Politics

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

Sunday

Elisabeth Dampier

Germany is dangerously close to banning the AfD

Alternative for Germany (AfD) has been declared ‘right-wing extremist’ who are ‘against the free democratic order’ by Germany’s domestic intelligence service. The Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) can now increase its investigation of the AfD, including tapping their phones, intercepting their electronic communications, and recruiting informants within the party. Public servants, especially those in the police or military, may find themselves fired unless they leave the party. Members of the party may find themselves barred from gun ownership. Some in public sector television are calling for the AfD to be kept off the airwaves. The AfD is being treated as though it were a dangerous fringe group,

Joe Bedell-Brill

Sunday shows round-up: Streeting calls Reform a ‘real threat’ to Labour

Wes Streeting admits that Reform UK might become Labour’s ‘main challengers’ Thursday’s local elections were bruising for both main parties, and a huge success for Reform UK, who won 677 seats. On Sky News this morning, Trevor Phillips asked Health Secretary Wes Streeting if Reform were taking votes away from Labour’s working class base. Streeting described Reform as a ‘real threat’, and suggested they might be the government’s main opposition by the next election. The health secretary called for Reform to receive more ‘airtime and scrutiny’, arguing that Farage’s healthcare policies are ‘a real threat to the NHS’, and added that Labour had to demonstrate ‘real improvement to people’s lives’

Michael Murphy

What Micheal Martin gets wrong about the 1916 proclamation

As thousands of protesters thundered through central Dublin over Easter weekend, waving a sea of tricolour flags, Ireland’s anti-immigration movement staked a bold claim. The legacy of the Easter Rising martyrs – who underwrote with their lives the founding of the Irish state – was theirs. ‘We will be a true following on from our forefathers in 1916 who had a workers’ revolution,’ declared Malachy Steenson, a Dublin councillor and nationalist leader.  This fusion of grassroots nationalism and potent revolutionary symbols powered the largest demonstration yet. A genie was out of the bottle, and the establishment took notice. It provoked a bitter historical tug-of-war as the government, mindful of the symbolic power of

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The ugly truth about Lucy Powell’s grooming gangs comments

This week Lucy Powell, leader of the House of Commons, did something unusual for a politician: she spoke from the heart. Her dismissal of the rape gangs as a ‘dog whistle’ was no gaffe. It was not a ‘blunder’. It was a brutally honest expression of the government’s exasperation with this pesky scandal. It was savagely candid, pulling back the curtain on Labour’s gross and haughty indifference to this outrage in which thousands of working-class girls suffered the most unspeakable abuse. Powell has essentially scoffed at thousands of working-class women by calling the scandal that ravaged their girlhoods a ‘little trumpet’ It was on Any Questions that Powell gave voice

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Jordan Bardella’s moment has arrived

It is time to take seriously the possibility that the next president of France will be Jordan Bardella. His star power was persuasively demonstrated at Thursday’s May Day rally of the Rassemblement National (RN) in Narbonne, the heartland of the French right. It was part political rally, part disco. The demographic was startling. The party stalwarts, aging boomers who have been voting for Le Pens for forty years, were heavily outnumbered by young people, dancing in front of the stage, waving tricolours. The French political establishment has long portrayed the RN as extremist, but Bardella threatens that characterisation Marine Le Pen, 56, spoke first and was rapturously applauded by her

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Are Protestants free to criticise Catholicism?

The death of a Pope is a time for assorted reflections on the Catholic Church. Protestants can be wary of speaking up. Even the word ‘Protestant’ is not a very familiar one these days. Sure, most of us know that the Church of England is Protestant, and that Luther was Protestant and that the Reformation was the birth of the Protestant movement. But the Church of England doesn’t draw attention to its Protestant identity. There’s a vague sense that to do so would be bigoted. For doesn’t Protestant mean anti-Catholic? The last proud Protestant was Ian Paisley – and even he softened in old age. It is now widely felt

Robin Ashenden

Are the Tories really mad enough to change their leader again?

