Politics

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

Wednesday

19 Mar 2025

Spring Statement or ‘Emergency Budget’?

12 min listen

The question that everyone in Westminster wants answered is what will actually be included in next week’s Spring Statement. Previously, the Spring Statement wasn’t looking like much to write home about – little more than an update. But with the economy taking a turn for the worse and her fiscal headroom narrowing, it has taken on renewed importance for Rachel Reeves, with the opposition trying their best to brand it as an ‘Emergency Budget’. What does Reeves need to do to calm the markets? Also on the podcast, Pensions Minister Torsten Bell gave an interesting interview to Newsnight last night, defending the government’s welfare reforms. Where are we with the fallout from

Lloyd Evans

Starmer looked scared of Badenoch at PMQs

At PMQs this week, Sir Keir Starmer got a proper grilling for a change. Kemi Badenoch used smarter tactics: short questions sharply focused; half-truths instantly rebutted. The Tory leader abandoned her normal habit of covering the entire spectrum of Labour’s shortcomings. She focused on their worst error: economic stagnation caused by the tax-grab Budget. Why, she asked, is the Chancellor holding ‘an emergency budget next week?’ A near fib from Starmer. She’d caught him out Sir Keir gave her a formulaic reply, crowing about his glorious achievements. ‘Record investment… three interest rate cuts…wages going up faster than prices.’ Kemi dismissed this as balderdash. She gave the true reason for the

Eliot Wilson

Who are the contenders to be the next ‘C’?

Somewhere in an office on the south bank of the Thames, a man is writing in green ink and signing himself simply ‘C’. He is doing these things because all of his 16 predecessors have done so since 1909. Sir Richard Moore is Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), more popularly known as MI6, the only employee of the organisation whose name is made public, and he will soon step down after five years in the role. SIS is Britain’s foreign intelligence organisation, collecting and analysing human intelligence overseas to protect the United Kingdom’s national interests, inform the government’s strategic understanding of the global situation and support counter-terrorism, counter-proliferation

Jawad Iqbal

Gareth Southgate has nothing original to say

Football’s most revered promulgator of platitudes is at it again. Sir Gareth Southgate, the former England manager, has warned that vulnerable young men are falling victim to ‘callous, manipulative and toxic influencers’. Delivering the Richard Dimbleby Lecture, Southgate said the young are falling prey to an ideology that asserts success is measured by money and dominance. This is just a tad rich coming from a man who owes his wealth and fame to a game that worships money above all else, and in which everyone – football club owners, managers and players – prizes dominance at any cost over their rivals. In a nutshell, a man who used to manage

Stephen Daisley

No one will thank Liz Kendall for doing her job

There are three thankless posts in a modern Labour government. There’s the Chancellor, who has to announce the tightening of belts and the hiking of taxes; the Home Secretary, who must busy themselves cracking down, banging up and throwing away the key; and the Work and Pensions Secretary, who is charged with Scroogeing every last penny out of the benefits system. These are the ministers Labour’s grassroots and its graduate liberal voters love to hate, but they likely do more to keep Labour in power than their more popular colleagues. Labour liberals have an outsized influence in policy debates, overrepresented as they are in the BBC, the NGOs and academia,

Isabel Hardman

Badenoch caught Starmer out at PMQs

Keir Starmer didn’t have to defend his welfare cuts until later in the session at today’s Prime Minister’s Questions, because Kemi Badenoch decided to focus on the looming increase to employers’ national insurance contributions. She was right to do so ahead of the spring statement, and her attacks were, for the second week running, much better than they have been previously. Starmer and his whips had clearly anticipated that tax and welfare would be the two hot topics of the session, and they’d found a Labour backbencher sufficiently loyal and self-loathing to ask a totally pointless question just before Badenoch. Andrew Pakes praised Starmer for the ‘welcome boost in the

Brendan O’Neill

Why don’t we hear more about Israel’s stunning blow against Hamas’s fascists?

