Politics

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

Saturday

22 Nov 2025

We should admire Shabana Mahmood’s political conversion

It’s difficult to recall any minister in recent years, let alone a Home Secretary, who has been lauded with such praise for command of their brief as Shabana Mahmood over the past week. Even those who are far from convinced that her plans to reform the asylum system will do the job intended are mostly fulsome in their regard for her. As Keynes once put it: ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’ But if there is one nagging doubt, it is that Mahmood appears to have swung dramatically from her earlier stance in opposition as an identikit Labour politician – when she embraced

Angela Epstein

It’s miserable being an Epstein

It was shortly after my fifteenth birthday that I discovered the music of The Beatles. A school friend and I stumbled upon the Fab Four while browsing in a record shop. We were hooked: we’d listen to their songs with almost religious devotion. One thrilling touchpoint for me was their manager, Brian Epstein. As a teenager, discovering we shared a surname – and that he too was a northerner – felt magical. With unreconstructed youthful aplomb I’d boast of the connection. Later, in the world of work, as people forever misspelled my name, I’d summon Brian – note the casual intimacy of first name allegiance – to clarify while enjoying

Michael Simmons

Why Britain needs more Yimbys

21 min listen

Chris Curtis and Maxwell Marlow may have different political ideologies, but they agree on one key diagnosis: Britain is broken. Their solution can be found on baseball caps and bucket hats across social media and SW1: ‘Build Baby Build’. Less than a week before the Budget, Chris – MP for Milton Keynes and chair of the Labour Growth Group – and Maxwell – policy fellow of the Yimby Initiative, alongside his day job at the Adam Smith Institute – join our economics editor Michael Simmons to talk about the pro-growth measures they champion to radically change Britain. Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

Friday

21 Nov 2025

James Heale

Reform’s Russia problem

Nigel Farage has had better afternoons. Nathan Gill, the former leader of Reform UK in Wales, has just been sentenced to ten-and-a-half years in prison after admitting taking bribes to give pro-Russia interviews and speeches. The one-time Brexit party MEP is believed to have received up to £40,000 in total for helping Kremlin-friendly politicians in Ukraine. At the Old Bailey, Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb said Gill had abused his position and eroded ‘public confidence in democracy’. Oleg Voloshyn, once described by the US government as a ‘pawn’ of Russia’s secret service, gave the money on behalf of a ‘close friend’ of Vladimir Putin’s, Viktor Medvedchuk, who was the source of both

Svitlana Morenets

Volodymyr Zelensky is facing the ultimate test

Standing outside his presidential office in Kyiv tonight, on the same spot as on the second day of Ukraine’s full-scale war with Russia, Volodymyr Zelensky addressed Ukrainians. He said he hadn’t betrayed the country then and wouldn’t do so now. Ukraine faces ‘one of the most difficult moments in our history’, he said, while the Trump administration presses it into a deal with Russia. The US, once Ukraine’s biggest ally, has issued an ultimatum: either Zelensky signs the framework of the 28-point peace plan drawn up by Washington and the Kremlin by next Thursday, or Trump will cut intelligence-sharing and weapons supplies for Ukraine. The pressure on Ukraine right now

Steerpike

Second MP quits Your Party

Another one bites the dust. Iqbal Mohamed has become the second Independent MP to quit the left-wing Your Party amid party infighting. The group, founded by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, has seen unedifying splits become very public as serious rifts grow between the MPs involved in its launch. The animosity between Corbyn and Sultana has been well documented and now two members of the parliamentary Independent Alliance group have deserted the party. Talk about trouble in paradise, eh? In a letter, Mohamed slammed the ‘false allegations and smears’ about him, which he described as ‘surprising and disappointing’. He went on: I have decided to leave Your Party and continue

Joanna Williams

Why so many young people don’t have a job

Why are so many young adults not in education, employment or training? The latest statistics show that almost one million 16 to 24-year-olds are unemployed, or ‘Neet’, to use the inappropriately cheery-sounding acronym. Fractionally down on the previous quarter, this is still close to a ten-year high. The number of Neets has been consistently above 900,000 since early 2024, peaking at 987,000 – around one-in-eight young people – earlier this year. Falling out of education and employment in your early twenties can have a devastating impact. More than half a million of those who are not currently working or studying have never had a job. Neets face not just financial

