Politics

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

Saturday

Steerpike Steerpike

Will Labour’s uniform cap hit pupil performance?

It is the perennial question of British politics: who is next in the ministerial sack race? For a while, it seemed, the answer was Bridget Phillipson – the minister waging a one-woman-war on the Tories’ school reforms. But today, the Times suggests that the Education Secretary has been told her job is safe, citing private text messages from Keir Starmer. That means she can press on with her Schools Bill which includes, among other measures, plans to limit the number of branded uniforms items schools can insist on. This cap is being hailed as a way of keeping costs down – but Mr S wants to know if it will

Steerpike Steerpike

Reform UK plots new wave of student societies

They say that the children are our future. So what better way for a party to demonstrate its potential than by winning support among the nation’s yoof? Britain’s universities are often depicted as hotbeds of leftism, incubators for the kind of avocado-eating, chai latte-drinking wokerati that sends Jonathan Gullis into a tizzy. But now Mr S hears that a new wave of Reform UK student societies could change all that – with branches expected to launch in the forthcoming academic year. Currently, there are three universities branches across the country with Reform societies at Durham, East Anglia and York. These were all established when the party had less than 70,000 members.

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Why I changed my mind about multiculturalism

When Blackburn MP Adnan Hussain complains about an opponent believing ‘free speech means protecting the right to offend Muslims’, you feel an instinctive response gathering in your throat. You’re damn right it does. It means the right to burn the Qur’an, mock the Hadith and doodle cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed performing in a rainbow-flag hijab on RuPaul’s Drag Race. In a liberal society, people should be free to blaspheme against any and all religions, even pretendy ones like Anglicanism. Mass immigration plus non-integration have allowed enclaves of reaction to sprout up in Britain. In these parallel states, some migrants and subsequent generations live as paper citizens but do not subscribe

Jim Lawley

Will Gibraltar get in the way of Starmer’s EU reset?

For years, the UK, Spain, Gibraltar and the European Union have been negotiating, on and off, to resolve the complex issue of Gibraltar’s post-Brexit land border with Spain. Now, ahead of next week’s meeting in London when Keir Starmer welcomes EU leaders to discuss a ‘reset’ in UK-EU relations, Spain’s Foreign Minister, José Manuel Albares, has brought ‘the Gibraltar issue’ firmly back into the spotlight.  Referring to the planned reset, which covers a wide range of issues including defence and security, fishing and British exports, Albares told the BBC’s Newsnight programme, ‘There are many, many things we need to talk [about], Gibraltar included.’ Emphasising that the relationship between the UK and

Michael Gove

Debate: should Kemi Badenoch go?

30 min listen

Kemi Badenoch has come in for criticism since becoming leader of the opposition – for her energy, her performances at PMQs and her inability to galvanise her shadow cabinet. On this podcast, James Heale hosts the trial of Kemi Badenoch and asks whether someone else might be better placed to take the Tories into the next election and – more importantly – who that prince (or princess) across the water could be. The Spectator’s assistant content editor William Atkinson makes the case for the prosecution, while Michael Gove sets out why the Tories should stick with Kemi. Lara Brown, our new commissioning editor, acts as the jury. ‘If your house

Michael Gove

Michael Gove, Max Jeffery, Paul Wood, Susannah Jowitt and Leyla Sanai

38 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Michael Gove interviews Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood (1:17; Max Jeffery shadows the police as they search for the parents of three abandoned babies (14:41); Paul Wood asks if this is really the end of the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (20:57); Susannah Jowitt reports that death has come to the Chelsea Flower Show (28:55); and, Leyla Sanai reviews Graham Swift’s new anthology of short stories, Twelve Post-War Tales (34:23). Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Alex Klaushofer

Sainsbury’s self-checkout surveillance has gone too far

Sainsbury’s is stepping up surveillance on its self-checkout tills. It’s hard not to laugh out loud. Not only will shoppers in some stores be recorded close-up by a VAR-style camera as they pack their groceries, but should anything appear amiss they may be shown a replay bearing the message: ‘Looks like that last item didn’t scan. Please check you scanned it correctly before continuing’. It doesn’t get much more Big Brother than that. Britain is rapidly becoming a surveillance society. Banks of cameras are part of the furniture on our streets, and in our supermarkets and shops. Some stores even use facial recognition. As I wrote in The Spectator a year ago, this obsession with

