Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Thursday

Eliot Wilson

Kemi Badenoch is right to call for more defence spending

Kemi Badenoch has announced a series of commitments on defence spending that she would implement if she were to become prime minister. This is an important and sensitive issue as the war in Ukraine continues and there are repeated warnings about the heightened threats to the UK. The Conservatives would reallocate £17 billion of public expenditure to the Ministry of Defence (MoD), Badenoch said yesterday, because the ‘defence of the realm must be the first priority of any government’. The most politically sharp-edged measure the Tories have announced is repurposing the National Wealth Fund (NWF), which Labour established to ‘increase investment… to accelerate delivery of the government’s growth and clean

Brendan O’Neill

What the word ‘intifada’ really means

Finally the left is showing an interest in freedom of speech. And all it took was a police clampdown on cries for violence against Jews. They turned a blind eye when cancel culture ran riot on campuses. And when gender-critical women were gagged for telling the truth about biology. And when people lost their jobs after dissing Islam. But stifling Jewphobic speech? That’s a step too far. They’re up in arms now. Let’s be clear: ‘Globalise the intifada’ is a call for anti-Jewish violence This is the news that the Metropolitan Police and Greater Manchester Police have promised firmer action against chants like ‘Globalise the intifada’. In the aftermath of

Michael Simmons

Despite the rate cut, inflation remains a danger

The Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) has just voted to cut interest rates to 3.75 per cent and in doing so has delivered the Chancellor an early Christmas present. The five to four decision brings rates down to from the 4 per cent they’d been held at since August. The cut is the fourth this year and means base borrowing costs are now at their lowest rate since February 2023. The cut has happened because swing voter and Bank Governor Andrew Bailey switched his vote. Markets had anticipated the move, with trades implying a cut had 90 per cent odds. However, the fact the decision swung on a knife edge

John Keiger

Bats are paying the ultimate price for our wind turbine obsession

The 11,000 wind turbines in the UK are not only an eyesore, they are also a killer. Their blades can spin deceptively fast at up to 186 miles per hour. Even if most are bridled at 56 miles per hour for structural reasons, they still manage to kill creatures which fly into their paths. Birds of prey and swifts are particularly vulnerable, as are songbirds, many of which are on ornithological ‘red lists’. The scale of the slaughter of bats is monumental: 200,000 annually in Germany, 500,000 in the USA and 30,000 in the UK, according to a French study into the impact of wind turbines on bats by the Museum national d’histoire naturelle, recently reported in Le

Duncan Gray

How to really save the BBC

Donald Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the BBC has accidentally done Britain a favour. One ‘fake news’ moment involving the US president has turned what would normally be a media-page squabble into a question on the doorstep: should every household in the UK continue to pay to receive a live television signal, enforceable by law, to fund the BBC? In a world of monthly subscriptions for global streamers, the licence fee has never felt more like an anachronistic tithe. The British public are fed up with the licence fee BBC Charter renewal – due at the end of 2027 – has become an election issue. There’s a chasm that needs

Iain Mansfield

Why should British taxpayers fund students’ European Erasmus jollies?

Half a billion pounds of taxpayers’ money will be spent on rejoining the EU’s Erasmus+ student exchange programme. With libraries closing, criminals being let out of jail early and funding for maths and classics in schools slashed, it is the clearest indication yet of where this government’s priorities lie. Rejoining Erasmus+ simply means that working people will now be funding these young people’s excursions The decision to re-enter the Erasmus+ is widely touted as ‘permitting’ UK students to access study opportunities on the continent. The reality is that many university courses have always offered students the opportunity to spend some time studying abroad, whether in the EU or elsewhere. Rejoining

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The crackdown on 'globalise the intifada' chants is too little, too late

