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Nigel Jones

Rupert Lowe faces life in the political wilderness

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Rupert Lowe must currently be the most frustrated man in British politics. The MP has been exonerated of accusations brought against him by Reform, yet his political career appears to be over. The police have said that there is insufficient evidence to justify proceeding with charges after leaders of his old Reform party accused the Great Yarmouth MP of bullying his office staff and threatening party chairman Zia Yusuf. Lowe, who has been expelled from Reform and now sits in parliament as an independent MP, responded to the news of him being cleared with an angry tweet accusing party founder and leader Nigel Farage of being a ‘viper’ and added

Steerpike

Starmer announces Rwanda-style scheme in immigration U-turn

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Starmer Chameleon is at it again. Now Sir Keir has announced plans for a Rwanda-style immigration scheme after scrapping a rather similar idea put forward under Rishi Sunak’s Conservative party. It transpires that the Prime Minister has opened formal talks with a number of Balkan states about sending asylum seekers to detention centres overseas – despite blasting the Tory party’s Rwanda scheme as a ‘gimmick’. Talk about a U-turn! During his trip to Albania today, Sir Keir announced that the government is considering sending failed asylum seekers to ‘return hubs’ overseas after they have exhausted all appeal options. Instead of holding people in the UK, the Labour lot want to

Ian Williams

What the next phase of Trump’s trade war with China looks like

For clues as to where US policy towards Beijing goes next, look beyond Donald Trump’s chaotic and erratic tariffs and focus instead on the small print of the US-UK draft trade deal. It has a clear message: that if you want to do business with Washington, keep China at bay. The agreement itself doesn’t quite put it that way. It doesn’t need to. Instead, there are broad pledges to cooperate and coordinate on ‘the effective use of investment and security measures, export controls, and ICT [information and communications technology] vendor security’, and ‘to address non-market policies of third countries’ – all tailor-made for China, even if the country is not

Laurie Wastell

How Labour ended up taking on the Boriswave

Sir Keir Starmer, remarkably, has launched an immigration crackdown. Britain risks becoming an ‘island of strangers’ after the Tory ‘one-nation experiment in open borders’, he said on Monday. A Home Office white paper has introduced several measures which will supposedly bring the sky-high numbers down. Most interestingly, the government will extend the required qualification period for Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) – which grants migrants access to the welfare state and the ability to bring dependents – from five years residency in the UK to ten. On Wednesday it confirmed that this would apply retroactively. Which means that should this go through – there will be a public consultation – it

Jonathan Miller

Who judges the judges?

I started out as a reporter covering the criminal and civil courts in Ohio. I got to read every piece of paper filed with the clerk’s office, a bottomless source of stories. These were the days when people still trusted reporters and talked to us. I hung out with the prosecutors and cops, and wandered in and out of the judges’ chambers. It horrifies English lawyers when I suggest there is merit in electing judges rather than allowing them to be appointed by the diversity-obsessed Judicial Appointments Commission After the closing gavel, judges, prosecutors, defence lawyers and we reporters would assemble in chief judge Kessler’s chambers for a whiskey. He kept a

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