Politics

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

Thursday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Was Kemi Badenoch’s speech a success?

Kemi Badenoch’s first big speech of 2024 was meant to seize the news agenda and tell the public that the Tory party is changing under her leadership. Yet in a sign of the difficulties opposition leaders have getting their messages out, Badenoch had to compete with the Labour government announcement of a ‘rapid national audit’ and new local inquiries into the grooming gangs scandal. The timing of Yvette Cooper’s statement to the House – 20 minutes into Badenoch’s speech – meant it was Labour leading the news in Westminster this afternoon. However, that’s not to say it was a wasted opportunity. After Badenoch told her shadow cabinet last week that

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Empire of Trump, the creep of child-free influencers & is fact-checking a fiction?

43 min listen

This week: President Trump’s plan to Make America Greater In the cover piece for the magazine, our deputy editor and host of the Americano podcast, Freddy Gray, delves into Trump’s plans. He speaks to insiders, including Steve Bannon, about the President’s ambitions for empire-building. Could he really take over Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal? And if not, what is he really hoping to achieve? Academic and long-time friend of J.D. Vance, James Orr, also writes in the magazine this week about how the vice president-elect could be an even more effective standard-bearer for the MAGA movement. Freddy and James joined the podcast, just before Freddy heads off to cover

Reem Ibrahim

Removing the nicotine from cigarettes could be bad science

On Wednesday, the Biden administration announced a bizarre proposal to cap the amount of nicotine in cigarettes. This change could see as much as 95 per cent of the total nicotine content removed, aiming to ‘save many lives and dramatically reduce the burden of severe illness and disability’, according to FDA Commissioner Robert Calliff. Reducing the harms posed by cigarettes is a noble public health aim, but this particular measure is simply not based in fact. Nicotine is the addictive component of cigarettes, but alone, it is relatively harmless. Cigarettes are harmful due to the products of combustion. Setting tobacco on fire produces carbon monoxide and tobacco tar, containing carcinogens

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Yvette Cooper announces new local grooming gang inquiries

There will be more inquiries into grooming gangs after all – just not a full public inquiry. Yvette Cooper has just announced in the Commons that there will be five new local inquiries, including one in Oldham which triggered the most recent row on these crimes. The Home Secretary also announced that Louise Casey is going to conduct a rapid review into grooming gangs, looking at the data on these crimes, to see what can be learned at a national level. She told MPs: ‘As well as reviewing past cases we also need much stronger action to uncover the full scale and nature of these crimes… The data on ethnicity of both

John O’Neill

High Court puts £1.3 billion in benefit savings in doubt

A government consultation on restricting access to disability benefits was ‘so unfair as to be unlawful’, the High Court ruled today, putting £1.3 billion a year of benefit savings in doubt.  The Work Capability Assessment is the gateway to Universal Credit health benefits and up to £4,900 a year for recipients. The Tories planned to change parts of the assessment relating to moving around and getting out of the house to take account of the rise of home and flexible working. Reforms were due to start from September this year, growing to affect 420,000 people who would be assessed as having a less severe level of incapacity, and another 30,000 who would be found to

Oscar Edmondson

Is Starmer doing enough for Ukraine?

13 min listen

Keir Starmer is in Ukraine today, on his first visit to Kyiv since becoming Prime Minister. And he came bearing gifts: a 100-year partnership agreement between the UK and Ukraine, covering nine ‘pillars’ from culture to science. It is hoped that the new pact will define the relationship between the two countries well beyond the current conflict with Russia. This is all in the context of Donald Trump’s return to the White House, with his administration agitating for a peace deal. Is peace on the horizon? Also on the podcast, Kemi Badenoch’s big speech – in which she criticised the decisions made by successive Tory prime ministers – was overshadowed

Matthew Lynn Matthew Lynn

Regulators don’t create growth 

Perhaps you could gather a group of traffic wardens and ask them how to build a racetrack. Or get the leaders of the Salvation Army over to suggest some cool ideas for a cocktail bar. Think up any improbable brainstorming sessions, and it will still be hard to imagine anything more awkward than the gathering of regulators Chancellor Rachel Reeves summoned to Downing Street today to give her some ideas on growth. After all, that is her job, not theirs.  Just the concept of frog-marching regulators into the Chancellor’s office and demanding ‘growth ideas’ is ridiculous It hardly sounds like fun. The chief executives of such august sounding bodies as

