Politics

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

Wednesday

James Snell

Could Ukraine go nuclear?

Should Ukraine have nuclear weapons? This is a question that was raised, a little insincerely, by President Zelensky recently as he discussed Nato membership and its alternatives. If Ukraine was not in Nato, Zelensky mused, the only alternative would be to look for protection of another kind: nuclear arms. A recent story in the Times said that Ukraine could make a ‘rudimentary’ nuclear bomb ‘within months’ if Donald Trump withdrew Ukraine’s military assistance. Russia has not used its nuclear weapons, but they have been the major reason no western power has directly intervened on Ukraine’s side. Ukraine had its own nuclear arsenal after the fall of the Soviet Union left it

Tuesday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The farmers’ revolt makes me proud to be British

My first thought upon seeing today’s revolt of the farmers was just how gloriously normal it looked. For more than a year London has been besieged by wild-eyed plummy leftists and fuming Gen X’ers screaming blue murder about the Jewish State. Now, for sweet relief, we get men and women in waxed jackets and sensible winter headwear taking to the streets, not to rage against a faraway land but to defend their own land from the grubby taxing of the Labour government. Now that’s proper protesting. It made me want a warm beer. A malady has infected the influential classes – we might call it farmerphobia What happened today was

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Why the farmers’ protest probably won’t work

Cold drizzle falling on tweed. That was the abiding image of today’s protest in Westminster which filled Whitehall with tens of thousands of indignant farmers. Just two tractors were admitted. One was parked outside Downing Street and the other stood by the women’s war memorial. Groups of farmers clambered onto the metal flanks and took snaps of themselves. Many held home-made placards denouncing ‘farmer harmer’ Starmer and ‘Rachel Thieves’, the chancellor. Some of the more paranoid demonstrators saw Labour as a historic threat to the working class. Everyone seemed obdurately upbeat despite the freezing rain ‘First the miners, then the farmers, next it’s you.’ The simplest signs appealed to common

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Clarkson blasts BBC in farmers’ protest interview

Thousands of farmers descended on Westminster this morning to protest the Labour government’s new inheritance tax plans. As protesters brandished placards and called for the Chancellor to row back on her proposals, some rather famous faces were seen in the crowds – with former Top Gear presenter and now Clarkson’s Farm host Jeremy Clarkson amongst those spotted. The BBC was quick to grab the TV icon for an interview on the issue – but the broadcaster may have got a little more than it bargained for… Refusing to play ball with the Beeb, Clarkson was fast to blast Victoria Derbyshire over her line of questioning. When the Newsnight host quizzed

Michael Gove

Farmers won’t be quick to forgive Labour

12 min listen

Thousands of farmers descended on Westminster today to protest the inheritance tax changes proposed in Labour’s Budget. Amidst a sea of tweed and wellington boots, speeches and support came from the likes of Kemi Badenoch, Ed Davey, Nigel Farage and Jeremy Clarkson. To what extent is this just a fringe issue that the government will be able to brush off? Or has the issue exposed a rural blind spot for Labour? And how lasting could the damage be? Katy Balls and Spectator editor Michael Gove discuss with James Heale.  But first, William Moore has been out and about getting the views of farmers directly from the protest… Produced by Patrick

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Mandelson urges PM to end ‘feud’ with Musk

Well, well, well. Picking a fight with Elon Musk is hardly the wisest decision Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour lot have made so far, especially given the new job the Twitter CEO has been awarded by Donald Trump. With Musk set to become co-leader of the president-elect’s Department of Government Efficiency, the UK Prime Minister might want to start figuring out how to repair relations with the US tech billionaire – and now even some on his own side are urging Starmer to make amends… Speaking on Times Radio’s How to win an election podcast today, Peter Mandelson has today urged the PM to ‘engage’ with Musk – ‘rapidly, directly, personally’.

