Politics Archives

Wednesday

21 Aug 2024

Steerpike

BBC blasted over Sir Brian’s ‘partisan’ badger doc

The Beeb is developing a habit of being the news rather than making it – and the upcoming release of Sir Brian May’s badger documentary this Friday is no exception. The public service broadcaster has been slammed for allowing a BBC 2 programme to air after it emerged that the Queen guitarist will this week release a tell-all about badger culling. In the show, the longtime animal rights activist will attempt to make the argument that killing badgers to stop the spread of TB is like, er, burning witches to ‘protect your crops’. May has warned viewers that his findings are ‘pretty shocking’, adding the story ‘will outrage viewers more

Matthew Lynn

Rachel Reeves has already run out of cash

It was easy to mock it as a piece of political grandstanding. On taking office, the Chancellor Rachel Reeves almost immediately discovered a ‘black hole’ in the public finances, and started warning of tax rises in the autumn. To many of her opponents, it looked like pure opportunism. And yet, now it turns out that she was right. The latest data on public finances show that the British government really is running out of cash. There is just one snag. Everything Reeves’s colleagues are doing will make that even worse, and her threatened tax rises won’t raise anything close to enough money to make the numbers add up. The public

Ross Clark

Keir Starmer is being humiliated by the rail unions

The foolishness of the government’s appeasement of the unions is becoming clearer by the day. The 15 per cent pay rise for train drivers had hardly been signed off when Aslef announced a further set of strikes on LNER trains over rostering. Now, it is the turn of the Transport and Salaried Staff Association (TSSA), which represents office workers and senior staff in the rail industry. They are demanding not just a pay rise but also a 35-hour working week and 38 days’ holiday a year – a full ten days above what most people are awarded under their employment contract. Any genuine private industry which carried on like this,

Lee Cohen

Kamala Harris would be bad news for Britain

With the Democratic National Convention taking place this week, it’s crucial to consider the potential consequences for Britain and global stability if Kamala Harris emerges victorious in the presidential election in November. The past four years have not been kind to the special relationship. After Donald Trump’s warmth towards Britain, Joe Biden’s tenure called into question the commitment Democrats have to America’s alliance with the UK. Often seen as one of the most anti-British presidents, Biden’s approach to Brexit, the Good Friday Agreement, and his handling of Afghanistan all suggested that he felt some hostility towards the UK and cast doubt on his dedication to the special relationship. His reluctance

Steerpike

Labour cronyism claims continue

Another day, another drama. The spotlight is back on Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour lot as accusations of cronyism continue to fly in. Now it transpires that yet another civil service appointee has rather strong political links to Starmer’s army. Ex-Labour Together campaigner Jess Sargeant has been appointed to a top civil service job, with Politico suggesting she will play a leading part on the issue of Lords reform. Alright for some… As revealed by Guido Fawkes, Labour-sympathetic Sargeant has bagged a deputy director role with the Cabinet Office’s Propriety and Constitution group only eight months after she moved to ‘Starmerite central’ Labour Together. Before that, Sargeant was an Institute for

Brendan O’Neill

Yvette Cooper’s chilling crackdown on ‘harmful’ beliefs

Why is there not more disquiet over Yvette Cooper’s promise to crack down on ‘harmful’ beliefs? To my mind it ranks as one of the most chilling political pledges of the modern era. The thought of a Labour government, or any government, imperiously decreeing which ideas are ‘harmful’ and which are benign leaves me cold. It’s a first step to tyranny and it needs to be walked back. A war on ‘harmful’ beliefs would give the government a blank cheque to demonise views that are old-fashioned, possibly unpopular or just not very PC The Home Secretary has commissioned a rapid review of ‘extremist ideologies’ as part of a new government

Edward Howell

Kim Jong Un will take no blame for North Korea’s floods

The sight of a grimacing Kim Jong Un on board an inflatable rubber dinghy is not what one would expect from the leader of a country which has repeatedly threatened to ‘annihilate’ the United States. As floods ravage across provinces along North Korea’s border with China, the North Korean leader has leapt upon the occasion to berate his officials for mismanagement, reinforce state ideology, and emphasise that under the protection of the Supreme Leader, all will – eventually – be well. While the devastating flash floods of July and early August primarily affected areas in the northern part of the country, the consequences have been felt across the hermit kingdom.

