Politics Archives

Monday

7 Jul 2025

The decline of the fact checkers is something to celebrate

For some years now, one of the greatest worries among a certain coterie has been that of ‘misinformation’. This is the idea that the masses, left to their own devices – figuratively and literally – are unable to discern what is true and what is false. This is what has prompted the establishment of such gatekeeping bodies as BBC Verify, institutions that presume to protect the general public from the vast tides of online nonsense. Logically had ostensibly noble intentions upon its creation in 2016 The news that Britain’s biggest fact-checking company, Logically, has gone into administration, will be a blow to those who think we need such bodies. Former

Sunday

6 Jul 2025

Steerpike

Kemi: Farage is a ‘bullshitter’

What a week it has been in British politics. After the welfare rebellion on Tuesday and then the shambles of PMQs on Wednesday, life in CCHQ must now seem a little easier. This week, it was the turn of Kemi Badenoch to address the Conservative Group dinner at the Local Government Association annual conference. And the Tory leader delivered a rather risqué line about Reform, according to a recording sent to Mr S. Badenoch told her audience on Wednesday that: Sometimes it’s really challenging when we have opponents to the left and the right of us promising people things that we know that they can never do. And a man

Noor Qurashi

Britain’s high streets have become unhappy, dangerous places

Supermarket staff in London are now serving customers from inside glass and metal cages. The unveiling of such desperate security measures, including at a Sainsbury’s store in Battersea, should shock us. Yet in Britain, we’ve become so accustomed to shoplifting and crime on our streets that its introduction generates barely a murmur. Our supermarkets and shops have morphed from places where customers can be trusted, to environments where they are watched like hawks and treated with suspicion Sainsbury’s says the crackdown has been implemented to ‘protect’ staff serving vape bars, tobacco and alcohol to customers. It’s hard to blame the supermarket for its logic. But that doesn’t mean we should

Liz Walsh

Ireland will regret its planned Israeli settlements trade ban

If Ireland’s foreign affairs minister expected plaudits from EU leaders for the republic’s looming ban on Israeli settlement goods, he was sorely disappointed. Ireland, Simon Harris pontificated in Brussels, ‘is the only country in the entire European Union that has published any legislation ever in relation to banning trade with the occupied Palestinian territories, but it’s pretty lonely out there.’ Frankly, this is hardly surprising when you take your country on a solo run into perilous economic and diplomatic territory. The Israeli Settlements (Prohibition of Importation of Goods) Bill 2025 (PIGS) will ban goods produced, or partly produced, in Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It applies

Niall Gooch

It’s time to arm the police

Displays of sheer physical bravery are always impressive. Having been in precisely one real fight in my life, I enormously admire those who put their lives on their line for the rest of us every day, so I almost found myself applauding when I saw last week the police bodycam footage of Inspector Molloy Campbell taking on the drug-crazed sword-wielding murderer Marcus Monzo. Armed only with his extendable baton, Campbell kept Monzo at bay, before other officers eventually subdue him with tasers. The ‘long peace’ of low crime enjoyed by Britain from the last decades of the nineteenth century to around the middle of the twentieth, is well and truly

Maxwell Marlow

Britain’s state pension is about to blow

Health Secretary Wes Streeting says that the changes to the Welfare Bill will ‘give people peace of mind’. Perhaps for some, but certainly not economists. Britain’s welfare crisis is staggering – £313 billion a year is spent on disability payments, Universal Credit, winter fuel payments, Motability, child benefit, and, most expensive of them all, the state pension. Currently, the state pension costs over £150 billion a year, and is engineered to grow at the highest of either inflation, wage growth, or 2.5 per cent. When you factor in our rapidly aging population, the welfare state is quite literally primed to blow. Whitehall is on a collision course of its own

Francis Pike

How Britain came to dominate Formula 1

This weekend, Formula One returns to where it all started 75 years ago: Silverstone. But although the first F1 Grand Prix took place in the UK, the sport was initially dominated by Italian cars and Latin drivers, rather than Brits. Dottore Giuseppe Farina, a lawyer turned racing driver, won that first F1 race in front of King George VI. Driving an Alfa Romeo 158, Farina went on the win the championship. For the next seven years, Alfa Romeo, Ferrari and Maserati swept all before them. Did British dominance of F1 come only from European teams’ exit from the sport? It was in this era that the legend of Enzo Ferrari