Steerpike Steerpike

Full timeline: Rachel Reeves’s CV claims

Dear oh dear. Rachel Reeves has ended up in something of a pickle over her employment history, with the Chancellor under fire over whether she has been straight with the public about her economist background. Certainly after that Budget, Mr S is hardly surprised eyebrows are being raised… Pressure has been piling on Reeves for weeks, with questions arising around exactly how long she worked at various institutions, exactly what she worked as and whether she has been playing fast and loose with the truth of the matter. As the curious case of the Labour MP’s CV rumbles on, Steerpike has pulled together a list of exactly which of her

James Heale James Heale

Farmers won’t be quick to forgive Labour

Thousands of farmers descended on Westminster today to protest the government’s plans to raise inheritance tax. Hundreds of men, women and children in flat caps, tweed jackets and Wellington boots poured into Whitehall at lunchtime for a rally outside Downing Street. A series of speeches by the likes of Kemi Badenoch and Ed Davey culminated in an appearance by Top Gear star Jeremy Clarkson, before the farmers headed en masse to Parliament Square.  The cause of their anger was the change in Rachel Reeves’ budget which means that from April 2026, inherited agricultural assets worth more than £1 million will be liable to pay the tax at 20 per cent. The National

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Hong Kong’s death by a thousand cuts

Overnight, dozens of influential figures in Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement were sentenced to lengthy terms under the fiercest application of the city’s National Security Law so far. That these former legislators, activists, and legal academics have only been sentenced three years after their detention is typical of how the Chinese Communist party operates in Hong Kong, described by one academic to me as ‘death by a thousand cuts’. China hopes that, with incremental moves over time, its yoking of the city will be met with minimal international backlash. That calculation looks to have been proven right. The activists were accused of being involved in an unauthorised democratic primary in 2020,

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

When will Starmer see sense on small boats?

Labour’s approach to tackling the small boats crisis is based around a dichotomy so overly simplistic that it should not fool even an averagely intelligent child. Keir Starmer set it out in an article for the Sun newspaper in July: the people in the boats are innocent victims, the people arranging for the boats to be there for them to get into at the appointed hour are evil and must be hunted down. Starmer pledged to ‘smash the vile criminal gangs that profit from illegal immigration’. ‘Every week vulnerable people are overloaded onto boats on the coast of France. Infants, children, pregnant mothers – the smugglers do not care. They’re

Laurie Wastell

Don’t blame the police for our sinister free speech laws

The shocking police doorstepping of Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson last week has rightly sparked grave concern about the parlous state of freedom of speech in Britain. Sir Keir Starmer has now joined the leader of the opposition Kemi Badenoch in arguing that police should be concentrating on the physical crime increasingly blighting our towns rather than things that are said online. ‘Police the streets, not the tweets’, has become a popular refrain overnight. But why are the police trawling the internet for wrongthink in the first place? So far any discussion of this has been focused on non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs). Badenoch has called for the laws around NCHIs to be reviewed. Shadow home secretary Chris

Cristina Odone

Has Labour given up on solving the social care crisis already?

The Toto Washlet toilet: at the press of a button, a jet of clean warm water sprays your nether regions; press another button and warm air dries them. The sleek bowl, a masterpiece of Japanese technology, can be fixed at the right height for your use, ensuring easy access. At around £3,000 this stylish, ultramodern feature will transform your bathroom routine – and your carer’s life. Gone is the ignominy of wiping bottoms, gone the back-breaking hoisting of their charge onto the toilet. As their role is shorn of some of its more humbling aspects, the carer’s satisfaction improves, their status takes a giant leap forward, and they are free

Rakib Ehsan

Nigel Farage is right to talk about British Muslims

Nigel Farage claims that British Muslims are just as concerned, if not more, by the threat of Islamist extremism. The Reform leader said that ‘if you’re a Muslim family and the news is all about radical Islamists committing heinous acts, you’re going to think “wow, my neighbours may well be prejudiced against me because I’m Muslim’”.  Farage is determined to face down his critics Farage is right: after all, wicked crimes committed by a sliver of British Muslims – especially Islamist terrorist attacks – have the potential to fan the flames of prejudice towards the entire group. Farage, whose political image is centred on being a straight-talker when compared to the

