Politics

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

James Heale

The ‘Your Party’ conference is a mess

It used to be said that the old Liberal party had so few MPs that they could fit in the back of a taxi. At least they were willing to share the same vehicle. After more than five years of plotting, Jeremy Corbyn’s Your Party is finally holding its first conference in Liverpool this weekend. The run-up to the event was overshadowed by not one, but two, MPs exiting the six-strong ‘Independence Alliance’ in the House of Commons. That sense of infighting and paranoia has set the stage nicely for the past 24 hours. For Zarah Sultana has announced that she is boycotting day one of the conference, in protest

Israel is turning the screws on Hezbollah

The killing of Lebanese Hezbollah military chief Haytham Ali Tababtabai by Israel this week reflects how much the balance of power between Jerusalem and the Iran-backed Shia Islamist group has shifted since the year-long war between the two in 2023 and 2024. Yet, paradoxically, Tabatabai’s killing also shows that nothing has been finally settled between the two enemies. While Hezbollah has now been shown to be much weaker than Israel, it nevertheless remains stronger than any internal faction in Lebanon, including the official Lebanese government. The practical consequence of this is escalation: Hezbollah is seeking to repair and rebuild its capacities, no force in Lebanon is willing or able to stop

Claude Lanzmann would despair of today’s Europe

The late Claude Lanzmann, director of the monumental Shoah – the nine-and-a-half hour documentary about the Holocaust, released in 1985 and widely considered the greatest cinematic work on the subject – would have turned 100 this week, a destiny he missed by only eight years, dying in 2018. What would the filmmaker – who devoted almost a decade to his masterpiece, nearly obliterating himself in the process – make of Europe in 2025, a place where idealistic crowds of the young march for Israel’s annihilation, where the words ‘Dirty Jew’ are spray-painted on Parisian walls, and where, in the first six months of 2025, there were a registered 646 anti-Semitic acts

There are some crimes where only a jury can ensure justice

David Lammy’s plans to prune the right to trial by jury are certainly drastic. Juries would remain only for murder, manslaughter, rape and cases deemed to be in the public interest, with other offences carrying sentences up to five years tried by judge alone. Lawyers are predictably unhappy at these proposals. They see them as seriously compromising the traditional rights of defendants to be tried by their peers, not to mention revealing the hypocrisy of the man who, under the Tories, robustly defended the right to trial by one’s peers. They also think, rightly, that Lammy is now acting not so much from principle as from a desperate need to

Theo Hobson

Why the BBC keeps on blundering

The dust is settling on the BBC’s latest crisis over its sloppy editing of a Donald Trump video, but it won’t be long before the next blunder. The reality is that every BBC crisis is epiphenomenal: the anger that periodically flares up against the BBC is rooted in our frustration that it fails to do the impossible and provide cultural order and unity. This is hard to articulate, so we magnify secondary issues like the pay of its top presenters, and perceived bias in the news. In doing so, we ignore the real problem: that the BBC can’t win. We can no longer trust the BBC to shelter us from

Disraeli to Reeves: how each Chancellor drank their way through the Budget

34 min listen

Throughout the years, the only person permitted to drink inside the House of Commons is the Chancellor, so what has been the tipple of choice for each resident of Number 11 dating back to Benjamin Disraeli? Following Rachel Reeves Budget this week, Michael Simmons and James Heale drink their way through the ages, discuss the historical context of each Budget, and question whether Rachel Reeves has the toughest job of them all. This episode was originally recorded for Michael Simmons’s new podcast Reality Check. Search Reality Check wherever you subscribe to your podcasts.

Rachel Reeves’s Budget was based on fiction

I think we will look back on this week as one of the most pivotal of this government. It was the moment when Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves revealed themselves. This week’s Budget showed clearly what Reeves’s revealed preferences are – and what they are not When we were all trying to work out what Theresa May really thought about Brexit, her chief negotiator Oliver Robbins privately told his team they should be guided by her ‘revealed preferences’. This week’s Budget showed clearly what Reeves’s revealed preferences are – and what they are not. Growth is not, as the government keeps claiming, its top priority. Growth was downgraded for every

Freddy Gray

Why is the US obsessed with Britain’s decline?

