Politics

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

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Reeves’s Spring Statement just doesn’t add up

Is Rachel Reeves toast? Not according to her. The Chancellor delivered an aggressively self-confident statement about Labour’s spending plans this afternoon. Soberly dressed in maroon, she rattled through her speech like a garden shredder grinding up branches and reducing them to pale little woodchips. Anyone would think she was pondering a leadership bid. After listing her achievements since last July, she issued a warning to the doubters.  ‘I will return in the autumn to deliver the Budget.’  She relied on a good deal of amateur magicianship to conceal her fibs and exaggerations. Last autumn she claimed that £6.5 billion could be raised by cracking down on tax evasion. But that’s

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Team Trump walked into Jeffrey Goldberg’s trap

Jeffrey Goldberg laid a trap and Team Trump has blundered right into it. In Monday’s sensational story, ‘The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans’, the Atlantic editor rather pompously declared that he was withholding some of the information he had received on grounds of national security, contrasting his own propriety with the slapdashery of the Trump administration’s national security operation. As an intelligent man who has spent years trying to undermine Donald Trump and his movement, he must have guessed what the response would be. The President and his team did what Donald Trump always does when attacked: counter punch, hard and wild. They poured scorn on Goldberg,

Steerpike Steerpike

Darren Jones compares disability cuts to pocket money

Oh dear. It seems that some Labour ministers are in desperate need of some media training. First, there was Seema Malhotra mixing up the inflation rate with interest rates. Now, Darren Jones – Rachel Reeves’ No. 2 – has managed to put his foot in it on her proposed benefit cuts. Appearing on Politics Live this lunchtime, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury was asked about the government’s newly-published impact assessment. It says that there will be an additional quarter of a million people – including 50,000 children – in relative poverty in 2029/30 as a result of its welfare changes. Host Jo Coburn asked Jones for the justification for

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Why are there more protests against Hamas in Gaza than Britain?

You’re more likely to see a protest against Hamas in Gaza than in London. For brave, spirited agitation against this army of anti-Semites that murders Israelis and oppresses Palestinians, forget Britain’s activist class – they’re too busy frothing about the ‘evil’ Jewish State morning, noon and night. Look instead to the bombed-out Gaza Strip itself, where, finally, fury with Hamas is bubbling over. If Palestinians vented their Hamas criticism in Britain, they would get an earful from ‘progressives’ Hundreds of Gazans took to their rubble-strewn streets to register their disdain for Hamas. Around a hundred gathered in Beit Lahia in the north of Gaza, brandishing placards saying ‘Stop War’ and

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Rachel Reeves can’t blame anyone else for stagnant growth

It didn’t take long for the Commons to spot the glaring omission in Rachel Reeves’s boast that the Office for Budgetary Responsibility (OBR) has increased its growth forecast for next year and beyond. The OBR’s growth forecast for this year has just been halved relative to its estimate made last October, down from 2 per cent to 1 per cent. Take into account the growing population and the OBR expects GDP per capita to rise this year by just 0.3 per cent. While the Chancellor wants us to concentrate on later growth forecasts, these do not negate the deterioration in our short-term prospects. Overall, the OBR judges the cumulative growth

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

Reeves’s Spring Statement was written for the OBR

Rachel Reeves didn’t want today’s Spring Statement to be seen as a budget, but a budget it has turned out to be. The Chancellor has had to find £15 billion of spending cuts across welfare and the rest of government. Rising borrowing costs at the start of the year chipped away at her headroom and the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has now confirmed that the £10 billion margin she left herself in the autumn was wiped out. Had the Chancellor not acted today she would have broken her ‘ironclad’ fiscal rule by more than £4 billion – a £14 billion swing since the Budget. The spending cuts Reeves has

Kyle Macleod

Scotland’s universities must scrap free tuition

Scotland’s universities are in a crisis of Holyrood’s own making. The Scottish Funding Council is currently discussing bailout terms for the University of Dundee, while other universities, including my own alma mater the University of Edinburgh, have announced large redundancy packages to try and balance the books. This financial pressure, while exacerbated by other factors, largely results from the Scottish National party’s (SNP) zero tuition fee policy, in which domestic students pay nothing for their education. Some good may, however, yet come from this crisis, as it has increased political will to reconsider this cornerstone SNP policy. The current crisis represents an inflection point for Scotland’s higher education sector Currently,

