Politics

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

Thursday

22 Aug 2024

Does the UK really need an immigration deal with the EU?

There is talk, yet again, of the UK and EU agreeing some kind of youth mobility scheme, increasing the opportunities for under-30s from the EU to work in the UK. This has been proposed repeatedly over the past couple of years, especially because of similar schemes being agreed between the UK and Canada and Australia. In opposition, Labour was adamant that it had no interest in such a scheme, seeing it as too close to the return of free movement. But now it is in government, seeking a ‘reset’ in relations with the EU, something has to give. And it appears that a youth mobility scheme – along with the

Steerpike

Scottish Tory leadership race: runners and riders

While contenders in the UK Tory leadership race ramp up their campaigns, north of the border the Scottish Conservative contest is just about to get started. Nominations for candidates to succeed outgoing leader Douglas Ross close on the 22 August at 12pm. Each leadership hopeful will need 100 party members to back them in order to formally stand before voting takes place next month – with the winner to be announced on 27 September. Initially six candidates declared they would run for the top job, however just before nominations closed, ex-athlete Brian Whittle announced he would, er, no longer run – and has now endorsed Murdo Fraser, alongside two other

Steerpike

SNP membership numbers plummet further

Oh dear. It’s not a good time to be an SNP politician, what with the recent electoral wipeout, the party’s muddled stance on the Middle East and party insiders already plotting who their next leader will be. And now it transpires that the party has lost yet more members, leaving its card-carrying supporters at a new low of just over 64,000. Crikey… After the bitter leadership contest that tarnished the reputation of the SNP, membership numbers fell from 125,000 in 2019 to around 72,000 – a staggering drop of 43 per cent. Not that the party was particularly keen to admit it, with then-spin doctor Murray Foote resigning after it

Patrick O’Flynn

Keir Starmer is caving on immigration already

It should come as no surprise that Keir Starmer has already contracted a severe dose of Boris Johnson disease when it comes to immigration policy. This occurs when a prime minister has a general commitment to bring down the overall volume of inward migration and yet makes so many specific exceptions that such an outcome becomes impossible. In Johnson’s case the list of special cases became comically long: Ukrainians, Hong Kongers, Afghans, overseas students and their dependents, social care visas, lower earnings thresholds, not getting round to deporting illegal arrivals to Rwanda or almost anywhere else. As a result net migration rose to levels that led to a ferocious electoral

Kristina Murkett

The problem with compulsory GCSE resits

This morning, students up and down across the country will anxiously open up their GCSE results, with local papers publishing photos of glowing over-achievers and other heartwarming success stories. The national media will, in all likelihood, focus on the number of top grades, and how this fits into recent trends concerning grade inflation as exam boards try to re-stabilise results post-Covid. Yet this hyper-fixation on the number of 7s, 8s and 9s (the equivalent to an old-style A or A*) means we tend to overlook something much more important: the long tail of underachievement in England. We should be far less concerned by how many people do well at GCSE,

Andy Maciver

Does it matter who wins the Scottish Tory leadership race?

Nominations for candidates wanting to stand in the Scottish Tory leadership contest close today. One candidate has already voluntarily dropped out, and it’s not clear if all of the remaining five will receive the 100 votes they need from the membership to progress to the next stage. Already there has been much drama, with some contenders even suggesting the race be paused after revelations about outgoing leader Douglas Ross came to light. Yet as the Scottish Conservative leadership contest descends into internecine warfare, one could be mistaken for believing that at stake is something of importance, something of value. But the uncomfortable truth is: it doesn’t really matter who runs

Jonathan Miller

French politics has become an absurdist farce

It’s the rentrée politique this week in France, the start of the political year, a bit earlier than normal. It promises to be a macedoine of absurdist farce and media frenzy. On Friday President Emmanuel Macron, the principal personality in this drama, will begin to see the leaders of some (but not all) of the 14 or 15 political factions that form the dysfunctional National Assembly. A negligent wager with no upside and unlimited downside – and this from the so-called Mozart of finance His mission is to appoint a prime minister who can cobble together some semblance of a credible, durable government in the EU’s second-largest economy. An economy that already does

Kate Andrews

Can you spot an ‘extreme misogynist’?

