Politics

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

Thursday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Labour’s attack lines are working

Rachel Reeves is getting better and better as Shadow Chancellor. Mind you, her response to Jeremy Hunt’s Autumn Statement was the second one she’s had to produce in two months, given it was only in September that she was reacting to Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-Budget. There was plenty to criticise and plenty of political attacks to launch. And she offered it all with a mix of cold fury and jokes.  Reeves framed her assessment of Hunt’s economic announcements using the famous Ronald Reagan question of whether people felt better off as a result of the government. She said voters would be asking: ‘Are me and my family better off with a

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Three ways Hunt’s Autumn Statement will be judged

The government expects its Autumn Statement to be judged on three tests. First of all, how do the markets react? The decisions announced today by the Chancellor Jeremy Hunt mean that the government will be issuing £31 billion less in gilts – in other words, in borrowing – than expected after the mini-Budget. The initial market reaction to this has been positive. However, the new fiscal rule – to have debt falling as a percentage of GDP by the end of the five-year forecast period – is still relatively loose. Hunt and Sunak are relying on their credibility and their willingness to make difficult choices to reassure the markets.   Perhaps

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Will the Autumn Statement break the Tory truce?

It’s crunch day for Rishi Sunak. This morning his Chancellor Jeremy Hunt will stand at the despatch box and unveil a mix of spending cuts and tax rises worth in the region of £55 billion in a bid to fill the fiscal black hole in the public finances. Hunt is expected to tell MPs his fiscal plan will help Britain ‘face into the storm’ by being ‘honest about the challenges, and fair in our solutions’ to inflation and rising energy prices.  The measures Sunak and Hunt are expected to pitch as the best response to the global financial situation – as well as the fallout from Liz Truss’s not-so-mini-Budget which

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

What can we expect from Hunt’s Autumn Statement?

Later this morning Jeremy Hunt will deliver his first Autumn Statement as Chancellor. With the focus firmly on the dire state of the economy, pressure is on Hunt to deliver on his promise to reduce inflation (which yesterday hit 11.1 per cent) and restore stability. As Kate Andrews writes in this week’s magazine, the Chancellor’s measures are likely to see a new era of austerity ushered in due to a number of a trailed tax hikes and public spending cuts. In recent days, Hunt has been laying the ground work for what is likely to be a difficult times ahead. So what can we expect from today’s statement? The Chancellor’s

Steerpike Steerpike

Tugendhat: we will win the next election and win it well

The China hawks were out in force last night. Over at the Walkers of Whitehall tavern, it was the turn of Alicia Kearns to charm the Onward think tank. To a packed audience, the Rutland and Melton MP was hailed as ‘the youngest select committee chair, the first female Foreign Affairs committee chair and the first speaker to finish our bar tab in under thirty minutes.’ And just down the road at the WPI Strategy’s annual party in Smith Square, it was up to Kearns’ predecessor Tom Tugendhat to address assembled journalists, think tankers and various other Westminster creatures. The security minister was clearly in a boisterous mood, remarking how

Wednesday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Is Xi drifting away from Putin?

There’s been none of the wolf warriorism we’ve become used to from Chinese diplomats as President Xi met world leaders this week. While meeting presidents Biden, Macron and Australia’s PM, Xi was all smiles; the discussion focused on climate change and food security, as well as how to prevent tensions from spilling over into war. The one exception to Xi’s more charming image seems to have been his encounter with Canada’s leader Justin Trudeau, who received a dressing down for his government leaking contents of their bilateral the day before. But this awkward clash was the exception. And on Russia, Xi seems to have said all the right things. According to a White House readout of Xi and Biden’s three-and-a-half hour meeting on Monday,

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Xi rips into Trudeau

Justin Trudeau might be the self-anointed king of elite liberal opinion but it appears his methods find little favour with Beijing. Cringeworthy footage has now been released of President Xi Jinping dressing down the Canadian premier on the side-lines of the G20 conference. The two leaders were caught on camera having an, er, lively discussion at the global summit in Bali today, with Xi tearing into the Prime Minister. A visibly irritated Xi confronted Trudeau about how details of an earlier meeting between them, which was held yesterday, had been leaked to the press by Canadian government sources. The media reported that Trudeau had raised ‘serious concerns’ over suspected domestic

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

PMQs: A marvellous day for the Anti-Bullying Alliance

Global Rishi was absent from PMQs today. He’s busy reclining in a supersonic airline seat, paid for by someone else, as he flies back from the G20 summit, preceded by a stint at Cop27. The aim of these endless conferences is to protect us all from the curse of low taxes, falling energy bills and national sovereignty. And the negotiations are said to be going well. As he jets needlessly around the world, campaigning to stop others from jetting needlessly around the world, Rishi is probably unaware of the petty squabbles that occupy MPs. Meanwhile, on planet earth, this is a Very Special Week in Parliament. It has its own

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Does Westminster even care about the Union?

The Supreme Court will hand down its judgment in the Scottish independence referendum case next Wednesday. This is the reference brought by the Lord Advocate, Scotland’s most senior law officer, over Nicola Sturgeon’s proposed Scottish Independence Referendum Bill. Downing Street has refused to grant a re-run of the 2014 referendum, in which Scots voted to remain part of the United Kingdom. Sturgeon has said her government will simply hold a referendum of its own. Going to the Supreme Court is a political move, and presumably reflects Sturgeon’s suspicion that Holyrood holding a referendum in defiance of Westminster is unlawful.  The issues before the justices are threefold. One, whether this is

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

What do we know about the Polish missile tragedy?

