Politics

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

Thursday

16 Jan 2025

Regulators don’t create growth

Perhaps you could gather a group of traffic wardens and ask them how to build a racetrack. Or get the leaders of the Salvation Army over to suggest some cool ideas for a cocktail bar. Think up any improbable brainstorming sessions, and it will still be hard to imagine anything more awkward than the gathering of regulators Chancellor Rachel Reeves summoned to Downing Street today to give her some ideas on growth. After all, that is her job, not theirs. Just the concept of frog-marching regulators into the Chancellor’s office and demanding ‘growth ideas’ is ridiculous It hardly sounds like fun. The chief executives of such august sounding bodies as

Steerpike

Badenoch shuts down idea of Reform-Tory merger

In her first big speech of the year, Kemi Badenoch has taken a pop at Chancellor Rachel Reeves, reiterated her calls for a national inquiry into the grooming gang scandal and hit out at Britain’s immigration figures. Mr S was rather interested, however, in what the Tory leader said about Reform UK. Speaking in London today, Badenoch was quizzed on whether her party could merge with the increasingly popular Farage-founded party ahead of the 2029 general election. The Tory leader hit out at the idea, remarking to her audience: ‘Nigel Farage says he wants to destroy the Conservative Party. Why on earth would we merge with that?’ She added about

Steerpike

Blue Labour founder jets off to Trump inauguration

Well, well, well. President-elect Donald Trump may have snubbed Sir Keir Starmer and missed off the new US ambassador Peter Mandelson when he was sending out his inauguration invites but there is one Labour figure who has been deemed privileged enough to make the cut. Steerpike can reveal that Lord Maurice Glasman is currently making his way to DC after being personally invited to the ceremony by the Trump team. How very interesting… The Labour peer and author of Blue Labour is, Mr S understands, heading out to the presidential inauguration – and appears to be the only Labour figure to have been expressly invited by the president’s top team,

Hannah Tomes

Netanyahu: Hamas is backtracking on ceasefire

Benjamin Netanyahu has this morning accused Hamas of trying to backtrack on the six-week ceasefire and hostage release that was agreed yesterday. The Israeli Prime Minister’s office released a statement saying that Hamas objected to part of the deal that would give Israel the power to veto the release of certain prisoners, and that negotiators had been instructed to hold firm on the agreed terms. The statement also said Hamas was trying to ‘extort last-minute concessions’ – a claim the group denies. An Israeli cabinet vote on the deal, which was expected to take place later today, has been delayed ‘until the mediators notify Israel that Hamas has accepted all

Marcus Solarz Hendriks

The questions that need answering on the Chagos Islands deal

The art of policymaking is to chart a course through evolving circumstances. In the face of resistance, there are three options: resist and persevere in kind, adjust, or fold and abandon ship. The best policymakers make the correct decision at the right time. The British government is in such a moment with its attempt to cede the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. For months, it has elected the first option – even as the new Mauritian government rejected the terms of the original deal, and Donald Trump’s election victory promises to usher in an administration with dim views of the agreement. As the Chagossians condemned their exclusion from the negotiations, and Maldivian opposition

Eliot Wilson

Starmer’s support for Ukraine has become half-hearted at best

Sir Keir Starmer arrived in Kyiv this morning. He came by train, crossing the border from Poland, since air travel into the Ukrainian capital is now unacceptably hazardous. Perhaps he regards this visit as a respite after the week’s event so far at Westminster. The Prime Minister arrived to meet President Volodymyr Zelensky bearing gifts. The centrepiece is an extensive 100-year partnership agreement between the United Kingdom and Ukraine, covering nine ‘pillars’ from culture and education through science, technology and healthcare to security and military assistance. This is intended to be a significant and enduring relationship. Since the general election, however, the support has seemed to some to have wavered

