Politics

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

Tuesday

James Heale James Heale

Nigel Farage turns his guns on the Red Wall

Much of the commentary on the local elections has focused thus far on the Tories’ southern discontent. But today, Nigel Farage will turn his guns on the north of England, as he seeks to position his party as the real challenger to Labour across swathes of the so-called Red Wall. Key voters in these northern constituencies broke with Keir Starmer’s party over Brexit, elected Boris Johnson in 2019 but then switched back to Labour in protest at the Tories last July. Given the government’s subsequent woes, Farage clearly now senses an opening. This afternoon’s speech has been heavily trailed, with a column in the Sunday Express and the splash of today’s Sun. ‘Britain

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

The Bank of England’s mission to tame inflation just got harder

Much to the concern of the Bank of England, British workers are continuing to bank inflation-busting pay rises. Figures just released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that over the three months to February, the average worker received a pay increase of 5.6 per cent. Remove inflation and that works out as a 2.8 per cent real-terms rise.  The persistence of strong pay growth is likely to alarm the nine members of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee. They have repeatedly warned that they consider sustained wage increases to be a key sign of entrenched inflation. The committee has previously said it wants to see pay growth slow before

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Europe’s annual migrant crisis is just getting started

Irregular border crossings into the European Union dropped by 31 per cent in the first quarter of 2025 to 33,600. The figures, released by Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, appear to show that the EU is getting a grip on illegal immigration. The gangs in charge of the people-smuggling trade are becoming ever more sophisticated and cunning But figures can be misleading. The biggest fall in irregular entries was the Western Balkan route, down 64 per cent on the same period in 2024. This is largely attributable to the accession of Bulgaria and Romania to the Schengen Zone on 1 January this year. As a result, more

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Is the NHS losing its appeal for Britain’s youth?

The NHS has survived many Conservative governments which, according to their opponents, were out to privatise it. But can it survive a growing disenchantment on the part of young professionals who are turned off by the idea of having to queue for healthcare? According to the Independent Healthcare Provider Network (IHPN) – admittedly not an entirely disinterested party – the largest growth in the private health sector is among young professionals in their 20s, 30s and 40s, who want rapid scans and other diagnostic tests without the wait. As the organisation’s chief executive, David Hare, puts it, these are people ‘who are accustomed to high quality, convenient and personalised services

Jonathan Spyer

Iran is playing for time in the US nuclear talks

Over the weekend, the US and Iran held opening talks in Oman on Teheran’s nuclear programme. With the first round concluded, the Iranian regime’s position on the negotiations is becoming clearer. The Islamic regime, which prides itself on its strategic patience, intends to buy time, while avoiding any major and irreversible concessions. Whether Donald Trump’s administration will prove willing to accommodate Iran’s demands is another matter entirely.   Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Ismail Baqaei said on Sunday that Iran would refuse to discuss anything other than the nuclear programme in the talks. Teheran, Baqaei said, ‘will not have any talks with the American side on any other issue.’ To rebuild, replenish, re-arm, and recruit, Iran

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

The sad death of ITV

The slow death of ITV makes for painful viewing. In its glory days of the 1980s and 1990s, the channel had a salty naughtiness, a thrilling random quality. Its kids’ shows were raucous or even scary, its crime dramas were raunchy, its quizzes and games were sparkly and crass and its highbrow offerings were spicy. The channel had an edge to it; watching ITV was aspirational and fun. It was cool. ITV has swapped any distinctive offering for constant retreads of the same generic thrillers But ITV has swapped any distinctive offering for constant retreads of the same kind of generic gloomy thriller; at the moment it’s tempting us with

Monday

David Shipley

Why are violent prisoners continuing to offend in jail?