Imagine if, following an Allied raid on Nazi positions, the newspapers the next day told us about nothing but the civilian casualties. No mention of the fascists who were killed. No utterance of their names, no information about their ranks. Instead, just pained commentary on the suffering of the innocents who tragically found themselves swept up in this act of war. This is one of the most blistering assaults on Hamas’s terror army since 7 October We would think that strange, right? We would consider it a reneging on the journalist’s duty to tell the truth about war. Well, that’s how I feel perusing the coverage of Israel’s resumption of

Yossi Melman

A storm is brewing for Benjamin Netanyahu

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is once again plunging Israel into a deeply polarising legal and political crisis. Over the weekend, he announced his plan to dismiss Ronen Bar, the chief of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service. This was followed on Tuesday by his decision to renew the war in Gaza, by violating the fragile ceasefire that had stayed in place for several months, showing disregard for the safety of the 59 remaining hostages in the process. Netanyahu, who is facing three criminal indictments for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, justified his decision to dismiss Bar by stating that he had lost confidence in his security chief. However, there

Steerpike

Sturgeon unveils memoir cover

Nicola Sturgeon may be stepping down at the 2026 Scottish parliament election but fear not, the SNP’s Dear Leader won’t be out of the public eye for good. While many might have expected the former first minister to retire to the shadows after the rather tumultuous two years she has faced, it appears the Queen of the Nats is determined to stay in the spotlight. This summer, Sturgeon will release her memoir – which she promised last week would be a ‘candid’ read – and has even teased her fans and followers with a sneak preview of the cover. Taking to Instagram – where else? – the ex-SNP leader unveiled

Ian O’Doherty

How Conor McGregor humiliated the Irish government

The Irish Taoiseach Micheal Martin will have felt some relief after his visit to the White House last week. While Trump criticised Ireland for poaching American pharmaceutical companies, the general consensus was that Martin had walked away pretty unscathed. In fact, the mood was so optimistic following the encounter that Tanaiste Simon Harris, also in America for the week, offered Trump a state visit to Ireland sometime next year. But whatever warmth of feeling the Irish government may have had towards the American President will have plummeted into the freezing depths following Trump’s decision to invite Conor McGregor to the White House to mark St Patrick’s Day. It is perhaps

Alan Roden

Scotland’s politicians must take the Reform threat seriously

Support for Nigel Farage’s party in Scotland is surging. This is despite the fact the Scottish group has no party leader, no parliamentarians and next to no operation on the ground. On his recent trip to Glasgow, Reform UK’s deputy leader Richard Tice struggled to explain any devolved policies and even failed to remember the names of two councillors at an event set up to announce their defections. Meanwhile in Westminster internal battles have exploded in public with a bust-up between MPs Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe, while Reform voters are starting to turn against their leader. But to Scottish voters, all this doesn’t appear to matter. Today, a new opinion poll by Survation, commissioned

Alex Klaushofer

Bristol’s low traffic bullies have gone too far

At 3am last Thursday morning, council contractors and police descended on a Bristol neighbourhood to install roadblocks under the cover of darkness. Fadumo Farah was one of the residents who got up that night to see what was going on. She was shocked to see dozens of police officers and security guards with drones. It ‘felt like a movie scene,’ Farah said. In a last-ditch attempt to prevent the work proceeding, she – and a group of other residents – lay down in the road. The operation was the latest episode in a long-running battle over Bristol’s first Low Traffic Neighbourhood (LTN) – known in the local lingo as ‘East Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood’

Steerpike

Reform records highest support yet in Scotland

As if Brits haven’t had enough elections and leadership competitions lately, north of the border political parties are gearing up for the 2026 Scottish parliament poll. While the embattled SNP has had a rocky few months, now Scottish Labour is under fire thanks to Sir Keir Starmer’s unpopular policies. But there is one party that only seems to be picking up support: Reform UK. New Survation polling for Quantum Communications reveals support for the Nigel Farage-led party in Scotland has surged again. Reform is predicted to pick up 17 per cent of the constituency vote share and 16 per cent on the regional list – leaving the group with 14

