Politics

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

Tuesday

Michael Evans

What is Zelensky’s ‘victory plan’?

President Zelensky is in the United States for his latest, possibly last, throw of the dice before the American election, in his attempt to prove that victory can be achieved against Ukraine’s Russian invaders. The redoubtable leader of Ukraine has brought what he calls his ‘victory plan’, which embraces every facet of his nation’s future. It includes his strategy for forcing President Putin to end the war and for the West to guarantee his beleaguered country’s long-term security and economic prosperity. It’s a grand vision which he will present to President Biden in the White House on Thursday. There are a number of conditions which are dependent on American support,

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Is Scottish Labour really back?

Labour’s first conference from government in 14 years might not be taking place against an ideal backdrop, with the Prime Minister and other ministers under scrutiny for accepting designer clobber and other goodies from party donors, but there is an unlikely glimmer of hope in the form of Anas Sarwar. Unlikely, that is, because Sarwar is leader of Scottish Labour and for almost a decade that great clunking juggernaut of electoral inevitability had sputtered to a halt and begun to rust. Reduced to just one seat north of the border and in a distant third place at Holyrood, the Scottish party had become an ominous lesson in how thoroughly Labour

Eliot Wilson

What is the point of Sue Gray?

Keir Starmer takes centre stage at Labour’s conference in Liverpool today, but whatever the Prime Minister has to say, the truth is that the event has been overshadowed. The Prime Minister must have hoped this would be a triumphant gathering bathed in the glow of a landslide election victory less than 12 weeks ago. Instead he will be disappointed: the decision to cut winter fuel payments has sparked fury and there is deep unease at the row over ministers accepting gifts from wealthy donors. The discovery that Sue Gray, the prime minister’s chief of staff, is paid more than her boss also continues to cause tension – not least because

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Will things really get better under Labour?

Labour’s honeymoon didn’t last long. Keir Starmer won power less than three months ago with a vow to ‘change Britain’. But the Labour government’s missteps over the last few weeks – not least the ongoing row about freebies – makes it hard to distinguish life under Labour to what came before. ‘Vanity snappers’, free posh frocks and taking thousands of pounds of hospitality tickets while telling voters that hard times are coming: what did Starmer expect voters were going to make of this politically toxic combination? Taking ‘unpopular decisions,’ as the Prime Minister pledged to do, sounds good, but the trick is to present these in a way that makes

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The hidden costs of furlough

It wasn’t long ago that a Conservative government was congratulating itself for achieving the lowest unemployment figures in half a century. This won’t wash any more, since the wider picture has become clear: while official unemployment figures remain low, figures for ‘economic inactivity’ have seen a sharp rise. We have 9.4 million of working age who are economically inactive – a number that has increased by one million since before the pandemic. It is just that only a small proportion of them show up in the unemployment figures. Many of the remainder – 2.8 million – are on long-term sickness benefits, a number that has risen by 700,000 since the

Monday

Lucy Dunn

This is a ten-year plan, says Labour health minister

Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government has made a lot of noise about the perilous state of the NHS, insisting the institution must ‘reform or die’. But while the rhetoric is right, what does Labour actually plan to do about it? There are ‘three shifts’, health minister Stephen Kinnock told Isabel Hardman at The Spectator’s ‘How to fix a broken NHS’ audience today: a change of focus from hospital care to a more community-centred approach, a move from a paper-based, analogue-style practice to better use of AI and digital technology, and a transition from dealing with sickness to emphasising prevention. But it’s not just the NHS that has to adapt and modernise: other facets

Steerpike Steerpike

Labour MP: regulate media to ‘make Starmer’s job easier’

To Liverpool, where all the wit and wisdom of Sir Keir’s Labour party is gathered. Starmer’s army has come to the city armed with bright ideas and insightful opinions — and no one more so than Bell Ribeiro-Addy.  The Labour MP for Clapham and Brixton Hill has been thinking long and hard about the woes her party has faced this last week — cronyism accusations, a freebie fiasco and anti-Sue Gray leaks, to name but a few — and has come up with a solution. To help Starmer better handle press scrutiny, Ribeiro-Addy has suggested the Prime Minister should consider, er, regulating the press. If you want to deal with