Eliot Wilson

There’s no such thing as ‘proper Conservatism’

The contest to be the next leader of the Conservative party, which has six entrants and will last until November, by necessity involves a great deal of reflection. It could hardly be any other way, in the wake of the party’s worst defeat in its 200-year history: every aspirant is right to understand that there can be no realistic hope of recovery without understanding how Conservatives came to such a calamitous and precipitous failure. This fixation with ‘proper Conservatism’ manages to be simultaneously meaningless and noxious One of the most common themes, which was being thrown around well before the general election, is that the party has lost its ideological

Tuesday

20 Aug 2024

Steerpike

Now Ross brands Scottish Tory colleagues ‘calculating b**tards’

As the UK Tory leadership contest rumbles on, north of the border the Scottish race is hotting up. Last week saw a rather dramatic few days in which four of six contenders called for the competition to be paused and the party’s deputy leader quit her post after ‘disturbing claims’ about outgoing leader Douglas Ross emerged. It transpired that Ross attempted to shuffle out a prospective parliamentary candidate so that he could be selected to contest a Westminster seat in the 2024 election. The Telegraph report also claimed that the Scottish Tory leader wanted to ditch the top job over a year ago – and instead coronate current leadership candidate

Tom Slater

Why is the Welsh government so worried about racist buildings?

It’s hard to keep up with what is racist these days. It used to be straightforward. You know, discriminating against, hating or depriving rights to certain groups for no other reason than the colour of their skin. But that quaint definition just won’t do anymore. Nowadays, the countryside is racist, maths is racist, telling a Japanese person you like sushi is racist, wearing a sombrero if you’re not Mexican is racist, compliments are racist, babies are racist. To that yawning list we can now add… buildings. Particularly those in Wales, it seems. The Welsh government has pledged to ‘eradicate’ systemic racism by 2030, and apparently it’s starting with those notorious bigots,

James Heale

Can Starmer reinvigorate Welsh Labour?

12 min listen

Keir Starmer has been meeting the new First Minister Eluned Morgan as part of a two day trip to Wales. While the trip included a visit to a wind farm, Starmer quickly faced questions about the fate of steel workers in Port Talbot. What does this challenge tell us about Starmer’s Industrial Strategy and his relationship with the devolved nations? Could Welsh Labour soon face the same anti-incumbency threat that the Conservatives and the SNP faced? James Heale is joined by Tom Baldwin, Starmer’s biographer, and Ruth Mosalski, political editor at WalesOnline. Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

Ian Williams

Labour are bowing to China’s influence

The new Labour government is supposedly committed to ‘defend[ing] our sovereignty and our democratic values’, as its manifesto put it, but it appears to have stumbled at the first hurdle, delaying a key measure for countering the influence of hostile states, which MI5 has described as essential for Britain’s national security. The foreign influence registration scheme (FIRS) would for the first time force anyone in the UK acting for a foreign power or entity to declare their activities. It was due to be implemented later this year, part of a new National Security Act that represents the biggest revamp of the UK’s espionage laws in more than a century. FIRS would

Steerpike

Left-wing media’s double standards on show at DNC

To the Windy City, where the Democratic National Convention is in full swing. In the early hours of this morning, outgoing President Joe Biden bid an emotional farewell to conference delegates to pave the way for Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign, and former US leader Barack Obama is due to speak today. But besides the big names of the moment, Mr S spotted something rather interesting about just how the DNC has been received in comparison to its Republican counterpart by some of the noisiest voices in UK media… When a selection of British politicians decided to make the transatlantic voyage to Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention last month, not

