Politics

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

Wednesday

8 Jan 2025

The demise of the Royal Society of Literature

The tenth anniversary of the slaughter of Charlie Hebdo journalists reminds us that the literary establishment has long been equivocal when it comes to defending free speech. So news this week that the Royal Society of Literature is in ‘meltdown’, after singularly failing to defend its members when under attack, sadly comes as no surprise. Indeed, the departure of the once-great society’s chairman and director, shortly before a forthcoming annual general meeting that was expected to have seen calls for their resignation, should be welcomed by all who support artistic freedom. The Royal Society of Literature has had a particularly turbulent few years Globally, the rift among literature’s great and

Steerpike

Mandelson won’t represent UK at Trump inauguration

It’s the big question all Westminster is asking right now. Who has got a golden ticket to Donald Trump’s inauguration? The quadrennial bash is happening in just twelve days’ time, with the great and the good all fighting to get a seat. Nigel Farage will be there, keen to show he’s still besties with ’47’ after his falling out with Musk. But while the Reform leader missed out on bagging the plum post of becoming ‘our man in Washington’, at least he gets a seat when Trump gets sworn in. For Mr S has confirmed that Lord Mandelson will not be representing the UK at the ceremony, with the role

Steerpike

Musk attacks Keir ‘Starmtrooper’ again over grooming inquiry stance

There’s no rest for the wicked. Twitter chief Elon Musk has barely come up for air over the last week with his continued attacks on the Labour Prime Minister over Britain’s grooming gang scandal. As calls for a national inquiry intensify, the tech billionaire has taken to his social media site yet again to take a pop at Sir Keir Starmer over the Labour party’s stance on the issue. In a scathing tweet, Musk wrote this morning: Now why would Keir Starmtrooper order his own party to block such an inquiry? Because he is hiding terrible things. That is why. Crikey. The bold claim follows days of accusations aimed at

Freddy Gray

Does Britain want to join Trump’s new world order?

Goodbye EU, hello AU? It’s been evident for a few months now that Donald Trump’s second administration will be more geostrategically ambitious than his first. Yesterday, in another extraordinary press conference in Mar-a-Lago, we got a glimpse of what Trump and his advisers are thinking for the planet in 2025 and beyond. Trump reiterated his desire to annex Canada and Greenland. He declared that the Gulf of Mexico should be called the Gulf of America, said the United States should take back control of the Panama Canal, and told Hamas ‘all hell will break loose’ if its Israeli hostages are not returned before his inauguration. Earlier, as if to underscore

Edward Howell

Kim Jong Un isn’t going away

It was only a matter of time before North Korea lit things up again. As US Secretary of State Antony Blinken embarked on a five-day sojourn to Seoul, the hermit kingdom welcomed the US official in the way it knows best – by testing another ballistic missile. North Korean state media proudly announced that Monday’s missile launch was of its latest hypersonic intermediate-range ballistic missile system. For Kim Jong Un, now entering his 14th year in power, the test of the ‘strategic weapon’ – which flew 1,100 kilometres with an altitude of close to 100 kilometres – would ‘contain any rivals in the Pacific’ and demonstrate to its ‘enemies’ that it would be

Patrick West

Facebook is no place for politics

There was much jubilation yesterday among advocates of free speech following the news that Mark Zuckerberg is to relax restrictions on free expression on the social media platforms owned by Meta, including its most popular site, Facebook. This initiative will include doing away with politically-biased ‘fact checkers’, lifting restrictions on contentious political topics, and adding a function similar to ‘community notes’ on X. Social media has always been part of the problem. It has been a chief motor in bringing about our age of conformity and censorship Those who write and campaign on the importance of free speech, and whose livelihoods depend on this principle being upheld, were understandably delighted: Toby Young praised Zuckerberg’s statement as

Gavin Mortimer

Why do the left mock the dead?

It was party time in Paris and elsewhere in France on Tuesday evening as hundreds of people celebrated the death of Jean-Marie Le Pen. The figurehead of France’s far-right died earlier in the day aged 96 and within hours a jubilant crowd had assembled in the capital’s Place de la République. Champagne was uncorked, fireworks were sent into the night sky and there were chants of ‘The dirty racist is dead’ and ‘Marine, you are next’. Marine Le Pen assumed leadership of the National Front in 2011, 40 years after her father helped found the party that is now known as the National Rally. The reason some on the left like to

Tom Slater

Is this the end of the Big Tech censorship industrial complex?