To no one’s surprise, this week’s election results make miserable reading for the Tories, and the attacks on Kemi Badenoch have now begun. In an article in The Spectator, William Atkinson lambasts her as ‘an active barrier to the party’s saving itself,’ adding that she ‘had her chance to prove herself and has been found wanting.’  Meanwhile, there are stories in the press of senior Tories angling for her close rival, shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick, to take over as head of the Conservatives. Badenoch herself was prepared for this, declaring in advance that the results would be ‘challenging’ but denying they would be a comment on her leadership: ‘We

John Curtice

Who can knock out Mr Farage?

David Cameron’s promise of an EU referendum in 2013 was designed to head off the apparent challenge to his party’s election hopes that was being posed by Nigel Farage’s Ukip. Although Ukip still did well in the 2015 election, the Conservatives won an overall majority. Unfortunately for Mr Cameron, he lost the subsequent referendum, and his party was then tossed into years of turmoil over how the decision to leave should be implemented. Still, in 2019, Boris Johnson’s promise to deliver his ‘oven-ready’ Brexit deal headed off the threat from Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party and paved the way to another overall majority. Brexit was duly delivered and, it seemed, the

Ed McGuinness

What Kneecap won’t tell you about growing up in Belfast

The three members of Irish rap band Kneecap are ‘ceasefire babies’: they grew up on the streets of Belfast around the time of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. So did I. But the similarities between me and the band end there. Despite what some of Kneecap’s fans might think, there was nothing glamorous about life as a ‘ceasefire baby’ On a November night in 2001, I was at the cinema with my brother. In Belfast, one of the best cinemas at the time was in Yorkgate. Unfortunately, it was situated at what is known as a ‘flashpoint’, where the Catholic New Lodge estate abutted the fiercely Protestant Tigers Bay. Riots were common. A

Saturday

Steerpike Steerpike

Labour minister: rape gangs are a ‘dog whistle’ 

Uh oh. Commons Leader Lucy Powell has found herself in hot water after making some rather careless remarks on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions yesterday. The Labour politician sparked outrage over her reaction to a point by Tim Montgomerie – the founder of Conservative Home who has since aligned himself with Reform – who brought up a recent Channel 4 documentary on grooming gangs.  Cutting across him, Powell replied: ‘Oh we want to blow that little trumpet now, do we?’ ‘No,’ Montgomerie responded. ‘There was a real issue…’. Not that Powell appeared willing to listen, interrupting again: ‘Let’s get that dog whistle out, shall we?’ Oo er. Talk about flippant!

Terry Barnes

Australian election: Trump helps topple second conservative leader

Tonight, Australia voted decisively for continuity. The Labor government of prime minister Anthony Albanese has not merely been re-elected. It has absolutely thumped the conservative Liberal-National party coalition, headed by Liberal leader Peter Dutton. At the close of counting tonight, Labor achieved a majority in the 150-seat parliament, winning 77 seats and leading in another five. The coalition has been decimated, reduced from an already-low 55 seats to winning just 29 and leading in another eight. Frontbenchers and talented up-and-comers around the country have been swept away in seats deemed safe. Worse for the conservatives, Dutton himself has had the ultimate Portillo moment, losing his own constituency having held it

Lucy Dunn

Does Keir Starmer ‘get it’?

16 min listen

As the parties regroup following the local elections, both Labour and the Conservatives have to face a miserable result. Lucy Dunn speaks to Isabel Hardman and pollster Luke Tryl about the anger and disillusionment amongst the electorate, and why Keir Starmer message ‘we need to go further and faster’ can’t cut through. 

Kara Kennedy

The strategic ascent of Kai Trump

In the gilded corridors of Trump Tower and the manicured greens of exclusive golf courses, a new Trump is quietly ascending. At just 17, Kai Trump – the eldest of the President’s grandchildren – is executing what appears to be a carefully orchestrated entry into public life, blending the traditional pathways of political families with the modern currency of social media influence. ‘He’s just a normal grandpa,’ Kai says in one of her videos about the President. ‘He gives us candy and soda when our parents aren’t looking.’ The statement, seemingly innocent, accomplishes something the Trump campaign has struggled with for years: it humanises the most polarising figure in American politics. This is no