Steerpike

Librarians attending ‘whiteness studies’ to avoid ‘racist’ venues

Just when you think the equality and diversity police can’t get any madder, they do. Now it transpires that libraries across Wales have been told to become ‘anti-racist’ in the devolved Labour government’s bid to ‘eradicate’ systemic racism by 2030 – with librarians urged not to hold meetings in ‘racist’ buildings by decolonisation training experts. It turns out that Welsh library workers are being educated – as part of a £130,000 ‘anti-racist library collections’ project – in ‘critical whiteness studies’. These aim to help staff understand the ‘dominant paradigm of whiteness’ besides other issues, as part of the Welsh government’s 2022 Anti-Racist Wales Action Plan. Crikey… The Chartered Institute of

Ross Clark

Labour are about to ‘switch off’ growth

What a joke the government’s promise to concentrate on ‘growth, growth, growth’ is becoming. Since the Prime Minister uttered those words on entering Downing Street, we have had road schemes cancelled and money withdrawn from a supercomputer project at Edinburgh university, that could have given Britain’s AI industry a leg-up. We have had fat pay rises for public sector workers without any requirement for them to adopt more efficient working practices. And we have businesses about to be lumbered with the requirement to offer employees flexible working hours from day one of their employment. Now there is another productivity-destroying proposal on the table. Angela Rayner has drawn up plans for

Iain Macwhirter

Drug deaths rise again under the SNP

Scotland’s drug misuse deaths – the worst in Europe – have long been a stain on the Scottish government’s record. Today it just got worse. The latest figures show a shocking 12 per cent increase in drug deaths to 1,172. It dashes hopes that last year’s dip in mortality showed that the problem was easing. It’s all about poverty and deprivation, say politicians quoting the various drug charities who insist drug addiction should be treated as a social disease. But this doesn’t explain why the Scottish death rate is three times that of England’s. Scotland is not three times more deprived. Nor is it down to Westminster cuts, as nationalists

Steerpike

Trump was ‘very rude’, thought Queen

Good heavens. As the 2024 US presidential campaigns pick up pace, some rather damning revelations have emerged about the impression contender Donald Trump left on Queen Elizabeth II. A new biography serialised in the Mail, A Voyage Around the Queen by Craig Brown, has set out the late monarch’s reflections on meeting the US businessman and former president – and it appears that she was not particularly complimentary… The pair first met in the summer of 2018, over English tea at Windsor Castle. But despite the civilised setting, the then-President is said to have rather ruffled feathers. It is claimed Trump first kept the Queen waiting for ten minutes in

Julius Strauss

Putin takes revenge for the Kursk attack with glide bombs

In the sprawling and unlovely village of Billopilya, only five miles from Ukraine’s border with Russia, when death comes, it comes from the skies. Moscow had been targeting the hardscrabble settlement with glide bombs – known here as KABs – ever since Ukrainian troops smashed their way into the Kursk region on 6 August. Vladimir Putin’s troops may be struggling to contain the estimated 6,000 Ukrainian soldiers now in Russia proper. Kyiv’s forces have seized a salient of land that encompasses more than 1,000 square kilometres. But even as Moscow slowly musters the forces to fight back against the incursion, it has ratcheted up attacks on Ukrainian civilians in apparent

Freddy Gray

Democrats, Labour & ‘working people’

15 min listen

It is day one of the DNC. Freddy Gray meets two Labour MPs, Lucy Rigby (North Northampton) and Mike Tapp (Dover and Deal) who have been invited to the convention to inform the Democrats on how to appeal to ‘working people’.

Monday

19 Aug 2024

Steerpike

Watch: Snappy Starmer dismisses ‘nonsense’ Sue Gray rumours

To Northern Ireland, where Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has been speaking to reporters about emergency prison measures, the violent riots that swept Britain’s streets and the response of the police. But during his interrogation by journalists, the PM didn’t seem to be in the mood to entertain recent rumours that his chief of staff, Sue Gray, is becoming a disruptive presence in Downing Street. Touchy subject, Keir? In a rather curious Times piece, Gray was accused of ‘subverting’ Sir Keir’s cabinet by ‘personally dominating’ negotiations about the proposed venue for the 2028 Euros tournament. The ex-Irish pub owner is facing allegations that she is trying to secure millions of