Politics

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

Thursday

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

Can Rachel Reeves woo Trump’s team – without alienating the EU?

The government is on a charm offensive in Washington. Tonight, Britain’s ambassador to the US, Lord Mandelson, will host officials from Donald Trump’s government and American business figures at the British embassy. Tomorrow, the Chancellor will meet her counterpart, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Rachel Reeves is looking to permanently end the punishing 25 per cent tariff on British cars and 10 per levy on other exports. Reeves has given an interview to one of Trump’s favourite channels, Newsmax, in which she was asked about her upcoming meeting with Bessent. In response, Reeves said she believed ‘there was a deal to be done’ and that both Keir Starmer’s and Trump’s governments

James Snell

I’ve had enough of crimewave Britain

Knife crime, shoplifting and fraud is on the rise in Britain. Fraud was up by a third in the last year, according to figures released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which also reveal a 50 per cent increase (to around 483,000 incidents) in theft. Shoplifting offences rose by 20 per cent in 2024 – reaching the highest figure in over 20 years. What’s shocking about this tidal wave of crime is that it is hardly surprising. Anyone who has lived in England over the last decade or so cannot fail to have noticed that our streets feel more dangerous. Where I live in Essex, there have been more stabbings. Many people

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Fact check: is Ed Miliband right to say tax rises don’t affect gas prices?

It’s official: subjecting oil and gas companies to a 78 pence tax rate (which is corporation tax plus the government’s windfall tax) doesn’t increase energy prices in the UK. That is what Ed Miliband told us on Sky News this morning, so it must be true. He will no doubt be hoping that we don’t look at the figures published by his own department which show that gas consumers in Britain pay an average of 10.17 pence per kilowatt-hour while US consumers – where the oil and gas industry is encouraged rather than taxed to near-extinction – pay the equivalent of 4.04 pence. Sky's @WilfredFrost questions the Energy Secretary Ed

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

Who do voters trust most on the economy?

12 min listen

Chancellor Rachel Reeves has been in Washington D.C. this week at the IMF’s spring meetings, and will meet US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tomorrow. Cue the ususal talk of compromising on chlorinated chicken. Not so, reports the Spectator’s economics editor Michael Simmons, who explains that Reeves may offer a reduction in long-standing tariffs already imposed on American cars. But, it’s been a bad week of economic news for the Chancellor as the IMF downgraded the UK’s growth forecast.  We’re also one week away from the local elections – Starmer’s first big test since last year’s general election. The economy isn’t usually the number one issue at local elections but, as More in

Matthew Lynn

Can Rachel Reeves get a US trade deal over the line?

As the Chancellor Rachel Reeves flies into Washington for a series of high-level meetings, there is lots of spin from the Treasury that she is about to tie up a trade deal with the United States. The plan is that it would save the UK from tariffs and may even give a much needed boost to the British economy. But all the evidence we have tells us that Reeves is a terrible negotiator who constantly overestimates her own abilities. It is far more likely she will blow the deal at the last minute.  It hardly sounds like a very promising meeting. On Friday, Reeves is due to meet with President

Catriona Stewart

Swinney’s ‘anti-Reform’ summit didn’t achieve much

John Swinney’s cross-party civic gathering – or ‘anti-Reform summit’ – met in Glasgow on Wednesday, with political party leaders from across Holyrood prepared to discuss how to rid Scotland of the hard right. Yet what began as a ‘Democratic Resilience Summit’ rather backfired for those politicians keen to push back against Reform UK’s surge in Scotland – as it turned into a chance for Nigel Farage’s party to enjoy free publicity. Some 50 organisations from across civic society – including religious and third sector groups as well as every Holyrood party leader except Russell Findlay of the Tories – met in the centre of Glasgow to agonise over how to

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

What the exploding DHL packages tell us about the Kremlin

The unfolding tale of incendiary devices planted in DHL packages across Europe not only highlights the dangers of Moscow’s campaign of direct measures against the West. It also suggests that, contrary to more alarmist claims, it is possible for such threats to be deterred and limited. In July of last year, a package bound for Britain ignited in the section of Leipzig airport devoted to DHL cargo freight. Another caught fire later that month in a DHL depot in Birmingham. Two more were found in Poland, one of which set light to a warehouse in Warsaw, while the other was successfully intercepted. After the US government’s quiet intervention, Moscow did