The vibe shift is real. Yes, all the chatter about the re-election of Donald Trump causing a cultural sea change in American life might just have something to it – if Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s shock announcement is anything to go by. In a five-minute video, Zuck – who also appears to have undergone a Gen Z makeover – has announced that Facebook and Instagram will be scaling back their censorship rules, especially when it comes to contentious topics like ‘immigration and gender’. Those who draw up their ‘content policies’ will now be based in Texas, rather than California, to allay conservatives’ concerns about political bias. ‘Expert’ fact-checkers will be swapped for

Jacob Heilbrunn

Donald Trump’s plans sound… interesting

No one can accuse President-elect Donald Trump of failing to be transparent about his intentions and plans. Speaking at a lengthy news conference at Mar-a-Lago, Trump promised to rename the Gulf of Mexico the ‘Gulf of America’. He also refused to rule out employing military force to reclaim the Panama Canal and to seize Greenland. He did, however, exempt Canada, declaring that he would rely solely on ‘economic force’ to create a great union between the two countries. All that was missing was a vow to reunite with Great Britain and Trump would have reverse-engineered much of the British empire. Trump had good reason to feel bullish. For one thing, Meta CEO Mark

Tuesday

7 Jan 2025

Steerpike

Trump praises Musk as ‘smart guy’ when quizzed on Labour attacks

It’s been an eventful week for UK-US relations. Twitter CEO Elon Musk has spent much of it berating the Labour government over Britain’s grooming gang scandal, calling first for Home Office minister Jess Phillips to take the place of far-right activist Tommy Robinson in prison before going on to say that Prime Minister Keir Starmer should be incarcerated. Crikey. The tech billionaire’s attacks have been so relentless that even Sir Keir’s big healthcare speech on Monday was overshadowed by the media attention on Musk. Starmer has now hit back at the Tesla boss, remarking that: ‘Those that are spreading lies and misinformation as far and as wide as possible, they

Steerpike

Royal Society of Literature in meltdown over diversity drive

All is not well in the Royal Society of Literature. It now transpires that the bosses of the prestigious 200-year-old organisation have resigned after a rather tumultuous year – and ahead of an AGM that could have seen a vote of confidence called by outraged former chairs, presidents and directors. The reason for the widespread unhappiness within the group? Frustration over diversity hires and growing concerns about censorship. Not even our literary societies are safe, eh? Chairman Daljit Nagra and director Molly Rosenberg have resigned in the face of growing criticism of their tenure at the RSL. The organisation’s leadership has had a litany of complaints levelled at it, including

Patrick O’Flynn

Keir Starmer is dangerously out of touch

The refusal of western elites to admit the failings of multiculturalism, and their ongoing molly-coddling of minority vested interests, is giving birth to white identity politics. That’s the troubling big picture takeout from recent events across the West – the Trump landslide, England’s summer riots, the reluctant dribbling out of statistics showing some foreign national groups are vastly over-represented in criminality (including sex crimes) and now the clamour for a specific public inquiry into rape gangs formed by Pakistani heritage men. A long-running and concerted attempt by the political class to sustain a framework that depicted minority groups always as victims and never as victimisers has run its course. The reality that

Jonathan Miller

Jean-Marie Le Pen won’t be missed

Perhaps it’s tasteless to make the point that maybe nobody will be happier to see Jean-Marie Le Pen buried than his daughter Marine. The founder of the National Front died this morning at the age of 96, discredited, ignored, mentally incapacitated and largely irrelevant, except as a spectre. Today the terms ‘hard right’, ‘extreme right’ and ‘far right’ are often carelessly employed, but Len Pen père was all of these, a millstone for his daughter as she attempted to drag the party towards the mainstream and kick down the door of the Elysée Palace. Though it’s been years since his outbursts against Jews, Arabs and gays made headlines, it’s now sure there

James Heale

Farage vs Musk

18 min listen

How do you solve a problem like Elon? We have spent much of the past week talking on the podcast about Labour vs Musk, and the tech billionaire’s vocal criticism of how the government is dealing with the grooming gang scandal. But Reform UK are having their own issues with the volatile owner of X. There have been questions over whether Musk could still bankroll the party after he called for Farage to step down following a disagreement over Musk’s support for the far-right activist Tommy Robinson – but in the last 24 hours, it seems the tech billionaire has rowed back a little on his stance and has returned

Ross Clark

Can the grid cope with many more EV chargers?

