Politics

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

Monday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Ministers are clearly concerned about school reform row

You could tell from this afternoon’s Education Questions in the Commons that ministers are worried about the row over their school reforms: they’d planted loyal questions from backbenchers to help them fend off criticism. Even before the Conservatives had raised the latest concerns about the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, Labour backbencher Luke Akehurst had popped up to ask Bridget Phillipson about child protection. The Education Secretary seized the opportunity to describe the Bill as ‘the single biggest piece of child protection legislation in a generation’, adding: ‘That’s why it’s a shame that the Conservative government – the Conservative opposition – have played silly games on this subject.’ Akehurst helped

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

How is round one of Trump’s deportations plan going?

33 min listen

Colombia has agreed to accept military aircraft carrying deported migrants from the US – avoiding a trade war between the two countries. Donald Trump had threatened sanctions on Colombia to punish it for initially refusing military flights following a rapid immigration crackdown. What are the challenges of deportation flights, and what’s Trump’s vision for Latin America? Freddy Gray is joined by Todd Bensman, Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, and author of ‘Overrun’. 

Steerpike Steerpike

Full list: Labour MPs who opposed Heathrow expansion

There are just two days to go until Rachel Reeves’ big growth speech. The Chancellor is expected to turn her fire on Nimbys – Not In My Back Yard residents – and give Heathrow’s third runway the long-awaited green light. Naturally, a bigger airport is not something Reeves herself would support near her own constituency: in 2020 she opposed Leeds Bradford’s £150 million expansion on the grounds it would ‘significantly increase air and noise pollution’. Awkward. Still, at least Reeves can claim to having always been a long-time supporter of increased capacity at Heathrow. That is something which cannot be said of many of her colleagues, dozens of whom voted

Louis-Vincent Gave

Has DeepSeek popped the AI bubble?

The arrest of Huawei’s chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou in Canada in 2018, and the ensuing United States ban on high-end semiconductor exports to China, transformed Donald Trump’s “trade war” into a “tech war”. At the time, the US clearly felt it had a comparative advantage in technology, and that if it had to fight a battle against China, then picking tech as the battlefield made good sense. In September 2021, US commerce secretary Gina Raimondo, declared that: “If we really want to slow down China’s rate of innovation, we need to work with Europe”. As a result, Europe was roped into a cold war most European businesses – not

Steerpike Steerpike

Navy rebrands HMS Agincourt to appease French

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more. Trump might be back in the White House but here in Whitehall, woke remains the prevailing orthodoxy. Officials have reportedly now approved a Royal Navy request to change the name of HMS Agincourt to avoid offending the French. Yes, that’s right: military triumph is now apparently something to be ashamed of in Labour Britain. No wonder they don’t want to hike defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP…. The vessel in question is an Astute-class submarine which in 2018 became the fleet’s sixth vessel to be named after the 1415 English victory over the French in the Battle of Agincourt.

Jonathan Sacerdoti

There is no justice in the Gaza hostage deal

Imagine waking up to the news that Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, the brutal killers of British soldier Lee Rigby, were being released from prison. Picture the outrage as the British public remembers the images of Rigby being hacked to death on a Woolwich street in broad daylight, his killers unapologetic and defiant even during their trial. Imagine, too, if Axel Rudakubana – the teenage terrorist who stabbed three young girls to death during a Taylor Swift-themed dance class – walked free, boasting about his satisfaction with the murders. These scenarios are unthinkable. Yet, in Israel, they are a grim reality. This is a deal that ensures the cycle of

Ross Anderson

What I learnt from playing with China’s new AI

I asked a question about the Uyghurs, and China’s new ChatGPT-competitor, DeepSeek, started to answer.  In two rapidly written paragraphs, DeepSeek described the Uyghurs as a ‘Turkic ethnic group primarily residing in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in the People’s Republic of China’, and told me that they had a ‘rich heritage that includes contributions to art, music, literature, and science’, particularly given that Xinjiang had once been passed through with the famous Silk Road trading path.  All good so far.  But then it hit the third paragraph, starting to write that ‘the Uyghur community has been the subject of significant international attention due to reports of human rights abuses

