Politics

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

Monday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

How do we draw the line between gambling and gaming?

‘Skins gambling,’ anyone? No, until yesterday, me neither. It’s nothing to do with strip poker or 70s bovver boys. It’s the name given to a completely unregulated gambling industry, aggressively promoted to teenagers and estimated to be worth multiple billions of pounds a year – yes, billions with a b. One reason this isn’t a major scandal, I think, is that it will sound too far-fetched and too obscure and confusing to the sorts of people who we might hope would be scandalised into doing something about it. But so it was, too, with credit default swaps. So let’s try to explain. (I’m largely indebted for my own understanding to

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Casting an able-bodied actor as Richard III isn’t ‘offensive’

The row over Richard III rumbles on. Disability groups have objected to the Globe’s forthcoming production in which Michelle Terry will take the lead. The able-bodied Terry, who happens to be the Globe’s artistic director, has apologised ‘for the pain or harm that has been caused by the decision for me to play Richard III.’ This carefully worded statement gives the impression that some external authority reached ‘the decision’ to award her the role but was that really the case? Casting decisions at the Globe, she goes on, are made ‘rigorously’ and ‘always in dialogue with members of our many communities.’ One of the ‘communities’ she seems to have ignored

Eliot Wilson

Can Sinn Fein’s Michelle O’Neill save Northern Ireland?

The appointment of a new executive by the Northern Ireland Assembly on Saturday was a hugely significant moment. There was no government at Stormont for exactly two years from 3 February 2022 until Michelle O’Neill of Sinn Féin accepted the assembly’s nomination to be first minister at the weekend. She is the first Republican leader of Northern Ireland since the state was created in May 1921, what its inaugural prime minister, Sir James Craig, would describe as ‘a Protestant parliament and a Protestant state’. This was history being made live on television. For the national and international media, I suspect this will be the end of the story which began

Jay Mens

Performative airstrikes against the Houthis will achieve nothing

Performative sanctions have long been the last refuge of the lazy policymaker looking to ‘do something’. Take, for instance, the sanctions that are slapped on unsavoury individuals from around the world on an almost-weekly basis: Turkish assassins, Iranian guerrilla commanders, Somali pirates, and Yemeni rebels are among those who have been whacked with the sanctions stick. Unsurprisingly, nobody has repented as a result of being listed, meaning that the sanctions roster is a government naughty list and little more. After more than a decade of performative sanctions, the public is slowly cottoning onto the fact that they don’t seem to offer much. Amidst this scrutiny, policymakers are increasingly drawn to

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

In praise of Kemi Badenoch

Whenever international affairs are proving particularly ‘interesting’ there’s always some clown who pipes up with ‘Oh, if only women ruled the world – it would be so peaceful!’ But females can be every bit as keen on a ding-dong or a dust-up as men; in fact, I’d say that women who try to push the theory that we have a completely different political sensibility – saintlike and self-sacrificing and not prone to sins of the flesh like that Big Bad Boris – are often slithery, self-righteous snakes with a far more sinister agenda than many nakedly ambitious male politicians. But enough about Nicola Sturgeon. For as one door slams on

Sunday

Lucy Dunn

Are Scots tiring of devolution?

As Scottish devolution celebrates its 25th anniversary, are voters losing faith in Holyrood? A quarter of the country believes devolution has been bad for Scotland, with almost half of ‘No’ voters in the independence referendum now disillusioned. New polling for the Sunday Times finds that over a fifth of voters didn’t know if devolving powers to Scotland had been positive or negative, while 50 per cent still believe that overall devolution had been good.  There was a clear split on the devolution question based on how a person voted in the 2014 referendum, while age provided another dividing line: devolution was unpopular with half of those over 75 years old

Joe Bedell-Brill

Sunday shows round-up: Sinn Fein First Minister vows to be a ‘unifier’

Sinn Fein leader Michelle O’Neill made history this week as she became Northern Ireland’s first nationalist first minister. Speaking to David Blevins on Sky News, she described herself as a ‘proud Republican’, but insisted that she ‘wants to be a unifier’. Blevins asked her about her ambitions for Irish unity, pointing out that the UK government has said that there is ‘no realistic prospect of a border poll leading to a united Ireland’, and that Northern Ireland will be part of the UK for decades. O’Neill contested this claim, saying her appointment meant she had a mandate from the public, and described the near future as a ‘decade of opportunity’

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Why Kate Forbes is right about high tax

I was on BBC1’s Question Time with Kate Forbes in Glasgow last week in which she was oddly loyal to the SNP government. She seems to have been the only member of Nicola Sturgeon’s government not to be deleting her WhatsApp during Covid and I suspect she’s appalled at the way Sturgeon & co placed secrecy at the heart of their Covid response. She said on Question Time that the way to grow Scotland’s economy was to attract people to come and work there. I put to her that having the highest tax rates in the UK (as Humza Yousaf has chosen to do) didn’t exactly scream “come to Scotland!”.

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Can Trump ever get a fair trial?

15 min listen

Last week Donald Trump was ordered to pay more than seventy million dollars to E. Jean Carroll, the writer who accused him of sexual assault. Freddy speaks to Spectator columnist Lionel Shriver about some of the oddities of this case against the former president. 

