Politics

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

Tuesday

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

The middle-class obsession with the miners’ strike

The miners’ strike has struck again. It’s the fortieth anniversary of the protracted dispute of 1984-85, which means that you have to be about my age (55) to have had anything approaching an adult understanding of it at the time. The same old footage, the same old talking points, the same old grievances, excuses and myths regurgitated yet again As you get older, and time speeds up to a quite ridiculous and frankly unacceptable degree, anniversaries start to whip by like stations on a non-stopping train. It only feels like ten minutes since the thirtieth anniversary of the strikes, and now we have to go through the whole thing all

Monday

Steerpike Steerpike

Labour loses control of the credit card

After four straight election defeats, Labour are desperately keen to prove that the party has changed. Gone – supposedly – are the bad old days of tax and spend. Fiscal restraint is now the order of the day. The £28 billion in green spending has been unceremoniously axed; a commitment to restore the bankers’ bonus cap duly binned too. No more will ‘uncontrolled spending’ be synonymous with Keir Starmer’s party. So it must be to the chagrin of Labour HQ then that not all their frontbenchers appear to have got the memo about the importance of being trusted with the country’s credit card. For Steerpike has been told by one

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Linsday Hoyle has wound up the SNP again

Will Lindsay Hoyle really last as Speaker? Today he managed to enrage the SNP once again by refusing the party’s application for an emergency debate. The plan had been to use this SO24 debate, as it is known, to refresh the argument that the SNP couldn’t put to a vote last week about a ceasefire in Gaza. SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn raised this in a point of order this afternoon. He said: Mr Speaker, you apologised to the SNP and indeed you apologised to this House. You said: “I made a mistake, we do make mistakes and I own up to mine. We can have an SO24 to get

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Are pollsters underestimating Joe Biden?

31 min listen

Freddy Gray speaks to James Kanagasooriam who is the chief research officer at Focal Data about the state of the polls. They discuss why vaccines have become a polarising topic for this election; why bookmakers might be underestimating Joe Biden and the importance of the cost of living.

Andrew Tettenborn

The Church of England should stop distracting itself with ‘racial justice’

Churches are emptier than ever since Covid. Fewer clergy have more and more parishes to look after; the buildings themselves are falling down, with little money available to repair them. In the face of these existential problems, what high-profile subject was discussed over the weekend by the General Synod of the Church of England? Encouraging more worshippers, perhaps, or possibly improving finances? Not quite. You’ve probably guessed the answer: racial justice.  The Synod ran what can best be described as a consciousness-raising session to cheer on the work of the Archbishops’ racial justice commission. It’s aim, it seems, is to push race towards the top of the ecclesiastical agenda. St Paul would

John Oxley

Is there a house-building cartel?

The Competition and Markets Authority report on the housing sector should be a boost to the Yimby policy machine. It expressed grave concerns about the housing market operating like a cartel, and said that much of this was enabled by the current planning system.  The CMA was tasked with looking at the housing market a year ago, because targets are consistently missed, prices are consistently rising, and there are allegations that tactics such as ‘land banking’ are used to drive up profits. The result was a strong indictment of the planning system as it currently stands.  The report found that under-staffed planning departments, combined with a veto-heavy system, made getting

Ross Clark Ross Clark

John Kerry has unwittingly exposed the climate change wheeze

Here’s a good wheeze: prod every last inch of your own country, open the taps and become the world’s largest producer of fossil fuels. Then, when other countries start to try to develop their own resources, tell them they mustn’t, for the good of the planet. In other words, make them all dependent on you. That is pretty well what John Kerry, the outgoing US special envoy on climate change, suggested on the BBC’s Today programme this morning.  The US is shamelessly using climate change to promote its own industries ‘We do need gas to keep our economies moving but we don’t need to open a whole raft of new

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Ageing well: becoming a world leader in tackling dementia and Alzheimer’s

