Politics

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

Thursday

13 Nov 2025

A decade after Bataclan, France is more divided than ever

Ten years ago today, Islamist terrorists massacred 130 people in a coordinated attack across Paris. It was the heaviest loss of life on French soil since the second world war, and those who perished – as well as the 350 who were wounded – will be remembered today in a series of commemorations. Emmanuel Macron will visit the six sites where the terrorists struck, among them the Stade de France and the Bataclan concert hall, and the president will also inaugurate a memorial garden at Place Saint-Gervais, opposite Paris City Hall. According to the Élysée Palace, the day will be an opportunity for the nation ‘to honour the memory of

Edward Howell

Why Taiwan matters to Japan

It was only a matter of time before Japan’s Iron Lady would be targeted by China. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi mentioned how Tokyo might resort to force were Beijing to take military action over Taiwan: ‘If there are battleships and the use of force, no matter how you think about it, it could constitute a survival-threatening situation,’ she said. In response, China’s consul-general in Osaka, Xue Jian, threatened, on Monday, to ‘cut off’ the Japanese prime minister’s ‘filthy neck…without a moment’s hesitation’. Xue’s vitriolic online reaction, which he subsequently deleted from his X account, underscores how China’s wolf-warrior diplomacy has anything but abated. Yet, the incident highlights a more important

William Moore

BBC in crisis, the Wes Streeting plot & why ‘flakes’ are the worst

36 min listen

Can the BBC be fixed? After revelations of bias from a leaked dossier, subsequent resignations and threats of legal action from the US President, the future of the corporation is the subject of this week’s cover piece. Host William Moore is joined by The Spectator’s commissioning editor, Lara Brown, arts editor, Igor Toronyi-Lalic, and regular contributor, Melanie McDonagh. They also discuss the drama of this week’s Westminster coup plot, and Melanie’s new book about why Catholicism attracted unlikely converts throughout the twentieth century. Plus: what’s the most bizarre excuse a friend has used to back out of a social engagement?

Lionel Shriver

The UK’s tax take, take, take

Helping her country ski ever more steeply down the wrong side of the Laffer curve, Rachel Reeves may be preparing to violate Labour’s manifesto and raise income tax – perhaps a suitable juncture at which to examine just how wacko the UK tax code is already. Start with the duplicity of ‘national insurance’. This unhypothecated add-on simply pours into the Treasury’s coffers as plain taxes. Yet much of the populace still believes that NI specifically funds the NHS. This is misunderstanding by design. The sly mislabelling is a resentment blocker. In truth, the employee basic tax rate is a straight-up 28 per cent, not 20 as advertised. The mooted Reeves

The Spectator

Labour isn’t working

Labour: the clue should be in the name. In March, Keir Starmer branded Labour the ‘party of work’. If ‘you want to work’, he declared, ‘the government should support you, not stop you’. Even as his premiership staggers from crisis to crisis, that mission remains. If Labour doesn’t stand for ‘working people’ – however nebulously defined – it stands for nothing. As such, this week’s unemployment figures are more than just embarrassing for Starmer; they are a betrayal of his party’s founding purpose. Unemployment has risen to 5 per cent – its highest rate since February 2021, in the middle of the third lockdown. There has been a 180,000 reduction

Douglas Murray

Justice in war is messy

At the end of last month, a judge in Belfast issued a verdict that was both right and wrong. The case related to a man known to the public only as ‘Soldier F’. He was one of the members of the Parachute Regiment involved in the events of the day in January 1972 that became known as Bloody Sunday. That day 13 members of the public were shot dead during a civil rights march in Londonderry that turned violent. The precise details are probably more heavily documented than those of any other day in history thanks to the Saville Inquiry, which became the longest and costliest legal inquiry in British

Tim Shipman

Inside the Wes Streeting plot

Keir Starmer is stuck in a catch-22. If he is to avoid the threat of continual leadership challenges, the Prime Minister will need to deal with what every poll shows are the public’s three overriding concerns: the cost of living, rampant illegal immigration and the state of the NHS. But if serious progress is made in any of these areas, it is likely to turn the minister responsible into a viable leadership candidate. Let’s call it catch-25. Rachel Reeves at the Treasury has a monumental task and is politically tied to the Starmer project, so she can be ruled out. Of the other two key issues, most progress has been