Steerpike Steerpike

Badenoch shuts down idea of Reform-Tory merger

In her first big speech of the year, Kemi Badenoch has taken a pop at Chancellor Rachel Reeves, reiterated her calls for a national inquiry into the grooming gang scandal and hit out at Britain’s immigration figures. Mr S was rather interested, however, in what the Tory leader said about Reform UK. Speaking in London today, Badenoch was quizzed on whether her party could merge with the increasingly popular Farage-founded party ahead of the 2029 general election. The Tory leader hit out at the idea, remarking to her audience: ‘Nigel Farage says he wants to destroy the Conservative Party. Why on earth would we merge with that?’ She added about

Steerpike Steerpike

Blue Labour founder jets off to Trump inauguration

Well, well, well. President-elect Donald Trump may have snubbed Sir Keir Starmer and missed off the new US ambassador Peter Mandelson when he was sending out his inauguration invites but there is one Labour figure who has been deemed privileged enough to make the cut. Steerpike can reveal that Lord Maurice Glasman is currently making his way to DC after being personally invited to the ceremony by the Trump team. How very interesting… The Labour peer and author of Blue Labour is, Mr S understands, heading out to the presidential inauguration – and appears to be the only Labour figure to have been expressly invited by the president’s top team,

Hannah Tomes Hannah Tomes

Netanyahu: Hamas is backtracking on ceasefire

Benjamin Netanyahu has this morning accused Hamas of trying to backtrack on the six-week ceasefire and hostage release that was agreed yesterday. The Israeli Prime Minister’s office released a statement saying that Hamas objected to part of the deal that would give Israel the power to veto the release of certain prisoners, and that negotiators had been instructed to hold firm on the agreed terms. The statement also said Hamas was trying to ‘extort last-minute concessions’ – a claim the group denies. An Israeli cabinet vote on the deal, which was expected to take place later today, has been delayed ‘until the mediators notify Israel that Hamas has accepted all

Marcus Solarz Hendriks

The questions that need answering on the Chagos Islands deal

The art of policymaking is to chart a course through evolving circumstances. In the face of resistance, there are three options: resist and persevere in kind, adjust, or fold and abandon ship. The best policymakers make the correct decision at the right time. The British government is in such a moment with its attempt to cede the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. For months, it has elected the first option – even as the new Mauritian government rejected the terms of the original deal, and Donald Trump’s election victory promises to usher in an administration with dim views of the agreement. As the Chagossians condemned their exclusion from the negotiations, and Maldivian opposition

Eliot Wilson

Starmer’s support for Ukraine has become half-hearted at best

Sir Keir Starmer arrived in Kyiv this morning. He came by train, crossing the border from Poland, since air travel into the Ukrainian capital is now unacceptably hazardous. Perhaps he regards this visit as a respite after the week’s event so far at Westminster. The Prime Minister arrived to meet President Volodymyr Zelensky bearing gifts. The centrepiece is an extensive 100-year partnership agreement between the United Kingdom and Ukraine, covering nine ‘pillars’ from culture and education through science, technology and healthcare to security and military assistance. This is intended to be a significant and enduring relationship. Since the general election, however, the support has seemed to some to have wavered

Danny Shaw

How the CCRC failed Andrew Malkinson

I met Andrew Malkinson, the victim of one of Britain’s gravest miscarriages of justice, on just one occasion. But he left quite an impression and I’ve been thinking about his case, especially since the belated resignation of Helen Pitcher, chairman of the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC).  The organisation, which investigates potential wrongful convictions, failed Malkinson terribly. He served 17 years in prison for a rape he didn’t commit; the CCRC should have referred his case to the Court of Appeal after seven years. My encounter with the bearded, bespectacled Malkinson was at an office in central London on a summer’s day 18 months ago, shortly after his conviction had,

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Starmer should bite the bullet and scrap the triple lock

