Politics

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

Tuesday

James Heale James Heale

Can these Farage rivals’ start-ups hurt Reform?

You wait ages for a right-wing movement to come along – and then two do so at once. Former MEPs Ben Habib and Rupert Lowe both launched rival outlets yesterday. Habib now leads ‘Advance UK’, a political party whose first aim is to reach 30,000 members. Meanwhile, Lowe has started ‘Restore Britain’, a ‘bottom-up movement’ which welcomes members from all parties. It aims to start legal challenges, fund investigative journalists and champion whistleblowers. Both are ex-Reformers who came off worst in a fight with Nigel Farage The two movements share several key features. The first is a championing of direct democracy, with both Advance and Restore urging members to join

Simon Cook Simon Cook

Labour MPs need a reality check on Britain’s ballooning benefits bill

‘No one votes Labour to cut the welfare state. People vote Labour to grow the welfare state. That’s the role of the party.’ That’s what John McTernan, Labour strategist, said on Coffee House Shots last week. He’s absolutely correct, of course. But the ballooning cost of the benefits bill means that Labour now faces an uncomfortable decision, for which many of its MPs seem ill prepared. The total cost for Personal Independence Payments (PIP) alone is expected to reach £35 billion by the end of this decade, up from £16 billion in 2019-20 and £26.5 billion in 2024-25. The total benefits bill, including the state pension, universal credit and other

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

Will the welfare bill really push 150,000 into poverty?

Labour MPs are obviously going to panic when told their votes might plunge just one person into poverty – let alone 250,000. That was the original estimate for the fallout from Liz Kendall’s reforms to Personal Independence Payments (PIP) and Universal Credit. Yesterday, the DWP released a revised figure after Starmer caved to a rebellion by 126 MPs. The new number? Some 150,000 pushed into poverty. A marginally better headline, at a £2.5 billion cost to the taxpayer, but still enough to spook Labour’s already jittery backbenches. Frustratingly, these numbers, put out by the government, are completely meaningless. The government’s chosen metric, ‘relative poverty’, tells us far more about income

Michael Evans

Trump could bomb Iran again

President Trump has already warned Tehran that he’ll be back if Iran tries to revive and advance its nuclear programme, following the strikes by B-2 stealth bombers. Judging by the comments of the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Trump may find himself with this dilemma sooner than he thinks. Iran could return to enriching uranium in ‘a matter of months’, according to Rafael Mariano Grossi, IAEA’s director-general, in an interview with CBS News at the weekend. However, a number of questions need to be asked before the B-2s take off again from their Whiteman Air Force base in Missouri.  Trump hopes that the combination of twelve days

Adam James Pollock

Northern Ireland is still paying a heavy price for Brexit

This week heralds the arrival in Northern Ireland of yet more overregulation, bureaucratic overreach, and political incompetence. No, Keir Starmer isn’t making an unannounced visit to Belfast. From this month, many thousands of food products imported from Great Britain to Northern Ireland will have to display warnings on their packaging highlighting that these goods are not to be brought into the European Union. The reason why is essentially a bungled Brexit deal for which thousands of businesses – and millions of customers – will pay the price. It is yet another reason for British firms to stop doing business in Northern Ireland The Windsor Framework – the result of the UK’s

Max Jeffery Max Jeffery

Adam Curtis: ‘modern power makes me cry’

Adam Curtis used to make TikToks but he doesn’t want to talk about them. ‘I did quite a lot of TikTok, privately,’ he says, ‘just under another name. They’re probably out there somewhere…’ His head rests in his hand and his elbow on the chair next to him, the two of us among pink flowers at the kitchen table in the Soho townhouse where he works. He looks at me and repeats: ‘They’re private.’ For 30 years Curtis has been making documentaries for the BBC about how Britain became a sad place, or, in his own words: ‘What happened after the Cold War, mixed in with a deeper sense of…

Monday

Madeline Grant

Liz Kendall’s humiliating welfare climb-down

‘This government believes in equality and social justice,’ began Liz Kendall. Which government she was describing is anyone’s guess. I suspect that if you were to ask the general public what they thought the government believed in, ‘equality’ and ‘social justice’ wouldn’t even make the top 100 printable responses.  The government were facing a backbench rebellion so great that even the cabinet – who, as anyone who has ever seen them give an interview can attest, have an appetite for humiliation which appears to be almost sadomasochistic – were having second thoughts Kendall was at the House for the start of a monumental climb-down: think Hillary and Tenzing in reverse.