Wednesday

12 Nov 2025

Kitty Thompson

Polanski should be afraid of TikTok

There are few sights more unsettling than a politician trying to get ‘down with the kids’. Last week it was Zack Polanski’s turn. The new Green Party leader appeared on TikTok, lip-syncing along to Nicki Minaj with a climate activist as his contribution to the viral ‘What’s going on?’ trend. Rather than being met with rapturous applause, viewers that haven’t drunk the Green Kool-Aid were left asking what on Earth was going on. Although there is nothing wrong with politicians trying to appear human, many seem to forget that politics is supposed to be a serious business If you want to reach the youth, you don’t go on Newsnight. You

Tim Shipman

Wes for PM?

19 min listen

Conspiracy or cock-up? Westminster is abuzz after what appears to be a plan to decapitate Wes Streeting has spectacularly backfired. A flurry of late-night briefings designed to shore up Keir Starmer’s position turned personal against the Health Secretary, suggesting he was plotting a coup in advance of the Budget and in anticipation of – what many expect will be – a poor showing at the local elections. Streeting was left to defend himself on the media round, confidently declaring he was a ‘faithful’ and he also joked that he doesn’t know the whereabouts of Shergar and believes the moon landings are real. There is only one clear winner from this

Madeline Grant

Keir Starmer can’t even commit governmental suicide

It’s not often the Prime Minister gets a derisive laugh from the House of Commons for telling them that he had meetings with ministerial colleagues that morning. However No. 10 making a complete hash of a coup against the PM (or was it actually a pre-emptive coup against the Health Secretary?) meant that once again Sir Keir was in the chamber having to answer questions about the chaos caused by his government outside. The No. 10 debacle is really good stuff The No. 10 debacle is really good stuff. These people can’t even commit governmental suicide properly. This was the Day of Dupes meets Mean Girls, meets the Chuckle Brothers.

Charlie Walsham

Inside the BBC’s impartiality meltdown

As I watched Tim Davie and Samir Shah’s all-staff call on Tuesday, I became increasingly bemused and frustrated. It was impossible to tell from watching that the BBC is facing one of the greatest crises in its history. The fact that the call was hosted by an in-house spin doctor set the tone for softball questions and unchallenged responses. Despite quitting in disgrace over the impartiality row, Davie seemed remarkably buoyant, babbling a word-salad eulogy to the corporation he has steered to the very edge of a precipice. It was insufferable. It’s something of a bitter irony that many of my colleagues are at their balanced best when reporting on

Maxwell Marlow

The Waspi women don’t deserve a penny

Worry not, dear taxpayer, there are more bills for you to pay. Not only must you pay for the lockdown that kept you in your cramped apartment for a disease that didn’t affect you, and don’t forget the deficit payments of over £100 billion a year – really, you should just shrug it off. Even if you have your expensive degree, which creates negligible returns, and levelled with record living costs and taxation, you can of course pay for more benefits for a small minority of retired people who didn’t pay attention to changes in their state pension benefit. Let’s be clear – in 1993 when Ken Clarke announced a change to

Steerpike

Flashback: Streeting predicts he will be PM

Well that was jolly fun. Kemi Badenoch gave Keir Starmer an almighty pasting at PMQs, predictably lacerating him over the anonymous briefings about Wes Streeting. But – in fairness to Labour’s forces of darkness – the Health Secretary has not exactly been shy about his future intentions. As he told the Guardian in June 2023, he has ‘never been ashamed of aiming high and going as far as my talents will take me.’ And now, an old clip is circulating on the Tory WhatsApp groups. It was filmed in 2018 and features a succession of MPs being asked who will be Prime Minister in ten years’ time. Some of the

