Politics

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

Monday

22 Jul 2024

Did Kamala Harris just snub Barack Obama?

Kamala Harris just delivered her first public remarks since the Democratic ticket fell apart over the weekend. But this was not the moment to address the mess, or indeed her own candidacy for president – two subjects she avoided. Filling in for Joe Biden at a ceremony honouring the National Collegiate Athletic Association championship teams, Harris kept her remarks short. Standing outside the White House, she used her comments to lavish praise upon her boss, calling Biden’s record ‘unmatched in modern history’. (‘Yes, you may clap’ she encouraged, which led to a rather soft round of applause). It was quite the statement, which was as long (perhaps slightly longer) than

Isabel Hardman

How has Yvette Cooper started as home secretary?

Labour are now making daily pronouncements on the latest policy area where the last government left things in a worse state than it let on. The latest is immigration. Yvette Cooper came to the Commons this afternoon to make a statement on border security. Even though she is now the Home Secretary, she sounded strikingly like she was still in opposition. She was the one responsible for that delay. Anyway, Cooper told the Commons that ‘I have reviewed the policies, programmes and legislation that we have inherited from our predecessors and I have been shocked by what I have found.’ The added: ‘Not only are there already serious problems but

Stephen Daisley

Keir Starmer has made his first misstep as Prime Minister

In dodging calls from his party to remove the two-child cap, Sir Keir Starmer is making one of his first noteworthy mistakes as Prime Minister. Both John McDonnell, the far-left former shadow chancellor, and Anas Sarwar, the soft-left Scottish Labour leader, have called for the Coalition-era policy to go. The cap limits the payment of Universal Credit to a family’s first two children, with subsequent offspring meriting no additional payment. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, keeping the cap will mean an extra 670,000 children worse off by the end of this Parliament while scrapping it would reduce relative child poverty by half a million. The annual cost of

Steerpike

Green leader’s embarrassing U-turn over Biden remarks

Dear oh dear. With all that’s happening in the US Democratic party just now, one might have thought it would be near enough impossible for politicians elsewhere to catch the eye of the media. Well, fascinatingly, the Green party has defied all odds. The eco-zealots have found themselves in the spotlight this afternoon after a series of rather, er, bizarre responses to the news that Joe Biden will not contest the next election. After the US President announced he would be abandoning his re-election campaign on Sunday night, the Green party was quick off the mark with its press release – circulating it within an hour of the news so

Isabel Hardman

How much trouble will the benefit cap row cause Starmer?

If you wanted an idea of where the noisiest opposition to Keir Starmer’s government will come, the list of amendments to the King’s Speech is pretty handy. As I reported last week, there are a lot of amendments on the two-child benefit cap from different groups. The Greens have got one, independent MP Shockat Adam has tabled his own (also signed by the Greens and other independent MPs including Jeremy Corbyn), and the SNP have got theirs. Then there’s the amendment from within Labour, tabled by left-wing MP Kim Johnson. It currently has 29 signatures, of which 19 are Labour backbenchers. One of them, Rosie Duffield, created waves at the

Steerpike

Black attacks Forbes in SNP civil war latest

To Scotland, where the SNP infighting continues. After dozens of nationalist MPs were ditched this month by the electorate, some are already channelling their disappointment at MSP colleagues. It transpires that ex-MP Mhairi Black – who herself announced she was stepping down at this election due to Westminster’s ‘toxic’ culture – has taken aim at Deputy First Minister Kate Forbes and her religious beliefs, describing them as ‘archaic’ and ‘extreme’. Charming… In an interview with Scotland’s Sunday Post newspaper ahead of her Edinburgh Fringe show ‘Politics Isn’t For Me’, Black – who was former deputy leader of the Westminster group – claimed that Free Church member Forbes’ views on equal

Freddy Gray

Biden backs out: can anything stop Kamala Harris?

