All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
15 min listen
With reports of ‘billions’ of spending cuts earmarked for the Chancellor’s Spring Statement, taking place later this month, Michael Gove and Kate Andrews join Katy Balls to discuss what exactly Rachel Reeves could cut. With little fiscal headroom and sluggish forecasts of growth, Reeves doesn’t appear to have many options. It’s likely that welfare will
‘There are judges in Jerusalem,’ Menachem Begin is reputed to have proclaimed, following a court ruling which he believed vindicated one of his policy positions. The phrase has been appropriated by critics of judicial reform and others keen to see Bagatz, the Israeli supreme court, remain a bulwark against illiberal overreach by the government. ‘There are judges
There is little over a year to go until the 2026 Holyrood election and Scottish party selection processes are underway. This morning, two of the biggest names yet have said they will stand down at next year’s election: Finance Secretary Shona Robison and Transport Secretary Fiona Hyslop have announced they’re off. ‘The decision to retire
Israeli leaders recently made clear that the IDF’s current military deployment into south-west Syria is not intended as a stop-gap measure until its northern neighbour stabilises. Rather, in a speech last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told IDF officer cadets that the force’s troops would stay on the formerly Syrian side of Mount Hermon, and
Giving evidence to the Treasury Select Committee this afternoon, Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey doubled down on a point he has previously made to the committee: the economy is being pulled down by an extraordinary fall in productivity in the public sector. Relative to 2019, he said, productivity across the public sector is now
Small boat crossings since the start of the year are at a record level. Yesterday 326 migrants arrived, bringing this year’s total to 3,224. Last year 2,983 migrants crossed the Channel over the same period. The number who have made the journey since Keir Starmer became Prime Minister, having promised to ‘stop the small boat
What was the most important moment at Prime Minister’s Questions today? It was not the somewhat pedestrian back-and-forth between Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch on support for Ukraine. It was instead a subsequent point raised by David Davis on the subject of Britain’s Special Forces. Davis – a textbook example of a free-thinking backbencher –
It has been widely reported that, during his meeting with Prime Minister Keir Starmer last week, President Trump gave his consent to the UK’s proposed deal to transfer sovereignty over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. However, this is not quite what happened. What he actually said was that he thinks the US ‘will be inclined’
A bit of a stitch-up at PMQs, or so it seemed. The ‘opposition’ leader, Kemi Badenoch, ignored her duty to voters and spent ten minutes feeding softball questions to Sir Keir Starmer about President Zelensky. At issue was Donald Trump’s decision on Monday to withdraw military aid from Ukraine. Kemi meekly asked Sir Keir if
There is a grim irony in today’s announcement of the commemorations marking the 80th anniversary of VE Day on 8 May – at the very time that the Western alliance is collapsing. The plans include dressing the Cenotaph in Union flags, a military procession and flypast in London and a service of remembrance and thanksgiving
Keir Starmer has clearly decided that the only way to disagree with Donald Trump and his administration without angering the US President is to make statements that contradict him without ever mentioning him or J.D. Vance by name. Today he opened Prime Minister’s Questions by paying tribute to six young British soldiers who were killed
It’s a day ending in ‘y’ – which means there’s more bad news for the BBC. Now the government has taken aim at the broadcaster, with Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy slamming the Beeb today in a parliamentary statement. In the scathing text, Nandy wrote of how she is ‘deeply shocked and disappointed’ about the Hamas
Is Lindsay Hoyle turning into John Bercow? Mr S first asked the question in January after revealing that the Speakers’ Office had doubled in size on Hoyle’s watch. And now other outlets are running with the same theme, by looking at the Speaker’s trips abroad. It seems the man of the people rather enjoys the
Is Angela Rayner really being sidelined in this government, having been steamrollered by the rush for growth championed by Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves? That is a hypothesis which has been put forward many times in recent months, but it is not true to judge by the reaction of businesses to the Employment Rights Bill.
