Politics

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

Wednesday

5 Jul 2023

Steerpike

The SNP Westminster group’s civil war continues

All is not well among the SNP’s Westminster group and this time, it’s not Mhairi Black causing them trouble. Leader Stephen Flynn has today suspended Salmond ally Angus MacNeil from the party after a public bust up with the Chief Whip Brendan O’Hara. Tension has been brewing between MacNeil and O’Hara for a while but it came to a head last night in the Commons division lobbies. O’Hara is alleged to have been sending MacNeil, the MP for Na h-Eileanan an Iar, disciplinary notices about his poor attendance in parliament. It became one notice too many for MacNeil who, in his latest disagreement with the whip, reportedly seethed ‘You’re a

Kate Andrews and Michael Simmons

Happy birthday NHS. Here’s why you’re not feeling too good

Today is the 75th anniversary of the National Health Service. There is very little to celebrate. Waiting lists are at record highs: 7.4 million waiting in England, and counting. Practically every international comparison ranks the NHS as mediocre to poor on outcomes. Well-above average funding is being funnelled into the health service, yet it doesn’t seem to be making its way to staff salaries or to the frontlines for additional care. What’s worse, all these criticisms applied to the health service before the pandemic hit. The further deterioration of services since Covid is bringing to light all of its current – and previous – failings, as people increasingly ask if

Brendan O’Neill

Biden’s ‘Orwellian’ social media crackdown

Joe Biden cannot be trusted to protect the American people’s freedom of speech. He needs to be restrained, by law, from interfering with people’s First Amendment right to express themselves as they see fit. That is the implication of an extraordinary preliminary injunction slapped on the Biden administration this week by a federal judge. The injunction was issued by US District Court judge Terry Doughty. He says Biden officials likely conspired with social media companies to remove content, in particular content on Covid-19, that the government considered undesirable or dangerous. This would represent a flagrant usurping of the First Amendment, he says, which holds that the government shall take no action that

Ian Acheson

The Dartmoor prison hostage taking could have been far worse

Taking my son for a walk yesterday, we passed HMP Dartmoor, where I served as a prison governor. Unknown to us, a dramatic and serious incident was unfolding just behind its austere walls. A prisoner had taken an officer hostage in the establishment’s segregation unit. I understand that the officer was overpowered while letting the perpetrator out into the unit’s exercise yard. I’m told that this prisoner was armed with a bladed weapon and that the officer was overpowered with his own handcuffs. We won’t know whether all these details are accurate from the Ministry of Justice because they were only forced to reveal the scantest of details after the

James Heale

Did the NHS need a service at Westminster Abbey?

14 min listen

The NHS marks its 75th anniversary today, and in Westminster, both Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer attended a service at Westminster Abbey in honour of the organisation. James Heale talks to Katy Balls and Kate Andrews about why there was a church service for the NHS and whether Rishi Sunak’s time would have been better spent at Prime Minister’s Questions. Produced by Cindy Yu.

Isabel Hardman

Let us pray for the NHS

Why was there a service in Westminster Abbey thanking God for the NHS today? Some 1,500 NHS workers, many in uniform, packed into the Abbey along with politicians to mark 75 years of the service. As a celebration of the work those people have done, it was a good event: the Dean of Westminster, David Hoyle, paid tribute in his sermon to the ‘sheer bloody-minded persistence of tired, stressed, wonderful people in the NHS’. There were testimonies from healthcare workers who had treated sickle cell patients and children with cancer from Ukraine. And of course there were readings from Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer and an address from NHS chief

Annabel Denham

Is Labour really a credible government-in-waiting?

