Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Friday

Joanna Williams

Why so many young people don’t have a job

Why are so many young adults not in education, employment or training? The latest statistics show that almost one million 16 to 24-year-olds are unemployed, or ‘Neet’, to use the inappropriately cheery-sounding acronym. Fractionally down on the previous quarter, this is still close to a ten-year high. The number of Neets has been consistently above 900,000 since early 2024, peaking at 987,000 – around one-in-eight young people – earlier this year. Falling out of education and employment in your early twenties can have a devastating impact. More than half a million of those who are not currently working or studying have never had a job. Neets face not just financial

Steerpike

Ex-Reform Wales leader given jail time over bribery

News just in: the former leader of Reform UK in Wales has been handed a prison sentence of 10 and a half years for bribery. Nathan Gill admitted to taking pro-Russia bribes and was paid thousands to give TV interviews that favoured a key ally of Vladimir Putin. He also made pro-Russia speeches in the European parliament where he was an MEP for six years. Crikey! Gill – who was also previously the leader of UKIP in Wales from 2014 to 2016 before becoming Reform leader in 2021 – admitted eight counts of bribery between 2018 and 2019. Today, judge Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb told Gill his actions conflicted with his

Kristina Murkett

In praise of learning German

The University of Nottingham, one of the most prestigious Russell Group universities, is preparing to close its languages department, as well as 48 undergraduate courses across music, nursing, agriculture, theology, microbiology and education. It seems strange that at an institution which claims to be a ‘global university without borders’, students will no longer be able to study French, German, Spanish, Chinese or Russian. My reaction to this news is one of head vs heart. My head tells me that in order to survive and provide high-quality education, universities need to be solvent, and so perhaps this is a pragmatic decision – a hard one, but one that reflects our hard times. 

Madeline Grant

The monumental self-delusion of Rachel Reeves

Rachel Reeves has been speaking to the newspapers trying to sell her Budget, which given her communication abilities is a bit like asking King Herod to do your babysitting. The Chancellor of the Exchequer appears to be getting the excuses in early; it’s almost as if she, like everyone else, knows that next week’s announcements will be a catastrophe. The thread that comes through the article is that the country is somehow being punished for the Chancellor’s teenage insecurities Reeves’s big message is that she’s been ‘underestimated all her life’. A humbler person might wonder why everyone has consistently assessed her to be not up to the job rather than

James Kirkup

Food inflation is a ticking time bomb for Rachel Reeves

As the Budget approaches, Westminster is full of chatter about Rachel Reeves’s decision to take the ‘smorgasbord’ approach to fiscal policy: lots of small, detailed measures, each raising only modest sums for the Treasury. Conventional wisdom says, correctly, that this is risky. Every little tweak is another opportunity for something to misfire. And when people in SW1 talk about small Budget measures going wrong, they often invoke the same cautionary tale: the pasty tax. That was the 2012 proposal by the coalition government to impose VAT on hot takeaway food, meaning the price of a Greggs sausage roll or a service station pasty would rise by 20 per cent. The

Jake Wallis Simons

Will no one acknowledge how Mossad helps Britain?

Let’s imagine that an international jihadi network, with cells in London and Europe, had just been busted, with dramatic arrests in Britain, Germany and Austria. Let’s imagine that the group had been planning a string of atrocities, with a weapons cache discovered in Vienna. Let’s imagine that security services had unearthed ‘tens of thousands of Euros in cash, numerous data storage devices and mobile phones, gas pistols, firearms, ammunition, knives, and related literature’. You’d have expected such a story to make the news, right? Wrong. On Monday, the Israeli prime minister’s office announced that this precise scenario had unfolded, with Mossad handing intelligence to MI5 and European agencies that enabled

Steerpike

Will Starmer approve the Chinese super-embassy?