46 min listen

With cases of neurodegenerative conditions rising in the UK, it’s crucial to re-examine how we tackle these diseases. The Spectator’s assistant editor Isabel Hardman speaks to Debbie Abrahams MP (co-chair of the Dementia APPG), Dr Emily Pegg (associate vice president at Eli Lilly), Dr Susan Kohlhaas (executive director at Alzheimer’s Research), and Professor Giovanna Mallucci (principal investigator at the Cambridge Institute of Science). Eli Lilly and Company has provided sponsorship funding to support this event, and has had no influence over the content of the event or selection of speakers

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Lee Anderson doubles down in Islamist row

Rishi Sunak withdrew the whip from Lee Anderson on Saturday over his claim that Sadiq Khan had ‘given our capital away’ to Islamists, who he referred to as Khan’s ‘mates’. Two days on, the row is still dominating the media, with the BBC running a live blog on the issue. This morning, the Prime Minister used an interview with BBC Radio York to address Anderson’s comments directly for the first time. Sunak repeated three times that the comments were ‘not acceptable, they were wrong – and that’s why he had the whip suspended’. The main political story has moved from the harassment of MPs over the Gaza ceasefire vote Given

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Chris Bryant’s parliamentary hypocrisy

It’s D-day for Lindsay Hoyle as he battles to save his job. The Speaker of the House got into hot water with the SNP last Wednesday after kiboshing their attempts to force Labour into a bind on a Gaza ceasefire. Stephen Flynn, the nationalists’ Westminster leader, is now pushing for Hoyle to today grant a fresh vote on the Middle East crisis. Labour are, understandably, less keen on the idea, with the Starmer army keen to brush over the negotiating tactics they used with the Speaker last week. So it must have been to their chagrin then that Chris Byrant popped up on Channel 4 News last night to gleefully spill

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Have the Tories got ‘Islamophobic tendencies’?

11 min listen

Conservatives are divided over Lee Anderson’s suspension, with some believing that if he apologises for comments made about Sadiq Khan, he should be allowed to return. This has sparked new concerns about the Tory party having a problem with Islamophobia, worsened by Liz Truss appearing at an event with Steve Bannon who has also been accused of making Islamophobic comments. How can Rishi Sunak squash these accusations? Should Truss also lose the whip? Cindy Yu speaks to James Heale and Katy Balls. 

Steerpike Steerpike

Angela Rayner facing questions over council house sale

A difficult Monday morning for Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner. The right-on left-winger is facing some tricky questions today after Lord Ashcroft did some digging into her background for his latest book Red Queen? As part of his Rayner biography, the former Tory peer published documents which showed that in January 2006 the Ashton-under-Lyne MP bought her council house in Vicarage Road, Stockport, with a £26,000 discount under Margaret Thatcher’s right-to-buy scheme. She was registered on the electoral roll there from 2005 to March 2015. In 2010 she married Mark Rayner – but, confusingly, they were listed at different addresses for the next five years: she gave her address as

Matthew Lynn

Javier Milei’s Argentine revolution seems to be working

The currency would collapse. Output would go into freefall. Unemployment would soar, and the IMF would be back in charge quicker than you could say ‘chainsaw’. When Argentina voted into power its libertarian new president Javier Milei there were predictions that his radical free market reforms would quickly plunge the country into chaos. But hold on. In fact, it is not quite going according to the script – instead there are signs that Milei’s harsh medicine might be working.  The Hayek-quoting Milei represents a decisive break from a century of big-state Argentinian politics that turned what used to be one of the world’s richest countries into a synonym for chaos

Damien Phillips

Netanyahu’s post-war Gaza plan looks dead on arrival

Israel’s government has finally begun to turn its attention to what happens once the war in Gaza is over. The ‘basic contours’ of a hostage deal – and possible second Gaza ceasefire – continue to take shape, with further talks set to take place this week in Qatar’s capital Doha between Israel’s intelligence services, the United States, and Hamas via Qatari and Egyptian mediators. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan for post-war Gaza has been a long time coming, with his government constantly dogged by the question of what its goals are beyond destroying Hamas and what the endgame for the Palestinians might look like. You would think that with

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Can the EU survive another five years of Ursula von der Leyen?