Steerpike Steerpike

Siddiq hits back at Bangladesh over arrest warrant

Back to the curious case of Tulip Siddiq, Labour’s former anti-corruption minister who has been issued with an arrest warrant by Bangladesh over, um, corruption. Earlier this month, the Hampstead and Highgate MP was slapped with the warrant after the country’s Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) submitted a criminal charge sheet against the politician over investigations involving her aunt, and Bangladesh’s recently deposed prime minister, Sheikh Hasina. Now Siddiq’s lawyers have pushed back, accusing the country’s authorities of failing to uphold the MP’s ‘fundamental right to justice’. And so it rumbles on… Siddiq’s legal representatives blasted Bangladesh’s ACC for having ‘failed to provide a single piece of documentary evidence’ against her after

Ross Clark Ross Clark

No, Ed Miliband: zonal pricing won’t cut energy bills

Is Ed Miliband going to announce a move towards a zonal electricity market, where wholesale prices would vary between regions of Britain? It would appear to be on cards following the Energy and Climate Secretary’s interview on the Today programme in which he said he was considering the idea. Miliband’s apparent support for the plan follows intense lobbying by Greg Jackson, CEO of Octopus Energy as well as support from the National Energy System Operator (NESO), the new government-owned company which oversees the grid. However, zonal pricing is bitterly opposed by others in the energy industry, including Chris O’Shea, the generously-moustached CEO of Centrica, and Dale Vince, CEO of Electrocity

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Keir Starmer is a shallow man

Keir Starmer thinks ‘this is the time now to lower the temperature’ on the gender debate. To ‘move forward’. To ‘conduct this debate with the care and compassion that it deserves’. That is what he said at Prime Minister’s Questions. What a shallow, hollow man he is. Now is the time to lower the temperature? Not when women’s meetings were being cancelled, their proceedings disrupted, and their attendees attacked? Not when Kathleen Stock was being hounded out of Sussex University, Maya Forstater lost her employment contract, or Jo Phoenix was unfairly constructively dismissed from the Open University? Not when David Lammy called gender critics ‘dinosaurs’, Angela Rayner signed a charter

James Heale James Heale

The secret behind Reform’s local election campaign

It is an irony of Brexit that, since we left the EU, British politics has become more European. The local elections on Thursday will put another nail in the coffin of the two-party system that has dominated the UK for 100 years. Labour and the Conservatives now poll a combined 45 per cent of the vote: half the country want someone different. ‘Welcome to the age of five-party politics,’ says one Tory candidate. Alongside 1,600 council wards up for election, there are four metro mayoralties too. The reintroduction of first-past-the-post means that contests in the west of England, Cambridgeshire and Hull are four-horse races. Ten years ago, Ed Miliband’s ‘35

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The hidden violence behind the trans ruling

It is ten months since the then merely aspirant education secretary Bridget Phillipson addressed the important issue of where transgender people should go for a quick slash. Bridget was very much of the opinion that if you had a gender recognition certificate, then you should make for the cubicle which matched with whatever it said on that piece of paper, because it’s the ‘humane approach’. She added: ‘But I would expect that if you were someone that had gone through that formal process of recognition you are, to all intents and purposes, for legal purposes, regarded as being in a different gender, regardless of the sex into which you were

Wednesday

Daniel Thorpe

Istanbul was disgracefully unprepared for the earthquake

An earthquake of 6.2 magnitude hit Istanbul in the early afternoon. Lasting around 20 seconds, the city was sent into panic, with most of the residents rushing to the streets, looking for some of the rare open areas in the densely built quarters.  Although no deaths or major damage have been reported so far, the unpreparedness of the city was obvious from the first moment. I arrived at the closest designated assembly zone – the courtyard of a mosque – and found the gates locked. When the local imam finally turned up, he was not even aware that it was an assembly zone. His confidence that the Fatih quarter is