Well, well, well. Just days after MI5 alerted MPs and peers to Chinese espionage threats, it appears that Prime Minister Keir Starmer could be ready to give a Chinese embassy in London the green light. According to the Times, two Whitehall departments will submit their responses to the proposals in the next few days, ahead of the decision being made on 10 December. Despite warnings from intelligence chiefs about spying, and concerns about cables beneath the site connecting to the City of London, neither the Home Office nor the Foreign Office are expected to object – as long as the right ‘mitigations’ are in place.  The decision follows the collapse of

James Heale

Covid report: ‘a £200 million I told you so’

15 min listen

Yesterday we had the publication of the second module of the Covid Inquiry on the decision-making at the heart of government. It confirmed a toxic and disorganised culture at the heart of No. 10 and the headline is that the government acted ‘too little, too late’, costing as many as 23,000 lives in England. That figure is already disputed, not least by our economics editor Michael Simmons who argues on the podcast that the inquiry is a ‘disgrace’ and demonstrates a lack of domain knowledge about the limitations of modelling. Where else does the inquiry fall short? What will be the political ramifications in Westminster? James Heale speaks to Michael

Matthew Lynn

Don't write off Bitcoin yet

Bitcoin is crashing all over again, and it is taking the smaller crypto currencies down with it. It has fallen by a quarter from its highs, and there is little sign that the relentless selling is going to stop anytime soon. Plenty of people will be reheating arguments about how the digital currency is completely worthless and that the bubble was always going to pop one day. But Bitcoin has been through plenty of bear markets and it has always bounced back – and there is little reason to believe this crash will be any different. It is certainly a substantial fall. From a high of $114,000 (£87,300) a coin

Michael Simmons

Britain will never clear its debts

It’s hard to think of a more shambolic budget than the one Rachel Reeves will deliver next week. His Majesty’s Treasury has spent the last month pitch-rolling policies in the Financial Times – using the paper as a sort of town crier – then pulling them back as the OBR’s forecasts have wobbled.  Directly, the cause for this volatility is the wafer-thin headroom the Chancellor left herself after her first Budget and the Spring Statement. The markets quickly eroded the slack in the face of persistent inflation and a government politically incapable of reining in Britain’s stratospheric spending. Beneath all that is the staggering amounts we’re spending on debt interest.

David Shipley

Has Shabana Mahmood fixed the Boriswave?

After the pandemic the Boris Johnson government took a fateful and disastrous decision to suppress rising inflation by massively expanding migration. It was one of the worst decisions made by a British government in my lifetime, made all the more appalling because it followed a solemn promise that Brexit would bring a tough, ‘points-based’ migration system. Instead, we now know, we got the Boriswave. A vast influx of low-skilled migrants with many dependants, who would cost the country hundreds of billions once granted residency. In a lengthy document published yesterday, the Home Office describe the scale and disaster of what Shabana Mahmood calls ‘this extraordinary open border experiment’. It describes

Limor Simhony Philpott

Violent settlers must be stopped

A crisis of authority now festers at the heart of Israel. A shrill, violent fringe of extremist settlers in the West Bank is not only terrorising Palestinians, but undermining the authority of the Israeli state, its security and diplomatic relations. This week, there have been reported attacks by settlers near Deir Istiya, near Nablus, and in Jaba, southwest of Bethlehem. These settlers’ growing impunity, and the government’s failure to rein them in, is no longer a side issue. Settler violence is emerging as a national security crisis. This is not hyperbole. These hilltop radicals act with a confidence that is backed by far-right politicians and suggests de facto immunity: arson, intimidation, physical violence, price‑tag attacks,

Patrick West

We don't need white saviours to rescue us from St George's flags

Trends in society always come and go, but one that shows no signs of abating is the propensity among many to take offence at words or symbols. Just because that derisive word of the last decade, ‘snowflake’, has fallen out of fashion, it doesn’t mean that these hypersensitive souls have disappeared. Being compassionate in a patronising fashion from afar is mandatory behaviour for white liberals and our aloof, elite classes Emily Spurrell, chairwoman of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners, is a case in point. Spurrell hit out at the surge in St George’s and Union Jack flags being hung on lamp posts, motorway bridges and street signs across

Lara Prendergast

Labour's toxic budget, Zelensky in trouble & Hitler's genitalia

39 min listen

It’s time to scrap the budget, argues political editor Tim Shipman this week. An annual fiscal event only allows the Chancellor to tinker round the edges, faced with a backdrop of global uncertainty. Endless potential tax rises have been trailed, from taxes on mansions, pensions, savings, gambling, and business partnerships, and nothing appears designed to fix Britain’s structural problems. Does our economics editor Michael Simmons agree? Host Lara Prendergast is joined by co-host – and the Spectator’s features editor – William Moore, alongside associate editor Owen Matthews and economics editor Michael Simmons.   As well as the cover, they discuss: the corruption scandal that has weakened Ukraine’s President Zelensky –

Michael Gove

Q&A: Is it time to abolish the Treasury?