Can you tell the difference between an extreme misogynist and a moderate misogynist? Hating women has always seemed, to me anyway, a rather extreme position on its own. The label ‘extreme misogynist’ is surely repetitive. A moderate misogynist is an oxymoron. But then the Home Office announced this week that ‘extreme misogyny’ could be added to the list of ideologies the government monitors to tackle terrorism. I’ve been racking my brain, trying to figure out how the police would tell the extremists from the moderates. Does the extreme misogynist hold women in contempt all week long, while the moderate reserves his disdain for weekends? Does a mild misogynist simply begrudge

Freddy Gray

Can Kamala Harris bluff her way to the White House?

Chicago ‘There are no disasters,’ said Boris Johnson, who was born in America. ‘Only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.’ That quote speaks nicely to the story of the Democratic party’s 2024 election campaign. The first televised presidential debate, in Atlanta, Georgia on 27 June, seemed to have been an absolute disaster. President Joe Biden’s clear and present feebleness had been exposed for all the world to see. His opponent, Donald Trump, became the favourite to win back the White House – then, 16 days later, Trump survived an assassination attempt, and his stock rose even higher. Harris is a pop-up nominee in an age of diminished attention spans,

James Heale

Farage’s next move in his plan to destroy the Tories

On Tuesday afternoon, a familiar figure pulled up at a Westminster café to plot the Tories’ downfall. Nigel Farage beamed from the back of his black Range Rover as he arrived to welcome Reform’s latest recruits. The purpose of the Old Queen Street summit was to plan the party’s path to next year’s local elections in May. Where better to scheme than in the neighbouring street to Conservative Central Headquarters? ‘It baffles me how we’re the most successful political party in the western world,’ says one Tory While the Tories are enjoying a four-month leadership contest, Farage and his aides are hard at work. A constitution has been drafted to

The Spectator

Labour’s union problem

Less than two months in, one aspect of Keir Starmer’s government is becoming clear. This administration is closer to the trade unions than any we have had in the past 45 years. It is not just that the government has ceded readily to wage demands from teachers (a 5.5 per cent rise this year), junior doctors (22 per cent over two years) and train drivers (15 per cent over three years) – it has done so without seeking any agreement to changes in working practices. Given the abysmal productivity record of the public sector in recent years, especially since the pandemic, this is a remarkable omission. The government’s failure to

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: prisoners are freed, Ted Baker closes and train drivers announce strikes

Home Emergency measures, known as Operation Early Dawn, were brought in to ease prison overcrowding. Defendants would be summoned to a magistrates’ court only when a space in prison was ready for them, the government said, and would be kept in police holding cells or released on bail while they awaited trial. The measures at first affected the north and the Midlands. By the beginning of the week, 472 people had been charged with offences arising from the recent public disorder; 300 had appeared in court in the preceding week. Donna Conniff, aged 40, the mother of six children, was jailed for two years for throwing a brick at police

Wednesday

21 Aug 2024

Stephen Daisley

The SNP is learning there’s no such thing as a free lunch

During his time as Scotland’s First Minister, Alex Salmond was accused by the Scottish Labour leader Johann Lamont of fostering a ‘something for nothing’ culture with vote-grabbing policies like free university tuition, free prescriptions and a council tax freeze – expensive gimmicks that took cash away from where it was needed most. Lamont’s analysis was sound and reflected the consensus among Scottish economists but she was pilloried for her speech and her leadership never really recovered. Vindication twelve years after the fact might be cold comfort for Lamont but the SNP government has seemingly come around to her way of thinking. A week ago, it scrapped the devolved version of