Isabel Hardman

Only Wes Streeting came out well from PMQs

Who won PMQs this week? Not Kemi Badenoch, nor Keir Starmer for that matter. In fact, the real winner wasn’t in the chamber at all: Wes Streeting emerged from the session in even better shape than he was before Downing Street decided to launch an extraordinary briefing round against him. The jokes about the instability at the top of the government began even before the exchange between the leader of the ppposition and the Prime Minister. When Starmer gave his conventional first answer, that he had been having ‘meetings with ministerial colleagues and others’ this morning, there were loud guffaws from the benches opposite. Then Tory Lincoln Jopp offered Starmer

Chas Newkey-Burden

A ban on animal testing is long overdue

I was 12 years of age and mooching along Putney high street when someone thrust into my hand a leaflet that changed my life. It bore a photograph of a cat with its head covered in electrodes, and the slogan: Curiosity Will Kill This Cat. I had a beloved cat of my own called Chippy. The sight of the leaflet’s tortured feline froze me to the spot. Last year alone there were 2.64 million animal tests in Britain This was the mid-1980s, when animal testing was the main animal rights issue. You didn’t hear much about veganism, instead it was a different ‘v’ word – vivisection – that was the

Steerpike

Badenoch to set out Tory Budget alternative

It is a funny old time for the Tories right now. The government has rather sportingly decided to commit seppuku a fortnight before the Budget. So how are they to get any headlines? Mr S has done some digging and it turns out that the brains of Matthew Parker Street have been hard at work – a word, incidentally, that featured more than 50 times in Kemi Badenoch’s speech last week. Clearly Britney Spears’ 2013 hit has been playing on the Tory leader’s headphones… For next week, she and Sir Mel Stride, the Shadow Chancellor, are planning a big speech, setting out exactly what the Tories would do differently. Welfare

Steerpike

Lib Dems: We’re serious (really)

Pity the Liberal Democrats. You win 72 seats at an election – and all anyone wants to talk about is Nigel Farage. You then schedule a big morning pre-Budget press conference – and the government decides to tear itself apart. Like most of HM Lobby, Steerpike was unable to make it to this morning’s event with Daisy Cooper, the Lib Dem deputy leader. But he could not let the occasion pass without comment. For as Ed Davey’s party desperately tries to insert itself into the political debate, it seems that they have decided that comedy is the best solution to their tragedy. At a time when the nation’s finances are

Steerpike

Watch: Streeting hits out at No. 10

It’s nice, isn’t it. The quiet. Just sixteen months after their landslide triumph, the Labour party is now in full-on meltdown. The decision by Downing Street sources last night to launch a pre-emptive missile at Wes Streeting appears to have backfired spectacularly, as the popular Health Secretary handled today’s morning media round with aplomb. Gee, who could have foreseen that eh? Asked to rule out demanding Starmer’s resignation after the Budget, Streeting told Sky News: ‘Yes, and nor did I shoot JFK. I don’t know where Lord Lucan is, had nothing to do with Shergar, and I do think that the US did manage to do the moon landings. I

Ross Clark

Starmer must not give in to the Waspi women

If nothing else, the government is providing us with a masterclass in how to lose control of public spending. A billion dollars here, a billion dollars there, as Ronald Reagan once said, and soon it begins to add up to some serious money. Work and pensions secretary Pat McFadden has announced that he intends to take another look at one of the few good decisions Labour has taken since it came to office last year: to refuse compensation to nearly three million ‘Waspi’ women who have bleated that they weren’t given sufficient warning that their pension age was to be increased from 60 to 65, ruining their delicately-laid retirement plans.

James Heale

Are the knives out for Keir Starmer?

A flurry of late-night media briefings have triggered a full blown crisis for Keir Starmer. Allies of the Prime Minister sought to fire a pre-emptive strike in the Times and to the BBC, suggesting that he would fight any challenge to his leadership after the Budget. The Guardian subsequently reported that Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, has 50 frontbenchers willing to resign if the Budget goes badly and Starmer does not go. Various ministers, officials and allies are quoted – suggesting a degree of co-ordination, rather than just one rogue operator sounding off. Streeting, who was down last night to do this morning’s media round, was furious at both the