Ursula von der Leyen came to the post of President of the European Commission five years ago with a less than glittering reputation. Martin Schulz, her compatriot and former President of the European Parliament, described her as the ‘weakest minister’ in Angela Merkel’s government. There was a strong sense that she had been booted upstairs after her failures as German defence minister, which included running down the armed forces to the point where some soldiers had to take part in a Nato exercise with broomsticks in place of guns. Even the junior partners in the then ruling coalition in Germany declined to back her candidacy. With such low expectations she

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Will Navalny be given a public funeral?

Nine days after Alexei Navalny died in an Arctic prison colony, his body was finally handed over to his mother on Saturday for burial. The Russian authorities had been refusing to release his remains to her and his legal team while they claimed to be carrying out a ‘forensic examination’ to determine his cause of death.  The authorities’ decision to withhold Navalny’s body for more than a week was clearly a stalling tactic. His widow Yulia accused Putin of being directly responsible for this. ‘Murder was not enough for Putin. Now he is holding his body hostage,’ she said in a video address before the body was released. To truly

Sunday

Steerpike Steerpike

Tory MPs turn on Tobias Ellwood

The fall-out from Lee Anderson’s suspension continues tonight. With speculation still ongoing as to whether the Ashfield MP might defect to Reform, friends of the red wall Rottweiler are concerned that his suspension will, in the words of one, only ‘embolden the wets’. Such fears have only been strengthened tonight by a bizarre row breaking out in one of the Tory backbench WhatsApp groups.  It began when Sir John Hayes, chairman of the Common Sense Group, wrote in the aftermath of Anderson’s suspension that ‘the facts speak for themselves. Islamist extremism poses the greatest threat to national security and wellbeing’. It prompted Tobias Ellwood to weigh in and demand that ‘John

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Zelensky: ‘31,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed so far’

After two years of secrecy, Volodymyr Zelensky has finally revealed the number of fallen Ukrainian soldiers. ‘31,000 Ukrainian military personnel have been killed in this war. Not 300,000 or 150,000, as Putin and his deceitful circle falsely claim. But each of those losses is an enormous loss for us’, he said. The President chose not to disclose the number of wounded troops: this, he said, was to prevent Russia from knowing how many people had ‘left the battlefield’. The news was shocking but not surprising. Sergei Shoigu, the Russian Defense Minister, recently claimed that the Ukrainian army had suffered over 160,000 casualties during counter-offensive last year. Such Russian updates on

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

The fantastical myths that swirl around Vladimir Putin

If there is one man who is probably happiest that Vladimir Putin’s travel schedule has been so heavily curtailed of late, it is probably the Federal Protection Service officer responsible for ensuring the product of the president’s bathroom breaks return to the Motherland. Foreign powers may, after all, go to extreme lengths to test his health. When Putin does travel abroad, it is not just with his own food and drink, his own chefs and his array of bodyguards, it is also with his dedicated porta-potty. This allows his numbers ones and twos to be collected, sealed into special bags, and then put in a briefcase, ready to travel home

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

The Lee Anderson row shows the Tory party has broken down

What are we to make of the Lee Anderson saga? The very fact that this low-rent furore is dominating our Sunday political discourse speaks volumes. At the end of a week which saw the Commons change its procedures in a bid to placate the threat posed by a mixed bag of Islamist and Corbynista pro-Palestine ultras, the political media has found a compelling talking point with which to divert our attention. Rather than address the fundamental issue – that the Leader of the Opposition and the Commons Speaker gave ground to the mob – here we are agonising about whether Rishi Sunak acted swiftly or harshly enough against his most notorious