Protesters chanting ‘globalise the intifada’ will now be arrested, according to the heads of Greater Manchester Police and the Metropolitan Police. The announcement has been framed as a response to a ‘changed context’. But what it actually represents is an admission, belated and heavy, that the authorities spent years refusing to see what was directly in front of them. The chant was never opaque. The intifadas were not metaphors or moods The chant was never opaque. The intifadas were not metaphors or moods. They were campaigns of organised violence: shootings, stabbings, bombings, lynchings, buses torn apart, cafés turned into graves. And each individual terror attack, each ‘isolated’ act of violence

Tim Shipman

Daniel Finkelstein on anti-Semitism, Nick Fuentes & viral hate

33 min listen

Nick Fuentes is a 27-year-old American influencer with a growing following. He believes America has been subverted by rich, powerful Jews. He was recently interviewed by Piers Morgan, where these views were put to him directly. During the exchange, Morgan referenced a video made by Times columnist Danny Finkelstein about his parents – a clip that has since led to Finkelstein being inundated with thousands of antisemitic messages. Danny Finkelstein joins The Spectator’s political editor Tim Shipman to discuss the growth of antisemitism, and what it reveals about modern Britain, America and the internet. They explore the pressures of multiculturalism, what this all means for liberal democracy, and the fragility

Wednesday

Madeline Grant

An unhappy Christmas PMQs for Keir Starmer

Thank God! Today was the last Prime Minister’s Questions before Christmas and so Sir Keir and Mrs Badenoch began their speeches with seasonal greetings. Was a Christmas truce about to break out? Unlikely; Sir Keir couldn’t resist a poke at Reform’s Russian problems. ‘If wise men from the East come bearing gifts, this time report it to the police’ he scoffed. Today, Nigel Farage, Sir Keir’s very own Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, loomed down on proceedings from the Commons viewing gallery. Even he chuckled at this opening gag. The death of Tiny Tim is genuinely more likely to bring about a smile than the Prime Minister’s gags Things got

Tim Shipman

A ‘classically awful’ PMQs to round out the year

10 min listen

Today was the final PMQs of the year – and it was certainly not a classic. It is customary for the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition to make some attempt at Christmas cheer by telling jokes at the despatch box, but this year’s zingers were awful. Despite a promising start from Keir Starmer, it soon degenerated into quips about whether the Prime Minister has ‘the baubles’ and whether Kemi Badenoch will be ‘Home Alone’. None of the jokes were delivered with any aplomb. Is this parliament at its worst? Also today, Wes Streeting is under pressure as the junior doctors’ strike begins – how is he dealing

Isabel Hardman

Badenoch – and Starmer – should work on their PMQs jokes

Kemi Badenoch and Keir Starmer conformed to time-honoured tradition today at Prime Minister’s Questions by producing lots of jokes that would be rejected by a cracker company in their exchanges. The Tory leader’s lines included that the government was full of turkeys, Starmer didn’t have the baubles to stand up to striking doctors, and all Labour MPs wanted for Christmas was a new leader. Starmer had one decent joke Starmer had one decent joke that someone else had written for him at the start. As he wished the whole House a happy Christmas, he had some ‘advice’ for Reform UK, which was that ‘if mysterious men from the East appear

Druin Burch

The yearly flu crisis is entirely avoidable

Each winter our NHS is struck by an ‘unprecedented’ number of cases of seasonal illness. Politicians talk gravely of the hard work done by our doctors and nurses, and ask the public to do what they can to help. Newspapers and scientists describe the influx of cases in meteorological terms – a ‘surge’, a ‘wave’, perhaps a ‘viral maelstrom’ – and the bugs themselves, which are biologically ordinary, are given glamorous names. This year, influenza A strain H3N2 became ‘superflu’. We’re told the strain on the NHS this winter is unparalleled, but it’s really only slightly worse than last year. For the three decades I’ve worked in British hospitals, each

Ross Clark

Did Britain need to rejoin Erasmus?