Steerpike

Ex-Reform Wales leader given jail time over bribery

News just in: the former leader of Reform UK in Wales has been handed a prison sentence of 10 and a half years for bribery. Nathan Gill admitted to taking pro-Russia bribes and was paid thousands to give TV interviews that favoured a key ally of Vladimir Putin. He also made pro-Russia speeches in the European parliament where he was an MEP for six years. Crikey! Gill – who was also previously the leader of UKIP in Wales from 2014 to 2016 before becoming Reform leader in 2021 – admitted eight counts of bribery between 2018 and 2019. Today, judge Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb told Gill his actions conflicted with his

Kristina Murkett

In praise of learning German

The University of Nottingham, one of the most prestigious Russell Group universities, is preparing to close its languages department, as well as 48 undergraduate courses across music, nursing, agriculture, theology, microbiology and education. It seems strange that at an institution which claims to be a ‘global university without borders’, students will no longer be able to study French, German, Spanish, Chinese or Russian. My reaction to this news is one of head vs heart. My head tells me that in order to survive and provide high-quality education, universities need to be solvent, and so perhaps this is a pragmatic decision – a hard one, but one that reflects our hard times.

Madeline Grant

The monumental self-delusion of Rachel Reeves

Rachel Reeves has been speaking to the newspapers trying to sell her Budget, which given her communication abilities is a bit like asking King Herod to do your babysitting. The Chancellor of the Exchequer appears to be getting the excuses in early; it’s almost as if she, like everyone else, knows that next week’s announcements will be a catastrophe. The thread that comes through the article is that the country is somehow being punished for the Chancellor’s teenage insecurities Reeves’s big message is that she’s been ‘underestimated all her life’. A humbler person might wonder why everyone has consistently assessed her to be not up to the job rather than

James Kirkup

Food inflation is a ticking time bomb for Rachel Reeves

As the Budget approaches, Westminster is full of chatter about Rachel Reeves’s decision to take the ‘smorgasbord’ approach to fiscal policy: lots of small, detailed measures, each raising only modest sums for the Treasury. Conventional wisdom says, correctly, that this is risky. Every little tweak is another opportunity for something to misfire. And when people in SW1 talk about small Budget measures going wrong, they often invoke the same cautionary tale: the pasty tax. That was the 2012 proposal by the coalition government to impose VAT on hot takeaway food, meaning the price of a Greggs sausage roll or a service station pasty would rise by 20 per cent. The

Jake Wallis Simons

Will no one acknowledge how Mossad helps Britain?

Let’s imagine that an international jihadi network, with cells in London and Europe, had just been busted, with dramatic arrests in Britain, Germany and Austria. Let’s imagine that the group had been planning a string of atrocities, with a weapons cache discovered in Vienna. Let’s imagine that security services had unearthed ‘tens of thousands of Euros in cash, numerous data storage devices and mobile phones, gas pistols, firearms, ammunition, knives, and related literature’. You’d have expected such a story to make the news, right? Wrong. On Monday, the Israeli prime minister’s office announced that this precise scenario had unfolded, with Mossad handing intelligence to MI5 and European agencies that enabled

Steerpike

Will Starmer approve the Chinese super-embassy?

Well, well, well. Just days after MI5 alerted MPs and peers to Chinese espionage threats, it appears that Prime Minister Keir Starmer could be ready to give a Chinese embassy in London the green light. According to the Times, two Whitehall departments will submit their responses to the proposals in the next few days, ahead of the decision being made on 10 December. Despite warnings from intelligence chiefs about spying, and concerns about cables beneath the site connecting to the City of London, neither the Home Office nor the Foreign Office are expected to object – as long as the right ‘mitigations’ are in place. The decision follows the collapse of

James Heale

Covid report: ‘a £200 million I told you so’