Even for our broken prison service it’s been a terrible few days. On Saturday the jihadi terrorist Hashem Abedi used boiling oil and ‘homemade weapons’ in an assault at HMP Frankland which hospitalised three prison officers, the Prison Officers’ Association has said. Given the severity of the injuries, with one man suffering a severed artery in his neck and the other being stabbed at least five times in the chest, it’s only thanks to luck that no staff were killed. Then, this morning, it emerged that John Mansfield, a convicted murderer serving his sentence at HMP Whitemoor, was killed by another inmate on Sunday. While few will shed tears for

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Scunthorpe’s steel and Birmingham’s bins: a tale of two Labours

10 min listen

Panic has subsided over the British Steel crisis as Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, while visiting the site in Scunthorpe, confirmed that the raw materials needed to keep the furnaces running have been secured. While questions remain over the long-term future of the site, the Government are quite confident in their handling of the crisis so far – something not unhelpful with just over two weeks to go from the local elections. Less helpful is the news that over in Birmingham workers have rejected a pay deal with the Labour-run city council; the bin strike will continue. Is there more the government could be doing to end the dispute? Political

Nigel Jones

German tanks always flop. The Leopard 2 is no different

The much-vaunted German Leopard 2 tank – 18 of which were sent to Ukraine in 2023 after prolonged national debates and foot-dragging by the outgoing Olaf Scholz government – is reportedly proving a flop on the battlefield. According to a confidential assessment by Germany’s own defence ministry, and published by the Daily Telegraph, the Leopards have disappointed their Ukrainian army crews, as they are said to be over-complex to operate and vulnerable to aerial attack by Russian drones. So limited are the Leopards’ capabilities proving in real battle conditions that their range and mobility are restricted. According to the study, they are being used as little more than moderately mobile

James Heale James Heale

‘Betgate’ is the latest blow to the Welsh Tories

It is a tough life these days being a member of the Welsh Conservatives. The party lost every Westminster seat in July and now have barely a hundred councillors across the country. In December, the fractious parliamentary party voted by nine votes to seven to retain leader Andrew RT Davies; he quit regardless, prompting his replacement by Darren Millar. He looks to be taking his party to a distant fourth place in the newly-expanded Senedd next year, with polls suggesting that the Conservatives will finish ten points behind Reform. Now, today, a fresh blow has hit Millar’s party. Among those who have been charged by the Gambling Commission in last

Patrick West

‘Stop Brexit Man’s court victory is a win for free speech

From today, ‘Stop Brexit Man’ is free. This character, whose real name is Steve Bray, the long-standing bane of broadcasters, politicians and pedestrians on account of his persistent and clamorous pro-EU protests, has been cleared of flouting a police ban after playing anti-Conservative and anti-Brexit songs outside Parliament. Bray was apprehended after blaring loud music through speakers last March, when the then prime minister Rishi Sunak arrived for Prime Minister’s Questions. Today, Westminster Magistrates’ Court found him not guilty of failing without reasonable excuse to comply with a direction given under a 2011 Act on ‘prohibited activities in Parliament Square’. Free speech matters for the underdogs Some might lament that

Steerpike Steerpike

SNP backbencher blasts Nats over £20k pay rise

The cost of living crisis continues to afflict Brits across the country – but it would appear that Scottish government ministers aren’t having such a bad time of it. In fact SNP ministers will see their pay packets boosted by a whopping £20,000 after First Minister John Swinney’s government ended a voluntary pay freeze on salaries in a move the FM says was based on ‘fairness’. Not everyone is impressed by the decision, however, with opposition politicians slamming it as a ‘reward for failure’. Even SNP backbencher Fergus Ewing has taken a pop at party colleagues over the issue – tweeting this afternoon: ‘I read that Scottish government ministers are

Andrew Tettenborn

Would scrapping juries help tackle the courts backlog?

There’s a lot to digest in the new Crime and Justice Commission report, which came out today. Its proposals include, for example, a legal ban on access to social media for under-16s and a universal digital ID card system. But the most eye-catching idea in the Times-sponsored report is that for those outside the most serious crimes – notably murder, manslaughter, rape and serious violent and sexual offences – the right to jury trial should go. Instead, other crimes for which currently there is a right to a jury should, if the defendant chooses, instead be tried by a so-called intermediate court consisting of a judge sitting with two magistrates.  There

Lara Brown

Museums need a new approach to restitution 

Three years ago, the Horniman Museum agreed to return 72 Benin Bronzes to Nigeria. The museum’s chair hailed the decision as ‘moral and appropriate’. Curators were promised that they were handing those artefacts over to the National Commission for Museums and Monuments, a government agency tasked with preserving the country’s heritage. But where are the Bronzes now? The sad reality is it is almost impossible to find out. Since their return, Muhammadu Buhari, Nigeria’s President, has signed an official gazette confirming the Oba of Benin, not the National Commission, rightfully own the artefacts.  There is little evidence that they are on display in any Nigerian museums. Have they disappeared into his private

Eliot Wilson

Why is the army fixing Birmingham’s bin crisis?

