Politics

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

Wednesday

Debbie Hayton

Labour’s transgender civil war has hit a new low

August is the traditional silly season, but the Labour party risks descending into a farce from which it might struggle to recover when real politics resumes in September. In the absence of any direction from the party leadership, the transgender thought police have led the party down a rabbit hole. Last week, Spectator readers may recall the appalling attack on Rosie Duffield MP for claiming – quite rightly – that ‘only women have a cervix’. Now, the madness has continued. This week’s episode involves LGBT+ Labour. Not to be confused with the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights (LCTR) that appeared in February, LGBT+ Labour has a long history of campaigning inside

Steerpike Steerpike

Tory MP calls for England to take back Calais

The UK government has seemed flummoxed in recent days about how to best stop migrants and asylum seekers crossing the English Channel in inflatable dinghies – with ministers particularly concerned about the failure of the French authorities to prevent people traffickers organising journeys out of Calais. Immigration minister Chris Philp travelled to Paris this week in an attempt to strike a deal with the French about the return of migrants. Both sides have since expressed a ‘shared commitment’ to stemming the rise in Channel crossings, and Philp has promised to unveil a ‘joint operational plan’ in the coming days, to completely cut off the route. If all that seems too

Richard Dobbs

Matt Hancock needs a ‘big, hairy, audacious goal’ for test and trace

Stanford Business School professors, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras in their book Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, introduced the idea of the ‘big hairy audacious goal’, or BHAG. A BHAG (pronounced ‘bee hag’) is a bold, clear and compelling target for an organisation to strive for, with the appropriate resourcing. A great example was President Kennedy’s speech to Congress in which he said ‘this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth’. This audacious goal committed and motivated NASA and its suppliers to deliver a massive step up in

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

The case for a new Act of Union

Scexit, not Brexit, will be the word that defines Boris Johnson’s premiership. The Times has a new poll from YouGov showing the SNP on 57 per cent with nine months to go until devolved elections. The same poll puts support for Scotland’s exit from the United Kingdom at 53 per cent. This confirms earlier polls from Panelbase: Scexit is now the majority position. That support for the SNP has leapt along with Nicola Sturgeon’s approval ratings (up 45 per cent on this time last year) is confounding observers, not least given the Scottish exam results scandal of the past week. Sturgeon has, of course, benefited from fronting televised daily Covid-19

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Spare us Ben & Jerry’s lecture on the Channel migrant crisis

Multi-millionaire virtue-signallers Ben and Jerry are at it again. Once again the ice-cream capitalists are doing their woke schtick in the hope that even more of the right-on middle-classes will buy their expensive tubs of cream and sugar. This time they’re taking aim at Priti Patel, lecturing her on Twitter about immigration. Thanks, but no thanks — we don’t want vast corporations butting into our democratic politics. Ben & Jerry’s UK gave Patel a haughty ticking-off in a Twitter thread published yesterday. In response to Patel’s promise to reduce the number of migrant boats crossing the English Channel, B&J said the ‘real crisis’ is ‘our lack of humanity for people

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Is Britain heading for the worst economic hit in Europe?

It’s odd to read headlines today saying that the UK has officially entered recession. We’ve known this for months: shops were closed, restaurants shuttered. You couldn’t get a cup of coffee or a haircut, offices were closed and millions furloughed. These were not normal times – but we knew that then, as we know it now. What we didn’t know was how far the economy had contracted, and how much this could be remedied by ending lockdown. The big news today, revealed by official figures released by the Office for National Statistics this morning, starts to answer this. It turns out that our economic hit was one of the hardest

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Is Kamala Harris a good VP pick?

18 min listen

Yesterday evening, Joe Biden announced Kamala Harris as his running mate. While the Californian senator is seen by many as a safe pick, she notably came to blows with Biden in the Democratic primaries for his history of working with segregationists. Is this a good move by the Biden campaign? Freddy Gray speaks to Matt McDonald, managing editor of the Spectator USA.

Paul Wood

Was the ‘pee tape’ a lie all along?

Sir Anthony Eden’s wife, Clarissa, famously said that at times she’d felt as if the Suez Canal was flowing through her drawing room. Over the past four years, perhaps American voters have felt the Volga lapping at their feet. There’s been no escape from Russia and even the Mueller inquiry did not put the matter to rest. Before Mueller’s inquiry a year ago, the headlines were about whether President Trump had conspired – or ‘colluded’ – with the Kremlin; the news now is all about Trump’s revenge for what he calls a conspiracy ‘bigger than Watergate’. This Russia conspiracy has the intelligence agencies cooking up a fake story about collusion

Calum Isaacs

There’s nothing unfair about the way A-level results will be decided

This time tomorrow, I will be one of the hundreds of thousands of A-Level students across the country receiving their results. The hastily set-up grade allocation system – which will use an algorithm based on a pupil’s predicted and past grades, as well as a school’s recent exam history to give results – has generated a predictable amount of anger. But this frustration is misplaced. Even as a student from a comprehensive school, the type of school thought to be most disadvantaged by this method of allocating results, the chosen approach is the best we can hope for in these circumstances. After all, in the absence of exams what are the alternatives? One popular

Tuesday

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

The SNP’s Hate Crime Bill is turning the law into a culture war

Every time I re-read the SNP’s Hate Crime Bill, I become more convinced that its author, Humza Yousaf, is trying his hand at a Titania McGrath style satire of wokeness. Scotland’s justice secretary is woke but his draft legislation is such a smash-’n’-grab of every item on the wishlist of coercive progressivism that he can’t be entirely serious. It’s not everyone who can forge common cause between the Catholic Church and the National Secular Society, the Law Society and the Scottish Police Federation, so Yousaf is gifted in that regard. Now the Faculty of Advocates, Scotland’s answer to the Inns of Court, has issued a 35-page examination of the Bill,

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Have ministers really thought through their back to school strategy?