Steerpike Steerpike

Refugee Council’s closed door policy

When the Tories were in power, one of the harshest critics of the government’s Rwanda scheme to deport asylum seekers were the Refugee Council, who branded the plan, among other things, as ‘absurd and inhumane’ and ‘slam[ming] our door in the face of refugees in search of safety.’ Mr S was therefore curious to know what solutions to the asylum crisis would be proposed by the charity, at its event entitled ‘After Rwanda: Building an Asylum System That Has Public Support’, taking place at Labour conference this afternoon. Due to speak at the event was Home Office minister Angela Eagle, who would perhaps have been able to explain why Keir

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Who was the real audience for Rachel Reeves’s speech?

11 min listen

Chancellor Rachel Reeves has just finished her speech at Labour conference. After a brief interruption by hecklers, she addressed austerity, the pandemic, and winter fuel payments. How was the speech received, and who does it really speak to?  Elsewhere, Sue Gray’s lack of appearance in Liverpool hasn’t done anything to slow down discussion of recent controversy. James Heale is joined by Katy Balls and John McTernan, formerly Tony Blair’s Political Secretary.

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Reeves’s hypocrisy over freebie row

Back to Labour’s freebie row, which has spilled over into conference week. Sir Keir Starmer’s top team is desperate to get on top of the scandal, yet every time they try, they somehow manage to make things worse. Take Labour’s winter fuel payment-cutting Rachel Reeves, for example, who spoke to ITV News today about the fiasco. The Chancellor was quizzed about the whole affair on the airwaves after Labour’s popularity nosedived amid tales of extravagant gifting. First admitting to a cronyism problem that the party is ‘making sure we get a grip of’, Reeves then turned to defend a series of luxurious donations: What really grates is that people donate

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The plight of Hatun Tash shames Britain

There is a Christian preacher, a woman, who has suffered the most heinous persecutions. She has been chased by mobs, arrested, unlawfully jailed and even stabbed. Where did this hellish hounding of a follower of Christ occur? Afghanistan, perhaps? Somalia maybe? Actually it was right here, in Britain. An angry mob formed around her Her name is Hatun Tash. She is an ex-Muslim originally from Turkey. She’s now a Christian convert and colourful street preacher. She regularly gave impromptu sermons at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, where she’s been known to hold up a desecrated copy of the Koran while spreading the word of Christ. Her style is not to

James Heale James Heale

Is Labour going through its own Partygate?

11 min listen

Labour’s first party conference in government has opened under the shadow of the ‘Frockgate’ scandal, which continues to rumble on. James Heale and Katy Balls report from Liverpool on what the mood is like – and the big topics for the party this week. Produced by Oscar Edmondson and Cindy Yu.

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Has Labour got anything new to say at its party conference?

Have you learned anything about this Labour government from the conference speeches so far? Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ address to the hall in Liverpool this lunchtime was an announcement-free zone, and the same is true of all the other ministers who have got up to speak so far. All of them have followed the same format: attack the Tories and say things were so much worse when Labour came into office than expected, then move onto listing what the government is doing in very general terms, and then appeal to the party to work with the minister to get this done. This strategy allows the party to have a victory lap

Limor Simhony Philpott

Can Israelis stomach another war?

