Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Sunday

Steerpike

Cabinet ministers turn on Reeves

Oh dear. It seems that Rachel Reeves’ Sunday media round has done nothing to answer questions about whether she misled the country about the national finances. The Chancellor – or ‘the Chancer’ in the words of the Sun – has repeatedly denied lying about the size of the fiscal black hole in the run-up to the Budget. But her protestations of innocence have not been enough to convince a growing band of sceptics, which now, er, include members of her own front bench. Talk about losing the faithful… A series of ministers have told the Times that the cabinet was misled in the weeks ahead of Wednesday’s Budget. One says:

James Heale

Zack Polanski is the real winner of the Your Party conference

After two days of discord and division, Your Party has voted and it finally has a name – Your Party. This afternoon, 37 per cent of members chose to keep the party’s existing title rather than select one of the three alternatives: Popular Alliance, For The Many or Our Party. This marked one of the few highlights from the party’s inaugural conference in Liverpool. It otherwise proved to be an acrimonious affair in which the tensions between Jeremy Corbyn, Zarah Sultana and their respective allies have been on display for all to see. Clearly it is the Green party leader who will dominate the British left for the near future

Joe Bedell-Brill

Sunday shows round-up: Reeves denies misleading voters before Budget

The Budget is out and, as expected, its measures include the removal of the two-child benefit cap, along with tax rises of £26 billion. Today, though, the headlines focus on whether Chancellor Rachel Reeves deliberately misled the public about the state of the public finances to soften the reception of her Budget. On the BBC, Laura Kuenssberg asked Reeves why she had given the impression she would have ‘no choice’ to put taxes up, when in fact the Office for Budget Responsibility had said there was a £4 billion surplus. Reeves said her headroom had been downgraded from the £9.9 billion she had in the spring and claimed that £4

James Heale

Reeves's 'lying' denials are only the start

Four days after a Budget is usually the time when it starts to unravel. Some within Labour see it as a victory of sorts for Rachel Reeves that, so far, the post-Budget debate has focused mostly on the run-up to her statement rather than the measures it contained. Certain policies – such as business rates changes for small businesses – have the potential to blow up into political rows. But the collapse of the Chancellor’s authority this summer has meant the Budget did not contain any serious reform that could stir up major trouble.  Reeves made it through her media round but the impression was, at times, shifty and unconvincing Fearing

Mark Galeotti

Inside the mind of Putin's real hatchet man

As Moscow and Washington prepare for talks on the latest version of Donald Trump’s peace plan next week, leaked recordings of a conversation with US envoy Steve Witkoff have thrown a spotlight on to senior diplomat Yuri Ushakov. It seems he, not Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, is the prime mover behind Russia’s negotiating position. The stature of Lavrov, once a legend in the diplomatic community, has steadily diminished since 2014, when he wasn’t even consulted before Vladimir Putin decided to annex Crimea. Every year since then, the now-75-year-old minister has petitioned Putin to be allowed to retire; every year this is denied. Instead, Lavrov remains confined to a role of

Charles Amos

Pensioners don't need a £10 Christmas bonus

This week, 17.5 million people on various benefits including the state pension and disability living allowance will receive a £10 Christmas bonus. It’s about time though, that Keir Starmer played Scrooge and finally abolished the bonus altogether. For, unlike their Dickensian forebears, poor pensioners this Christmas won’t be going without food or warmth. In fact, they have more than enough of both. When the Christmas bonus was introduced by the Tory minister Keith Joseph more than 50 years ago, the basic argument was that pensioners needed the money to cope with that year’s soaring inflation of 7.1 per cent. Although believing £10 did not go far enough, the Labour politician

Saturday

Brendan O’Neill

Ireland is trying to eradicate its Jewish history

Now Ireland is erasing its Jewish history. This week Dublin City Council will vote on a proposal to change the name of Herzog Park in the south of Dublin. The park was named for Chaim Herzog, the Belfast-born, Dublin-raised Jew who later became the sixth president of Israel. ‘Following consideration, the Committee agreed… that the name “Herzog” should be removed from the park’, says the council’s chilling proposal. Scrubbing the name of a Jew from a public park? Tell me that isn’t anti-Semitism. For two years now, Herzog Park has been the focal point of that spittle-flecked Israelophobic fury that is so commonplace in modern Ireland. Last year an online

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

Jonathan Spyer

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

Robin Ashenden

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

Andrew Tettenborn

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

James Heale and Michael Simmons

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.

Friday

Tim Shipman

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

Tim Shipman

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 –

Lucy Dunn

France finally agrees to intercept Channel migrant boats – but there's a catch

After months of pressure from Britain, France has agreed to begin intercepting small boats in the Channel. The move comes after Keir Starmer wrote a letter urging Emmanuel Macron to support the proposal, telling the French leader that we ‘have no effective deterrent’ for migrants hoping to get to the UK illegally by sea. As reported by Le Monde, Starmer insisted: ‘It is essential that we deploy these tactics this month.’ France will intervene only before traffickers have picked up passengers The plan will see French security forces allowed to stop the small boats while they’re at sea, the caveat being that France will intervene only before traffickers have picked up

Lara Brown

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