19 min listen

What happens after Joe Biden? The President has announced that he won’t run for re-election. Biden has endorsed Kamala Harris, his Vice President, to be the new Democratic nominee. Can she convince Democratic voters, and the rest of the US? The Spectator’s Freddy Gray and Kate Andrews are joined by Tim Stanley, columnist for the Telegraph. This episode was originally broadcast on SpectatorTV. You can watch it here:

Eliot Wilson

Starmer needs more than money to solve his Northern Ireland problem

Keir Starmer has been in office for less than three weeks, but his government has spent an unusually large amount of time and energy on matters in Northern Ireland. With his newly appointed secretary of state, Hilary Benn, the Prime Minister visited Belfast within days of kissing hands, despite a schedule which also included the Nato summit in Washington. The administration faces a number of pressing problems in Northern Ireland which carry substantial price tags as well as powerful symbolic importance. Harland and Wolff was one of the great icons of Protestant industrial Belfast When Starmer and Benn met Northern Ireland’s first minister, Michelle O’Neill of Sinn Féin, one of

Ross Clark

Can Labour afford inflation-busting pay rises for teachers and NHS staff?

Well, that didn’t last long. Having preached to us about fiscal responsibility and ‘securonomics’, Chancellor Rachel Reeves appears to be about to cave in at the first opportunity – by hinting that she will grant 5.5 per cent pay rises to teachers, NHS workers, and other public sector workers. At the heart of Reeves’s problem is the role of pay review bodies The unions feel entitled to pay rises of 5.5 per cent because they have been recommended by pay review bodies – even though that is more than 3.5 percentage points above inflation. But there is a very big problem. Labour’s manifesto – which we kept being told was

Steerpike

Is Robert Jenrick in cahoots with Kemi Badenoch?

Back to Westminster and the looming Tory leadership contest. No one has officially announced their candidacy yet, but the rumour mill is in overdrive as the list of potential runners and riders continues to grow. And who better to pour petrol on the sparks of speculation then Boris Johnson’s longtime ally, Nadine Dorries? She has today taken it upon herself to write a rather public memo to the much-depleted group of (remaining) Tory MPs. ‘These tweets are for Conservative MPs and party members so apologise [sic] for the length in advance,’ she warned her 195,000 Twitter followers, before launching in. Claiming that the leadership campaigns for Robert Jenrick and Kemi

Katy Balls

Labour’s Kamala Harris problem

11 min listen

Last night we had the news that President Biden will not contest the election, announcing in a separate statement that he will support his vice president Kamala Harris for the nomination. As endorsements pour in from other notable democrats and donors it looks like it might be nailed-on for her. But what would a Kamala Harris candidacy mean for Labour unity? Meanwhile, the row over the two child benefit cap continues to swirl. What should we expect this week? Katy Balls speaks to Fraser Nelson and James Heale. Produced by Oscar Edmondson.

Sam Leith

The CrowdStrike crash was an act of God

CrowdStrike. What a name. It sounds, doesn’t it, like exactly what it’s meant to prevent? And a cloudstrike, in the sense of a bolt from the blue, is exactly what the company produced: millions and millions of Windows PCs simultaneously succumbed to the Blue Screen of Death, as a company whose whole raison d’etre is averting internet catastrophe caused one. The biggest, supposedly, in history. Is it in bad taste to say that the great internet outage of July 2024 was, in some respects, just a little bit funny? Plainly, it wasn’t funny if you were trying to book a GP appointment, or trying to pass through an international airport,

Gavin Mortimer

Why can’t French progressives be more civil?

There was a muted reaction among the French political class to the attempt on Donald’s Trump’s life. Keir Starmer sent his best wishes to the former president in the early hours of Sunday morning, but it was another six hours before president Emmanuel Macron followed suit. The caretaker prime minister of France, Gabriel Attal, made no comment, nor did the man who dreams of having his job, Olivier Faure, the secretary of the Socialist party. Politics in France is a squalid business One or two figures from the left-wing coalition did offer their lukewarm support to Trump. Sandrine Rousseau, for example, a Green MP, wished him a ‘speedy recovery’ and

Freddy Gray

Can anything stop Kamala Harris?

