Politics

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

Friday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

From the archives: Liz Truss

33 min listen

Before the new Women With Balls series arrives in Autumn, we have prepared a special episode from our archives. Katy Balls interviewed Liz Truss four years ago when she was chief secretary to the Treasury. Back then she was a straight talker who was gaining a reputation for her speeches that would often turn into memes. She was a politician that was starting to find her own voice and speak her mind. Now Liz Truss is vying to be the next Prime Minister and the odds-on favourite to enter 10 Downing Street. But what has changed since 2018? Katy Balls and Kate Andrews discuss the pathway of Liz Truss’s career

Ian Williams Ian Williams

The extreme heatwave wreaking havoc across China

China is struggling to limit the impact of its longest and most widespread heatwave since records began more than 60 years ago. Temperatures have reached the highest the country has ever recorded and a drought is wreaking havoc across much of southern China. It is compounding the multiple economic challenges facing China’s communist leaders, including the fallout from strict Covid-19 lockdowns and a bursting property bubble. Maximiliano Herrera, a weather historian who monitors extreme heat around the world, has described China’s soaring temperatures as the most severe heatwave ever recorded anywhere. The authorities have declared a drought emergency, warning that the critical autumn harvest is under ‘severe threat’. Almost half

Francis Pike

Pakistan is on the brink

On Tuesday I speculated that Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan, now the opposition leader, was so popular that he might have to be shot by his enemies to prevent him from coming back to power. This was not a throwaway statement. After Sri Lanka and Lebanon, whose political murder rate since the second world war has been off the charts, Pakistan with 44 political murders comes a clear third, not including the peripheral hundreds if not thousands who have died in bombings. As if in sync with my warning, Tuesday afternoon saw another political murder in Pakistan. Majid Satti, the leader of Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party in

Thursday

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Lockdown files: what we weren’t told

42 min listen

In this week’s episode: What has Rishi Sunak revealed about the lockdown decisions made behind closed doors? Fraser Nelson, Katy Balls and Kate Andrews join the Edition podcast to discuss (1.14). Also this week: From aid to trade: when will the West start to deal with Africa on its own terms? Spectator columnist, Aidan Hartley is joined by Degan Ali, founder and principal of DA Global (16.24). And finally: are handsy yoga teachers pushing their pupils away? Rachel Johnson makes this case in the magazine this week. She’s joined by Sasha Brown-Worsham who is a yoga teacher and author of the book Namaste the Hard Way (32.32). Hosted by Lara

Max Jeffery Max Jeffery

Is Rishi heading for political Siberia?

9 min listen

Rishi Sunak has today confirmed that he will stay on as an MP if he loses the leadership contest, and that he will also vote for a Liz Truss budget. Will this help the Tory party heal? Also, Rishi Sunak told The Spectator that scientists had too much power during lockdown. What has their response been? Max Jeffery speaks to Katy Balls and Kate Andrews. Produced by Max Jeffery and Oscar Edmondson.

Hannah Tomes Hannah Tomes

London is far outstripping the north in GCSE results

After two years of pandemic-related disruption, GCSEs were this year assessed in the same way as before Covid – i.e. by an outside examination board, rather than by teachers. London far outstripped the north of England when it came to pupils getting the highest grades, with 33 per cent of pupils in the capital being awarded a 7 (formerly an A) or above compared with just 22 per cent in the north-east. This widened the attainment gap from 2019 – then, there was a ten percentage point gap between the regions, compared with 11 percentage points this year. That London has far outstripped the north of the country – again

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Albanian channel crossings are making our borders look like a joke

The wholesale abuse of the United Kingdom’s asylum system has taken a novel, absurdist twist in the last few months. Recent years have seen thousands of young men predominantly from war-torn or extremely oppressive countries – such as Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria – chugged across the English Channel from the safe country of France to lodge asylum claims here. But a new dispensation involves thousands of young men from a European country that has not seen a war for a quarter of a century and aspires to join the EU travelling through a series of other safe countries before reaching France and then crossing the Channel to claim asylum