James Tidmarsh

Diplomacy alone won’t stop Rwanda stoking war in Congo

Goma, a city of 1.5 million in Eastern Congo, has fallen to the M23 rebels, openly backed by Rwanda. Foreign governments are calling for the rebels to withdraw, and the UN Security Council has been holding crisis talks, but this is not the time to stop at diplomatic gestures: maximum pressure must be applied on Kigali immediately to shut this conflict down. Anything less risks repeating the horrors of the Second Congo War. Between 1998 and 2003, over five million people died, countless families were shattered and entire communities were erased in the world’s deadliest conflict since the second world war. The Democratic Republic of Congo, a nation the size

Gary Marcus

Has China pulled ahead in the race for AI supremacy?

The race for ‘AI supremacy’ is over, at least for now, and the US didn’t win. Over the last few weeks, two companies in China released three impressive papers that annihilated any pretence that the US was decisively ahead. In late December, a company called DeepSeek, apparently initially built for quantitative trading rather than large language models (LLMs), produced a nearly state-of-the-art model that required only roughly 1/50th of the training costs of previous models – instantly putting them in the big leagues with American companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, both in terms of performance and innovation. A couple of weeks later, they followed up with a competitive (though

Stephen Pollard

Tory Nimbys are walking into Starmer’s trap

The government has yet to formally announce its widely trailed decision to expand Gatwick, Heathrow, and Luton airports. But that hasn’t stopped six MPs from writing to Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander with a pre-emptive attack. The four Green MPs, perhaps, plus a couple of anti-capitalist hard left Labourites? Nope. Four Lib Dems and two Conservatives – one of whom is, astonishingly, Andrew Griffith, the Shadow Business Secretary. The idea of the Shadow Business Secretary campaigning against a core component of economic growth would be funny if it wasn’t so utterly damning Griffith tells Alexander that local residents’ “life is blighted every single day by the noise of take-offs and landings

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Is Donald Trump warming to Keir Starmer?

16 min listen

Starmer and Trump have finally spoken, with a 45 minute phone call taking place between the two leaders. The pair reportedly discussed the ceasefire in Gaza, and trade and the economy, with Starmer attempting to find common ground by talking up his plans for deregulation. Cindy Yu speaks to Katy Balls and Kate Andrews about their relationship. Do these early signs suggest it will be wholly positive, or are there thornier issues to come?  Also on the podcast, Rachel Reeves is set to deliver a speech this week outlining her plans for growth – just how important is this week for her? Produced by Patrick Gibbons and Cindy Yu.

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Europe has no idea how to stop the spread of Islamism

Last week was surely one of the grimmest in Europe in years. The day after an Afghan migrant allegedly stabbed a two-year-old boy in Germany to death, Axel Rudakubana was sentenced to 52 years in prison for murdering Alice, Bebe and Elsie, three little English girls with a combined age of 22, in Southport. The court heard that Rudakubana told police in the immediate aftermath of the killing: ‘It’s a good thing those children are dead…I’m so glad…so happy’. What we didn’t hear enough about was the exact nature of his extremism. We know that an Al-Qaeda training manual was found in his bedroom, and that he was referred to

Steerpike Steerpike

Starmer’s foreign policy doctrine revealed

It is sometimes claimed that Mark Darcy in the Bridget Jones’ Diary series is based on Keir Starmer. One is an upright, priggish human rights lawyer: the other is a character played by Colin Firth. The book and then the film were set in the 1990s, when ‘Cool Britannia’ was at its peak and New Labour orthodoxies the fashion of the day. So is it too portentous an omen to note that in the latest instalment of the film – released next month – Mark Darcy’s character is sadly no longer with us? After all, Tories jibe, Sir Keir’s onetime uber-trendy views on rights look increasingly out-of-date in a world