30 min listen

Why are Americans so interested in Britain’s decline? While visiting London, Tucker Carlson has said that the country has ‘shrunken’ and its culture ‘destroyed’, particularly because of mass immigration. Freddy Gray is joined by Tim Stanley and Ed West to discuss whether Britain has become ‘ground zero in the decline of western civilisation’ and if the US has always viewed the UK this way. 

Stephen Daisley

Yes, John Swinney is a head of government

This week Catherine Connolly, the newly elected President of Ireland, welcomed John Swinney, First Minister of Scotland, to the Áras an Uachtaráin, official residence of the republic’s head of state. Her government X account posted some photographs of the meeting and described Swinney, who leads Scotland’s secessionist Scottish National party, as ‘the first foreign head of government received by President Connolly’. This was a statement of fact, but feelings don’t care about your facts, and so Connolly has found herself scolded on both sides of the Irish Sea. She has been told with the invincible confidence of the ignorant that she has insulted the UK’s Prime Minister. After all, Keir

The black hole myth & the brain drain conundrum

16 min listen

With Budget week finally at an end, certain mysteries remain. Chief among them is why the Chancellor decided to give an emergency speech preparing the public for a rise in income tax. On 4 November, Rachel Reeves summoned journalists to Downing Street early in the morning to warn that ‘the productivity performance we inherited is weaker than previously thought’. She then refused to rule out hiking income tax rates – sending a clear signal to markets that rises were coming. Nine days later, however, the Treasury let it be known via the FT that income tax increases would not be needed after all. When the gilt market reacted badly –

Lara Brown, James Heale, Sam Olsen & Toby Young

19 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Lara Brown reports on how young women are saying ’no’ to marriage; James Heale takes us through the history of the Budgets via drink; Sam Olsen reviews Ruthless by Edmond Smith and looks at Britain’s history of innovation and exploitation; and, Toby Young questions the burdensome regulation over Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Steerpike

Fact check: are the NYT’s experts right about UK immigration?

Yesterday’s release of immigration figures by the ONS didn’t make for particularly pleasant reading. While net migration had fallen to around 200,000 in the 12 months to June, much of this was down to an unusually high exodus of people, with 693,000 leaving the country over the same period. Many of those leaving were under the age of 30. That news, however, seemed to prompt something approaching gloating over at the New York Times, which published a piece yesterday headlined: ‘The British Public Thinks Immigration Is Up. It’s Actually Down, Sharply.’ To labour the point, the piece was accompanied by a picture of anti-migration protestors in Scotland. The not-so-subtle subtext

This is Hong Kong’s Grenfell

Hong Kong is reeling from the tragedy of a devastating fire which ripped through seven 30-storey apartment blocks in a crowded housing estate two days ago. The death toll so far is 128 and still rising. At least 76 have been injured and almost 300 are missing. Stories abound of survivors trapped in flames and smoke. The death toll so far is 128 and still rising. At least 76 have been injured As is so often the case in such tragedies, the emergency services responded with inspirational courage. Firefighters battled the blaze for hours, medics treated the injured, and rescue workers pulled survivors from smoke-filled stairwells. At least one firefighter

Steerpike

Starmer faces Labour rebellion over employment U-turn

Another day, another drama. On Thursday afternoon, it emerged that Sir Keir Starmer’s government were rolling back their commitment to change the ‘qualifying period’ for unfair dismissal from 24 months to day one. Now workers will have to have been in their job for at least six months to qualify, in a move that ministers hope will push the controversial employment rights bill through the House of Lords. But the U-turn has sparked anger among Labour MPs… The move is a breach of Labour’s 2024 manifesto – and backbenchers have not been quiet in their objections. Left-wing Labour MPs have hit out at the PM for stripping back the employment

