Politics

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

Wednesday

23 Oct 2024

Will the Chancellor widen the public-private pension gap?

Could Rachel Reeves really be so brazen as to lumber private sector employers with having to pay national insurance contributions (NICs) on their employees’ pension contributions – but to spare public sector employers the same burden? That is what is being reported this morning. It has been suggested that, in next week’s Budget, the Chancellor will announce the end of an exemption for private sector employers, which currently ensures employers don’t pay NICs on pension contributions. At the same time, Reeves is proposing to instantly compensate public sector bodies so they are effectively spared from have to bear the burden. This would be crass for two reasons. Firstly it would

Ed West and Niall Ferguson

Kemi vs Robert: who would be the best Tory leader?

Ed West on Robert Jenrick It’s a testimony to the sheer unpopularity of Keir Starmer’s government that only three months after voters gave the Conservatives their biggest electoral kicking in two centuries, Labour has already lost its polling lead. Indeed, it has achieved this so quickly that its opponents still don’t even have a leader. But as much as Labour has failed to impress, its dire poll numbers reflect a wider trend across the western world, where political leaders are now roundly hated almost everywhere. This suggests something more profound is going on. If politicians are disliked, it’s in part because western countries are so badly governed, although Britain seems

Eliot Wilson

What’s the point of the ‘gay ban’ veteran compensation?

Veterans who were dismissed from the armed forces because of their sexuality have criticised the government for the inadequacy of its compensation scheme. With a fund capped at £50 million and potentially as many as 4,000 eligible to seek redress, the average payment would be only £12,500. Military charities have dismissed this as ‘inadequate and unacceptably low’, lacking ‘the sense of justice these veterans deserve’. This is not an issue from the distant past. When I was young, it was taken as read that openly gay people did not serve in the military. That was not to say we thought the armed forces were 100 per cent heterosexual – the

Steerpike

Labour-linked censorship group plans to ‘kill Musk’s Twitter’

Donald Trump’s campaign has submitted an official complaint accusing Labour of breaking US electoral law over the secondment of volunteers, just days after Nigel Farage accused Labour of ‘election interference’ after party advisers headed stateside to canvass for Kamala Harris. Now leaked documents thought to have originated from a Labour-linked group suggest the lefty lot may also be looking to attack Elon Musk’s Twitter as part of their pro-Kamala efforts. Good heavens… Leaked documents thought to be drawn up by the Centre for Countering Digital Hate – founded by Sir Keir Starmer’s now-chief of staff Morgan McSweeney – have been posted on Paul Thacker and Matt Taibbi’s Disinformation Chronicle substack. The files reportedly

Toby Young

Why is Labour axing the Tories’ most successful education policy?

By any measure, the free schools programme has been a resounding success. If you judge schools by how much progress their pupils make between the ages of 11 and 16, free schools occupy the top five positions in the most recent league table and eight of the top ten. That’s pretty remarkable when you consider free schools comprise less than 3 per cent of schools in England and Wales. A free school – King’s maths school – was the top performing sixth form in the country for the ninth year in a row in 2024 and in 2022 was designated ‘best sixth form college of the decade’ by the Sunday Times. Why is Phillipson targeting the most

Freddy Gray

The British are coming! Labour’s comedy of errors in the US election

Our hapless Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, can’t even fly to Samoa without another international British embarrassment breaking out. The latest is an angry accusation from Donald Trump’s campaign that Labour is committing the crime of ‘election interference’ in the United States. ‘The British are coming!’ screamed a typically camp Trump-Vance official press release last night. The campaign denounced Britain’s ‘far-left’ governing party for attempting to subvert democracy by sending almost 100 of its activists across the pond to sway American voters. ‘The flailing Harris-Walz campaign is seeking foreign influence to boost its radical message – because they know they can’t win the American people,’ said Trump’s campaign manager Susie Wiles. ‘The Harris

Jawad Iqbal

The mystery of the missing Sue Gray

What has become of Sue Gray, the Prime Minister’s former Downing Street chief of staff, who was rather unceremoniously removed from her official duties earlier this month? At the time of her defenestration, there was much soothing talk about how she was moving to an important new role as Keir Starmer’s envoy on a new council of nations and regions. This body, according to official briefings, is intended to reset relationships and boost growth in every part of the UK. The new job was supposed to start immediately as part of a seamless transition that saw her replaced as chief of staff by Morgan McSweeney, who oversaw Labour’s victorious election

Yascha Mounk

Can America keep being the world’s policeman?