The Spectator

The Spectator presents: Living with a Politician

Exclusive to subscribers, watch our latest event Living with a Politician live.  Join Sarah Vine, (author of How Not to Be a Political Wife), with Michael Gove, Rachel Johnson (author of Rake’s Progress, her own odyssey as a political candidate) and Hugo Swire (whose wife Sasha wrote the bestselling Diary of an MP’s Wife) as they discuss the losses and laughter involved in being married to politics.

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Pro-Palestine mob in Leicester chant ‘death to the IDF’

Pro-Palestine demonstrators on the streets of Britain have been led in a chant of ‘Death, death to the IDF’ – in a sick imitation of punk duo Bob Vylan’s performance at Glastonbury. Protestors who gathered in Leicester on Sunday shouted the slogan during a speech by controversial activist and ex-Guantanamo inmate Moazzam Begg. Begg, now a director at CAGE, told the crowd: ‘One of the beautiful chants you made today was death to Zionism…You know yesterday at Glastonbury what was said? Shall I say the words? Death, death to the IDF’. At a protest in Leicester today, protestors chanted "Death to Zionism!” Speaker Moazzam Begg also repeated the chant heard

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Labour MPs are still sceptical of the Welfare Bill

Liz Kendall tried to use her Commons statement on the government’s U-turn on some of the disability benefit cuts to persuade her colleagues that the changes made the legislation worth supporting. Not all of them sounded very convinced: there were repeated complaints about a ‘two-tier system’ whereby two people with the same needs would get completely different levels of support. MPs were also concerned they were signing ‘blank cheques’ by voting on the bill tomorrow when full details of the changes won’t be available until later in the year. And there were suspicions that the changes won’t be as meaningful as ministers have suggested. The Work and Pensions Secretary gave

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Being a Christian isn’t easy

Spare a thought for Chris Coghlan, who has learned to his horror that not only is the Pope a Catholic, his own priest is one too. The Liberal Democrat MP, who voted to legalise assisted suicide, attends St Joseph’s Catholic Church in Dorking. He complains to the Observer that Father Ian Vane ‘publicly announced at Mass that he was… denying me Holy Communion as I had breached Canon Law’. Coghlan believes this represents a ‘completely inappropriate interference in democracy by religious authorities’. If you’re not a Catholic, at this point you’re thinking one of two things: ‘No thanks, I’ll leave the Papists to their internal disputes’, or ‘Canon Law would be a cracking name for a courtroom series about a priest turned

James Heale James Heale

How big will the Labour welfare rebellion be?

This afternoon Liz Kendall will update the House of Commons on her revised plans for welfare, following the concessions wrung out of her by Labour MPs. The Work and Pensions Secretary announced plans on Thursday night for £3 billion in additional funds. This will allow current claimants of personal independence payments to keep their current benefits. It ensures, too, that existing recipients of the health-related element of Universal Credit will have their incomes protected in real terms. The U-turn came ahead of tomorrow night’s vote on the welfare bill’s second reading. The whips estimate there will be around 50 Labour MPs who defy the government Ahead of Kendall’s statement, there

Steerpike Steerpike

Poll: half of voters unaware of ‘Boriswave’

What likelihood of a Boris Johnson comeback? Well, according to the man himself, there is, apparently, ‘more chance of a baked bean winning Royal Ascot’ than an improbable second premiership. Yet amid Kemi Badenoch’s constant woes, there are those who still harbour hopes of Johnson 2.0. Of course, one massive stumbling block could be the so-called ‘Boriswave’ – the huge numbers of mass migration unleashed on the country between 2019 and 2024, with legal arrivals peaking at 906,000 in June 2023. But now Mr S has some good news for our onetime premier. It seems that the public are rather less aware of this term than many online right-wingers. A

Matthew Lynn

Politicians, not ChatGPT, caused the recruitment slump

The machines are already smarter and better organised than humans. They never ask for a pay rise, and they don’t ask any awkward questions about the company’s environmental record. An artificial employee is, in many ways, the model employee. But is artificial intelligence really responsible for a recent fall in entry-level jobs, as new figures from Adzuna, the online jobs board, would have you believe? Or is the Chancellor Rachel Reeves as much to blame as the ChatGPT founder Sam Altman? It may be fashionable to blame AI, but it is wrong It is certainly looking like a tough year to graduate from university. According to figures from Adzuna, the

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Will Putin really rein in Russia’s defence spending?