Matthew Lynn

Britain should side with Trump over Europe

It may well be the biggest and most significant choice the Starmer administration will have to take. If Donald Trump decides to impose huge tariffs on China, potentially sparking a global trade war, the UK will have to decide whether it backs America, or tries to steer a softer path with the European Union. All the indications are that it will choose Europe. The trouble is, that will prove a huge mistake – the British economy is very different from the rest of Europe, and we will be thrown overboard as soon as it is convenient.  The contrast has ground to a halt, and it makes little sense to tie

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

I must stop hating politicians

Hate crimes, hate speech, hate groups… It is quite possible that we have less of these things today than ever before – they originated before our age, as anybody who’s read Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale can vouch – but we have never obsessed about them quite so much. What is hate in its 21st century, British sense? And why are some varieties of hate seemingly justified and good, and some appalling? In the public sphere, hate often seems ludicrously hyperbolic. A certain kind of person on the internet spent much of the last 14 years ranting about, and at, the Tories; appending the hashtag #GTTO (Get The Tories Out) to every passing thought

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Britain is eating itself to death

It is a fate which has been creeping up on Britain for years, but that doesn’t make it any the harder to bear when it becomes official. According to the OECD, we now have the lowest life expectancy in Western Europe. At 80.9, the average Brit now keels over more than three years earlier than the average Swiss (84.2), Spaniard (84.0) or Italian (83.8) – which are the top three countries in Europe. We have lower life expectancy than many significantly poorer countries such as Greece and Slovenia. We also live shorter lives than countries where assisted suicide is commonplace, like Belgium and the Netherlands. We also come out pretty

Steerpike Steerpike

Scottish Labour leader pushes back on winter fuel payment cut

While farmers gather in Westminster today to protest Labour’s Budget, it appears that north of the border Scottish Labour also have doubts about aspects of Rachel Reeves’s fiscal statement. Party leader Anas Sarwar has now vowed he will bring back the universal winter fuel payment for pensioners in a pushback against a cut brought about by, er, his own party in government. How very interesting… Speaking to the Daily Record, Sarwar today insisted: ‘A Scottish Labour government will reinstate the winter fuel payment for pensioners in Scotland.’ Never one to resist taking a pop at the current SNP administration, however, the Scottish Labour leader went on to add: The winter fuel

Benedict Rogers

The jailing of democracy activists marks a dark day for Hong Kong

Hong Kong has sentenced dozens of democracy protestors to years in prison, in the largest trial since Beijing’s National Security Law was imposed on the city in 2020. The imprisonment of the 45 former elected legislators and pro-democracy campaigners comes just a day after Keir Starmer met Xi Jinping, telling the Chinese leader that he wants a “strong UK-China relationship”. The draconian punishments that have been dished out today are a humiliation for the Prime Minister’s attempt to build rapport with Beijing. Student leader Joshua Wong was imprisoned for four years Among those who have been locked up are law professor Benny Tai, sentenced to ten years, journalist Gwyneth Ho,

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Could Trump save Ukraine?

One thousand days into Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, three facts seem to be evident. First, Russia is losing. It is using its soldiers like human ammunition, burning through its economic reserves and mortgaging its future to Beijing. Second, Ukraine is losing faster than Russia. Ukraine’s forces are beleaguered along a too-long front and increasingly reliant on what looks like press-ganging for recruits. The country’s energy infrastructure is 80 per cent damaged or destroyed. The third fact: Donald Trump’s election is throwing all the old assumptions about the war into doubt. It is a sign of the odd times in which we live… Chief of the Defence Staff Sir

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Banning Marine Le Pen from politics would be a grave mistake

Paris prosecutors last week recommended that Marine Le Pen be jailed and banned from public office for five years. The court also wants similar sentences for 24 members of the party who, along with Le Pen, are accused of misusing public funds. The prosecutor accuses Le Pen of using money intended for EU parliamentary aides to instead pay staff who worked for the party between 2009 and 2016. The defence’s argument is that it’s hard to differentiate between what constitutes EU work and party work as the two often overlap. The judges will study the evidence and a verdict is expected in early 2025. Le Pen was probably not surprised