America is retreating from the world stage. The country’s senile president appears absent from the dramatic events unfolding in the Middle East. Joe Biden urged Israel not to go into Rafah; to abstain from taking on Hezbollah; and to forgo retaliatory strikes against Iran. At every stage, the Israeli government followed its own counsel and is now reportedly ignoring his administration ahead of next month’s election. Biden’s term in office has been marked by similar haplessness elsewhere in the region. He will be remembered above all for America’s ignoble and chaotic retreat from Afghanistan, which left local contractors and translators in the lurch and allowed the Taliban to reimpose their

Tuesday

22 Oct 2024

Steerpike

Gang member jailed for kidnap and torture released by Labour

The second round of Labour’s early prison release scheme saw around 1,100 inmates released on Tuesday – and Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood is insistent that she wants this emergency release to be the last. As Mr S wrote earlier, a rather interesting range of jailbirds were let out early today – including convicted drug dealers, violent assaulters and identity thieves. But, in a shocking turn of events, it transpires that a London criminal jailed for the kidnap and torture of a 16 year old boy has also been let out early under the scheme. Isaac Donkoh – a gang member and drill music artist also known as Young Dizz –

Freddy Gray

Why is Trump winning Arab American votes?

Some experts believe that Donald Trump is on course to win a bigger share of the African American vote in 2024 than any previous Republican presidential candidate. You can’t trust experts. A number of highly-informed pundits made the same prediction in 2020 – and Joe Biden ended up winning 90 per cent of black voters that year. Kamala Harris, as the vice president of an unpopular administration, may struggle to reach that number. Yet Democratic strategists remain quietly confident that she’ll achieve something close. Team Harris-Walz is possibly more concerned about another, smaller subsection of the American electorate. According to a new Arab News/YouGov poll, among Arab Americans, Trump has a

Katy Balls

Michael Gove on prisons: Starmer is in the position of Bane

14 min listen

Another 1100 prisoners have been released today through the early-release scheme. How has this measure landed? With the news that former Conservative minister David Gauke will lead a review of prison sentencing, new Spectator editor Michael Gove joins Natasha Feroze and Katy Balls to discuss Labour’s long term strategy. Can Labour learn lessons from America? Produced by Megan McElroy and Patrick Gibbons. Join The Spectator’s Deputy Editor Freddy Gray for a special live recording of Americano on Thursday 24 October. You can buy tickets at www.spectator.co.uk/electionspecial.

James Heale

Andrew Bailey’s pessimistic pre-Budget warning

With a week to go until Rachel Reeves’s first Budget, Andrew Bailey has today sounded a note of gloomy caution. Speaking at a Bloomberg event in New York, the Governor of the Bank of England channelled the mythological Cassandra, whose warnings were accurate, but ignored. He told his audience today that ‘Cassandra was fated by the god Apollo to utter true prophecies but not to be believed’. Bailey’s meant to remind the audience that memories of financial crises recede over time. He warned against ‘the trap of complacency’, saying: I can observe this happening with the global financial crisis fifteen years or so on. I do get people telling me that

Michael Evans

Joe Biden wants Bibi to be careful

On 20 June 2019, President Donald Trump rescinded an order he had given for a military attack on Iran in retaliation for the shooting down of a long-range Global Hawk surveillance drone. He decided that a missile strike on Iranian military bases (which might cause casualties) would have been disproportionate. Global Hawk was unmanned. No American had died. The bombers, already en route, were summoned back to base. No one could suggest that Benjamin Netanyahu is facing the same decision. The circumstances are entirely different. There is no moral equivalence. On 1 October Iran launched nearly 200 ballistic missiles on Israel, and Netanyahu has vowed to respond with a significant retaliatory

Iain Macwhirter

What’s John Swinney got against two-spirit Scots?