Julius Strauss

Putin is biding his time to seek revenge for Kursk

Vladimir Putin, it seems, is procrastinating. Just when the war in Ukraine was going his way and the Russian army doing what it does best – pummelling its way forward like a leaden-footed but seemingly unstoppable heavyweight boxer – Kyiv has sneaked in a powerful side punch. By launching an incursion into the Kursk region, Ukraine has not only breached the borders of Mother Russia – the inner sanctum of what is still a regional empire of control and influence – but also opened a second front. For days Ukrainians braced for a spiteful rejoinder. Perhaps Putin would lash out with withering rocket attacks, a devastating bombing raid against a

Cindy Yu

Labour cronyism claims continue

13 min listen

The government seems to have appointed another party-political advisor to the civil service – this time Labour Together’s Jess Sargeant to the role of deputy director at the Cabinet Office’s Propriety and Constitution Group. Is the Labour party just as prone to a bit of cronyism as they accuse the Tories of having been? Cindy Yu talks to James Heale and Isabel Hardman. Produced by Cindy Yu.

Lisa Haseldine

Ukraine’s drone attack on Moscow piles the pressure on Putin

In the early hours of this morning, Ukraine hit Moscow with ‘one of the largest’ drone attacks against the Russian capital since the war began two and a half years ago. According to Moscow’s mayor Sergei Sobyanin, air defence forces shot down a number of drones – later confirmed to be 11 – between 3 a.m. and 4:45 a.m. ‘This is one of the largest attempts to attack Moscow with drones in all time,’ Sobyanin claimed. There have been no confirmed casualties or damage yet. Still, Kyiv’s attack managed to cause far-reaching chaos across Moscow, with three of the capital’s airports, Vnukovo, Domodedovo and Zhukovsky, forced to temporarily restrict flights

Ross Clark

Labour is losing fiscal credibility

Just how much longer will the government be able to sustain its assertion that the Conservatives left behind a £22 billion hole in the public finances? Confirmation that ministers are continuing to blame their predecessors for out-of-control public finances – and for expected tax rises in October’s budget – was provided this morning by Chief Secretary to the Treasury Darren Jones, who reacted to July’s grim borrowing figures by stating: ‘Today’s figures are yet more proof of the dire inheritance left to us by the previous government. A £22 billion black hole in the public finances this year, a decade of economic stagnation, and public debt at its highest level

Steerpike

Tories demand Treasury impartiality probe

Whitehall has received a lot of attention of late, what with interesting civil service appointments prompting claims of cronyism. And now Mr S can reveal that the Tories are calling for a civil service probe – and a ministerial apology – over impartiality concerns. The shadow minister to the Cabinet Office, Baroness Neville-Rolfe, has today written to Lord Livermore, the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, over fears that he may have ‘inadvertedly misled the House’ after he was quizzed about whether a party political document was uploaded to the official government website. Oh dear… Lord Livermore was this month questioned about the publication on the gov.uk website of the Chancellor’s statement on public

Katja Hoyer

Has Germany run out of money to give to Ukraine?

Germany is Ukraine’s biggest military donor in Europe. On paper, it appears determined to ensure that Vladimir Putin’s act of aggression does not pay off. But now a German newspaper has seen documents suggesting Berlin wants to halt new support for Kyiv. According to the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Finance Minister Christian Lindner sent a letter to Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock and Defence Minister Boris Pistorius to inform them that ‘new measures’ in aid of Ukraine’s struggle to survive may only be approved if ‘funding is secured’. Lindner urged both his colleagues to ‘ensure that the set upper limits are adhered to.’ The opposition has accused Scholz of playing party-political games

John Keiger

Does France need a government?

France has been without an official government for seven weeks, the longest in the history of the Fifth Republic. A caretaker prime minister and government have been running the country for what President Macron declared the ‘Olympic truce’. That truce is now over, yet the President is in no hurry to appoint a new prime minister. One can understand why. A clear majority of French voted for alternatives to Macronist policies in the European and legislative elections, something the President refuses to accept. Whichever government is eventually appointed will unpick much of the President’s policies over the last seven years. And given that the locus of power will shift from