How long do you give it before Labour abandon their promise of golden hellos for new teachers? Shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson has insisted their proposed £2,400 welcome bonus wheeze will be fully costed, funded by a tax raid on fee-paying schools. It is not yet clear whether Labour has considered that putting private education beyond the reach of tens of thousands will mean many pupils pouring into the state system, at a cost of hundreds of millions every year. Nor whether party strategists realise they may be slightly overestimating how far they can make the £1.6 billion raised annually from this levy go. Labour’s U-turns are a reminder that fantastical

Andrew Tettenborn

The EU is heading for a clash with Poland over immigration

Failing to tackle immigration isn’t only a problem for Rishi Sunak. The European Union is also struggling to deal with the issue. Now, Brussels has devised a plan for dividing up among its member states the would-be migrants at the EU’s doors. But Poland and Hungary are not happy. The EU used qualified majority voting, which is intended to allow a sufficient number of its larger countries to override a small number of holdouts, to push the idea through. Essentially each member state will be given a quota and could then be charged €20,000 (£17,000) per head for falling short. This is legally fairly watertight, since, under EU law, immigration is generally

Charles Moore

We’re finding out the price of net zero

Now that the cost of net zero has become a pressing political matter, I have been re-reading the prescient words of Matt Ridley in the House of Lords when, in 2019, he was one of very few who opposed the government’s ‘net zero by 2050’ pledge. ‘I was genuinely shocked,’ he said, ‘by the casual way in which the other place [the Commons] nodded through this statutory instrument, committing future generations to vast expenditure to achieve a goal that we have no idea how to reach technologically without ruining the British economy and the British landscape. We are assured without any evidence that this measure will have, “no significant… impact

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

The fine art of French rioting

Marseille One of the benefits of holidaying during a riot is you feel remarkably safe. Ruffians have no interest in you while they can be having fun at the expense of a much more exciting foe, the police. And besides, there are Lacoste stores to be raided: they have no time for your wallet. The other major benefit is you can get a table anywhere. We had the best seat in France last week: the first-floor balcony of La Caravelle, an old-school bar overlooking Marseille’s historic port and the perfect vantage point for taking in the fine art of French rioting. The choreography unfolded in fits and starts. The police vans

Jonathan Miller

Why Europe riots

Montpellier A spectre is haunting Europe. In France, Sweden, Germany, Belgium and even Switzerland, the rule of law is being challenged by the rule of gangs. Disaffected young people cut off from society feel nothing but nihilistic contempt for it. Higher temperatures and social media are creating a heated summer. Judging from recent events in Paris and Stockholm, this year could be the worst so far. The rise of gang violence is associated with immigration. Europe has shown itself incapable or unwilling to control the influx of migrants, some of them genuine asylum seekers, others simply opportunists. Nor have European politicians succeeded in dealing with the problems created by immigration,

Kate Andrews

What’s there to celebrate about the NHS?

It’s a rare occasion that sees politicians put aside their feuds and rivalries to gather together at Westminster Abbey. These moments are limited to weddings, coronations, funerals – and the National Health Service’s birthday. This week the Prime Minister, the opposition leader and a sprinkling of royals joined together to mark the NHS’s 75th anniversary, singing hymns and giving thanks for a system that, according to the latest report, delivers some of the worst outcomes for patients in Europe. ‘We all get that the model is broken and has to change. It’s just that no one is willing to say it out loud’ The George Cross, presented to the NHS

Katy Balls

Where’s Sunak? Dowden steps in at PMQs

Where’s Rishi Sunak? That’s the latest attack line from Labour politicians after the Prime Minister missed this week’s Prime Minister’s Questions to attend a service for the NHS at Westminster Abbey. He will also miss next week’s affair to attend a Nato summit. In Sunak’s place, his deputy Oliver Dowden stood at the despatch box where he faced Keir Starmer’s deputy Angela Rayner. She quickly brought up Sunak’s absence, suggesting it showed that the Tories had given up. Dowden – who has several years’ experience writing jokes for Tory leaders for PMQs – snapped back that ‘some leaders trust their deputies’. When pressed, there is no Labour frontbench politician who

Douglas Murray

French racism is not the problem

Last week we learned that a woman in a park in Skegness was dragged into the bushes and raped by a 33-year-old male. The man had arrived in the UK illegally on a small boat just 40 days earlier. If you have open borders and no checks on who is arriving, an uptick in crime will inevitably occur Strangely, I can find little anger about this. The story was reported in a couple of papers but there were no fulminating editorials or emergency questions in the House. Jess Phillips hasn’t found room to grandstand about it. Nor have Yvette Cooper, Stella Creasy or any of those other Labour MPs who

