Politics

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

Thursday

Steerpike Steerpike

Revealed: Reeves’s tax rises expose Labour’s misleading manifesto claims

Casting his mind back to the election, Mr S recalls a heated debate about which party would raise taxes most. In the final televised debate before the national poll, Sir Keir Starmer was quick to accuse then-PM Rishi Sunak of ‘repeating a lie’ – that Labour were going to raise taxes by £2,000 per person. And, to be fair, he had a point: on Sunak’s own maths the Tories would have raised taxes by, er, £3,000 per person. Awkward… Mr S’s friends at The Spectator’s DataHub have crunched all the manifestos put out at the time to see just who really would be responsible for the greatest tax hikes – with

Steerpike Steerpike

Sturgeon paid £25,000 for election night punditry

The SNP’s Dear Leader has not had the smoothest 18 months since her resignation last year – what with the police probe into SNP finances, the exodus of members from her party and the nationalists’ staggering loss of support in the general election. But it’s not all bad news for Nicola Sturgeon. It has now emerged that Scotland’s former first minister was paid a whopping £25,000 for playing pundit back in July, after Sturgeon controversially appeared on Channel 4’s election night special. Alright for some… The rather generous payment was logged by the SNP politician on the Scottish parliament’s register of interests’, which was published today. Sturgeon declared that her

Steerpike Steerpike

Is Ofcom guilty of double standards over GB News fine?

GB News has dealt with a number of Ofcom complaints in its time, but now things have become a little more serious. The media regulator has today announced that it plans to impose a whopping £100,000 fine on Gbeebies for ‘breaking due impartiality rules’ after it aired a pre-election interview with outgoing Tory leader and former prime minister Rishi Sunak. Crikey. The programme with which Ofcom took issue – titled People’s Forum: The Prime Minister – was, according to the media watchdog, ‘in breach of Rules 5.11 and 5.12 of the Broadcasting Code’ after Sunak was given ‘a mostly uncontested platform’ to big up the work of the government. The

Eliot Wilson

Labour’s £2.9bn defence boost doesn’t go nearly far enough

Anyone who is serious about the condition of the armed forces and Britain’s defence policy will not look a gift horse in the mouth. Rachel Reeves’s announcement in yesterday’s Budget that the government will spend an additional £2.9 billion on defence next year is welcome and desperately needed. But while it’s headline-grabbing, in reality it will make little difference to our national security and strategic posture. It is acknowledged across the political spectrum that we need to spend more on defence It is hard to think of a time, certainly since the end of the Cold War, when the international situation was so tense and challenging in so many areas.

James Vitali

Rachel Reeves’s Budget plan is much worse than you think

‘No plan for the economy’ is the charge being made against the government, as Conservatives take to the airwaves following the Budget. The problem is that, in this case, the charge is simply untrue. Labour do have a plan for the economy. It is called securonomics: a worldview set out in some detail by the Chancellor herself in the Spring during her Mais Lecture. And as Paul Mason put it earlier in the year in this magazine, securonomics constitutes a ‘coherent, well founded’ plan for the economy, rooted in a ‘clear political philosophy’. Securonomics will make Britain more lethargic, more risk averse Securonomics, at its most basic level, is a

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Why is the UN meddling in France’s hijab ban?

The United Nations this week criticised France for refusing to allow women and girls to wear a Muslim headscarf on the sports field. In a report published on Monday, a panel comprised of what the UN called ‘independent experts’ concluded that France’s measures banning women from wearing hijabs in sports were ‘discriminatory’. The experts said that the measures ‘infringe on individuals’ [French athletes’] rights to express their religion, identity and beliefs, as well as their right to participate in cultural life’. They also said that France’s secularism laws, which were introduced in 1905 to counter the influence of the Catholic church, ‘are not legitimate grounds for imposing restrictions on the rights