15 min listen

Yesterday we had the publication of the second module of the Covid Inquiry on the decision-making at the heart of government. It confirmed a toxic and disorganised culture at the heart of No. 10 and the headline is that the government acted ‘too little, too late’, costing as many as 23,000 lives in England. That figure is already disputed, not least by our economics editor Michael Simmons who argues on the podcast that the inquiry is a ‘disgrace’ and demonstrates a lack of domain knowledge about the limitations of modelling. Where else does the inquiry fall short? What will be the political ramifications in Westminster? James Heale speaks to Michael

Matthew Lynn

Don’t write off Bitcoin yet

Bitcoin is crashing all over again, and it is taking the smaller crypto currencies down with it. It has fallen by a quarter from its highs, and there is little sign that the relentless selling is going to stop anytime soon. Plenty of people will be reheating arguments about how the digital currency is completely worthless and that the bubble was always going to pop one day. But Bitcoin has been through plenty of bear markets and it has always bounced back – and there is little reason to believe this crash will be any different. It is certainly a substantial fall. From a high of $114,000 (£87,300) a coin

Michael Simmons

Britain will never clear its debts

It’s hard to think of a more shambolic budget than the one Rachel Reeves will deliver next week. His Majesty’s Treasury has spent the last month pitch-rolling policies in the Financial Times – using the paper as a sort of town crier – then pulling them back as the OBR’s forecasts have wobbled. Directly, the cause for this volatility is the wafer-thin headroom the Chancellor left herself after her first Budget and the Spring Statement. The markets quickly eroded the slack in the face of persistent inflation and a government politically incapable of reining in Britain’s stratospheric spending. Beneath all that is the staggering amounts we’re spending on debt interest.

David Shipley

Has Shabana Mahmood fixed the Boriswave?

After the pandemic the Boris Johnson government took a fateful and disastrous decision to suppress rising inflation by massively expanding migration. It was one of the worst decisions made by a British government in my lifetime, made all the more appalling because it followed a solemn promise that Brexit would bring a tough, ‘points-based’ migration system. Instead, we now know, we got the Boriswave. A vast influx of low-skilled migrants with many dependants, who would cost the country hundreds of billions once granted residency. In a lengthy document published yesterday, the Home Office describe the scale and disaster of what Shabana Mahmood calls ‘this extraordinary open border experiment’. It describes

Limor Simhony Philpott

Violent settlers must be stopped

A crisis of authority now festers at the heart of Israel. A shrill, violent fringe of extremist settlers in the West Bank is not only terrorising Palestinians, but undermining the authority of the Israeli state, its security and diplomatic relations. This week, there have been reported attacks by settlers near Deir Istiya, near Nablus, and in Jaba, southwest of Bethlehem. These settlers’ growing impunity, and the government’s failure to rein them in, is no longer a side issue. Settler violence is emerging as a national security crisis. This is not hyperbole. These hilltop radicals act with a confidence that is backed by far-right politicians and suggests de facto immunity: arson, intimidation, physical violence, price‑tag attacks,

Patrick West

We don’t need white saviours to rescue us from St George’s flags

Trends in society always come and go, but one that shows no signs of abating is the propensity among many to take offence at words or symbols. Just because that derisive word of the last decade, ‘snowflake’, has fallen out of fashion, it doesn’t mean that these hypersensitive souls have disappeared. Being compassionate in a patronising fashion from afar is mandatory behaviour for white liberals and our aloof, elite classes Emily Spurrell, chairwoman of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners, is a case in point. Spurrell hit out at the surge in St George’s and Union Jack flags being hung on lamp posts, motorway bridges and street signs across

Lara Prendergast

Labour’s toxic budget, Zelensky in trouble & Hitler’s genitalia

39 min listen

It’s time to scrap the budget, argues political editor Tim Shipman this week. An annual fiscal event only allows the Chancellor to tinker round the edges, faced with a backdrop of global uncertainty. Endless potential tax rises have been trailed, from taxes on mansions, pensions, savings, gambling, and business partnerships, and nothing appears designed to fix Britain’s structural problems. Does our economics editor Michael Simmons agree? Host Lara Prendergast is joined by co-host – and the Spectator’s features editor – William Moore, alongside associate editor Owen Matthews and economics editor Michael Simmons. As well as the cover, they discuss: the corruption scandal that has weakened Ukraine’s President Zelensky –