The rape gang scandal that has afflicted Britain compels us to review the assumptions that underlie multiculturalism. It’s time for us in the free world to look at human beings and their various cultures as they truly are, and not as the bien pensants wish and then so dangerously insist they must be. A society
Germany has finally decided to join the party – but Europe may come to regret it. After two decades of limited borrowing and fiscal restraint, Europe’s biggest economy is finally joining the high-debt club. Incoming chancellor Friedrich Merz will borrow €800 billion (£670 million), and perhaps much more, to pay for extra spending on defence
If there is one silver lining to Donald Trump’s Oval Office bust-up with Volodymyr Zelensky last Friday, it is that Europe is finally getting serious on rearmament and defence. Or is it? On Tuesday, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission (EC), announced a package of measures designed to encourage EU member states
Frustrated by a High Court injunction that prohibits protestors from occupying University buildings in Cambridge so as to block a degree ceremony on 1 March, ‘Palestine Action’ has resorted to violence (for that is what it is) to make its point. The fifteenth-century gateway to the Old Schools, the administrative headquarters of the University, has
It’s a turbulent time for the Western world, but Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government doesn’t seem to be taking things all that seriously. At least, not where its National Security Adviser is concerned. Jonathan Powell, Starmer’s lineman on the Chagos deal, is apparently banned from speaking to the national security committee on the grounds he
Donald Trump’s speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night was the most powerful, rousing, and pointed of any presidential address in decades. The first line captured the theme of the night. “America is back…and we are just getting started.” It ended with a peroration that his administration would “take up the righteous
Donald Trump’s address to Congress last night was made up of his greatest hits since returning to the Oval Office. Just over six weeks’ worth of public policy filled a 100-minute speech in what is being reported this morning as one of the longest Congressional addresses in history. The President touched on practically every topic,
Everything they taught you in school is a lie. Carthage was not salted, Canute knew he couldn’t control the tide, Marie Antoinette never said ‘let them eat cake’, and Mrs O’Leary did not start the Great Chicago Fire. Yet the biggest fallacy of the best years of your life is peddled not by teachers but
The Oscars, an institution that claims to celebrate artistic excellence, this week played a leading role in a sophisticated and cynical propaganda campaign against Israel. The 2024 Academy Award for Best Documentary went to No Other Land, a film that, beneath the veneer of raw storytelling and supposed human rights advocacy, is little more than a
We all know the nursery rhyme about “this little piggy”: one little piggy went to market, one little piggy stayed home and so on. A modern rewrite could also include the little piggy that got injected into a rich man’s body. The “super-rich” are using pigs brains to try and “biohack their way to immortality,”
Whenever I’m walking down Cornmarket Street in Oxford – an otherwise unlovely thoroughfare – there is something about the spectacle of the enormous Greggs there that gladdens my soul. Compared to all the other overpriced, depressing places that sell lunchtime sandwiches in the area – I popped into Pret the other day and was astonished
Will the real Volodymyr Zelensky please stand up? On Sunday, Ukraine’s president defiantly stated that ‘the final deal about ending the war is very, very far … nobody’s even started all those steps yet.’ But just three days later, Zelensky’s office issued a statement saying more or less the opposite. ‘None of us wants an
It’s great that JD Vance is all for free speech, though he does tend to shoot off his mouth in an off-putting way. He is, as Disraeli said of Gladstone, ‘a sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity.’ In an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity last night, the Vice President said: ‘If you
31 min listen
Donald Trump announced last night he is suspending military aid to Ukraine until Zelensky is ‘ready for peace’. Following this, the Vice President JD Vance sparked further international outrage in a Fox News interview referring to Britain as ‘some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years’. JD Vance has since
Volodymyr Zelensky is offering Donald Trump an olive branch after the American president paused all US military aid to Ukraine last night. Zelensky has expressed his regrets about the confrontation in the Oval Office and said his team is ready to come to the negotiating table ‘as soon as possible’. Ukraine wants to sign the
In recent years the study of human ancient DNA – extracted from excavated remains rather than living people – has become so popular that scientists are trying to clamp down on the number of samples taken from long-dead individuals. The research keeps coming, however, and it can be hard to keep up. One recent project
Donald Trump’s decision overnight to pause US military aid to Ukraine has sent politicians across the world into a tailspin. Here in the UK, political leaders are still grappling with the fallout from Friday’s disastrous meeting between the US president and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky. Keir Starmer has pitched himself as a ‘bridge’ between the two
My experience of Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex and Muchness of Montecito, has I imagine been quite a common one. I started out full of enthusiasm that this apparently self-made counter-jumper (actually expensively educated by her poor doofus of a dad) was bringing a soupçon of style to the old Windsors. When it transpired that
The western world might be collapsing but here in Westminster it is business as usual. In one of parliament’s dusty old committee rooms, Kim Leadbeater’s Assisted Dying Bill continues to slowly make its way through the legislative process, one agonising line at a time. But if you hoped that this exercise would be a Socratic
13 min listen
Overnight President Trump made another extraordinary move in his ongoing attempt to broker a deal between Ukraine and Russia, suspending all U.S. military aid to Ukraine. Katy Balls talks to James Heale and geopolitical analyst Mark Galeotti about how serious this development is and where it leaves Ukraine’s European supporters. Produced by Natasha Feroze and