Steerpike Steerpike

Reeves runs scared from GB News viewers

Budget day has been and gone and this morning Rachel Reeves was expected on the media morning round to discuss the fallout from her fiscal statement. Only it appears that the Chancellor seems to think she has better things to do than speak to the usual selection of broadcasters about her tax-raising Budget the morning after. It transpires that, at the very last moment, Reeves pulled out of a scheduled interview with Times Radio this morning – before pulling the same stunt an hour later with GB News. So much for transparency… While the Chancellor isn’t keen to reiterate her own Budget – a rather flimsy excuse, Mr S thinks

Lucy Dunn

Now the SNP must prove it can govern

In the history of devolution, no Westminster government has ever given Scotland as large a block grant settlement as the one announced by Labour on Wednesday. In her fiscal statement, the chancellor declared that politicians north of the border will receive £1.5 billion this year and a record £3.4 billion next year via the Barnett formula. It’s a move that caught the SNP by surprise, and one that has thrown the nationalist’s political strategy into doubt. Long before the July election, the SNP government began an anti-Labour austerity campaign – claiming Keir Starmer’s ‘tough decisions’ rhetoric was code for public service spending cuts while using policy positions like Keir Starmer’s

Jean-André Prager

Labour’s Budget is a missed chance to solve Britain’s benefits problem

‘Fixing the Foundations’ is the phrase the Labour government wants in your head after the Budget. But the thin gruel for dealing with the challenge presented by our ill-health and disability benefits system suggests those words don’t count for much. Apart from the defence of the realm, there is nothing more foundational to society than the way it treats its most vulnerable and most disadvantaged. Some people are, through no fault of their own, not able to work. Its the duty of the government to ensure that a safety net is in place to help these people; it must balance this by ensuring that the system is fair to the

Ian Williams Ian Williams

Why the Great Firewall of China is waging war on Halloween

The Chinese Communist party (CCP) is spooked by Halloween. In Shanghai, police have rounded up people gathering in costumes that included a Donald Trump with bandaged right ear, Spiderman, Deadpool and Batman. A man dressed as Buddha was also shown being escorted away in videos posted on Chinese social media, but quickly deleted by online censors. The aim seems to be to prevent a repeat of last year’s celebrations, when revellers used the occasion to take a tongue-in-cheek poke at the CCP, and costumes included a surveillance camera and hazmat suits (a swipe at Covid lockdowns). It has at times been like a game of cat and mouse The online

Rory Cormac

Sabotage is back in fashion

Sabotage seems to be back with a bang – and if not with a bang, certainly with a lot of smoke. Incidents have come thick and fast since 2022 when someone – and it still is not clear who – sabotaged pipelines in the Baltic Sea to disable the flow of natural gas from Germany to Russia. Since then, we have seen suspicious fires (or attempted fires) everywhere from an Ikea warehouse in Lithuania to a paint factory in Poland; we have seen explosions at defence plants and arms manufacturers spanning the US, Wales, and Germany. Meanwhile, arson brought French railways to a standstill on the eve of the 2024

Michael Evans

Can Zelensky and Putin do a deal?

Warring parties often strike deals. Exchanges of prisoners, ceasefires to deliver aid, covert talks between intelligence services – and eventually, hopefully, peace. But since Vladimir Putin ordered thousands of troops across the Russian border into Ukraine on 24 February 2022, there have been no peace negotiations and no sign of meaningful compromise from either Moscow or Kyiv. But now, after nearly three years of horrendous casualties and destruction in Ukraine, preliminary talks are underway, according to the Financial Times, for a deal in which both sides would agree to stop or reduce attacks on energy installations. While it might seem a bizarre development, it’s now in Moscow’s interest as much as