Tom Slater Tom Slater

Emily Maitlis wants a Remainer BBC

Thank god for Emily Maitlis. Finally someone has had the balls to call out the pro-Brexit, pro-Boris bias of the BBC. It’s been staring us in the face for years, as the Today programme, Newsnight, Question Time and the rest have become ever-more subsumed into the Ukipper deep state, forever deferential to its poundshop fascism. If that portrayal of our state broadcaster sounds like some wild-eyed conspiracy theory to you, utterly detached from reality, that’s because it is. But that didn’t stop Maitlis – formerly of the corporation, now unshackled from Beeb impartiality rules and with a new Global podcast to promote – from trotting out a version of it

John Ferry John Ferry

Nicola Sturgeon’s desperate spin on the Scottish deficit

Nicola Sturgeon and her colleagues plan to hold a referendum on Scotland leaving the UK a little over a year from now. All going to plan, they then intend to start governing a brand new state, with full control over taxes and spending, sometime in 2025. With such weighty obligations on the horizon, you would think the release of new, up-to-date official numbers outlining Scotland’s stand-alone fiscal position would be hotly anticipated by the First Minister and her team. Apparently not. Instead of blocking out time in her diary this week to showcase the Government Expenditure & Revenue Scotland (Gers) 2021-22 statistics, which came out on Wednesday, and which outline

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Japan’s nuclear renaissance

Japan is reversing its avowedly anti-nuclear stance, restarting idled plants and looking to develop a new generation of reactors, announced Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on Wednesday. This major policy shift from the world’s third biggest economic power underlines both the seriousness of the global energy crisis and points to the most likely way ahead. This announcement would have seemed unimaginable a decade ago in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, which saw the plant flooded and led to three separate hydrogen explosions. Then prime minister Naoto ordered those living within a 12-mile radius of the plant to be evacuated as the Fukushima area was designated a contaminated wasteland. I well remember the

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Are the French willing to pay Macron’s price?

The age of abundance is over, declared Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday, which must have come as news to the 14 per cent of French people who live below the poverty line. The president has returned to the office after his summer break seemingly intent on bracing the Republic for a winter of discomfort, caused largely by the effect of western sanctions on Russia after their invasion of Ukraine six months ago. Last Friday he told the French in Churchillian tones to accept that rising energy and food bills were the ‘price of liberty’, and he returned to the theme yesterday when he addressed his ministers. ‘Our system based on freedom

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Who will Liz Truss forgive?

Liz Truss has always been more popular with Tory party members than with Tory politicians. The moment of greatest peril for her in the Conservative leadership race was when MPs were whittling down the final two candidates. After being knocked out in the second round, Suella Braverman urged her Brexiteer backers to get behind the Foreign Secretary. Many refused to do so and instead supported Kemi Badenoch, which meant that Truss’s vote count only went up by seven MPs. The momentum could have moved to Badenoch, then behind by just 13. ‘It was the most stressful point of the contest,’ recalls a supporter of the Foreign Secretary. Eventually Truss made

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Money won’t keep the Union together

Despite its name, Gers Day is not an annual celebration of the Ibrox side that makes up one half of Glasgow’s notorious Old Firm. If only it were that uncontentious. In fact, Gers stands for ‘Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland’, the Scottish government’s yearly report on public finances. In a normal country, the publication of 76 pages of data tables and accountancy prose would go largely unremarked upon, so naturally in Scotland we have to turn it into another front in the independence wars. Because we really have nothing better to do. This year’s figures, like last year’s, reflect the unprecedented Treasury interventions during the Covid pandemic. However, they paint

Wednesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Emily Maitlis slams Brexit, the Tory party and the BBC

Well that didn’t take long. It’s only been a few months since the former Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis left the BBC, and already the broadcaster seems to be enjoying her newfound freedom from the corporation’s impartiality restraints. Speaking tonight at the Edinburgh international television festival, Maitlis used the event to hit out at her former employer for its ‘both sides’ impartiality and said that ‘an active Tory party agent’ was on the BBC board shaping news coverage. Maitlis also accused the corporation of ‘pacifying’ No. 10 after she was found by the BBC to have broken impartiality guidelines for starting Newsnight by declaring that ‘Dominic Cummings broke the rules’ during lockdown.