Sergey Radchenko

Trump was naive to think he could negotiate with Putin

President Donald Trump’s creative diplomacy in the Ukraine conflict – which entails bullying the victim and making unilateral concessions to the aggressor – has achieved its latest non-result. After a telephone conversation that lasted for an hour and a half, Trump failed to convince his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to accept the US proposal for an unconditional ceasefire. The war continues. Putin attempted to dampen expectations shortly before the call. Speaking to a gathering of Russian businessmen earlier in the day, he predicted that sanctions on Russia would not go away. ‘These are not temporary or targeted measures; this is a mechanism of systemic, strategic pressure on our country,’ he

Matthew Lynn

China’s BYD could kill Tesla

Tesla and its hyper-active boss Elon Musk are having a bad month. On both sides of the Altantic, there have been protests against the ‘Nazi-mobile’ and the ‘Swasti-car’. The electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer’s sales are collapsing across Europe, and its stock is in freefall. On top of all that, its main rival, China’s BYD, has just announced a super-faster charger that allows you to ‘fill up’ your EV as quickly as you once could your petrol car. All companies go through bad patches, especially when they are leading a new industry. But Tesla is losing its technological lead to China. That could prove fatal. There is growing evidence that China’s

Mark Galeotti

Trump’s call with Putin has bought Ukraine time

So who won from yesterday’s phone conversation between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin? Arguably, no one did – but nor did anyone really lose. Efforts to end the fighting live, maybe to die, another day. Putin managed to find a third way between agreeing to an unconditional ceasefire – which the Russians believe would benefit Ukraine, and which would have infuriated the ultra-nationalists – and rejecting Trump’s proposals altogether. The moratorium he called on strikes against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure looks like a concession but actually has little real impact now that winter is past, and the drones and missiles which would have been hitting power stations are still targeting cities.

Gavin Mortimer

Could a headscarf row bring down France’s government?

Might a headscarf bring down France’s coalition government? The question of whether the Islamic garment should be permitted on the sports field has revealed the ideological differences within Prime Minister Francois Bayrou’s fragile government. On the one hand, there are left-leaning ministers such as Elisabeth Borne (Education) and Marie Barsacq (Sport and youth) who see nothing wrong with the headscarf. Others, principally, Gérald Darmanin (Justice) and Bruno Retailleau (Interior), are fiercely opposed. Retailleau recently took Barsacq to task over her stance, saying the headscarf ‘is not a form of freedom, but a form of submission for women’. The headscarf is just the latest attempt by Islamists to destabilise France On

Steerpike

Watch: Labour MP’s cringeworthy Newsnight interview

The Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall announced a range of cuts to benefits payments in the Commons on Tuesday in a bid to save money and get people back to work. On the evening broadcast round that followed, Labour MP and pensions minister Torsten Bell was quizzed on Newsnight about what exactly the reforms would mean. But rather than reassuring viewers, Bell’s tone-deaf interview has left benefits-receiving Brits even more concerned about their futures. Challenging the Labour minister on how the welfare reforms will affect young people, the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire put it to him that ‘some young people are going to be living on around £70 a week’.

Katja Hoyer

Merz has paid a high price to pass Germany’s spending package

Yesterday, the German parliament approved a historic amount of debt-funded investment in defence and infrastructure. Over the next few years, Germany may spend up to €1 trillion (£841 billion) on its depleted military and crumbling roads, buildings and train tracks. These eyewatering amounts of money are intended to act as the glue with which to bind the country’s prospective coalition together. But they also give an indication of how much of their own programme the election-winning conservatives are willing to sacrifice in exchange for power. The likely next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, now starts on a credibility deficit. He’ll have to work hard to get back into the good books of

Jacob Heilbrunn

Cosying up to Putin has weakened Trump’s hand in Europe

Once upon a time, America practiced ping-pong diplomacy to try and improve ties with Mao’s China. Now Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are talking about organising hockey matches in America and Russia to bolster relations. Given that the two sides would be playing in ice rinks, it would be hard to say that Russia, which has been banned from the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup ever since its invasion of Ukraine, is coming in from the cold. But perhaps Putin, who has often taken part in games in Russia, will once more don his ice skates, while Trump serves as master of ceremonies. Trump has inadvertently weakened his ability

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