Matthew Lynn Matthew Lynn

The true cost of Labour’s Budget is impossible to calculate

No sombre music accompanied Rachel Reeves’s Budget, nor was there a reading from Corinthians. Yet, those details aside, one point is surely clear: Labour’s first Budget in 14 years was a requiem for entrepreneurial Britain. The four decades from the Thatcher reforms of the early 1980s, that turned the UK into one of the best places, at least in Europe, to start and build a company, are now officially over. Britain’s economy will be a lot poorer thanks to the Labour government. In Labour land, entrepreneurs might as well not exist True, the Budget might not have been quite as bad as some of the advanced speculation suggested. Even so,

Douglas Murray

The strange silence around the Southport attacks

There are certain rules in British public life that are worth noting. Such as this one: if someone is killed by a jihadist or someone who could plausibly be connected to immigration in any way, the British public will not be informed of the possible motive – or at least not until it becomes impossible to conceal it any longer. It was revealed that the attacker was of Rwandan heritage, at which point people said: ‘Nothing to see here’ Certain rules follow on from this. One is that ‘wise’ heads will inform anyone who does mention a likely motive that they must be exceptionally careful not to prejudice any forthcoming

Christopher Caldwell

How quickly would Trump wash his hands of Ukraine?

For American politicians, all wars are two-front wars. There is a hot battlefield somewhere in the Middle East or the South China Sea, and there’s a political battlefield in Washington, D.C. The domestic contest is decisive. The same goes for Europe. With Joe Biden riding into the sunset and the presidential campaign drawing to a close, American interest in Ukraine is winding down, too. Europeans talking tough about ‘standing up’ to Russia had better be prepared to do so on their own. The next president will find the domestic pressure to scale back involvement in Ukraine irresistible Donald Trump’s campaign message, muddled though it is, bodes ill for the Ukrainian

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Labour’s new cabinet divide

There were no civil servants present when ministers gathered for their weekly cabinet meeting on Tuesday. The reason? It was time to talk politics. On the eve of Labour’s first Budget for 14 years, Keir Starmer tried to rally his ministers around a common message: blame the Tories! He spoke of the so-called fiscal black hole bequeathed to Labour before he handed things over to his Chancellor to explain why difficult decisions were required on spending, tax and welfare. Plenty of Labour MPs and aides question the wisdom of an election campaign which has boxed them in For all the attempts to unite against a common enemy, just a glance

The Spectator

Rachel Reeves is taking us back to the 1970s

The first fiscal event to be delivered by a female Chancellor of the Exchequer is a landmark moment, but in every other regard this Budget was a return to the familiar, and failed, approach of Labour governments past. This was the Life on Mars Budget – a journey back to the 1970s, only without the cheap booze and fags. Tax rises, increased borrowing, a bigger state, spending on public services unaccompanied by meaningful reform and additional costs for those businesses which create wealth – we have seen all these before and we know they are the markers of decline. This Budget was a journey back to the 1970s, only without

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Tax rises, a cheddar heist and snail delivery man gets slapped

Home Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, repeatedly mentioning an inherited ‘£22 billion black hole’, raised taxes by £40 billion in the Budget, while saying she was abiding by Labour’s manifesto promise not to increase taxes on ‘working people’. A big hit came from increasing employers’ contributions to national insurance; the threshold at which it begins to be paid was reduced from £9,100 to £5,000. But income tax and NI thresholds for employees would be unfrozen from 2028. Capital gains tax went up; stamp duty for second homes rose. Fuel duty would again be frozen. The non-dom regime was abolished. Tobacco went up; a pint of draught went down

Wednesday

James Heale James Heale

Has Rachel Reeves killed the family farm?

As the post-Budget scrutiny gets underway, there is one group of obvious losers from today’s statement: farmers. The rural community is up in arms about Rachel Reeves’ changes to tax relief on farmland. From April 2026 this will be capped at 50 per cent for assets over £1 million – which works out at around roughly 67 acres. The average UK farm size is 217 acres, meaning the vast majority of ordinary family farms will now have to pay inheritance tax. Farms with amenity value or higher local land prices – such as those in the South of England – will be particularly impacted. Rural MPs from across the House