You may have thought that the Scottish government had abandoned gender metaphysics after the collapse of the ‘Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill’ last year. Think again. The SNP government appears to be heading back down the non-binary rabbit hole. This week it issued official guidance to public bodies suggesting that they should record public identities under no fewer than 24 gender categories. These include, in no particular order, genderqueer, genderfluid, bigender, androgynous, non-conforming, pangender, and neutral. Do they never learn? The LGBTQIA+ community will no doubt be worried about the absence of several gender that have featured prominently in the literature on non-binary identity, such as ‘two-spirit’. The cancellation of the two-spirit people

David Shipley

More early releases won’t solve the prison crisis

September’s tranche of early releases did not go as smoothly as the government might have hoped. Footage of delighted prisoners celebrating outside jails, or saying ‘I’m a lifelong Labour voter now’ will, no doubt, resurface in Reform’s local election campaign videos in the spring. Then there was Amari Ward, the man who allegedly sexually assaulted a woman within minutes of his release (a charge he denies), and the subsequent discovery that he, and 36 other men who’d been jailed for breaching restraining orders, had been released in error. Compounding this sense of disorder was the discovery that Serco, the Ministry of Justice’s outsourced ‘tagging’ provider, had been failing to tag

Steerpike

Starmer’s top five charmers released from prison

The second round of prison inmate releases is taking place today, with over one thousand people walking free from their institutions early. The jailbirds have been warned to be on their best behaviour this time – after the first release resulted in gleeful criminals popping champagne corks over freedom day coming early. But despite warnings to keep the celebrations to a minimum, a number of flash cars – including a Rolls Royce Cullinan, one of the most expensive supercars in the world – have graced prison grounds as families and friends pick up prisoners. Not that the Prime Minister has been all that thrilled by events. Sir Keir Starmer has

Steerpike

The five worst takes on the Chris Kaba case

Yesterday brought the news that the police officer accused of murdering Chris Kaba in 2022 had been acquitted. Racial justice groups have long criticised the Met police over the matter and on Monday evening, protestors once again took to the streets outside the Old Bailey to demand justice for the 24-year-old. But protestations about the case were rather premature, not least because the full detail on Kaba’s run-ins with the police only became public today – and now politicians and activists alike have been left rather embarrassed by the revelations… Kaba’s criminal history has been released today – and it rather changes the narrative. It turns out that the 24-year-old

Cristina Odone

Kemi is right about absent fathers

Kemi Badenoch MP keeps being compared to Margaret Thatcher. But the truth is she has taken on the persona of a different, though equally familiar, character this week: the boy who calls out the Emperor with no clothes. In this case the Tory leadership contender is saying the inconvenient truth that absent fathers are compromising their children’s future. Speaking to the Sunday Times, Badenoch argued that: ‘I think we ran into trouble decades ago when we were very critical of single parenthood. It sounded as if we were always talking about single mums. Where are the dads? Why are the dads not there? Why are they not looking after their

Francis Pike

India will never join China’s anti-western alliance

On the 15 November Xi Jinping will mark the 12th anniversary of his becoming general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party – the sixth paramount leader in China since Mao Zedong established communist rule in 1949. One of the consistent features of Xi’s rule has been China’s hostility to India. People’s Liberation Army incursions across Indian borders became a given. So, the announcement yesterday that India and China have reached a Himalayan border agreement comes as something of a surprise. Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar announced: We reached an agreement on patrolling [the border], and with that, we have gone back to where the situation was in 2020, and we can say…

Katy Balls

Keir Starmer’s prisons dilemma

Another month, another batch of prisoners released early. Today marks the release of the second tranch of offenders as part of the government’s plan to ease overcrowding in jails in England and Wales. The 1,100 prisoners released on licence today have sentences of five years or more but will have spent just 40 per cent of their time behind the bars. However, ministers are keen to stress that the scheme excludes those convicted of terrorism, sex crimes or serious violence. The Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood has been out on the media round this morning attempting to get on the front foot. The line from the government is that they have