Liran Nathan

Why this Jew is tired of London

I was born in London. It’s where I built my life. It’s where I have core memories, good friends, a bike, a gym, my local shops. London is my home. But I no longer feel at home, so I’ve decided to stay away. I love you London. You’ve given me so much. But you’ve broken my heart My parents emigrated in the 70s. And though I’m ethnically Jewish, I very much see myself as British. I am a beneficiary – and a custodian – of the values which gave my parents the opportunity to thrive in the United Kingdom. Values like equal opportunity, fair play, community, tolerance, freedom of religion and

Saturday

5 Jul 2025

Sophia Falkner and James Heale

The Tory newbies who fear they could be the last

It is a year today that the survivors of the 2024 Tory election disaster began to make their way to Westminster. Among the 121 Conservative MPs were 26 first-timers. Having lost so much talent last July, many of these now represent the party’s best hopes for the future. But with the Tories down to just 17 per cent in the polls, some fear that the intake of 2024 could be the last one of any great size or significance. ‘I didn’t sign up to slog my guts out for five years, just to lose in 2029’ says one. From bitter defeats often emerge impressive figures. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown

Steerpike

James McMurdock loses Reform whip

Oh dear. Reform UK has made much of its recent progress. Having lost Rupert Lowe at the beginning of this year, Farage’s forces then gained Sarah Pochin at a stonking set of local elections. But now the parliamentary party is backed down to four MPs again, after James McMurdock chose to resign the whip, amid allegations surrounding his ‘business propriety during the pandemic’. McMurdock, the MP for South Basildon and East Thurrock, will sit as an independent in the Commons while the claims are investigated. Lee Anderson, Reform’s Chief Whip, said today: I have today received a call from James McMurdock who has advised me, as chief whip, that he

Niko Vorobyov

Will a political crisis kill off Thailand’s marijuana ban?

In 2022, Thailand became the first nation in Asia to lift its ban on cannabis (or ‘kancha’ in Thai) after decades of prohibition. A massive industry mushroomed practically overnight: you couldn’t turn a street corner in Bangkok without seeing a shopfront with ‘DOCTOR WEED’ in big, green, neon letters. But now, Bangkok’s hazy days might be over. Last week, health minister Somsak Thepsutin signed a decree outlawing any sales without a doctor’s prescription. Since the vast majority of their customers are not epileptic or recovering chemotherapy patients, this means that most pot shops may well go out of business. Somsak even claimed he later plans to re-criminalise ganja outright, harkening back to the

Patrick Gibbons

How a history festival became a forum of fear

‘Defence needs to be our number one priority.’ This sounds like the sort of thing you’d hear at a Nato summit, or a Chatham House conference, but it was the plea of Colin Bell, a 104-year-old second world war RAF veteran, as he was interviewed at Chalke Valley History Festival last weekend. The Wiltshire festival was the brainchild of historian James Holland (second world war specialist; brother of Tom). Originally designed as a fundraiser for his local cricket club, the weeklong event is now in its tenth year. Speakers at last weekend’s event ranged from Max Hastings and Alice Loxton to Al Murray and Peter Frankopan, and were complemented by

Brendan O’Neill

Why is Bob Vylan free but Lucy Connolly in prison?

So now we know. Now we know that Bob Vylan’s sick chant at Glastonbury was not a colourfully worded call for the ‘dismantling’ of a military force, as the band’s leftish apologists claimed. No, it appears that this punk act really does want the soldiers of the Jewish nation to die. A new clip shows the lead singer saying ‘Death to every single IDF soldier out there’. There it is, as clear as it is vile: they want the hundreds of thousands of men and women who serve in the Israeli Defence Forces to perish, to be wiped out without mercy. There it is, as clear as it is vile:

Tim Shipman

Labour’s first year (in review) with Tim Shipman & Quentin Letts

22 min listen

Cast your mind back a year. Labour had just won a storming majority, promising ‘change’ to a stale Tory party that was struggling to govern. But have things got any better? In the magazine this week, Tim Shipman writes the cover piece to mark the occasion of Labour’s first year in government. He takes readers through three chapters: from Sue Gray (freebies scandal and winter fuel cut) to Morgan McSweeney (a degree of professionalisation and dealing with the Donald) to the point at which ‘things fall apart’ (assisted dying, the welfare vote and Reeves’s tears). On the podcast, Tim is joined by The Spectator’s James Heale as well as sketchwriter

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Islam has a rich history of depicting Muhammad

Journalists at LeMan are in fear for their lives after the Turkish satirical magazine published cartoons appearing to depict the Prophet Muhammad. The publication’s editor-in-chief Tuncay Akgun denied that the picture showed Muhammad, but his pleas have fallen on deaf ears. A mob gathered outside the magazine’s office in Istanbul on Monday. In the days since, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has slammed the cartoon as a ‘vile provocation’, and Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan described the image as an ‘immoral…attack against our Prophet’. But LeMan‘s critics appear to be blind to Islam’s rich tradition of depicting Muhammad. The idea of a categorical ban on drawings of Muhammad appears to be

Caleb Quinley

Myanmar’s junta is losing its grip on power

A Myanmar military jet continued to fly sorties just over our hidden frontline hospital. Every time it screamed low over the tree line, the entire clinic would crouch down and pray that this wouldn’t be the strike that hit us. These hospitals are prime targets; the military has no qualms about bombing groups of wounded fighters and civilians alike. Myanmar’s civil war has reached its most volatile and fragmented stage since the coup I was on the frontlines in Karenni State, at the township of Bawlakhe, where the resistance was launching a large, multi-pronged offensive to seize one of the most strategically important towns in the region. The two main

Friday

4 Jul 2025

Tim Shipman

Revealed: Morgan McSweeney’s memo to the PM on how Labour could fail

In this week’s cover story, I revealed details of a memo written by Morgan McSweeney, the prime minister’s chief of staff, written in May last year, before the general election, which predicted exactly how Labour would struggle in power, because of its historical tendency to want to ‘change the world’, rather than focusing on re-election in the way Conservative governments do. Central to this uncanny act of clairvoyance was the insight that even a large majority (at the time the memo was written, possible but not certain) would not insulate Starmer from the tendency of Labour MPs to drift into activism and campaigning against their own government, something we saw

Svitlana Morenets

Trump’s weapons pause will help Putin win

Vladimir Putin launched one of the largest air assaults of the war overnight, just hours after admitting to Donald Trump that Russia would not abandon its war aims in Ukraine. Some 550 missiles and drones were fired over more than 11 hours, most targeting Kyiv. Residents who endured another sleepless night were advised to keep their windows shut as smoke and dust from the blasts turned the air toxic. The civilian death toll would have been catastrophic had 90 per cent of the incoming missiles and drones not been intercepted. But Ukrainians will not be able to count on such protection for much longer as the Trump Administration halted air

Freddy Gray

Did Condé Nast shape the world?

35 min listen

In this episode of Americano, Freddy Gray speaks with New York Times writer and debut author Michael Grynbaum about his new book Empire of the Elite, a sweeping history of Condé Nast – the media empire that once dictated American taste, fashion, and celebrity. From Anna Wintour’s carefully staged exit to the vanished world of glossy magazine grandeur, Grynbaum charts how the institution that once crowned cultural royalty is struggling to stay relevant in an era of TikTok stars and Substack columnists. On the podcast they explore the rise of celebrity culture, the influence of British identity on Condé’s editorial direction, and the complex relationship between Donald Trump and the

Tom Harwood

Why is TfL’s boss attacking me for cleaning up his filthy trains?

If at first you don’t succeed; deny, deflect, attack. This is apparently the mantra of Sadiq Khan and his Transport for London (TfL) Commissioner, Andy Lord. This week both men hit out at volunteers like me and my friends at the Looking for Growth (LfG) movement, who in recent weeks have taken it upon ourselves to make the state of certain Tube lines ever so slightly less terrible. Anyone who has travelled on the Bakerloo or Central line in London over the last six months will have seen the state of the rolling stock. The clear deterioration of standards, and surging sea of graffiti tags. Astonishing. Sadiq Khan says @lfg_uk