Steerpike

Mhairi Black burns Oliver Dowden at PMQs

With Rishi and Keir giving thanks for ‘our’ NHS, that meant it was time for the deputies to come out to play. So at PMQs it was Oliver Dowden tasked with facing Labour’s Angela Rayner on renting reform. But the real highlight of the session came from the SNP’s Mhairi Black, who announced yesterday that she was standing down at the next election. After Oliver Dowden spoke warmly of Black, a fellow member of the 2015 intake of MPs, the SNP deputy leader retorted: ‘We did join this place at the same time — I’m pretty sure we’ll be leaving at the same time.’ The whole House enjoyed a joke

Katy Balls

Jonathan Ashworth: ‘We are at risk of a lost generation’

Jonathan Ashworth has started carrying a card in his shirt pocket. It’s the licence his father was given when he got a job in the 1970s at the Playboy casino in Manchester. ‘It’s silly, really. But it’s just a reminder that my dad was able to start a job as a croupier from a very poor working-class background in Salford and that completely changed his life,’ the shadow work and pensions secretary says when we meet in his Commons office. It was at the casino that his father met Ashworth’s mother – a Playboy bunny girl working as a waitress. ‘Every week, the Playboy bunny girls had to queue up

Con Coughlin

Why Putin still needs Wagner

It will be a matter of deep regret for Vladimir Putin that, in the wake of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s ill-fated attempt to overthrow Russia’s military establishment, he has finally been forced to come clean about the Kremlin’s association with the Wagner Group. Deniability is a vital facet for a veteran spook like Putin. Even when Wagner’s band of mercenary cut-throats were spearheading the assault on the east Ukrainian city of Bakhmut earlier this year, the Russian leader rebutted claims of Prigozhin’s involvement. ‘He runs a restaurant business, it is his job – he is a restaurant keeper in St Petersburg,’ Putin told Austrian television. Putin’s challenge is to maintain Wagner’s global operations

Stephen Daisley

The moment I fell in love with Mhairi Black

I think it was when she described Margo MacDonald as ‘just magic’ that I fell in love with Mhairi Black. As summations of pivotal political figures go, it’s akin to a first-time Labour parliamentary candidate calling Nye Bevan an absolute mad lad. This is how Black speaks, assessing political history as if she’s talking about that time Architects played the Cathouse. It’s not what you might expect from a middle-class lassie from Ralston, but it’s nothing so cynical as an act. Glasgow zillennial patter is a rhetorical mix of imported American sitcoms and a self-consciously Scottish tone. It’s like someone remade The Big Bang Theory with an all-Weegie cast. I find admirable

Gavin Mortimer

France’s riots have left the country more divided than ever

There is a myth of France, specifically of its banlieues, that has been frequently repeated in recent days. Descriptions of ‘marginalised suburbs’, ‘ghetto-like suburban estates’ and of ethnic minorities ‘shunted away into suburban housing projects…out of sight and out of mind’ have emerged in the international media. It’s even been suggested in one British publication that rising food prices were to blame for the riots. Nanterre, where 17-year-old Nahel was shot dead by a policeman eight days ago, has some tough estates but it not a ghetto abandoned by the French state. The housing estate where Nahel lived was built in the late 1970s and at the time was considered ‘an emblematic project

Steerpike

What makes Biden think Ursula von der Leyen is fit to run Nato?

Steerpike hates to brag, but you heard it here first. The Telegraph is now reporting that Joe Biden, having glock-blocked Britain’s Ben Wallace as Secretary General of Nato, is now pushing for the German Ursula von der Leyen. What makes Ursula qualified to lead the defence of the West? Well, she was German Defence Minister between 2013 and 2019 and what a marvellous job she did … In 2015, German troops were so ill-equipped that they had to use broomsticks instead of machine guns for a Nato exercise. It also emerged that German rifles wouldn’t shoot straight in temperatures above 30°C. Boom! By 2019, the Bundeswehr’s ammunition stocks were reportedly so low that they

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Wednesday