Is the government engaged in a campaign by stealth to return the UK to membership of the EU? It couldn’t make a better job of it if it was trying. This morning comes the news that Britain is to rejoin the Erasmus scheme, which offers students the opportunity to engage in an exchange with other European universities. The scheme was discontinued when Britain left the EU, but it will now be reintroduced for the 2027/28 academic year, when the government says that 100,000 students could benefit. It is easy to make a case for a scheme that gives students chance to study abroad – the ‘travel broadens the mind’ argument.

James Heale

Keir Starmer's union woes just got worse

During the dying days of Rishi Sunak’s regime, Labour politicians liked to encourage the idea that a change of government would improve industrial relations. Surely, their argument went, a party of labour is better placed to understand, negotiate and resolve questions of labour? But 18 months on, that notion is being tested to breaking point. Currently, it is the British Medical Association (BMA) which seems stubbornly determined to heap humiliation on Wes Streeting, with the Health Secretary unable to resolve the 33-month stand off over pay for resident doctors. Yet such are the government’s woes that the BMA’s intransigence is not the biggest union-related story currently troubling Downing Street. This

Andrew Tettenborn

The Church of England's gay marriage row will rumble on

The Church of England’s House of Bishops met to discuss the Living in Love and Faith (LLF) project yesterday: that is, the project to change the rules about blessings of single-sex relationships so as to allow stand-alone services (such blessings being currently permitted only as an incidental part of some other service) and, additionally, to eventually open the door to priests being able to enter into single-sex civil unions.  At yesterday’s meeting the bishops, as expected – although much to the fury of LGBT campaigners – confirmed their decision made in October to mothball the project. Though their precise formal statement has been left until after Christmas, it is now

Stephen Daisley

Why is the Scottish government so afraid of a grooming gangs inquiry?

The Scottish parliament has voted in favour of allowing government ministers to mislead it. That is the effect of a vote at Holyrood yesterday afternoon. The Scottish parliament is a failed institution that lurches between national irrelevance and terrible law-making The background is this: the SNP-run Scottish government is doing everything in its power to avoid holding a Scotland-wide inquiry into child grooming gangs, both by pivoting to the pre-existing but scope-limited Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry and by running a strategic review group to coordinate a re-examination by several institutions (Police Scotland, the NHS, etc) of their handling of past allegations. Keen to force the Scottish government’s hand, in September

Ben Miller

Can Rachel Reeves take credit for falling inflation?

For the second month in a row, inflation has fallen. Figures released by the Office for National Statistics show that last month the Consumer Price Index fell to 3.2 per cent from 3.6 per cent in October. November’s reduction is the largest since September 2024. For the government, this is very good news. High inflation over the past six months has intensified pressure on Labour to tackle the cost-of-living crisis. This was clearly reflected in last month’s Autumn Budget, with Rachel Reeves announcing freezes to rail fares and fuel duty, as well as measures to lower household energy bills. If inflation continues to decline at this rate, the Chancellor will

Rory Hanrahan

It's no surprise that the Bondi Beach attackers are related

The sun had barely set over Sydney’s Bondi Beach, when horror unfolded at the Hanukkah celebration. A father and son, armed with licensed firearms, opened fire on a crowd of hundreds gathered for the Jewish holiday, killing at least 15 people and injuring more than 40 others. The perpetrators have been identified as Sajid Akram, 50, who was killed by police at the scene, and his 24-year-old son Naveed Akram, who remains in a critical condition in hospital after being shot by police. The father-son dynamic here is no coincidence; it speaks to how hatred is often inherited The attack is Australia’s deadliest mass shooting in nearly three decades, a stark

Alexander Larman

The Brompton bicycle has had its day

Anyone who has had the misfortune to be in central London at rush hour will be familiar with an unlovely spectacle: that of a middle-aged man solemnly making a fool out of himself on an ungainly-looking bicycle that seems slightly too small for him. This mode of transportation is none other than the Brompton bicycle, once a status symbol for any upwardly mobile professional but now, increasingly and unsurprisingly, regarded as an object of ridicule. The recent news that the company’s sales are declining, for the third year in a row, will come as a surprise to few; it is more of a shock to realise that this strange, overpriced