Yossi Melman

Netanyahu is facing a brewing military rebellion in Israel

On Monday this week, Ronen Bar, head of Israel’s security service Shin Bet, challenged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to fire him in the country’s Supreme Court, blocking it – at least temporarily. He was supported in his claim by a number of civic groups and former military generals, including the former senior air commander Nimrod Sheffer, stating that Netanyahu wanted to get rid of him after suspecting that Bar was not loyal to him. The Shin Bet chief provided the court with classified documents showing that Netanyahu wished to turn the agency into his private secret police, like those in some dictatorial regimes. Bar also wrote in his

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

What’s going on with Pete Hegseth?

22 min listen

Freddy Gray is joined by Spectator US Editor-at-Large Ben Domenech to discuss defence secretary Pete Hegseth, whose job appears to be on the line. They explore Hegseth’s outsider status in Washington, his clashes with both hawkish and dovish factions, and the growing tensions over U.S. policy on Iran and Israel. 

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Why Trump’s team snubbed the London Ukraine peace talks

Has the moment arrived when Donald Trump abandons the last iota of his support for Ukraine in the war against Russia? Taking to his social media platform, Truth, the American President appeared to suggest so. Referring to his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump wrote, ‘He can have peace, or he can fight for another three years before losing the country’. The latest trigger for Trump’s ire against Zelensky appears to be the Ukrainian President’s firm rejection of any peace deal that included Ukraine having to concede Crimea – illegally annexed by Russia in 2014 – as legal Russian territory. ‘Ukraine does not legally recognise the occupation of Crimea. There’s nothing

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

PMQs: Kemi had Keir on the ropes

Women and Sir Keir Starmer. That was the issue that dominated a fiery PMQs today. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch asked Sir Keir if he’d been ‘wrong to say trans women are women.’  His bland but careful answer expressed a wish that ‘service providers’ should obey the ruling. Then he loftily advised the house to ‘lower the temperature.’  Kemi noted his failure to admit that he was wrong. And she accused him of targeting Rosie Duffield, ‘the brave member for Canterbury,’ and of ‘hounding her out of the Labour party for telling the truth.’ Would he apologise? No chance. Sir Keir boasted that Labour’s approach is to ‘treat everyone with respect’

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Parliament’s moral posturing on Israel is delusional

What’s the point of parliament’s foreign affairs committee holding mock-trial style hearings about Israel’s defensive war against Iranian-backed terror groups? Do its members genuinely believe that such performative enquiries contribute to peace in the Middle East? One wonders how Britain might respond if the Israeli Knesset held public hearings into British issues – on Muslim rape gangs, on two-tier policing, or on the stifling of political speech through Orwellian ‘non-crime hate incidents’. The UK would howl in protest. Yet it presumes the right to dissect Israel’s wartime conduct as if from a position of moral superiority, devoid of historical context and strategic understanding. Some seemed more intent on using me

Kitty Thompson

What Lent taught me about the sugar tax

Christ is risen. Lent is over, Eastertide has begun. With it, my Lenten fast – and that of millions of others – has also reached its natural conclusion. This year, I sacrificed every kind of sweet treat I could think of: cakes, chocolate, biscuits, jam, pastries, ice cream. In doing so, I found myself grappling with the significance of resisting temptation in a society that increasingly outsources its self-discipline. Back in March, I knew the next 40 days and 40 nights would not be easy. That is why I chose to do it. Growing up, no dinner was complete without a dessert. My grandad’s puddings would have made Mary Berry blush. Thanks

Ian Williams Ian Williams

China smells victory in its tariff war with Trump

It was an extraordinary statement, given all the bluster that had gone before it. Tariffs on Chinese goods will ‘come down substantially’ from their current level of 145 per cent, Donald Trump said on Tuesday, adding that ‘We are doing fine with China … We’re going to live together very happily and ideally work together’. Perhaps the message was aimed at placating the World Bank and International Monetary Fund spring meetings taking place in Washington this week. The IMF slashed its growth forecasts for the United States, China and most other countries, blaming US tariffs and warned that things could get a lot worse. Xi is calculating that Trump is