Is this the development that is finally going to make us shake off our aversion to electric vehicles (EVs)? Local authorities are reported this morning to have granted planning permission for £692 million worth of public chargers, potentially leading to the installation of ‘hundreds of thousands’ of EV charging points. A lack of public charging points is regularly cited as a reason for the slow uptake of EVs and the failure of car manufacturers to reach the target set for them in 2024: to ensure that 22 per cent of the vehicles they sold were pure electric. In the event, they managed only 19.6 per cent – and that was

Kate Andrews

Borrowing costs have just passed Liz Truss levels

The new year may have rustled up some surprise stand-offs for the Labour government (mainly calls from X founder Elon Musk for Keir Starmer to resign), but the rise of new problems does not mean the old problems have disappeared. A harsh reminder has been dished out this morning, as long-term borrowing costs reached a 27-year high, calling into question yet again exactly how the Treasury is going to make good on its spending commitments while sticking to the Chancellor’s own fiscal rules. Thirty-year gilt yields hit 5.21 per cent this morning – a level that surpasses the surge in borrowing costs following Liz Truss’s mini-Budget in 2022. The ten-year

Steerpike

Meta hires Trump ally in olive branch move

It’s all change at Meta HQ. As Mr S reported last week, former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg – who has served as one of Mark Zuckerberg’s senior execs at the company since 2018 – is now on his way out. Taking, ironically, to rival platform Twitter, Clegg wrote that it was now ‘the right time’ to move on from his role at the social media giant, adding his experience ‘truly has been an adventure of a lifetime’. How sweet. Clegg’s replacement will be his current deputy, Joel Kaplan – who was also George W. Bush’s White House deputy chief of staff. But that’s not the only reshuffle Meta has

Liam Duffy

Elon Musk isn’t an extremist threat

At conferences and roundtables on counter extremism in recent months, it has been impossible to escape the terms ‘mis’ and ‘disinformation’. For among experts, practitioners, academics, civil servants and police officers, it is the default explanation for understanding not only extremism in Britain, but the wider mood of popular discontent. Over the weekend, this view was lent further credence in the pages of the Observer by two counter-extremism heavyweights, former counter-extremism commissioner Dame Sara Khan and the former head of counter-terrorism police, Neil Basu. Together, they warn that the government’s new counter-extremism plans are not enough ‘to address a toxic pool of hatred, conspiracy theories and “dangerous rhetoric” from high-profile figures including Elon Musk.’

Gavin Mortimer

There’s something hypocritical about Macron attacking Musk

Europe’s leaders rounded on Elon Musk on Monday as the American tech billionaire continued to air his views on the state of the Old Continent. Although Musk – who in a fortnight’s time will be president Donald’s Trump efficiency tsar – has focused most of his ire on Britain, he’s also endorsed Alternative for Germany (AfD) in a newspaper column ahead of next month’s parliamentary election. Norway’s prime minister, Jonas Gahr Store, said in an interview that he finds it ‘worrying that a man with enormous access to social media and large financial resources is so directly involved in the internal affairs of other countries’. According to Store: ‘This is

Isabel Hardman

Sarah Champion and the grooming gang attention span problem

There are now two debates underway about grooming gangs and how the government should investigate them further. The first is the one raging on social media, largely conducted by people who haven’t up to this point shown much interest in the issue but who are busily accusing others of not doing enough. The second is a more fruitful one between the politicians who actually have engaged with the inquiries that have happened over the years, and who are now trying to work out what should happen next. Some MPs have been plugging away at the grooming issue for years, long before talking about it garnered them likes and retweets A

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