Friday

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Why the Istanbul talks failed

Only one conclusion can be drawn from today’s talks in Istanbul: Russia has once again rejected the proposed unconditional 30-day ceasefire. In the first meeting between Ukrainian and Russian delegations in three years, Moscow demanded Kyiv withdraw its troops from the four regions Vladimir Putin has claimed but failed to capture completely. When Ukraine refused, Russia’s chief negotiator Vladimir Medinsky reportedly threatened to seize even more: Kharkiv and Sumy regions next. He warned that Russia is prepared to fight forever, before asking: can Ukraine? ‘Maybe some of those sitting here at this table will lose more of their loved ones.’  Threats and unrealistic demands are part of the Russian negotiation

Lara Brown

Gender ideology is still dictating NHS policy

The NHS have decided that there is no minimum age before a child can begin treatment for gender dysphoria. Freedom of Information requests seen by the Telegraph have revealed that toddlers under the age of five are being treated in new specialist gender clinics. The health service had previously proposed that referrals could only be made for children over the age of seven, but after pressure from activists this has now been dropped. The treatment of ‘transgender toddlers’ is not the only cause for alarm The Cass review was thought to be a turning point for child safeguarding. The government then started making positive sounds on puberty blockers and women’s single

Lucy Dunn

Can the assisted dying bill survive?

16 min listen

Labour MP Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying bill is back in the Commons for the report stage today – returning to parliament for the first time since major changes were made to the legislation. While Leadbeater has insisted the bill is coming back ‘even stronger’ than before, support among MPs appears to be fading. The mood in parliament was different to the second reading – which listeners will remember as a self-congratulatory affair, hailed as a ‘historic’ day by Leadbeater – but today’s debate was notably more ill-tempered. The majority of speeches seemed to oppose the bill rather than support it, and a late intervention by Esther Rantzen did not help.

Steerpike Steerpike

Emily Maitlis doesn’t understand grooming gangs

‘You are focusing on Pakistani grooming gangs, because, probably, you’re racist.’ That’s what Emily Maitlis told ex-Reform MP Rupert Lowe when he had the misfortune of appearing on the News Agents podcast yesterday. But is she right? In fact, Pakistani men are up to five times as likely to be responsible for child sex grooming offences than the general population, according to figures from the Hydrant Programme, which investigates child sex abuse. Around one in 73 Muslim men over 16 have been prosecuted for ‘group-localised child sexual exploitation’ in Rotherham, research by academics from the universities of Reading and Chichester has revealed. Lowe has highlighted these cases and is crowdfunding an inquiry

Steerpike Steerpike

Equalities watchdog faces legal action over trans rules

Oh dear. Now legal action has been launched against the UK’s equalities watchdog – alleging that guidance around transgender people and toilet facilities breaches human rights law. Jolyon Maugham’s Good Law Project has today announced it has instructed a team of lawyers in a case against the Equality and Human Rights Commission and Labour’s equalities minister Bridget Phillipson. Good heavens… It comes after the ruling by the Supreme Court last month that backed the biological definition of a woman, concluding that ‘sex’ in the Equality Act referred to biological sex. The equalities watchdog insisted the ruling meant that transwomen should be prohibited from using female toilets and changing facilities –

James Heale James Heale

Parliament is changing its mind on assisted dying

There was a markedly different feel to today’s debate on Assisted Dying. The last time the House debated Kim Leadbeater’s Bill at the end of November, there was plenty of pep and self-congratulation among the speeches. But today, it was a decidedly more bad-tempered affair, as MPs met for the first day on the Bill’s report stage, ahead of its Third Reading in a month’s time. There are four obvious reasons why today saw a shift in the mood of the House. The first was the chop-and-change of the Bill’s safeguards during committee stage, with roughly 150 changes since the last vote. Labour’s Florence Eshalomi gave one of the most

Andrew Tettenborn

A 10mph speed limit is preposterous

The increase of 20mph speed limits in Britain has been sending drivers around the bend. But if an organisation called the Road Safety Foundation (RSF) has its way, things could be about to get even slower – and more frustrating – for motorists. The RSF says that road speeds in cities should be cut to 10mph to prevent deaths and reduce serious injuries. Talk of a 10mph speed limit is preposterous. Does the RSF want to take us back to 1903, when the Motor Car Act of that year first raised the speed limit to what was then a blistering 20mph? Nearly all of human progress involves trade-offs between advantages and risks

Nicholas Farrell

Is Keir Starmer ‘far right’ now?