Danny Shaw

How the CCRC failed Andrew Malkinson

I met Andrew Malkinson, the victim of one of Britain’s gravest miscarriages of justice, on just one occasion. But he left quite an impression and I’ve been thinking about his case, especially since the belated resignation of Helen Pitcher, chairman of the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC). The organisation, which investigates potential wrongful convictions, failed Malkinson terribly. He served 17 years in prison for a rape he didn’t commit; the CCRC should have referred his case to the Court of Appeal after seven years. My encounter with the bearded, bespectacled Malkinson was at an office in central London on a summer’s day 18 months ago, shortly after his conviction had,

Ross Clark

Starmer should bite the bullet and scrap the triple lock

Could the government be preparing itself for a spending cut which would eclipse the ending of the winter fuel payment? In his mini-reshuffle in response to the resignation of Tulip Siddiq, Keir Starmer has appointed the newly-elected MP for Swansea West, Torsten Bell, as pensions minister. It is an interesting choice because, in his former life as director of the Resolution Foundation, Bell was a loud critic of the triple lock, which he called ‘a messy way of achieving the objective of a higher state pension’. He advocated raising the state pension in line with average earnings instead. The Prime Minister quickly moved to scotch suggestions that the triple lock

Lucy Dunn

The PMQs question that should really worry Keir Starmer

The leader of the opposition found it difficult to land her punches in Wednesday’s Prime Minister’s Questions, with Kemi Badenoch not quite able to work out how she wanted to attack Sir Keir Starmer. The Prime Minister fended off a number of issues from the Tories, from the economy to the Chagos Islands to Gerry Adams – but in the end it was a question from his own side that threw the Labour leader off balance. It wasn’t the usual soft questioning the Prime Minister might have expected from his own party when new Labour MP Brian Leishman stood up to speak. The left-leaning politician for Alloa and Grangemouth –

Steerpike

Suspended Labour MP pleads guilty to assault

To the curious case of Mike Amesbury, the former Labour MP who was caught on camera in some rather shocking footage last year. The politician was charged in November and has now pleaded guilty to assault during his appearance in Chester Magistrates Court this morning – after he punched a man in Frodsham last year. A video surfaced in October which appeared to show the then-Labour politician speaking to a man at the side of a road, before throwing a punch at his victim. It was later reported that the bust-up had been the culmination of an ongoing dispute over the temporary closure of the Sutton Weaver swing bridge, and

Steerpike

Scottish Tory council leader defects to Reform

Scottish Tory leader Russell Findlay has barely been in the job four months and already his party is facing defections. Mr S can reveal today that Glasgow councillor – and the Scottish Conservative’s leader on Glasgow City Council – Thomas Kerr has jumped ship to Nigel Farage’s party to represent Reform UK on Glasgow City Council. With the Scottish Conservatives already nervous about next year’s Holyrood poll, the news will come as yet another blow ahead of the election… The Glasgow councillor – who in 2023 stood against Labour’s energy minister Michael Shanks in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election – has insisted that ‘Reform UK represents the change that

Zoe Strimpel

Are we calling too many fat people obese?

Over the years I have learned not to take BMI measurements too seriously. I’m pretty healthy, touch wood, and fit, and don’t look remarkably like a porker. But by BMI standards, I am very definitely “overweight”, once or twice even bordering on the dreaded orange swathe of the chart that signifies obese (“severely obese” is shown in a screaming red). Podge is here to stay, so we need to adjust our scales for assessing it When I was younger and vainer I was more than once crushed by the chart’s verdict. I needn’t have bothered. What an as-good-as arbitrary crunch of simple metrics means for people of different propensities and builds

Kate Andrews

The UK economy is in a rut

The UK economy has grown for the first time in three months. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) reports that the economy expanded by 0.1 per cent in November after it contracted by 0.1 per cent in both September and October. This uptick is largely thanks to an increase in services output, which grew by 0.1 per cent in November 2024, after falling by 0.1 per cent in October (a downward revision from last month’s estimate that there had been no growth. So has the economy turned a corner? It’s very difficult to spin this morning’s news in a wholly positive light. Yes, it’s good that the economy did not