The Ajax scandal is worse than embarrassing

Luke Pollard, recently promoted to Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry, must have looked forward to visiting General Dynamics UK in Merthyr Tydfil at the beginning of the month. The facility in south Wales builds the Ajax armoured fighting vehicle and its five variants (Ares, Athena, Apollo, Atlas, Argus: alliteration pays well in the defence sector), of which the British army has ordered a total of 589. The visit marked the vehicle’s initial operating capability (IOC), the development stage at which it is available in minimum, usefully deployable form. This was especially significant for Ajax because the platform has endured a torrid birth and evolution. When the army decided to

The strange death of England

Whatever happened to Britain, or the UK, or England, or whatever they’re calling it? We can’t even agree on what it’s called. But what happened to England, the England that, if you’re over 50, you grew up learning about, the England that controlled the world, the England that ran the largest empire in human history at the end of the first world war?  Britain, which is an island in a pretty inhospitable climate, controlled something like a quarter of the Earth’s surface – and not controlled in the way the United States controls the rest of the world with an implied threat or with economic ties through trade, but with administrators and

Nigel Farage must come clean about his Dulwich College schooldays

The allegations concerning Nigel Farage’s conduct as a schoolboy have returned with unusual force, not because the country is suddenly preoccupied with the internal sociology of Dulwich College, but because Farage now leads a party that sits at the centre of the national debate. Any claim about his past, however old and recycled, is inevitably refracted through the lens of present politics. The BBC reports, the Guardian testimonies, and Farage’s own responses raise a set of questions that extend far beyond the details of adolescent behaviour. They touch on character, trust, political identity and the delicate task facing any new political movement seeking broad public legitimacy. If Farage admits he

What my run-in with Michael Gove can teach Labour MPs about digital ID

There are times in politics when a feeling of dread overwhelms. When your boss wants to go down a path you think is wrong. Spring 2021 brought one such moment for me, as vaccine passports were dangled as the key to our pandemic freedom. I suspect the Technology Secretary, Liz Kendall, experienced a similar feeling when told to front the Prime Minister’s mandatory digital ID plan. The OBR revealed this week that that plan will likely cost taxpayers a staggering £1.8billion. Ministers must realise that Britain could do without Keir Starmer’s enormously expensive, unpopular and troubling scheme. But will any of them yet be telling their leader? My suspicion is

Gavin Mortimer

France’s military service rollout is about more than Russia

National service is being brought back in France. Emmanuel Macron used a visit to a military base in the Alps on Thursday to outline his initiative. The service will begin next year for a term of ten months, and it will be voluntary. Macron’s plan is being viewed as a response to the Russian threat, but for many French people there is a greater – and far closer – menace than president Putin. This view is shared among the silent majority and explains why Le Pen’s party now has the most seats in parliament Macron set a target of 50,000 annual recruits by 2035 with most aged 18 and 19,

Defending marriage, broken Budgets & the ‘original sin’ of industrialisation

38 min listen

‘Marriage is the real rebellion’ argues Madeline Grant in the Spectator’s cover article this week. The Office for National Statistics predicts that by 2050 only 30 per cent of adults will be married. This amounts to a ‘relationship recession’ where singleness is ‘more in vogue now than it has been since the dissolution of the monastries’. With a rising division between the sexes, and many resorting to alternative relationships like polyamory, how can we defend marriage? For this week’s Edition, host William Moore is joined by political editor Tim Shipman, assistant editor – and parliamentary sketchwriter – Madeline Grant and the Spectator’s diary writer this week, former Chancellor and Conservative MP Kwasi Kwarteng. As

David Lammy wouldn’t even show up to defend abolishing juries

Wantage may seem an unlikely birthplace for England’s greatest gift to the world. Yet as well as being the site of King Alfred’s birth, it gives its name to the legal code of the 990s, in which Aethelred the Unready laid down the right of an Englishman to be tried by a jury.  Fast forward a millennium or so and Lammy the Unavailable seems to be determined to smash that right. Robert Jenrick had asked an urgent question of The Sage of Tottenham, but Lammy couldn’t even be bothered to turn up. ‘Do we need to send out a search party to Savile Row?’ Jenrick asked, referencing a past excuse