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s new ‘far right’ mission to lock up asylum seekers in distant countries yesterday suffered an embarrassing setback on live television. The former human rights supremo – who cancelled the Tory Rwanda scheme on day one in office – was in Tirana, less than one year later, to discuss setting up a similar scheme in Albania. Or so the media were led to believe in press briefings beforehand: that it would be a main item on the agenda at his bilateral meeting with Albania’s socialist Prime Minister Edi Rami. Italy’s conservative Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, has already launched such a scheme in Albania. She is still called

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The anti-Israel Eurovision mob are Hamas’s little helpers

Imagine booing a survivor of a fascist attack. People actually did that this week. Pro-Palestine activists heckled and insulted a young woman who survived Hamas’s anti-Semitic butchery of 7 October 2023 by playing dead under a pile of bodies. Take a minute to consider the depravity of this, the sheer inhumanity of tormenting a woman who experienced such terror. It was a spectacle of cruelty masquerading as protest The woman is Yuval Raphael. She’s the 24-year-old singer who’s representing Israel at Eurovision. The last big music event she attended was the Nova festival in the desert of southern Israel on 7 October 2023. What she witnessed there almost defies belief.

Alexander Horne

MPs should get a say on Starmer’s trade deals

Sir Keir Starmer has been busy talking up his trade deals with the US and India, while also planning ‘reset’ talks with the EU next week. Yet are these agreements all they are cracked up to be? The simple answer is that it is hard to tell because MPs are unlikely to get an opportunity to scrutinise them adequately. However, with all these deals, the devil is likely to be in the detail – and there is every chance that each one may prove to be politically contentious in the coming weeks and months. Over the past year alone, Labour has proposed a controversial new deal with Mauritius over the

Michael Evans

The red lines delaying an American nuclear deal with Iran

Speaking to reporters on his Middle East diplomatic tour, Donald Trump hinted at what could be his biggest foreign policy achievement to date. A nuclear deal with Iran is ‘close’, he said. Tehran has ‘sort of’ agreed to curbing its suspected clandestine atomic weapons programme. The US and Iran have now had four rounds of indirect negotiations in Oman, and although the content has remained confidential, the atmosphere between the two sides has been candid but amicable, raising expectations that a deal to stop Tehran ‘breaking out’ and building a nuclear bomb could be brokered diplomatically without the need for Trump to resort to military force. When the first round

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Rachel Reeves’s war on family businesses

The Environmental and Rural Affairs select committee is surely right that the government imposed the inheritance tax changes on farmland without proper consultation – and ignored the likelihood that they will cause serious hardship for family farms. Never mind the threshold which Rachel Reeves claims will mean most farms can still be passed on IHT-free – something questioned by the NFU and other critics – the new rules will inevitably drive many larger farms out of business when the current generation passes on. But is there really any point in what the committee is proposing: that the changes are simply delayed for a year? Surely what we really need is

Steerpike Steerpike

Sturgeon earns more from second jobs than her MSP role

To the SNP’s Dear Leader, who just can’t seem to keep out of the spotlight. Now Scotland’s former first minister – who is still a sitting MSP – has been accused of prioritising herself over her constituents after her declared extra earnings reveal she is earning more from her second jobs than her role as a parliamentarian. Alright for some! Alongside her £74,000 a year MSP salary, it transpires that Sturgeon has declared almost £200,000 of additional earnings since resigning from the top job as FM in 2023. Alongside her day job, the Glasgow politician has received yet another bumper sum of £76,500 for her upcoming memoir, Frankly, which is