Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.
31 min listen
Freddy Gray is joined by Oliver Bateman, historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. They discuss how important Pennsylvania will be during the election, the mail-in ballot system, and the state of the race.
43 min listen
This week: who’s on top in the Conservative leadership race? That’s the question Katy Balls asks in the magazine this week as she looks ahead to the Conservative Party conference. Each Tory hopeful will be pitching for the support of MPs and the party faithful ahead of the next round of voting. Who’s got the most to lose, and could there be some sneaky tactics behind the scenes? Katy joins the podcast to discuss, alongside Conservative peer Ruth Porter, who ran Liz Truss’s leadership campaign in 2022. We also include an excerpt from the hustings that Katy conducted with each of the candidates earlier this week. You can find the
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 September, when the Russian Security Council held a meeting to discuss Russia’s nuclear deterrence posture. The Russian President said that the doctrine will be updated so that if a non-nuclear state attacks with the cooperation of a nuclear state, it will be seen as a joint attack. And Russia will consider a nuclear strike once: ‘we receive
12 min listen
Events have moved on fast since Labour conference with the mounting prospect of ‘all out war’ in the Middle East. This comes after reports that Israel are preparing a ground invasion of Lebanon to push back Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah. What levers are at the disposal of the international community to de-escalate this very volatile situation? Also today, Keir Starmer’s impressive performance on the international stage risks being undermined by the freebies story which continues to rumble on. What’s the latest? Oscar Edmondson speaks to James Heale and Michael Stephens, senior fellow at RUSI. Produced by Oscar Edmondson.
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 platform to slam Starmer’s top team throughout their first party conference in power – and the Corbynista is pulling no punches. First going for the main man himself, Abbott posted a grainy photo of Sir Keir at the weekend as the frockgate saga ramped up, accusing the PM’s top team of being ‘in the pocket
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 and the roofs of private residences. Hezbollah in turn fired long-range missiles for the first time, including a half-tonne monster that targeted the Tel Aviv region. However, just days into the higher-intensity conflict, suddenly the media this morning was full of reports of an imminent ceasefire. What happened? This most recent round of conflict began
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, antisocial behaviour is often rewarded. From my time in Wandsworth I think of the man who beat his elderly cellmate so badly that the man was hospitalised while his attacker was rewarded with a single cell, and the most desirable job in the gardens. Another man trashed his cell and was placated with an Xbox.
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 many rich individuals to leave the country that, even with higher taxes, the government will be the net loser. If that is what the OBR concludes it will blow a hole in Rachel Reeves’ budget next month. Ending non-dom status was one of the handful of planned tax rises which the government was prepared to
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 Act of 1991 ended it due to preference for a more risk-based approach, remission was a central feature of prisoners’ lives. Good behaviour could earn you days off your sentence up to one third of time you were due to serve. The penalty of misbehaviour was lost remission. The prison population in 1991 was about
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 much derided hate crime Act look like a manifesto for free speech by comparison. The proposed law, first introduced by Justice Minister Helen McEntee in November 2022, was always a divisive piece of legislation. It was condemned by many because it looked as if it been drafted by a committee of rabid social justice warriors
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 Alli – with the Labour peer said to be the ‘best friend’ of the donor. How curious… McDonagh registered the £1.2 million loan from Alli in March last year, stating that it was an ‘interest free loan to bet repaid on the sale of the home I share with a family member’. She added: ‘The
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, Shabana Mahmood, told the Labour conference that she wanted to reduce the number of female prisoners and announced the setting up of a Women’s Justice Board under prisons minister, Lord Timpson, to see how this could be done. For every woman locked up in this country, there are something like 25 men Sounds good? Possibly.
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 stick to the conditional tense when talking about the charges; his interlocutor made it sound as if Le Pen was guilty until proven innocent. She will be joined the dock in Paris next week by 26 other members of the National Rally, including Louis Aliot, the mayor of Perpignan. They are accused of the misappropriation
Next month’s Budget tax raids on capital have provoked a festival of creative doom-mongering on the fringes of Labour’s conference as well as in the columns of the business press. Most frequently voiced is the prediction that the 2,000 or so denizens of London’s private equity community who benefit from the ‘carried interest’ tax wheeze will pack their Louis Vuitton bags into their Chelsea tractors and form a convoy down the M20 towards continental tax havens. A recent addition to the litany is a warning from the London Stock Exchange chief Dame Julia Hoggett that the ‘ongoing viability’ of the Aim market for smaller companies is at risk if the
As a peer who hates publicity, Lord Alli might have been expected to dodge the Labour conference – given the near-constant coverage of ‘donorgate’. Former staff talk of birthday cards and Christmas gifts, of Prada bags and Paul Smith shirts Yet there he was, clad in his 1990s telly executive uniform of white trainers and dark suit, nonchalantly strolling around Liverpool. It was public confirmation of what Alli’s friends say privately: that brushes with the press won’t deter him from bankrolling the party he has financed for 25 years. Alli, who is thought to be worth £200 million, has found himself the unwelcome centre of attention over his gifts to
There is worryingly little time left to make the appropriate preparations for Bridget Phillipson’s official birthday, on 19 December. As far as I am aware, no venue has been booked as yet – and given that the minister for women and incalculable self entitlement has her birthday slap bang in the middle of the festive season, finding a suitable place may prove problematic. The Royal Albert Hall, for example, is already booked out for an evening with Guy Barker’s Big Band Christmas, but I dare say that if pressure was brought to bear this could be junked so that the celebrations for Bridget’s 41st might be housed in a suitable
Are the Conservatives in a fit state to choose a new leader? The party that gathers in Birmingham next week needs to face a difficult fact: no matter how bad things are, they may become a lot worse. The party has lost, but not learned. They preach liberty while preparing to vote for a smoking ban. They are wedded to a net-zero agenda that forces up the cost of living. The difficulty is that all four candidates for the leadership are deeply compromised by the biggest mistakes of the past few years. On the issue of lockdown – perhaps the most damaging policy ever inflicted on this country by its
In recent years, the Conservative party conference has become something of an irrelevance. Often it is little more than a networking event, filled with dull speeches, all carefully stage-managed by No. 10. But next week’s gathering in Birmingham will be one of those rare Tory conferences that decide the party’s future. The leadership race has gone on for so long that the conference will be a political talent contest, with the four remaining leadership candidates – Kemi Badenoch, Tom Tugendhat, James Cleverly and Robert Jenrick – setting out their stalls. ‘We know each other’s lines so well now that we could imitate each other,’ says one leadership contestant. ‘There is definite
As the four candidates prepare to make their pitch at the Conservative party conference in Birmingham, we quizzed them about their ideas and ambitions. Why did the Tories lose the general election? JAMES CLEVERLY: We lost the ear of the British public. They stopped listening to us. We over-promised and under–delivered on a load of issues so our election promises were met with real cynicism. People had literally closed their ears – and minds – to our arguments. Even if we had had the best policy platform in the world, people weren’t willing to give us the time of day. If we make fewer promises but make sure that we
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 a ‘credible and irreversible path to a viable Palestinian state alongside a safe and secure state of Israel’. He added: ‘That is the only way to provide security and justice to both Israelis and Palestinians.’ He also turned on Russia, saying he didn’t know how the country could ‘show its face in the building’. This