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Rachel Reeves’s non-Budget is very bad news

Rachel Reeves framed her Spring Statement around the insistence that Labour’s Plan for Change was already working, which meant that any changes she was having to make today had to be framed as small ‘adjustments’, rather than the sort of change of course that would allow the Conservatives to claim she was delivering an ‘emergency budget’.  She insisted that she was sticking to only one fiscal event a year, but the Chancellor did have to make a number of admissions in today’s speech, chief among them that the OBR had cut its growth forecast for the year from 2 per cent to 1 per cent. She said she was ‘not

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Keir tells Kemi that a phone ban in schools is ‘completely unnecessary’

Any session of Prime Minister’s Questions that takes place before a fiscal event is merely a warm-up act that everyone forgets within seconds, but today Keir Starmer made that warm-up a bit more closely connected to the Spring Statement by insisting to the chamber that ‘I have full confidence in the Chancellor’. He was answering a question from Conservative MP Jerome Mayhew, who claimed that Rachel Reeves’s ‘plans have collapsed around her ears with an emergency budget to cut that spending’.  Kemi Badenoch, though, gave a nod to the Spring Statement, before focusing her questions on education. She did so in her characteristically unorthodox manner, and this time, it didn’t

Ian O’Doherty

Can Ireland prove that it isn’t a ‘tax scam’?

Howard Lutnick, former CEO of the financial firm Cantor Fitzgerald, and now Secretary of Commerce in the Trump administration, has quickly attained the status of pantomime villain in Ireland. Last year, Lutnick criticised Ireland’s tax arrangements, saying ‘It’s nonsense that Ireland of all places runs a trade surplus at our expense.’ He increased his pressure on Ireland last week when he appeared on the All-In business podcast and sarcastically referred to Ireland as his ‘favourite tax scam’ – the one he was most looking forward to ‘fixing’. This has prompted an increasingly nervous Irish government to make extra efforts to placate the Trump administration – which they previously treated with a

Coffee House

Spring Statement: Rachel Reeves says 2025 growth forecast halved

Rachel Reeves delivered some bad news in her Spring Statement: the UK’s growth forecast has been halved to 1 per cent for 2025. But the Chancellor revealed that the Office for Budget Responsibility has upgraded its longer-term growth estimates from 2026. Reeves also announced a benefits shake-up and a crackdown on tax avoidance. Here’s how it unfolded on our live blog:

Nigel Jones

The University of Sussex has learned nothing from the Kathleen Stock debacle

The University of Sussex, one of the leading temples of progressivism in academia, has been fined £585,000 for failing to safeguard free speech following the Kathleen Stock affair. Stock, a philosophy professor, was hounded out of Sussex in 2021 over her belief in biological sex. The Office for Students (OfS)’s investigation into the fallout from that debacle is damning: it criticised the university’s policy statement on trans and non-binary equality, saying its requirement to ‘positively represent trans people’ and an assertion that ‘transphobic propaganda [would] not be tolerated’ could lead staff and students to ‘self-censor’. The message that the times have changed does not seem to have got through to

Steerpike Steerpike

Labour minister confuses interest rates with inflation

Happy spring statement day, one and all. Today’s fiscal event – which is definitely NOT an ’emergency Budget’ – looks set to contain more gloom and doom about Rachel Reeves’ vanishing fiscal headroom. Looks like that £40bn October tax raid didn’t help much eh? So, with inflation still running high and the growth figures revised downward, it might be a good time for ministers to reassure the markets that Labour knows what it is doing in office. Far from it. For Seema Malhotra, the minister for migration, this week took to X to illustrate her own economic credentials. She took aim at the last government, declaring that ‘Under the Tories’, there

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Ukraine is looking like the loser in Russia-US peace talks