36 min listen

To submit your urgent questions to Michael and Maddie, go to: spectator.co.uk/quiteright This week on Quite right! Q&A: Is the Treasury still fit for purpose – or has ‘Treasury brain’ taken over Whitehall? Michael and Maddie dig into the culture and power of Britain’s most influential department, from the Oxbridge-heavy ‘Treasury boys’ to a ‘visionless’ Chancellor. Then: after Michael’s suggestion that Piers Morgan should be the next director-general of the BBC – why, in his view, could cnly a disruptive outsider could shake the organisation out of its complacency. Plus: the rise of ‘Mar-a-Lago face’ in US conservative politics, and whether Britain has its own aesthetic quirks – from Ozempic-thinned

Thursday

Madeline Grant

Creasy’s opposition is the best advert for Mahmood’s migrant crackdown

One must say this for the Home Secretary, she is a Parliamentary Pugilist. While the general demeanour of the government in which she serves has a Sir Robin the Chickenhearted attitude to parliamentary spats (one can imagine the adenoidal cry of ‘Run Away’ ricocheting around No. 10 every Wednesday), Shabana Mahmood seems to enjoy a fight with all and sundry. Nobody epitomises the arrogance and intellectual expiration of the Labour party better than Stella Creasy She had fun at the despatch box earlier this week, trolling Green MPs into lengthy tantrums. There was unfinished business for the Home Secretary from one particular bout. Step forward Max Wilkinson, the smarmy Lib

Steerpike

Covid report: governments acted ‘too little, too late’

Back to the Covid inquiry, where chair Baroness Heather Hallett has presented the findings of its report. The conclusions don’t particularly paint anyone in a good light and the report even claims that acting ‘too little , too late’ cost the country as many as 23,000 lives in England – although this figure is already being disputed given that, um, ‘modelling’ doesn’t establish anything. The report also suggests that lockdown could have been avoided altogether had social distancing and isolation been introduced earlier. Good heavens… Former prime minister Boris Johnson has been dragged back into the limelight too, after the report claimed that BoJo failed to tackle a ‘toxic and

Oscar Edmondson

Is Labour turning blue?

12 min listen

While we wait for the findings of the Covid Inquiry into the decision-making during the pandemic, Shabana Mahmood has given a statement in the Commons outlining further details of Labour’s migration crackdown. The headline is that those who arrived during the so-called ‘Boriswave’ will have to wait up to 20 years before achieving settled status. Figures within Reform are having fun with the suggestion that the Home Secretary is more aligned with them on migration, but it is perhaps fairer to say that Shabana is taking her cues from the Blue Labour movement. What is Blue Labour? And is Shabana Blue Labour? Oscar Edmondson speaks to Isabel Hardman and Paul

Tom Mangold

How the BBC covered up the Bashir scandal

When, as a snivel-nosed provincial reporter, I arrived at the Sunday Pictorial (now the Sunday Mirror) the news editor gave me a lengthy briefing, a huge unlit cigar rolled around his mouth: ‘This not the Croydon Advertiser Tom’, he advised. ‘I don’t want reporters. I want operators. When you do the big story for me, you don’t cover the story you inhabit it. You wear it like a coat; it becomes your entire life. Forget your marriage, holidays, private time, weekends off… You become the chauffeur, the buyer of drinks and dinners and bunches of roses. Then, slowly you become the dry shoulder, helpful adviser, the trusted confidante. Soon you know more about

Steerpike

Ex-Labour MP joins Greens

Zack Polanski’s Green party has experienced a membership boom in recent months, after the new leader was elected at the end of summer. Under the eco-populist’s rule, the party has seen its membership figures soar and its accounts are looking healthier than ever with recent reports suggesting that party has, er, too much money to know what to do with. One of the new sign-ups is no stranger to the House of Commons – as onetime Labour MP for Brighton Kemptown and Peaceheaven Lloyd Russell-Moyle has jumped ship. How interesting… Discussing his move, Russell-Moyle gushed: For almost ten years I worked alongside Caroline [Lucas] as the MP next door. My