Politics

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

Tuesday

11 Nov 2025

How a right-wing putsch felled the infallible BBC

By now you’ll know all about the crisis at the BBC, especially if you watch or read or listen to the BBC, which seems to be reporting on little else. There is nothing that exercises the corporation quite like the opportunity to talk about its specialist subject. You know the resignation of director general Tim Davie is a big story because BBC News has broken into its 24-hour coverage of Celebrity Traitors to bring us updates. On-air talent is muttering darkly about political campaigns and the corporation being ‘under attack’, the standard metaphor for occasions when a media empire funded by a legally-enforced, universal TV tax is subjected to scrutiny.

Matthew Lynn

Will Rachel Reeves listen to easyJet's warning?

We are all familiar with the different excuses for why we find ourselves stuck at the Spoons in Luton or Stansted airport for hours, trying to avoid the stag party, as we wait for our flight. There is fog over the Channel. The French air traffic controllers are on strike. There are not enough planes. But there may soon be another reason to add to the list: the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has increased taxes too often. The boss of easyJet has warned today that if flight levies go up again in the Budget, he will have to take capacity out of the UK market. Just like France, we may be

Gareth Roberts

The BBC has been taken over by middle-class brats

After its Gotterdämerung week, capped by the ‘sorry not sorry’ resignations of Tim Davie and Deborah Turness, it didn’t take long for the BBC and its supporters to start flinging mud. You are political; we are not. We are only being nice; you have mounted a ‘right-wing coup’. I’m trying to imagine what a Daily Telegraph coup would look like – Janet Daley rolling in atop a T-54 tank, Charles Moore installed as El Presidente. You might think that reacting to Michael Prescott’s internal report sooner might’ve been a better idea for Tim Davie than doing nothing much and hoping it wouldn’t leak; that ‘I’ll put this fizzing stick of

Eliot Wilson

The ECHR is destroying British army morale

Nine retired senior military officers have written an open letter to warn that the expansion of human rights legislation is damaging morale within Britain’s armed forces and undermining their effectiveness. These are among our most eminent generals: all have held four-star rank; three have served as Chief of the General Staff, the professional head of the British Army, and one is a former Chief of the Air Staff, the RAF equivalent. Their argument is this. Human rights legislation, especially an ‘ever-broadening interpretation’ of the European Convention on Human Rights, is being used to re-examine actions taken by armed forces personnel in combat. This is being done ‘to fight political or

Michael Simmons

Rachel Reeves is killing the jobs market

Britain’s unemployment rate has hit 5 per cent – the highest level since the pandemic. Figures, just released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), also show 117,000 payrolled jobs wiped out in the last year. The hiring slowdown seems to be getting worse as what was initially a reaction to the Chancellor’s £25 billion raid on employer National Insurance now turns into fears about the coming Budget. Meanwhile, wage growth continued to ease, although it still remains well above inflation. Wages were up 4.8 per cent across the economy compared to last year, with pay rises doing considerably better in the public sector. However, if wage growth slows again

Ross Clark

Rachel Reeves is dragging Britain into a productivity doom loop

Just how much more desperate can Rachel Reeves get? Giving an even heftier clue to Radio 5 listeners on Monday that she is going to break Labour’s manifesto promise and raise income tax, the Chancellor explained that this is necessary in order to raise Britain’s lousy productivity record. Sticking to the manifesto commitments, Reeves said: Would require things like deep cuts to capital spending. The reason why our productivity and our growth has been so poor these last few years is because governments have always taken the easy option to cut investment in rail and road projects, in energy projects, in digital infrastructure. As a result, we’ve never managed to

Daniel Hannan

The truth about 'UK-born' criminals

The police want us to know one thing about Anthony Williams, the alleged LNER knife attacker. We can only speculate about his motives, his record or whether he was responsible for an earlier attack in the London Docklands. But one fact was broadcast almost immediately: he was British-born. The police put out a statement soon after arresting him (along with a second man, who was released afterwards): A 32-year-old man, a black British national, and a 35-year-old man, a British national of Caribbean descent, were both arrested on suspicion of attempted murder. Both were born in the UK. OK, he was born in the UK. So were three of the

