears to be that the war began on 24 February 2022. However, that aggression – the largest incursion by one European country on another since the Second World War – was just an explosive escalation of a war that had started ten years ago. Throughout those years, Kyiv’s Mykhailivska Square has featured rows of Russian military vehicles captured during the war in Donbas. The population of Ukraine is less than a quarter of Russia’s but despite this disparity in size the country has kept the Russian bear at bay

Lloyd Evans

Who’s more embarrassing: Corbyn or Truss?

Sir Keir Starmer’s advisers have very short memories. At PMQs, the Labour leader mocked Liz Truss for visiting America to ‘flog a new book in search of fame and wealth’. He jeered at her suggestion that ‘the deep state’ had sabotaged her career, and he put it to Rishi Sunak that the Tories have become ‘the political wing of the Flat Earth Society.’ Sir Keir forgets that his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, is far more embarrassing than Liz Truss whose premiership was over in less time than it takes to eat a toffee apple. Corbyn was Labour leader for four years and Sir Keir was one of his favoured lieutenants. Rishi

Isabel Hardman

PMQs: Starmer and Sunak argue over who has the bigger racism problem

Today’s Prime Minister’s Questions was less about Rishi Sunak and more about the Tories around him. Keir Starmer opened his attack by describing the Conservatives as ‘the political wing of the flat earth society’. He said that ‘Tory MPs spent last week claiming that Britain is run by a shadowy cabal made up of activists, the deep state and most chillingly of all, the Financial Times’. Starmer’s second question referenced Liz Truss directly, but the first question was clearly designed to take in Lee Anderson’s comments about Sadiq Khan handing control of London to Islamists. His argument on both was that the Tories weren’t serious about governing any more, and

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