Nigel Jones

Starmer has much to learn from Trump’s Colombia migrant victory

During Sir Keir Starmer’s first phone call with Donald Trump since the President’s inauguration, the two leaders discussed the ceasefire in Gaza and the economy. We don’t know if Starmer and Trump touched on the topic of illegal migration during their conversation late last night, but, if not, Starmer missed a trick. He has much to learn from Trump about how to handle this thorny subject. Whether Sir Keir will learn any lessons from Trump’s short way of dealing with illegal migration is doubtful Late last week, as a first taste of the President’s pledge to send ‘millions’ of illicit migrants back to their countries of origin, two U.S. military aircraft

Matthew Lynn

Britain is on track for a ‘Reeves recession’

Business confidence is falling. Companies are warning that profits will be lower than expected, and they are already planning to cut their output. The Chancellor Rachel Reeves might have hoped that this week would open with better news on the economy, especially as she is planning a major speech to relaunch her plan for growth on Wednesday. Instead, it has started with yet more bad news. In reality, a ‘Reeves recession’ is now a certainty – and the Chancellor won’t be able to escape the blame for that. The CBI reported today that British businesses are braced for a ‘significant fall’ in trading over the next few months. There is

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Is Donald Trump warming to Keir Starmer?

Does Keir Starmer finally have cause for optimism over Donald Trump? It did not go unnoticed that the only Labour figure to bag an invite to the President’s inauguration last week was Maurice Glasman, the architect of Blue Labour. On returning from Washington DC, the Labour peer told PoliticsHome that the team around Trump is ‘very, very sceptical about the Labour government’. So aides will be breathing a sigh of relief that, on Sunday night, Starmer finally spoke with Trump. The Labour leader was the first President’s first call to a major European leader (though Italy’s Giorgia Meloni of course attended the inauguration). Those comments show that Trump is not

Angela Epstein

We need to reclaim the word ‘Nazi’

You can tell a lot about a person by their reaction to traffic wardens. Those of a mellow, reflective bent may find their minds drifting to the Beatles’ affectionate pursuit of Lovely Rita, the meter maid. Otherwise, the sight of ticket wardens in sensible shoes and with expressions of fixated intent prowling our city centres can trigger a more visceral response. They’re more than jobsworths. They’re traffic Nazis! The word Nazi is trivialised If you’ve been habitually stung by plastic pouches left under the wipers you may see no problem in that. Just as spectres of the Third Reich are summoned to blast grammar Nazis or lockdown Nazis, isn’t this the best way

Marc Cave

How to fix Holocaust education

Is Holocaust education letting today’s anti-Jewish racism off the hook? When it became compulsory in 1991, Britain was largely in remission from the ancient disease of anti-Semitism. Life was stable. The Berlin Wall had fallen. Liberal democracy was the only future — indeed, Francis Fukuyama infamously wrote how the 1990s would mark ‘the end of history’. How we Fukuyama’ed it all up. Times are now bad and bad times demand scapegoats. So anti-Jewish conspiracy theories thrive on a global scale Joseph Goebbels would lust after. It creates the conditions for the next Jewish genocide. And yet Holocaust education has barely responded. A different kind of Britain today calls for a different kind

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Heathrow’s third runway won’t improve London’s air quality

Is Rachel Reeves really correct that her new-found enthusiasm for a third runway at Heathrow would be consistent with the government’s net zero targets and other environmental policies? Over the weekend she argued that a third runway would be good for air quality over London because it would mean fewer planes circling over the capital. She also asserted that ‘sustainable aviation fuel is changing carbon emissions from flying’, and that ‘there’s huge investment going on in electric planes’. It isn’t clear where Reeves sourced her evidence that a third runway could actually improve air quality, but that certainly wasn’t the conclusion of a 2017 study by consultants WSP commissioned by

Eliot Wilson

Keir Starmer can’t afford not to hike defence spending

Over the last few years, defence spending has been higher up the political agenda than at any time since the end of the Cold War. The scale, intensity and sheer cost of the war in Ukraine following Russia’s invasion in February 2022 provided a shock to the system – but it only reinforced what many of us had known for a long time: the United Kingdom’s military capabilities in every domain are underfunded, stretched beyond endurance and often non-functional. But is Keir Starmer now avoid increasing defence spending at all? Last February, the House of Commons defence committee published a report entitled Ready for War?. It had damning conclusions. The