‘Join the Army and see the world’ used to be the War Office’s boast. In those inter-war years it meant Egypt, Malta, Jamaica and Hong Kong, but for a lucky few recipients of the King’s shilling their next deployment will be to organise rubbish collections in Birmingham. The government has announced that a ‘small number of office-based military personnel with operational planning expertise’ will assist Birmingham City Council in dealing with the effects of a month-long strike by refuse workers. At the end of March the council declared a major incident, with up to 20,000 tonnes of rubbish lying in the city’s streets and reports of rats the size of

Steerpike Steerpike

Ex-Tory MP charged with gambling offences

The 2024 general election may feel like a lifetime ago, but the Gambling Commission has certainly not forgotten about it. The watchdog has this morning charged 15 people over bets placed on the timing of the national poll – including former Tory MP and ex-parliamentary aide to Rishi Sunak, Craig Williams. Dear oh dear… The development comes after several political figures faced scrutiny last summer over placing bets on the date of the general election. Last June it emerged that Craig Williams, the Prime Minister’s closest parliamentary aide, placed a £100 bet on there being a July election — just three days before a rain-soaked Rishi Sunak announced the date

Steerpike Steerpike

Siddiq hit with arrest warrant by Bangladesh court

Back to the curious case of Labour MP Tulip Siddiq, who has now had an arrest warrant issued against her in Bangladesh over alleged corruption charges. The warrant was issued by a judge in Dhaka on Sunday after the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) last week submitted a criminal charge sheet against the politician – who was until recently, um, Labour’s anti-corruption minister. The jokes write themselves… In one of at least three investigations against the Hampstead and Highgate MP, Bangladesh’s ACC has accused Siddiq of putting pressure on her aunt Sheikh Hasina – the country’s recently-deposed prime minister – to give plots of land in a Dhaka residential development to three

Stephen Pollard

Why the silence over the MP banned from Hong Kong?

This time last week there was near universal outrage on the left – and even from some Conservative MPs – after Israel barred two Labour MPs, Abtisam Mohammed and Yuan Yang, from entry. The Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, described the Israeli decision as ‘unacceptable, counterproductive, and deeply concerning…this is no way to treat British parliamentarians’.  The Middle East minister, Hamish Falconer, opened an 80-minute statement on the matter by summoning all the gravity he could muster and telling the Commons that this was ‘unacceptable and deeply concerning. It is no way to treat democratically elected representatives’. Later that day, dozens of Labour MPs gathered for a photograph with Mohammed and

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Hamas is exploiting the freedoms it wants to destroy

In any sane world, it would be dismissed as grotesque fantasy: Hamas – the Iranian-backed terror group responsible for the 7 October massacre – petitioning British courts to lift its designation as a terrorist organisation. But this is one of those times it seems the entire world has gone mad.  For here we are, in Great Britain, witnessing Hamas, aided by British lawyers, seeking to launder its blood-soaked record under the false banners of ‘liberation’ and ‘resistance’. This is not mere absurdity. It is a direct assault on the integrity of British democracy – and on very survival of western civilisation. While our principles of justice rightly insist that all

Sunday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

British Steel and the death of dim-witted globalisation

The dewy-eyed and rather dim-witted vision of globalisation is dead, I think for good. Labour is to effectively re-nationalise British Steel in Scunthorpe and in making the announcement that Parliament was to be recalled, Sir Keir Starmer said: ‘This afternoon, the future of British Steel hangs in the balance. Jobs, investment, growth, our economic and national security are all on the line.’ The crucial part of that sentence is ‘national security’: an acceptance that trade does not happen in a vacuum, separated from the rest of life. It was always contingent. It was never sensible to have the Chinese running our only virgin steel blast furnace, just as it was