It was late in 1997 when I got to a small military base on the border between Israel and Lebanon. Straight out of training, my welcome to the base involved sitting in the war room wearing a helmet and a bulletproof vest, hoping that the barrage of rockets flying over our heads, courtesy of Hezbollah, wouldn’t hit. It was time of constant clashes with Hezbollah in south Lebanon. Casualties were commonplace. I’ve been to too many funerals and have seen too many parents bury their sons – my friends, peers and brothers in arms – than I’d care to remember. It was also a time when the Israeli public grew

Matthew Lynn

We don’t need Rachel Reeves’ ‘industrial strategy’

It is not hard to imagine what will be in Rachel Reeves’ ‘industrial strategy’. There will be lots of ‘green industries’, along with plenty of ‘cutting-edge technologies’, all designed to nurture ‘national champions’ in the ‘sectors of the future’. And presumably Lord Alli, the Labour donor who has been footing the bill for Keir Starmer’s wardrobe, will be put in charge of overseeing all the details. Alongside the tax rises in the Budget planned for next month, the Chancellor’s promise of a full-blown industrial strategy is a troubling prospect. ‘Around the time of the Budget we will publish a green paper on a new industrial strategy focused on driving and

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

It’s no surprise nurses want a bigger pay rise

Just as the Chancellor Rachel Reeves was talking in her conference speech about the importance of resolving public sector strikes, the Royal College of Nursing announced that its members had rejected their pay deal. Nurses have voted two thirds against the 5.5 per cent pay rise, and the College published a letter to Health Secretary Wes Streeting warning that ‘this outcome shows their expectations of government are far higher’. The timing was no accident. It was almost at the very same moment that Reeves was arguing that the government needed to make pay offers to stop the strikes so that public services could run properly again. The RCN’s ballot underlines

Steerpike Steerpike

Wes Streeting’s surprising praise for Reform

After the general election this year, Nigel Farage argued that he was now the leader of the opposition, after his Reform party took more than six million votes, and came second in swathes of seats across the north of England.  The Conservatives furiously disagree with him of course, especially given the Tory party’s higher vote share and seats – but one person at least seems to subscribe to Farage’s way of thinking.  Speaking at an Ipsos Mori event at Labour conference on Monday, Health Secretary Wes Streeting pointed out that the Conservative party is currently in a fight for its survival and that ‘we are kind of due’ the sort

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

The tragic cost of Japan’s floods

Yet another natural disaster has struck in Japan as floods and landslides in the Noto peninsula, precipitated by ‘unprecedented’ rainfall, have killed seven (according to the state broadcaster NHK) with 10 people missing. As usual, these numbers are expected to rise. The Ishikawa area was pounded on Saturday with the heaviest continuous rainfall (540 millimetres in 72 hours in the city of Wajima) since records began. One resident Akemi Yamashita described scenes as ‘heart-breaking’ with the floods, which she saw rising quickly to half the height of her car as she drove through town, like ‘something from a movie’. This latest tragedy is a reminder of how treacherous, climatically and

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Who was the real audience for Rachel Reeves’s speech?

Rachel Reeves had to deal with unexpected turbulence in her party conference speech, after anti-Israel protesters interrupted her. But that was the easy bit, since she just opted to go for the Labour line for stage disruption: ‘We are a changed Labour party that represent working people – not the party of protest’. That response received applause in the hall, where delegates regularly cheered on the first female chancellor. The harder task for Reeves today was finding a way to hold the line on difficult spending decisions, while also striking a more upbeat tone than the miserable-ism that has dominated the past few weeks. Reeves made it clear she would

Steerpike Steerpike

Starmer’s biographer slams ‘office politics’ of freebie fiasco

It’s day two of Labour conference and Sir Keir Starmer’s freebie fiasco still hasn’t gone away. Over a week since it transpired that clothing donations to Lady Starmer hadn’t initially been declared properly, revelations that the Prime Minister has received over £107,000 in donations since 2019 have caused outrage among the party’s voter base – and its own MPs. Corbynista Diane Abbott slammed the party’s top team for being ‘in the pocket of millionaires’, while Labour parliamentarians have blasted Starmer’s ‘double standards’ over the issue. Talk about trouble in paradise… But not everyone believes the matter deserves media attention. At a Labour conference fringe event today, Sir Keir’s own biographer