Politics

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

Thursday

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,

Nigel Jones

A divided Tory party is destined to lose the next election

I think that I may be able to claim credit for being the first writer to question the once universal assumption that Rishi Sunak would be the next Prime Minister. Back in March, after the then-Chancellor’s disastrous Spring budget statement, in a piece for this site headlined ‘How Sunak Sunk Himself’ I pointed out the dents in the smooth billionaire’s shiny armour that have now become gaping rusty holes, and turned ‘Dishy Rishi’ into ‘Fishy Rishi’. Too rich during a cost of living firestorm, too out of touch with ordinary people struggling to make ends meet, and too prone to making basic political errors, Sunak’s flaws have been brutally exposed

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

The stalemate in Ukraine won’t last forever

Addressing the vexed question of who is winning the war in Ukraine, six months on, is a task to challenge military strategists, geopolitical analysts – and semanticists, because so much depends on what ‘winning’ means. On one level, after all, one could suggest everyone is losing. That said, we cannot escape the fact that both Moscow and the West had essentially written Ukraine off at the start of the war. The conventional wisdom was that it would take perhaps a fortnight for Vladimir Putin’s much-vaunted war machine, the product of two decades of heightened military spending, to defeat its Ukrainian counterpart.  Instead, the Ukrainians proved determined and disciplined in the

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

The Conservative party is a void

Like the winter of discontent, the summer of 2022 is a season that will burn itself into the national consciousness. Predictions of a dark (in all senses of the word) future are daily occurrences. All but the wealthy wonder how they will cope with the hard times that are almost on us. The sense we’re in a runaway crisis is everywhere. Everywhere, that is, except among the leaders of our self-indulgent government. It has shirked its duty to lead the country and preferred to take a long, lazy holiday instead. For Boris Johnson, a redundant prime minister serving out his notice period, his life consists of Mediterranean jaunts. For Liz

Tuesday

Max Jeffery Max Jeffery

Can only Corbyn fix the Tories?

9 min listen

There are only three hustings left in the Tory leadership race, after six weeks which have seen the party tear itself apart. What will fix the party? Is Jeremy Corbyn the solution? Max Jeffery speaks to Fraser Nelson and Katy Balls. Produced by Max Jeffery. ‘Liz Truss is going to have a short window to give the good news of a tax cut. After that, I suspect it’ll be bad, after bad, after bad.’ – Fraser Nelson

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

We shouldn’t accept the Channel crossings

Yesterday, 1,295 people arrived in the UK by crossing the Channel in small boats. That is the highest daily total since current records began being kept in 2018. More than 6,000 people entered the country this way in the first three weeks of August and more than 22,500 in the first eight months of the year. That is almost double the numbers seen at this point last year. From a video of the latest arrivals, there seem to be quite a number of young, fit, unaccompanied men. As an immigration liberal – someone who believes in safe, sustainable, legal immigration – it continues to baffle me that my fellow liberals

Robin Ashenden

Aleksandr Dugin’s daughter paid the cost for his beliefs

In the spring of 1994, year three of the Bosnian war, Ana, the daughter of the Bosnian Serb Lieutenant Colonel General Ratko Mladic, took a pistol from her father’s room in Belgrade – the special silver pistol with which he’d intended to celebrate the birth of his first grandchild – and shot herself in the head. She was 23 years old. Ana Mladic hadn’t been herself, it was said, since returning from a study trip to Moscow where, people guessed, she had read in a newspaper about her father’s war crimes at Sarajevo. Or had been alerted to them by the cold-shouldering of fellow students. Her suicide was something Ratko

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

We’re at pandemic levels of death. Why is no one talking about it?

At the peak of the lockdowns, thousands were dying every week. Newspaper front pages demanded action. But in the latest week’s data, covering the week to 12 August, some 1,082 more people than would be expected in a normal year died in the UK. These so-called ‘excess deaths’ have averaged 1,000 for 15 weeks of this year. Yet unlike Covid deaths, they are met with near silence. But it isn’t Covid that’s causing these deaths anymore. In the latest figures, published by the ONS, just 6 per cent of English and Welsh deaths had anything to do with Covid. Of nearly 10,000 weekly deaths in England, just 561 mentioned the virus

Sam Ashworth-Hayes Sam Ashworth-Hayes

Britain is not prepared for winter blackouts

Britain has a bold new plan for dealing with a winter energy crisis: ‘hope for good weather’. It’s hard to see what else is on offer; nobody seems to be seriously discussing what the government can do to secure energy supplies through the winter, how households will heat their homes, and whether we should rescue businesses driven to bankruptcy by soaring energy prices. The state is braindead until Boris Johnson finally departs. His potential successors are engaged in hard-hitting discussions over whether it’s possible to hold a budget without OBR forecasts, or whether tax cuts will drive inflation higher. Meanwhile, natural gas prices are soaring as the Nord Stream pipeline

Francis Pike

Is Imran Khan Pakistan’s Donald Trump?

Imran Khan, the cricketing hero, legendary lothario and deposed prime minister of Pakistan, is in trouble again. His political opponents in the police and the judiciary, in a manner not dissimilar to the judicial attack on former US president Donald Trump, have moved against Khan in recent days by accusing him of terrorist activities. In theory, these charges could carry the death penalty. Khan’s crime was to threaten retaliatory action against the police and the judiciary in revenge for the arrest of his chief of staff, Shahbaz Gill. Gill had been roughly arrested by police and his assistant allegedly beaten up. In addition, police had tried to apprehend former Khan acolyte

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

The desperate demonisation of Liz Truss

We’re being asked to credit Liz Truss with a lot of unlikely things now that’s she almost certainly on course for No. 10 – that she’s a snazzy, relaxed media performer; that she can solve the eruption of problems caused by decades of cross-party can-kicking in a few weeks; that she has Churchillian resolve and Thatcherite implacability. But just recently a new claim is surfacing, very much not coming from her ‘people’, which is the hardest to swallow of all – that she is a fascist. Of course, the boggle-eyed have said this about pretty much every Conservative leader – pretty much every Conservative – in living memory, but I’ve noticed

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Farewell, St Anthony Fauci

So farewell, Anthony Fauci, the unfortunate face of America’s pandemic response. Well, not so unfortunate – the doctor is stepping down as head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases this December, riding off into the sunset with a reported $350,000 per year golden parachute, the largest pension in US federal history. Fauci has developed something of a reputation for baffling the public – whether it be for contradictory advice on the efficacy of masks or herd immunity or vaccines. Even his resignation announcement was confusing:  I will be leaving these positions in December of this year to pursue the next chapter of my career… While I am