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The problem with Biden’s student debt plan

In Europe it is handouts to help pay our energy bills – even for people who could easily afford to pay them. In the US, it is student debts being written off. With remarkable speed the West is emerging into a new age of big – no, make that huge – paternalistic government. Today, Joe Biden announced that graduates who earn less than $125,000 a year, and who live in a household whose joint income is less than $250,000, will have $20,000 worth of student debt written off. For those who work in the non-profit sector, the military, or federal or local government, the write-off will be 100 per cent.

Steerpike Steerpike

Nicola Sturgeon’s Scotland stinks

Nicola Sturgeon is having something of a summer of discontent. It started almost promisingly in July, when the Scottish Government managed to buy off ScotRail drivers with a five per cent pay bump. That brought to an end weeks of travel disruption caused by Aslef members refusing to work overtime on the newly-nationalised rail company. A temporary timetable instituted in response saw 700 services culled from Scotland’s rail network. No sooner was the ink dry on that deal than local government workers rejected a two per cent pay offer and voted to strike. Now 13,000 nursery staff, school janitors, dinner ladies and teaching assistants will walk out for 72 hours

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Is Truss’s social care pledge more borrowing in disguise?

14 min listen

In the latest leadership hustings, Liz Truss promised to take money away from the NHS to put into social care. But as Kate Andrews points out in this episode, given that Truss is also planning on scrapping the National Insurance rise, Truss’ll need to find more money in order to fund this latest pledge. On the episode, Kate talks with Fraser Nelson and Katy Balls. ‘This is the second time in her campaign that she has done something which has made me really doubt whether she’s serious about her economic mission. And the other time, of course, was when she announced that she’d do regional pay.’ – Fraser Nelson. Produced

James Ball

Brexit isn’t to blame for sewage dumping at sea

Facing inflation rates in excess of 18 per cent, a painful recession, and the prospect of electricity bills costing more than a mortgage, the UK’s troubles are mounting. But weighing on our minds almost as much is the fact that we seem to be pumping unprecedented levels of sewage into the sea. This would be far from ideal – to say the least – at any time of year, but coming in the peak of August, just as families are out trying to enjoy the beach, the issue is understandably hitting home. But while it’s true that there have been days of huge sewage discharge into the sea, there has

Steerpike Steerpike

Matt Hancock joins the Metaverse

Of all the politicians to be the first to wire in and blast into the Metaverse, it turns out that the House of Commons’s brave pioneer has become none other than Matthew Hancock. The MP joined the online world today as part of an event organised by the tech firm Shift. Mr S couldn’t help but notice though that the Cybernaut Hancock that emerged from the Metaverse wormhole a different man than many of his colleagues remember. His avatar, created by the tech firm for him to roam this new universe (pictured above) seems to sport a resurgent hairline and a rather strapping build. What on earth has brought all this about? A few months ago, Hancock delivered a virtual

Andrew Lilico

Politicians should let the market solve the energy crisis

What policies should the government adopt in response to the energy crisis? When thinking about any policy, the correct place to start is to consider what kinds of solutions the market would produce absent any government intervention. Markets will always produce some kind of answer, and the market answer will often be very good in many respects. Policymakers should not assume they are intervening in a void, where almost any well-intentioned action might be better than nothing. Instead, they should always be more humble, seeking to understand what the market might do, accept that the market response is likely to be pretty good, and think about how, if at all,