All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
The public response to Sir Keir Starmer and his ministers accepting gifts from Labour donors and others has been what you might expect: rhymes with ‘snouts in the trough’. However, popular indignation is not universal and there is a cohort who are outraged by the outrage. They believe the real villainy lies not with ministers
Vladimir Putin has announced that Moscow’s nuclear doctrine will be adjusted, telling a group of senior officials that Russia could use nuclear weapons if it is attacked using conventional weapons. Inevitably there is concern that Putin could resort to a nuclear strike on Europe if western assistance to Ukraine crosses certain red lines. Putin’s remarks took place on 25
All is not well in the Labour party at present. If Sir Keir Starmer didn’t have enough on his plate, what with concerns about cronyism and the ongoing freebie scandal, one of his own backbenchers seems rather publicly out to get him too. Diane Abbott has been particularly active on social media lately, using her
The war that neither side wanted began this week in earnest. After last week’s exploding pagers and walkie-talkies reportedly injured 1,500 members of Hezbollah’s military forces, the Israeli Air Force began a broad campaign of airstrikes against Hezbollah targets across Lebanon, assassinating several senior leaders of the group while targeting long-range missiles hidden in warehouses
Before I was sentenced to prison I imagined it as a place of discipline, where we who had broken society’s rules would be taught to be better men. I could not have been more wrong. One of the most toxic, and least-understood problems with the British prison system is the moral code it teaches. Terrible,
It takes something when even the Guardian is warning you that your tax rises might end up costing more than they raise in revenue. The paper is reporting today that Treasury officials are becoming worried that the Office for Budgetary Responsibility (OBR) will conclude that plans to abolish non-dom status and its associated loopholes will persuade so
Texas. Big country, big ideas. The new Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood has become enamoured with an intriguing idea from the Lone Star state – letting prisoners out early for good behaviour. Those of you who still watch reruns of Porridge on BritBox will be having déjà vu. Back before the Criminal Justice
To the surprise of nobody and the disappointment of only a few, the Irish government has finally accepted reality and dropped its hugely controversial plans to introduce stringent hate speech legislation. Under its original proposal, the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hate and Hatred Offences) Bill 2022 was so broad that it made Scotland’s
Another day, another drama. Now it transpires that a Labour MP took a million-pound loan from Lord Alli – to buy a flat for her sister. Mitcham and Morden’s MP Siobhain McDonagh was helped in her bid to buy accommodation for her terminally ill sibling and formerly Labour’s first female general secretary, Baroness McDonagh, by
There are not many women in prison, but those who are inside show worryingly high rates of mental illness, suicide and self-harm; their families suffer badly while they are inside, and when they are released, few of them come out rehabilitated in any real sense. Given this, you can see why the new Lord Chancellor,
There was a vigorous interview on Tuesday morning on a prominent French radio station. The guest was Jean-Philippe Tanguy, a senior MP in Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, and the last question put to him concerned his leader’s impending trial on charges of financial impropriety. Tanguy had on two occasions to remind the presenter to
Keir Starmer has moved on rather quickly from Labour conference, pitching up in New York to tell Israel that it can use ‘no more excuses’ and must allow more aid into Gaza. In his speech to the UN General Assembly, the Prime Minister also called for an immediate ceasefire, and said there needed to be
The general election may have been and gone but north of the border another fight is shaping up. The SNP has lost both members and support in the wake of Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation, the police probe into party finances and the party’s inability to find a new indyref strategy. Meanwhile, Scottish Labour under Anas Sarwar
London mayor Sadiq Khan, whose official day job is running the capital, is in New York this week, where he has denounced Donald Trump and urged Americans to vote for Kamala Harris. Trump would set the wrong tone for the rest of the world, Khan declared. ‘What I’d say in a respectful way to Americans is:
Is it really true that obesity rates in England have stabilised or fallen, as has been reported today – and that, according to the Obesity Health Alliance, this may be down to things like junk food being removed from supermarket checkouts and calories being provided on menus? While obesity rates have ballooned, smoking rates have
Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood is right about one thing: when it comes to addressing crimes committed by women, prison doesn’t work. Mahmood said at the Labour party conference on Tuesday that she is looking at alternatives to custody, such as community-based sanctions and programmes. Having campaigned on behalf of numerous women in prison over the
It’s a time of new beginnings here at The Spectator after Sir Paul Marshall’s historic £100 million bid for the magazine. As we plan for further growth, I’m delighted to announce two major appointments: Charles Moore is to become our new chairman and Michael Gove is to succeed me as editor. There’s never a good
Donald Trump is campaigning hard on protectionism, promising to bring skilled manual jobs back onshore. What will that look like? Huge tariffs on imports, foreign companies unable to ‘steal’ American jobs, a re-industrialisation of the heartlands of the United States. But here’s the catch: a trade war on the scale that Trump is promising is
Keir Starmer’s first Labour conference as Prime Minister has ended in humiliation after delegates backed a motion condemning cuts to winter fuel payments. The Prime Minister has faced a backlash over his plan to scrap universal payments to help elderly people with their fuel bills. Starmer’s changes mean that only those who get pension credit
Arguably the most difficult speech of the whole of Labour conference came from Liz Kendall. The Work and Pensions secretary not only had the winter fuel payment cut to deal with, she is also responsible for welfare reform to get people off sickness benefits – one of the most fraught areas of policymaking – and will
The OECD’s interim Economic Outlook report has landed this morning and its forecast for the UK has been revised significantly upwards. Having predicted in May that the economy would grow by 0.4 per cent this year, the policy organisation now expects the economy to grow by 1.1 per cent. This lifts the UK from the
Labour’s freebie fiasco isn’t going away. Sir Keir Starmer has prompted more headlines by suggesting he took thousands of pounds of donations from millionaire donor Lord Alli because of, um, his son. Excuses, excuses… The Prime Minister was speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme about the ongoing frockgate scandal when he claimed that he
Whatever happened to the Wagner Group, Evgeny Prigozhin’s shadowy army of prisoners and mercenaries? In the wake of Wagner’s abortive mutiny in June 2023 – and of Prigozhin’s own not-so-mysterious death two months later in a plane crash near Moscow – most of the Russia-based units of the group were rolled into the Kremlin’s official
This Labour conference has largely been about Keir Starmer and his ministers making the argument for what they are doing, rather than giving any details of how they plan to achieve it. Wes Streeting’s speech to the hall in Liverpool this morning fitted that pattern. He didn’t announce anything new. Instead, he set out quite
The recent fighting between Israel and Hezbollah is a war that’s not yet officially a war, initiated by a political party without a mandate that takes its orders from Tehran, in support of a Palestinian party that few Lebanese care about. Hezbollah was the jewel in the Mullah’s turban It is a decades-old conflict, an
As the security situation in Lebanon deteriorates, the British government is accelerating plans to evacuate its civilians. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office has advised British nationals in the country to leave while commercial flights were still operating. It also said that British nationals should have an evacuation plan, and warned that they should ‘not
It was presented as a bold stimulus to boost China’s ailing economy – but while it excited stock markets in Asia, Western economists were underwhelmed. At a rare press conference in Beijing on Tuesday, the usually gnomic governor of the People’s Bank of China, Pan Gongsheng, unveiled a range of measures designed to ‘support the
Britain’s republicans won’t give up. In spite of trying to use the coronation of Charles III as an opportunity to push their campaign to abolish the monarchy, support for the institution has remained stubbornly high. It is our elected politicians – on both sides of the political divide – who seem to have lost support rather
The ravens really are leaving the tower. In recent months, Reform has been turbo-charging its professionalisation drive, working to set up branches across the country as part of their efforts to elect enough MPs to form the next government. There’s been a big back office clear-out and tonight it sounds like there has been another
