Politics

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

Tuesday

Matthew Scott

Removing jury trials is a democratic outrage

In June 2020 the impact of Covid led some to argue that trial by jury should be temporarily suspended. David Lammy, who was at the time the shadow justice secretary, strongly opposed the idea. He tweeted: ‘Jury trials are a fundamental part of our democratic settlement. Criminal trials without juries are a bad idea.’ It now appears that Lammy thinks the time has come, and that he is the man, to destroy this fundamental part of our democratic settlement. He intends the destruction to be permanent. A memo seen by the Times says he is preparing to end jury trials except for murder, rape or manslaughter cases. The sole justification for

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Make Gordon McKee a minister

With his viral video explaining debt-to-GDP ratio through the medium of biscuits, Gordon McKee is putting the ‘nom’ into economics. Since his election to the Commons last year, the Glasgow South MP has established himself as the Labour politician with the best social media game, a sort of Robert Jenrick of the left. His latest video sees McKee, mug of tea in hand, build a 3D graph of international debt-to-GDP ratios using custard creams and bourbon biscuits. Custard creams equal national wealth; Bourbons, government debt. The 31-year-old stacks up bickie after bickie as he recounts the key points at which debt rose: Gordon Brown’s bank bailout; 14 years of the

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

What’s going on with Marjorie Taylor Greene?

22 min listen

Freddy Gray speaks to the Washington correspondent for Vanity Fair Aidan McLaughlin about his interview with Marjorie Taylor Greene. The Congresswoman, who was formerly a MAGA loyalist, announced her resignation having fallen out with President Donald Trump. Freddy and Aidan discuss the fallout, her unpredictable views on current issues & why the media loves a political convert.

Druin Burch

Only radical change can cut NHS waiting lists

A research letter in the Future Healthcare Journal, laying out the scale of performance failings in the NHS, has attracted a lot of attention today. It has shone a spotlight on the fact that, to fulfil its pledge to voters to reduce waiting times and ‘fix the NHS’, Labour must somehow find a way to cut the health service’s treatment backlog in half. The research explains that the NHS has a constitutional requirement that 92 per cent of patients must wait no longer than 18 weeks for treatment after being referred by their GP. That target was last met in November 2015. At that point, the total national waiting list was

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Labour MP’s bizarre Putin warning

To the Commons, where this afternoon parliamentarians have spent some time discussing the G20 and Ukraine. The Prime Minister updated politicians on his trip to the G20 summit in South Africa, while politicians focused on the Russian invasion of Ukraine given what has been widely interpreted as a Vladimir Putin-friendly peace proposal from the US. While Sir Keir Starmer’s statement was as, er, lacklustre as ever, one of his own MPs decided to inject a little more passion into the session. Dr Rupa Huq, the Labour MP for Ealing Central and Acton, started by lamenting the conflict in the East – noting the heartbreaking stories of child abductions by Russia

Joanna Marchong

No one wants to hear from the Tories

For a party long described as Britain’s ‘natural party of government’, the Conservatives have spent an astonishing amount of time recently behaving as if the electorate suffers from acute memory loss. Every crisis they now attempt to offer solutions to in opposition is one they helped engineer in government. Every principle they defend today is one they discarded yesterday. And every lecture on restraint or prudence is delivered with the tone of a headteacher whose school burned down on his watch. Take Send as an example. (‘Send’ stands for special educational needs and disabilities.) After years of cuts, expansions and unfunded, changing statutory obligations to the system by which pupils

Steerpike Steerpike

Lammy to scrap jury trials in backlog crackdown

Under a shake-up of the legal system, it transpires that juries are to be scrapped in all cases except murder, rape and manslaughter. The majority of cases will be heard by a judge alone in new plans pushed by Justice Secretary David Lammy – in a move that goes much further than the suggestions of Sir Brian Leveson, who reviewed the UK’s criminal courts this year. Good heavens… As reported by the Times, a memo sent by Lammy to ministers and civil servants insisted there was ‘no right’ to jury trials in the UK – before adding that radical action was necessary to slash the justice backlog in England and

James Heale James Heale

Why Reeves’s smorgasbord Budget won’t fix Britain

14 min listen

James Nation, managing director at Forefront Advisers, and Michael Simmons join James Heale to analyse what we know, one day ahead of the Budget. James – a former Treasury official and adviser to Rishi Sunak – takes us inside Number 11, explains the importance of every sentence and defends the Budget as a fiscal event. Plus, Michael takes us through the measures we know so far – but is the chaotic process we’ve seen so far just symptomatic of ‘broken Britain’? Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

Matthew Lynn

Reeves’s Budget is dead on arrival

The Budget speech has no doubt been finalised. The red box has been dusted off. And the pie charts are ready to be released. Assuming Chancellor Rachel Reeves doesn’t call in sick tomorrow, the Treasury, along with the rest of us, will be waiting to see how tomorrow’s Budget is received. But do we really need to wait? With the pound falling, the economy stagnant, and house prices sliding, the truth is that this Budget is dead on arrival. After all the leaks and spin we have endured over the past few months, it may seem as if there have already been ten Budgets. A dozen or more major tax

Steerpike Steerpike

Starmer apologises over banned TikTok dance

Of all the things the public might think Prime Minister Keir Starmer should apologise for, a TikTok dance is probably not top of the list. Yet that is exactly what the Labour leader has expressed regret over, after a visit to a primary school on Monday. The PM found himself being dressed down by the headmistress of Welland Academy in Peterborough, after he engaged in a banned social media dance that has caused both parents and teachers no end of irritation. Not like Starmer to be unhelpful, eh? Sir Keir visited the school with his Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson in tow to promote the government’s expansion of free school meals.