Ukraine’s worst nightmare is coming true: Vladimir Putin has presented the bill to end his war – and Donald Trump is forcing Kyiv to pay it. After 12 hours of talks with seasoned Russian diplomats in Saudi Arabia, the US delegation was so worn out and desperate for a win that they agreed to ease sanctions on Russia. In return, Moscow pledged not to bomb civilian vessels in the Black Sea and to halt strikes on energy and oil infrastructure if Kyiv does the same. But soon after the meeting ended, the Kremlin extended its list of demands. Volodymyr Zelensky says this isn’t what Ukraine and the US agreed to

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Putin’s duo are spinning ceasefire talks to Russia’s advantage

The delegation Moscow sent to ceasefire talks in Saudi Arabia was clearly well-chosen. Grigory Karasin, for example, the former diplomat (including a spell as ambassador to the United Kingdom, 2000-5) and Sergei Beseda, head of the Federal Security Service’s Fifth Service, especially responsible for penetrating and subverting Ukraine. They certainly seem to be doing a good job of advancing Russia’s interests at the talks. After Vladimir Putin reportedly acceded to a month-long moratorium on strikes against energy infrastructure (which both Moscow and Kyiv are already accusing the other side of breaking), the latest round of talks seem to have led to the acceptance of the other leg of this painfully

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Falling inflation may have rescued Rachel Reeves

Clothing retailers have saved Rachel Reeves from having to go naked into the debating chamber. As the Chancellor rises to deliver her Spring Statement today, she will have the comfort of knowing that the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) has fallen from 3.0 per cent to 2.8 per cent – and unexpectedly at that. The main reason is that clothing retailers cut their prices by 0.3 per cent in February – against a 2.1 per cent rise in February 2024. The fall will help ease pressure on households, but nothing like as much as it will ease pressure on Reeves herself. A revival of the cost-of-living crisis is the last thing

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Trump aide admits group chat leak

As Denis Healey said: ‘when you’re in a hole, stop digging.’ It has been a furious day in Trumpland after White House officials accidentally added journalist Jeffrey Goldberg to a highly sensitive group chat on Signal about planned airstrikes in Yemen. Initially, the administration went on the offensive, with Defense Secretary Pete Hesketh calling Goldberg a ‘guy that peddles in garbage.’ But now, 24 hours on, Trump’s National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, has held his hands up for ‘signal gate.’ Speaking to Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, Waltz accepted responsibility for making the Signal group – while, er, continuing to deflect blame. ‘It’s embarrassing, yes. We’re going to get to the

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

The promise Putin made to Russia – and broke

When Vladimir Putin launched his bid to be elected as Russia’s president in 2000, he had already been in the role for a month and a half. His predecessor Boris Yeltsin had stepped down on 31 December 1999, appointing his young prime minister in his place to prevent political opponents from prosecuting him and his associates – on well-founded grounds – for corruption. At the time, less than a decade after the collapse of the USSR, Russia had fair elections, freedom of expression, a thriving press and a growing economy. A quarter of a century on, all of that has gone. Today marks exactly 25 years since Putin was elected

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

Is Reeves brave enough to give the economy the medicine it needs?

Rachel Reeves has wanted to downplay the significance of the Spring Statement this afternoon. But with every leaked proposal and briefing, the statement feels increasingly like a full-blown Budget. Soaring borrowing costs, and a growth forecast set to be slashed in half, have wiped out the Chancellor’s £10 billion headroom against her ‘ironclad’ fiscal rules. Reeves’s statement could now include civil service reforms, NHS productivity measures and an ‘austerity-lite’ stance on future spending. There will be no major tax decisions, barring a possible extension to fiscal drag. But today’s announcement is a crucial one for the Chancellor. Reeves’s didn’t expect the outlook for Britain’s economy to be so bleak. Yet

Robin Ashenden

Jim Callaghan’s greatest achievement was to be himself

The government’s recent, palpable turn to the right seems to be gaining pace. In the past few weeks, Keir Starmer has slashed overseas aid, proposed a radical downsizing of the civil service, abolished NHS England and vowed to make serious cuts to welfare. As the Labour left pick up their weapons and prepare to do battle, conservative commentators are lauding the Prime Minister as being ‘to the Right of the Tories’ and cheering him on.  For all his quiet bonhomie, Callaghan never flinched from levelling with the public when it counted The situation calls to mind an earlier Labour prime minister who died exactly 20 years ago today and took his