Phillip Ullmann

Why inflation figures may have given Labour false confidence

The relief from Downing Street at yesterday’s inflation data – which showed that it dipped to 2.5 per cent in the 12 months to December, down from 2.6 per cent the month before – was palpable. Darren Jones, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, cast a breezy image as he described his boss, the Chancellor Rachel Reeves, as “brilliant”. The choices facing Reeves and Starmer would be bleak Keir Starmer will now be able to offer his Chancellor more than lukewarm assurances that she is not facing the chop. The news will abate the recent cycle of media criticism and with President Trump’s inauguration next week, focus will soon turn elsewhere. Her

Arieh Kovler

How Trump shaped the Hamas-Israel ceasefire deal

After days of increasing optimism, Qatari prime minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani summoned the press last night to announce that Israel and Hamas had agreed on a ceasefire and hostage deal. In the hours since, Israel has accused Hamas of backtracking on the agreement and dozens of people have been killed in Israeli strikes on Gaza. A planned cabinet vote on the deal in Israel has been pushed back, yet Hamas insists it is still committed to the agreement, which is due to come into effect on Sunday. The deal is complicated, delicate and full of moving parts. Phase one will see Hamas release 33 hostages, both living and dead:

Tessa Clarke

The Chagos Islands deal that Starmer ignored

As Mauritius and the UK scramble to finalise the terms of a treaty to hand over the Chagos Islands before Donald Trump becomes president, there remains a glaring issue with any agreement: for years, both governments have ignored the desire of Chagossian leaders for a democratic solution to the islands’ future. It is 104 days since Sir Keir Starmer announced in regal style – by No. 10 press release rather than to our elected representatives in parliament first – that he’d agreed to hand over the sovereignty of the Chagos Islands, the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), to Mauritius. The secret deal included the fate of the island of Diego Garcia, a

Gavin Mortimer

Why has Trump invited Zemmour – and not Le Pen – to his inauguration?

There will be two politicians from France in Washington next week to see Donald Trump sworn in as president – and Emmanuel Macron isn’t one of them. The president didn’t get an invite (unlike his European rival, Giorgia Meloni) and nor for that matter did Marine Le Pen. It says much about how Reconquest is viewed by Team Trump that a party with no seats in the National Assembly is invited to his inauguration The two French politicians invited to witness arguably the greatest political resurrection in American political history are Eric Zemmour and Sarah Knafo. The latter was until a few months ago best known as Zemmour’s partner – professionally and

Sam McPhail

What does Greenland have that Trump wants?

Donald Trump’s favourite President, William McKinley, added Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines to the American fief at the turn of the twentieth century. Trump once saw Greenland on a map and reportedly said: ‘Look at the size of this. It’s massive! That should be part of the United States’? Two years later, his language is stronger: ‘For purposes of national security and freedom throughout the world, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.’ Trump’s first proposal to buy Greenland in 2019 was rebuffed by the Danes who have sovereignty over it. For Trump, this is not just about military bases – US

Michael Simmons

Is public sector headcount out of control?

Eyebrows were raised in the House of Lords this week as the Justice and Home Affairs Committee heard evidence that the Ministry of Justice is having to recruit from overseas to staff Britain’s overcrowded jails. Mark Fairhurst, the national chairman of the Prison Officers’ Association, said: We are recruiting from overseas and you are getting recruits from overseas, we have heard, turning up at the gate with suitcases and family in tow asking “Where is my accommodations?” […] We have got examples of overseas recruits sleeping in their cars because they have no accommodations. Apparently there has been a bunch of overseas recruits who, because they have no accommodations, there

Michael Gove

The answers Starmer must give

It will probably only damn me further in the eyes of many, but when I was a government minister I often used to ask Labour predecessors for advice. Tony Blair especially. He may have felt it was a forlorn exercise ever offering me his wisdom, especially when I went on to back Brexit, support parliament’s prorogation under Boris and defend Dominic Cummings against all comers, but I always appreciated his insights, even when we disagreed. No position is so strong, no policy so perfect, that it cannot benefit from being tested by critics. If those critics have experience of office, know its powers and limitations, so much the better. And

Unlock full access to The Spectator

Thursday