Colin Brazier

Why Britain’s farmers aren’t revolting

Europe’s ablaze, but not on this side of the English Channel. Paris has been besieged. Dutch politics turned upside down. Yet in the country that gave history the Peasant’s Revolt, the only thing British farmers are flailing is hedgerows. As tractors blockade the chancelleries of Belgium and Germany, why is it that the only traffic gridlock caused by British agriculture is the queue of cars outside Jeremy Clarkson’s café? Partly, it’s who we are. Battlefields of industrial strife like Peterloo and Orgreave aside, our culture of protest is different. As the comedienne Victoria Wood put it, the British do not have revolutions, preferring instead to write to ‘Points of View’.

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Will Londoners fall for Sadiq Khan’s election bribes?

Taxpayers are being treated to a clutch of pre-election bribes from a politician who only a few months ago was claiming there was a lack of money for anything. That will almost certainly be true of Jeremy Hunt’s budget on 6 March, but it is already true of Sadiq Khan’s London Mayoralty budget for 2024/25. Khan was in no doubt who was to blame last December when he announced that the Mayor’s precept on council tax bills in London would rise by 8.6 per cent, more than twice the rate of inflation. The government, he claimed, was starving London of money. It was ‘due to the continued lack of national investment

Saturday

Daniel DePetris

What will US air strikes actually achieve?

The 28 January drone strike in Jordan that killed three American soldiers and wounded 40 more necessitated a US military response. Under no scenario was President Biden not going to retaliate. The question was how strong the retaliation would be. We now have the answer.  Yesterday’s series of airstrikes against the Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Iranian-supported militias was by far the largest US military operation we’ve seen in Iraq and Syria since Biden’s term began. Before yesterday, the US limited its operations to precision strikes to one or two militia facilities at a time. Those operations didn’t result in the deterrent effect the White House was looking

Jawad Iqbal

America is being sucked back into the Middle East

It didn’t take long for the US military to retaliate to the drone strike in Jordan that killed three American soldiers. It was always a question of how hard and when, not if, America would strike back. ‘Our response began today. It will continue at times and places of our choosing,’ President Joe Biden said in a statement. Be in no doubt though: the US air strikes, using long-range bombers to hit 85 targets in Iraq and Syria, mark a dangerous and unpredictable new phase in the spiralling Middle East conflict, with potentially far-reaching consequences. The Americans chose their targets carefully enough. They hit four locations in Syria and three

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

America is getting closer to open conflict with Iran

‘Always mystify, mislead, and surprise the enemy,’ said Sun Tzu. The Biden administration takes the opposite approach. America’s Commander-in-Chief spent much of the last week warning America’s antagonists in the Middle East that the US would respond to the killing of three of its troops in Jordan last weekend. And last night the retaliation finally began. US forces used some 125 bombs on seven sites in Syria and Iraq, targets that the Pentagon believes are tied to attacks on Americans.  Iran was not hit, importantly, even though the White House has directly blamed the Iranian regime for the many attacks against western assets since the war in Gaza began in October. The widespread fear

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

Lionel Shriver, Angus Colwell and Toby Young

32 min listen

On this week’s episode, Lionel Shriver asks if Donald Trump can get a fair trial in America (00:39), Angus Colwell speaks to the Gen-Zers who would fight for Britain (08:25), Matthew Parris makes the case for assisted dying (13:15), Toby Young tells the story of the time he almost died on his gap year (20:43), and Harry Mount tells us about the grim life of a Roman legionary (25:38).

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The housing crash that never was

So is that the end of the property ‘crash’? Nationwide reported this week that its house price index was up by 0.7 per cent in January, already going some way to erasing the fall of 1.8 per cent it measured last year. The very similar Halifax index never even recorded a fall last year – it claims that prices rose by 1.8 per cent over the course of 2023, and by 1.1 per cent in December. No one should take the Halifax and Nationwide indices too much to heart. They are based on data from a limited number of mortgage approvals – those handled by the lenders themselves – in

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Is Caroline Nokes really a Conservative?

Quite a number of people have been asking what Caroline Nokes MP is doing in the Conservative party after her very odd appearance on Newsnight on Thursday. She was meant to be discussing the asylum status of Abdul Ezedi, the sole suspect in the horrific Clapham alkali attack which left a mother with life-altering injuries and her two daughters in hospital. His asylum status – he was granted asylum the third time he asked after claiming to have converted to Christianity and therefore to be at risk of persecution in Afghanistan – was quite an issue, given that, in 2018, he was found guilty of a sex offence. Something there

Joanna Williams

Labour’s ‘trans inclusive’ conversion therapy ban will be a disaster

Keir Starmer has a reputation for changing his mind. But on one issue at least, the Labour leader remains worryingly consistent. Addressing an LGBT+ Labour meeting in Parliament this week, Starmer declared, ‘Labour governments and the LGBT+ movement have a history of achieving incredible things together.’ His own contribution to this long march of progress has already been determined. Starmer yet again pledged that a Labour government will outlaw all forms of conversion therapy. Sir Keir is adamant that, on his watch, a conversion therapy ban will be ‘trans inclusive’. In other words, it won’t just outlaw attempts to turn homosexuals straight but, crucially, it will most likely make it