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump's battle against the Democrats is only just beginning

No sooner did Democrats in the American Senate reach a deal to end the federal government shutdown than a frenzy of liberal pearl clutching ensued. The Democrats should have held out longer, they argued. Healthcare subsidies could have been rescued. Donald Trump’s approval ratings were plunging. Golly, maybe the Democrats could even have driven the dreaded Trump from office? Jonathan Chait’s verdict in the Atlantic was not untypical: ‘Senate Democrats just made a huge mistake.’ Don’t believe a word of it. The surprising thing isn’t that Democrats folded. It’s that they held out as long as they did. In the end, the moderate Democratic Senators, ranging from Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman

Druin Burch

Are we forgetting how to remember the glorious dead?

The generation that fought in the First World War is gone, and the days are closing for those who served in the Second. Since I started as a doctor, one of the standard questions, to check whether people were oriented, has been to ask them the dates of World War Two. In the past few years, for the first time, I’ve met people who look outraged or indifferent, saying they couldn’t be expected to know. What was once a universal cultural possession has, for them, become trivia. Something has happened to the way we mark Remembrance Day The question used to yield remarkable stories, but it has been years since

Monday

10 Nov 2025

Steerpike

Reeves to spurn Budget tipple (again)

There are just two weeks to go until Rachel Reeves’ second Budget. Twelve months after telling the CBI that she was ‘not coming back with more borrowing or more taxes’, she is now planning to do, er, exactly that. All sorts of various measures are being tipped and touted in the newspapers. But the most eye-catching is clearly the mooted rise in the basic rate of income tax. No Chancellor has dared hike this since Denis Healey in 1975: a decision which was followed a year later by the infamous IMF bailout. An encouraging precedent… Reeves is a history lover, who loves to lecture on Harold Wilson and have pictures

Steerpike

Reeves hints she will break income tax pledge

There are just sixteen days to go until the Budget – and the pitch is being well and truly rolled. Having conducted her ‘I can’t talk about that’ press conference last week, the Chancellor has now done an interview with 5Live to drop a few more hints about the truly Awful Statement she is planning in a fortnight’s time. That sound you can hear is the rich and mobile fleeing this country… The big question about her second Budget is whether Reeves intends to break her 16-month-old pledge not to raise income tax, VAT or National Insurance. The answer, increasingly, appears to be ‘yes’, with the Chancellor informing the Office

Oscar Edmondson

What now for the BBC?

12 min listen

It seems that the BBC is once again setting the news agenda – via tales of its own incompetence. The Corporation has spent days battling accusations that it aired a doctored clip of a speech by President Trump in a Panorama documentary back in January 2021. The White House Press Secretary has called the Beeb ‘100 per cent fake news’ while Kemi Badenoch has demanded that ‘heads must roll’ … and now they have. For Tim Davie, the Director-General of the BBC, announced his resignation, alongside Deborah Turness, his senior colleague and CEO of News. But will two scalps be enough? James Heale speaks to Tim Shipman and Sonia Sodha. Produced

Gavin Mortimer

Night-time air patrols won't stop small boat crossings

The government has deployed two aircraft to the Channel to detect and monitor small boats crossing under the cover of darkness. The planes, De Havilland Dash 8s, are equipped with hi-tech cameras and sensors and will give Border Force ‘eyes’ on the boats heading from France to England. The optimists within government hope that the aircraft’s ‘night vision capability’ will enable Border Force to identify and arrest the smugglers ferrying migrants across the Channel. After a period of inclement weather grounded the small boats, more stable conditions at the end of last week led to a surge in crossings: 621 migrants reached England on Thursday, 648 on Friday and 503

Matthew Lynn

Will London tempt the New Yorkers fleeing Mamdani?