Could the government be preparing itself for a spending cut which would eclipse the ending of the winter fuel payment? In his mini-reshuffle in response to the resignation of Tulip Siddiq, Keir Starmer has appointed the newly-elected MP for Swansea West, Torsten Bell, as pensions minister. It is an interesting choice because, in his former life as director of the Resolution Foundation, Bell was a loud critic of the triple lock, which he called ‘a messy way of achieving the objective of a higher state pension’. He advocated raising the state pension in line with average earnings instead. The Prime Minister quickly moved to scotch suggestions that the triple lock

Lucy Dunn

The PMQs question that should really worry Keir Starmer

The leader of the opposition found it difficult to land her punches in Wednesday’s Prime Minister’s Questions, with Kemi Badenoch not quite able to work out how she wanted to attack Sir Keir Starmer. The Prime Minister fended off a number of issues from the Tories, from the economy to the Chagos Islands to Gerry Adams – but in the end it was a question from his own side that threw the Labour leader off balance. It wasn’t the usual soft questioning the Prime Minister might have expected from his own party when new Labour MP Brian Leishman stood up to speak. The left-leaning politician for Alloa and Grangemouth –

Steerpike Steerpike

Suspended Labour MP pleads guilty to assault

To the curious case of Mike Amesbury, the former Labour MP who was caught on camera in some rather shocking footage last year. The politician was charged in November and has now pleaded guilty to assault during his appearance in Chester Magistrates Court this morning – after he punched a man in Frodsham last year. A video surfaced in October which appeared to show the then-Labour politician speaking to a man at the side of a road, before throwing a punch at his victim. It was later reported that the bust-up had been the culmination of an ongoing dispute over the temporary closure of the Sutton Weaver swing bridge, and

Steerpike Steerpike

Scottish Tory council leader defects to Reform

Scottish Tory leader Russell Findlay has barely been in the job four months and already his party is facing defections. Mr S can reveal today that Glasgow councillor – and the Scottish Conservative’s leader on Glasgow City Council – Thomas Kerr has jumped ship to Nigel Farage’s party to represent Reform UK on Glasgow City Council. With the Scottish Conservatives already nervous about next year’s Holyrood poll, the news will come as yet another blow ahead of the election… The Glasgow councillor – who in 2023 stood against Labour’s energy minister Michael Shanks in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election – has insisted that ‘Reform UK represents the change that

Zoe Strimpel

Are we calling too many fat people obese?

Over the years I have learned not to take BMI measurements too seriously. I’m pretty healthy, touch wood, and fit, and don’t look remarkably like a porker. But by BMI standards, I am very definitely “overweight”, once or twice even bordering on the dreaded orange swathe of the chart that signifies obese (“severely obese” is shown in a screaming red). Podge is here to stay, so we need to adjust our scales for assessing it When I was younger and vainer I was more than once crushed by the chart’s verdict. I needn’t have bothered. What an as-good-as arbitrary crunch of simple metrics means for people of different propensities and builds

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

The UK economy is in a rut

The UK economy has grown for the first time in three months. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) reports that the economy expanded by 0.1 per cent in November after it contracted by 0.1 per cent in both September and October. This uptick is largely thanks to an increase in services output, which grew by 0.1 per cent in November 2024, after falling by 0.1 per cent in October (a downward revision from last month’s estimate that there had been no growth. So has the economy turned a corner? It’s very difficult to spin this morning’s news in a wholly positive light. Yes, it’s good that the economy did not

Phillip Ullmann

Why inflation figures may have given Labour false confidence

The relief from Downing Street at yesterday’s inflation data – which showed that it dipped to 2.5 per cent in the 12 months to December, down from 2.6 per cent the month before – was palpable. Darren Jones, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, cast a breezy image as he described his boss, the Chancellor Rachel Reeves, as “brilliant”. The choices facing Reeves and Starmer would be bleak Keir Starmer will now be able to offer his Chancellor more than lukewarm assurances that she is not facing the chop. The news will abate the recent cycle of media criticism and with President Trump’s inauguration next week, focus will soon turn elsewhere.  Her