‘There are two things that are important in American politics,’ said Mark Hanna. ‘The first is money and I can’t remember what the second one is.’ Kamala Harris, who cut her political teeth in the mega-rich world of west coast Democratic politics, understands that point well. The immediate threat to Harris comes from the right of her party Following Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 election, she’s already made sure the big money is right behind her. Over the weekend, she and her husband Doug Emhoff successfully wooed the Democratic plutocrats who really decide things. The Soros family, for instance, and the LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman have already declared their

Steerpike

First official Scottish Tory leadership bid announced

And so now we have it: the first official contender for the Scottish Conservative leadership contest. Russell Findlay, the party’s current justice spokesperson announced this morning that he was throwing his hat into the ring — after his party’s rather underwhelming general election campaign. In a lengthy article for the Scottish Daily Mail, Findlay first paid tribute to former leader Ruth Davidson, hailing her leadership for making the party a serious force in Scottish politics. ‘We need to build on that legacy, not tear it down,’ the shadow justice secretary wrote. A little less kind to the party’s more recent approach, however, Findlay went on: We’ve not been conservative enough…

Freddy Gray

Joe Biden’s legacy is one of failure

He resisted as they tried to force him away. He showed his defiance. Then, after a struggle, he gave in and was removed. That could be a description of the near-assassination of Donald Trump last weekend. Or the words might equally apply to Joe Biden’s experience since his abysmal debate performance last month. There’s a curiously asymmetrical relationship between the two old men now. Whereas Donald Trump, 78, survived his brush with death, Joe Biden’s political career died on that debate stage in Atlanta, Georgia. He staggered on for almost a month but, as leading Democrats queued up to tell him to go, his position was untenable. Now that Biden

Sunday

21 Jul 2024

Steerpike

Joe Biden’s presidency in Spectator covers

Over the past four years, Joe Biden has featured on 18 covers of The Spectator. They range from the upbeat – the halcyon days of 2020 and 2021 when he swore to restore the world order – to the sombre – such as the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the chaos in the Middle East. Overall though, they clearly tell a tale of a leader in decline, whose fitness for office came to be questioned increasingly loudly throughout his tenure. Eventually, he was unable to silence the doubters no longer, announcing this Sunday that he would not contest the next presidential election. 1 August 2020 Biden edges ahead in the polls

Jacob Heilbrunn

Republicans shouldn’t underestimate Kamala Harris

Joe Biden has bowed to the inevitable in withdrawing from the presidential race and endorsing his Vice President, Kamala Harris. Only now has the presidential race become interesting as the 59-year-old Harris, who is more than likely to receive the Democratic nomination, prepares to face off against Donald Trump. Suddenly the Republican candidate has become the old codger while the probable Democratic one represents generational change. Trump, you could even say, has become yesterday’s news. This is why Republicans would be wise not to underestimate Harris, a former federal prosecutor and California senator whose early years as Vice President were marked, among other things, by public scrutiny of her staff

Michael Simmons

Does Kamala Harris poll better against Donald Trump?

Kamala Harris seems overwhelmingly likely to replace Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee, having been given the blessing of both Bill Clinton and Biden himself. But does she actually have a better chance of beating Donald Trump than Biden did? The betting markets think it’s a done deal: the below shows that other possibilities (Gavin Newsom, Whitmer etc) are nothing more than wild outside bets. So let’s focus on Harris. Since the Trump-Biden debate last month, a handful of polls have shown that voters would be no more or less likely to vote Democrat if Harris replaced Biden as the presidential nominee. In all of these polls, Trump leads (albeit

Yascha Mounk

After Biden: what the Democrats should do now

President Joe Biden – who has announced that he will not run for re-election – has served the United States honourably for five decades, as a senator, as Barack Obama’s vice president, and finally in the highest office in the land. Biden has endorsed Kamala Harris, his Vice President, to be the new Democratic nominee. The best thing for Democrats to do now is to stage a genuinely open competition for who should oppose Donald Trump in the presidential race. Voters deserve a say in who represents them, and Harris was not on primary ballots in either 2020 or 2024. And the competition, even if messy, is likely to strengthen