As New York’s wealthy elite weigh up the options under their new ‘democratic socialist’ Mayor Zohran Mamdani, many of them are now reported to be considering fleeing to London instead. But will it really offer them the safe harbour they are searching for? The truth is that under the Labour Chancellor Rachel Reeves and Mayor Sadiq Khan, Britain’s capital has become an even worse place to be rich than the city they are looking to get out of. There are plenty of reasons for American billionaires to feel nervous about the Mamdani regime. The new mayor has promised an extra 2 per cent tax on incomes above $1 million (£758,000)

Joanna Williams

There has been no ‘coup’ at the BBC

Readers who woke to Radio 4’s Today programme at around 6:30 a.m. can be forgiven for leaping out of bed in alarm. ‘There has been a coup at the BBC!’ cried presenter Nick Robinson, or words to that effect. Clearly, as we lay snoozing, a hostile takeover of our state broadcaster was underway. ‘These are not,’ Robinson informed us, ‘normal times’. Indeed, they are not. His monologue began: The boss of the organisation which remains, despite all the rows about bias, the most trusted news organisation in the country – perhaps also across the globe – has quit, along with the head of news, after a row in which the President of

Brendan O’Neill

The BBC's fake news blindspot

The rot at the BBC is worse than people think. It’s far more serious than the occasional twisting of facts to get one over on a politician the Beeb hates, like Donald Trump – an act of journalistic malpractice for which director-general Tim Davie and News CEO Deborah Turness have now resigned. This scandal exposes a great truth of our time – that the elites are often more susceptible to fallacy and hysteria than the rest of us The deeper problem is that the BBC has been so corrupted by faddish ideology that it is now content to burn truth itself in the service of that ideology. It has supped

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The rot at the BBC runs far deeper than Tim Davie

The resignations at the top of the BBC mark a critical juncture for an institution long seen as a pillar of British public life. Yet their departures, while welcome, are insufficient. The BBC’s failure is not confined to the mistakes of individual executives. It is institutional, entrenched, and long overdue for a reckoning. The BBC has repeatedly blurred moral lines on Israel and antisemitism Unlike privately funded media outlets, be it GB News, Talk, The Spectator, the Daily Telegraph, or the Daily Mail, the BBC is funded by coercion. Britons are compelled by law to finance its operations if they own a television, regardless of whether they watch or endorse

Anthony Browne

Why the BBC keeps getting it wrong

The double-decapitating explosion over BBC bias is a gift for commentators, but much of the commentary misses a key central point. It is not just that the BBC is paid for by a compulsory tax on television ownership, which people are sent to jail for not paying. But just as importantly, it enjoys a position of unrivalled, semi-monopolistic power in our national debate. This BBC morning editorial meeting is group think in institutionalised form Some of those on the left often love to complain, normally alluding to one Rupert Murdoch, about concentration of power in the media, and the need for diverse sources of journalism. But Mr Murdoch’s power pales

Steerpike

Exclusive: Reform launches its student wing

You know you’re not a proper political party, until you’ve had the obligatory youth wing scandal. Pubescent politicos have long been a feature of Westminster life. In the Starmer army they have NOLS – National Labour Students, where generations of power-crazed identikit drones have been churned out, each bearing the same dead eyes and rictus grin. The Tories meanwhile have – or, had – Conservative Future, the successor to the Young Conservatives. Part-dating agency, part-ideological madrasa, these outlets served to inculcate generations of Tories with the attitudes, contacts and god-awful catchphrases needed to govern. Now, in their quest for power, it seems Reform UK has finally got serious. After months

Theo Padnos

The jihadist I knew: my life as a prisoner of Syria's president

As Washington rolls out the red carpet today for the former al-Qaeda chieftain and now Syrian president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, Syria’s minorities continue to live in terror. An army of destruction, half Mad Max, half Lollapalooza is rolling through the desert somewhere south of the country’s capital, Damascus. Who has ordered these militants into action? No one knows. What do they want? It isn’t clear. But, as a former prisoner of al-Sharaa’s band of jihadists, I can’t say I’m surprised by what is unfolding in Syria. That dark prophecy is alive in al-Sharaa’s Syria Whatever else might be said about the old regime of Bashar al-Assad, no one was ever in