There’s something rather ominous about a government minister waving around the results of a yet-to-be-published study to underline that they’ve definitely got a tricky policy nailed down. Over the weekend, we saw the Prime Minister and Education Secretary both insisting that it would be fine for English schools to reopen in September because a piece of research by Public Health England showed that there was little evidence the virus is transmitted at school. But the Times today reports that officials working on the study are uncomfortable with the way their findings have been represented by ministers and that older children may spread the virus in the same way as adults do. It is almost

Matthew Scott

Rape prosecutions targets are a disastrous idea

Prominent amongst the achievements of the current government has been the establishment of a battalion of ministerial taskforces. We now have the culture renewal taskforce, the waste taskforce, the infrastructure delivery taskforce, the libraries taskforce, the university research and knowledge exchange sustainability taskforce and the roadmap taskforce (whose onerous task it is to coordinate no fewer than five sub-taskforces). First among equals of all of these is the criminal justice taskforce, established with the explicit purpose of restoring the Conservative Party’s reputation as the party of law and order. Chaired by the Prime Minister, members are reported to include Priti Patel, Robert Buckland and what is described as a ‘rolling

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Will England have to follow Scotland’s exams U-turn?

16 min listen

After a week of feet dragging, the Scottish government has today dramatically U-turned on downgrading exam results for 76,000 students. Those who received lower marks will now revert to the original predicted grades given by their teachers. Meanwhile, we are two days away from the English A-Level results being out, so will Gavin Williamson also reconsider the way results are moderated in England? Cindy Yu talks to Alex Massie and Kate Andrews. Also on the podcast: the latest ONS jobs figures.

John Connolly John Connolly

Nicola Sturgeon’s exam results U-turn

The Scottish government has U-turned on its decision to downgrade thousands of students’ exam results. Instead, pupils in Scotland who had their grades lowered by the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) will be able to rely on teacher assessments of their results, the Scottish Education Secretary John Swinney has announced. The U-turn comes after Nicola Sturgeon was forced into a humiliating apology yesterday for her administration’s handling of the exam results fiasco, which saw pupils in Scotland’s most deprived areas have their pass rate downgraded by more than students in wealthier areas. According to the Scottish children’s commissioner, grades had been lowered by taking into account the historic performance of a

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Why unemployment figures haven’t budged

Look past the headline statistics and you’ll see economic reality starting to infiltrate the labour market. Today’s employment figures from the Office for National Statistics mark very little movement from the previous quarter, with employment at 76.4 per cent (down 0.2 per cent on the previous quarter) and unemployment at 3.9 per cent (unchanged from the previous quarter, still hovering at a record-low level). Yet today also marks the biggest decrease in UK employment for a decade, since May 2009 in the wake of the financial crash. For many workers, being temporarily away from paid work is likely to become permanent How can this be? The official figures from the

Neil Scolding

Don’t rush to judgement on Boris’s handling of Covid-19

The verdict is in: Boris Johnson’s handling of coronavirus has been disastrous. Britain’s death toll remains one of the highest in the world, sick patients were discharged back into care homes at the height of the epidemic; and millions of pounds blown on useless PPE which can’t be used by NHS staff. But while it’s true that some things have gone wrong – as Boris himself has conceded – it’s also true that many of those loudly condemning Boris for the way he has dealt with the pandemic have form in criticising Boris. So are they right? And is it fair to blame Britain’s coronavirus blunders on the PM? The UK

Monday

Nick Tyrone Nick Tyrone

Starmer is falling into Boris’s trap on school reopenings

The National Education Union has issued 200 safety demands they want met before schools are to fully reopen in September. The response from many Tory MPs to this has been to describe the list as a ‘wreckers’ charter’, designed to make a return to the classroom this autumn practically impossible. Boris Johnson, meanwhile, is establishing getting kids back to school full-time once again in September as one of the guiding missions of his premiership. As the prime minister said, ‘now that we know enough to reopen schools to all pupils safely, we have a moral duty to do so.’ This is a wise move by Boris Johnson. Getting the classrooms

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

The UK’s incoherent Channel migrant strategy

I saw a little cloud no bigger than a man’s fist that was coming in from the sea, reported the servant of the Prophet Elijah to his master. In that Bible story, the incoming cloud was the sign of an impending rainstorm that the drought-hit land of Israel positively yearned for. The political storm brewing in response to the dinghies coming in from the sea on the south coast of England every day will bring no such relief to Boris Johnson and his ministers. Instead it will bring frustration and rage – the rage of voters witnessing the Government colluding in the wholesale exploitation of the asylum system by irregular

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Is the Preston lockdown justified?

13 min listen

Over the weekend, the city of Preston in the north of England was partially locked down. But on what basis? Cindy Yu talks to Kate Andrews and Fraser Nelson about whether the government is implementing local lockdowns based on the right metrics.

Ross Clark Ross Clark

How Covid spread in Sweden’s care homes

Why did Covid prove so lethal in care homes? Between 2 March and 12 June, there were 66,112 deaths of care home residents in England. Of these, 19,394 ‘involved’ Covid (in the Office of National Statistics’s own terminology) – 29.3 per cent of the total. As has been apparent from the beginning of this crisis, the risk of dying of Covid-19 sharply rises with age, so in that sense it is not surprising for deaths among care home residents to be high – but why has it proved so difficult to protect residents from the disease, not just in Britain but in many countries? It simply isn’t possible to isolate