12 min listen

Last night there were fears of a direct attack from Russia on a NATO country, after a missile struck two Polish nationals on the border with Ukraine. An investigation is now underway, but who is responsible for these deaths? Also on the podcast, Dominic Raab took PMQs today despite bullying allegations against him gathering pace. What are the latest developments in the bullying row?  Cindy Yu speaks with James Forsyth and Katy Balls.  Produced by Cindy Yu and Oscar Edmondson.

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

The squeeze: how long will the pain last?

Rishi Sunak has ushered in a new era of austerity, not just Osborne-style spending cuts, but tax hikes as well. His Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, says the plan is not just to balance the books but to control inflation, and so this will be the theme of the Sunak years: Austerity 2.0. Throughout the leadership campaign, Sunak repeatedly argued that persistent high deficits were no longer an option. Difficult decisions lay ahead, he said, and claims to the contrary were ‘fairy tales’. His critics said this was a safety-first ‘Treasury view’, and Britain had plenty of scope to borrow more. But Sunak was certain that the debt racked up during the

Iain Macwhirter

Crossing the ‘gender-bread’ border: what Scotland’s gender bill means for England

‘A man’s a man for a’ that’ said Robert Burns. Well, perhaps not for much longer. The Scottish Parliament has recently voted in favour of legislation to allow lads to become lassies, and vice versa, merely by declaration. No medical intervention or diagnosis of gender dysphoria required. Under the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill, which enters its committee stage this week, Scots will be able to change their legal sex at ages 16 and 17 after six months of living in their new gender, and after three months if aged over 18. First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has enthusiastically embraced the claim made by her coalition partners, the Scottish Greens, that

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Is China finally easing its zero Covid strategy?

China’s president Xi Jinping has shaken hands with more world leaders over the last two days than he has met in three years. Xi hasn’t worn a mask throughout the G20 summit: from the moment he and his opera singer wife stepped off the plane in Bali, emerging from a Covid cocoon. When the summit finishes tomorrow, Xi will go straight to Thailand to meet other Asian leaders at the APEC summit. His outgoing deputy Li Keqiang has also been meeting other southeast Asian leaders in Cambodia. For China’s leaders, pressing the flesh has been unthinkable since the pandemic first broke out in China in December 2019. Now the pathological

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

A worrying lesson from the Polish missile tragedy

When what seems to have been a Ukrainian S-300 air defence missile accidentally hit the village of Przewodów in Poland, killing two farm workers, it became at once a litmus test of national attitudes and a reminder of the wider dangers of the war in Ukraine. At first, confusion about what had happened allowed everyone to reach for their favourite conclusion. There were suggestions that this was a deliberate Russian attack to test Nato’s will, and calls for the alliance’s Article 5 – whereby an attack on one member should be considered an attack on all – to be invoked. Poland’s early assessment that this was a ‘Russian-made missile’, which

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The contours of the next election have been set

Since the 2008 financial crash, British politics has been moving faster and faster, and becoming less stable. This frenzy reached its apogee with Liz Truss’s 44-day stint in No. 10 which had enough drama for a ten-year premiership. One of the challenges for Rishi Sunak is to calm things down and to return politics to a more normal pace. It will be a good sign for the government if the World Cup dominates newspaper front pages for the next month. However, there is one area where Sunak needs politics to move faster than normal. Jeremy Hunt’s Autumn Statement is the kind of fiscal event that you would expect at the

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Is Donald Trump the Jeb Bush of 2024?

Donald Trump has been running for president for at least a decade. His campaign did not start on 16 June 2015, when he descended that golden escalator in that eponymous tower in New York. It began on 19 November 2012, days after President Barack Obama had defeated Mitt Romney, when Trump registered a trademark application for the phrase he pinched from Ronald Reagan: ‘Make America Great Again.’ After he won the White House in 2016, Trump did not cease pursuing re-election. After he lost in 2020, ditto. The fundraising – the key part – and therallies have kept going and going. On Tuesday night, at his home at Mar-a-Lago, Florida,

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Labour rains blows on Raab over bullying claims 

Once again, the Tories went into Prime Minister’s Questions in a defensive crouch over the behaviour of one of their ministers. Shortly before the session, Rishi Sunak tried to soften the blows that were due to rain down on Dominic Raab over allegations about his behaviour towards civil servants. The Prime Minister, still overseas, announced there would be an independent probe into the claims that had been made. This at least meant Raab, who was standing in for him in the Commons, could say the government takes bullying seriously. But it didn’t stop the session from being dominated by Labour attacks on the matter.  Raab’s problem is that when his

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

How Russia responded to the Polish missile incident

Yesterday, during the largest wave of missile strikes conducted by Russia since February, a shell flew six kilometres over the Ukrainian border into Poland, killing two people. Before any facts had been established, there was confusion in the Russian media whether to report on the story with outraged protestation or excitement. To begin with, Russian commentators reacted with glee. TV presenter and known Kremlin mouthpiece Margarita Simonyan gloated on social media, referencing recent Ukrainian shelling on the Russian border and taunting ‘Now Poland has its own Belgorod region, what did you expect?’. Nevertheless, several hours after the news broke, a statement came from the Russian Ministry of Defence denying responsibility