William Atkinson

Badenoch is leading the Tories off a cliff

It’s always sad to discover that one of your favourite quotations was made up. After communism’s fall, Robert Conquest’s American publisher was said to have asked him for a new title for a republished edition of The Great Terror, his seminal book documenting Stalin’s mass murder of his own citizens. His suggestion? I told you so, you fucking fools. Alas, I recently learnt that the faultlessly polite Conquest never said it, the anecdote being an invention of his swearier chum Kingsley Amis. Nonetheless, ‘I told you so, you fucking fools’ would be a rather cask strength way of describing how those of us who have long been gloomy about Tory

Alexander Larman

The revenge of Prince Harry

It was always unlikely that Prince Harry was going to take his latest and perhaps most humiliating legal defeat with calmness and equanimity, and so it proved swiftly afterwards. Not only did he give a lengthy interview to the BBC in which he alternated between anger and blame and claiming that it was his intention to reconcile with his family, and specifically his father – William may be a step too far – but he also released an emotive and angry press statement in which he talked about how the court ruling had uncovered ‘shocking truths’. He appeared to suggest that there has been a conspiracy against him; a conspiracy led by the same people, the statement suggests, ‘that

Lucy Dunn

Reform’s next challenge is delivery

The Cholmondeley Arms is set just off the main road of the quaint, red-bricked market town of Frodsham. Not that this watering hole is much of a tranquil escape: it’s lavishly draped in Union Jacks and VE day memorabilia and boasts a spacious beer garden out the back. It doesn’t serve food and features a healthy crowd of regulars sat by the bar. It plays clubland classics from 11am to 2am, when it ejects its clientele. Ex-Labour MP Mike Amesbury should be able to testify to that, given this is the pub he stayed at ‘til closing last year before he decided to knock one of his constituents for six.

Julie Bindel

Do Green voters know what they’ve done?

The Green party has done well at the local elections, making dozens of gains across England. But do those who voted Green, perhaps for the first time, realise what they have done? If not, they will spend the next four years regretting their vote. Perhaps the party’s name led them to naively conclude that the Greens are an organisation focused solely on caring for the environment. They thought their vote was about protecting England’s green and pleasant land. But they have been deceived. This so-called ‘nice’ party can be rather nasty The truth is that the Greens sometimes appear more eager to talk about a trans person’s ‘right’ to use

Terry Barnes

Will Australia’s angry voters punish Labor at the polls?

Australia goes to the polls today, pitting the first-term Labor government of prime minister Anthony Albanese against the Liberal-National party coalition headed by Liberal leader Peter Dutton. As the election campaign for the federal election entered its final week, the agenda-setting Newspoll in the Australian newspaper asked voters whether Albanese’s government deserves re-election. Damningly, less than two-fifths said yes; well over half said it deserves throwing out. It’s no wonder voters feel angry about Labor Yet Newspoll, and all other opinion polls, have Labor on track to win today, either in a narrow majority in the 150-seat House of Representatives, or in minority supported by a left-leaning crossbench. It’s no

Martin Narey

What the Auschwitz memorial gets wrong

In 1982, to the shock of almost everyone who knew me, I began a two-year training programme designed to turn me into a competent prison governor. It was a largely unmemorable experience but with a singular exception. I read an article about the commandants of the Nazi death camps called ‘A curious absence of monsters.’ It was and remains the most troubling thing about the Holocaust I’ve read, and it encouraged me to read a great deal more about the individuals who industrialised barbarism.  Auschwitz as it is currently presented fails in one important respect In all the 23 years I worked in and around prisons in England and Wales,

Charlotte Henry

Ed Davey’s quiet victory

There’s no doubt that Friday’s local election results belonged to Reform. Nigel Farage’s party has picked up hordes of councils, councillors and mayoralties at the expense of the two major parties. However, it won’t only be Farage and co. who are heading into the bank holiday on a high. The Lib Dems have made meaningful gains, and these should worry the Tories as much as anything Reform have done. They hint at an almost total collapse of the moderate, “one-nation” voter base that used to be so crucial Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey, whose elections day stunt was to hand out ice creams in Shrewsbury (his party is hoping