James Heale James Heale

Rachel Reeves is running out of excuses

The Chancellor addressed her backbench troops last night, ahead of Wednesday’s Budget. Rachel Reeves’ remarks sought to impress upon her colleagues the importance of unity amid a likely onslaught of criticism. ‘Politics is a team sport,’ she said. ‘We have to stick together if we’re going to deliver the change, and get the second term that we want.’ She stressed that her Budget is a ‘package’, which will contain both good and bad choices. ‘It’s not a pick and mix – you can’t say you like the cola bottles but you don’t like the fruit salads. It comes together as a whole.’ That can be read as a warning to

Joanna Williams

Trigger warnings are out of control at the University of Essex

You don’t need a PhD to see that censorship thrives in universities. In the past few weeks alone, a professor has been banned from the University of Manchester and described as a ‘potential risk to colleagues’ for having allegedly used ‘the n-word’ in a disciplinary meeting; a sociology lecturer at Abertay University has been subjected to a smear campaign for inviting a speaker critical of Scotland’s rape laws; and pro-Palestinian student activists at City, University of London have called for the dismissal of a Jewish professor because he completed compulsory military service in Israel during the 1980s. Professors at this august institution have placed trigger warnings on essays discussing free speech

Steerpike Steerpike

Two peers suspended over lobbying

To the House of Lords, where it transpires that two peers are to be suspended after they were deemed to have breached lobbying rules. Undercover footage recorded by the Guardian caught Lord Dannatt and Lord Evans of Watford offering parliamentary services to clients who were hoping to lobby the government. The House of Lords’ standards watchdog launched separate investigations into the two men – and now Richard Dannatt faces a four-month suspension while David Evans will be suspended for five months, once the House of Lords approves the commissioner’s sanctions. Oh dear… Lord Dannatt was found to have offered a potential client private meetings with ministers – and was secretly

Jimmy Nicholls

Does Rachel Reeves really get more online abuse than most?

In politics, as in life, it helps to get your excuses in early. That presumably is why, ahead of tomorrow’s Budget, Keir Starmer has mounted a vanguard action in defence of his chancellor Rachel Reeves. ‘I’m acutely aware that women get much more abuse and criticism than men do and I think it’s about time we acknowledge that,’ he told broadcasters over the weekend. Starmer was responding to earlier complaints from Reeves that she is the victim of patronising  – and, even worse, male – armchair critics. ‘I’m sick of people mansplaining how to be chancellor to me,’ she told the Times, adding in a grumble about those nefarious ‘boys

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Nigeria’s mass school abduction is its worst yet – but the West doesn’t seem to care

The kidnapping of over 300 students and teachers from a Catholic school by armed men in the Papiri area of central Nigeria is one of the worst mass abductions the country has ever witnessed. The horrifying incident on Friday is far from isolated: more than 2,500 students have been taken in at least 70 raids on schools in the last decade. The St Mary’s School attack came in the same week that gunmen killed a teacher and abducted 25 students from a girls’ secondary school in Nigeria’s Kebbi State. More than 2,500 students have been taken in at least 70 raids on schools in the last decade While no one

Lawrence Goldman

David Olusoga’s Empire exposes the BBC’s history problem

While the BBC’s mis-editing of Donald Trump’s words has dominated the headlines, less attention has been paid to another example of the corporation’s bias: its coverage of history. The BBC’s latest blockbuster history series, Empire, fronted by David Olusoga, shows the extent of the problem. This slanted and biased version of history is nothing new No one watching these three programmes, which were broadcast this month, could be in any doubt that a negative view of British history pervades everything. The series is not a balanced history of the empire, but rather a collection of some of its most controversial and violent episodes. When Olusoga himself isn’t telling us what

Monday

William Atkinson

William Atkinson, Andreas Roth, Philip Womack, Mary Wakefield & Muriel Zagha

35 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: William Atkinson reveals his teenage brush with a micropenis; Andreas Roth bemoans the dumbing down of German education; Philip Womack wonders how the hyphen turned political; Mary Wakefield questions the latest AI horror story – digitising dead relatives; and, Muriel Zagha celebrates Powell & Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going! Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Nigel Jones

Comparing Reform to the Nazis is no joke

It is a well known axiom of politics that once you compare your opponents to Hitler’s Nazis you have well and truly lost the argument. But that golden rule seems to have been lost on Tory party chairman Kevin Hollinrake who has rightly come under heavy fire for comparing Reform UK to the Nazis. Hollinrake’s gaffe is a measure of just how worried the Tories are about the rise of Reform Hollinrake posted two images on X showing a black and gold Reform logo promoting the populist party on a football shirt next to a picture of the Nazis’ golden party badge – a special award instituted by Hitler on

Jacob Heilbrunn

Elon Musk’s Doge was a damp squib

Doge has been Doge’d. Elon Musk’s once fearsome US Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) has been shut down eight months before its contract officially ends in July 2026. What was supposed to be an organisation that exploded traditional ways of running the federal government has turned into a damp squib. Doge was established by President Trump on the first day of his second term in office. Headed by Tesla chief Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy (who resigned early on to run for governor of Ohio), it struck the kind of fear into government bureaucrats that a visit from the Red Guards might instill during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Musk’s minions rampaged

Steerpike Steerpike

Trump team warned over London’s Chinese super-embassy

So much for a simple Chinese takeaway. In his never-ending search for growth, Sir Keir Starmer has finally alighted on the obvious answer: cosying up to the liberal-minded democrats of Tiananmen Square. The Prime Minister is expected to fly to Beijing in the new year, once the long-awaited Chinese super-embassy in Tower Hamlets secures planning approval next month. No wonder 2025 is the year of the snake, eh? But there now seems to be a spanner in the works, ahead of the mooted approval on 10 December. For a group of American politicians are up in arms about the possible threat to global financial security. Steerpike has been shown a