At the very time when those warmongering Nato nations are pledging to raise their defence spending substantially, that doveish peacenik Vladimir Putin is promising to reduce his. It’s hard to know which of these two commitments is less plausible, but those anticipating the cranking down of the Russian war economy any time soon are going to have to wait rather longer. At the recent St Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), Putin said that: We are planning to reduce defence spending. For next year and the year after that and so on – for the next three years – we are planning to do so, although there is not yet a

Robert Taylor

The state needs to chill out about the hot weather

Since the year dot, it’s got rather warm in southern England at some stage most summers. Not scorching. In recent years, it’s usually reached around 30-ish. Sometimes higher. A bit cooler than the sort of weather millions tolerate when they go to the Med on their hols. So, do we really need to be subjected to yet more panicky government heat alerts? The UK Health Security Agency, set up by Matt Hancock in 2021, has warned that ‘significant impacts are likely’, including death, among people aged 65 and over. As if entering a teaching your granny to suck eggs contest, the agency then informs us that ‘using fans, wearing loose

Tim Shipman

Does Starmer still want to be PM?

13 min listen

There have been a number of navel-gazing interviews with the Prime Minister over the weekend. Across thousands and thousands of words, he seems to be saying – if you read between the lines – that he doesn’t particularly enjoy being PM. In better news, Labour seems to have quelled the welfare rebellion. Liz Kendall is making a statement in the Commons this afternoon, in which she will outline the concessions that Labour has made on its controversial welfare bill. All in, the cost has spiralled by £3 billion per calendar year – which an already put-upon Chancellor will have to find. Whilst it remains the largest rebellion of this government,

Alexander Larman

Take me back to Glastonbury

Judging by the coverage of this year’s Glastonbury festival, and the reaction in certain quarters, you would be forgiven for thinking that it was little less than a hard-left, Jew-hating Nuremberg rally. It is an impressive achievement to unite the government, led by the Prime Minister, and the opposition in blanket condemnation of two of the acts performing. But the groanworthily named ‘Bob Vylan’ – and the more up-and-at-‘em Kneecap – managed to raise their profiles far beyond what their mediocre music warrants by making various anti-Israel, pro-Palestine comments during their sets. Living up to the old adage that all publicity is good publicity, their streaming numbers promptly went through

Fin de Pencier

On the Israel-Syria border, death is always close

Syria’s new president, Ahmed Al-Sharaa, is desperate to stay on the sidelines of the Iran-Israel war. Most middle eastern states have strongly condemned Israel for its surprise attack on Iran, but the Syrian government has been conspicuously silent. Since coming to power in December 2024, Al-Sharaa’s forces have confronted Iran-backed militias in many regions of Syria, and moved to curtail Tehran’s soft power by expelling Iranian clerics and closing Shia religious centres. The rag-tag collection of Sunni-Islamists, who now form a large part of the Syrian army, have a long list of scores to settle with the Shiites and their main patron. But, simultaneously, Israel has launched hundreds of airstrikes

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Should Chris Coghlan be denied Holy Communion?

It is not, it’s fair to say, a universal view among Catholic priests that MPs who vote the wrong way on assisted dying and the decriminalisation of abortion up to birth should be punished by excluding them from communion. But so it has turned out with Chris Coghlan, the Lib Dem MP for Dorking and Horley. He voted for assisted suicide and didn’t vote at all on the Antoniazzi amendment allowing women to abort up to birth. Now he’s complaining that his parish priest is intent on denying him communion at mass. Or as he put it on X: My Catholic Priest publicly announced at every mass he was denying