Politics

If there’s one thing that a despot wants, it is to stay in power. North Korea’s totalitarian Supreme Leader, Kim Jong Un, is no exception. Not only does he seek to maintain the survival of his ruling regime, but Kim also yearns for North Korea to be recognised as a de facto nuclear-armed state. But whilst revolutions are rare in the nuclear-armed hermit kingdom, Kim wants to ensure that even the slightest seeds of dissent fail to be sown. Whether military elites or the North Korean youth, everyone must be kept in check. And how better to do so than by drafting a 300,000-strong youth ‘shock brigade’ to reconstruct flood-damaged

The trial of Luis Rubiales, former president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation, starts in Madrid on Monday. After Spain won the women’s World Cup in August 2023, Rubiales kissed player Jenni Hermoso during the medal ceremony. She says that the kiss was not consensual. Rubiales maintains that it was and, along with three of his colleagues, is alleged to have brought pressure to bear on Hermoso to change her story. If found guilty, Rubiales faces two and a half years in prison for sexual assault and coercion. His colleagues, accused only of coercion, could be sentenced to 18 months each.   A few minutes before the kiss, the camera

There is something of an anti-climax in the naming of the judges involved in the Sara Sharif case. It’s true that Judge Alison Raeside, Judge Peter Nathan and Judge Sally Williams oversaw Family Court hearings involving Sara in the years before she was murdered in 2023 by her father Urfan Sharif and stepmother Beinash Batool. But Family Court judges in England are hardly household names. The vast majority of people will never have heard of Raeside – who decided that Sara should live with her father – or Nathan and Williams. It is a fair inference that, after a few days, their names will be forgotten. A blackout on the identities

Uh oh. There’s more trouble in nationalist paradise. A series of interviews with past and present Scottish government ministers have been published on the Institute for Government website as part of a devolved government series – and they make for some rather revelatory reading… As if the Nats hadn’t aired their dirty laundry enough, the IfG interviewees – including former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and disgraced ex-health minister Michael Matheson – pulled no punches when conversations turned to their colleagues. One person in particular came out of it all worse for wear – with hapless Humza Yousaf on the receiving end of a rather lot of criticism. First, the SNP’s

This week looks to be a significant one for polling in British politics. For the first time, every poll released across seven pollsters has had the Reform ahead of the Conservatives. So it is regrettable for Tory chances then, that an interview by Priti Patel has reignited debate around her party’s failure on mass migration. This failure is cited as the single biggest reason why 2019 Tory voters abandoned the Conservatives last year, according to the most comprehensive study to date. Speaking to Harry Cole on TalkTV, the Shadow Foreign Secretary was asked about the explosion of arrivals on her watch. As Home Secretary under Boris Johnson, net migration figures