Politics

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

Wednesday

26 Mar 2025

Scotland’s universities must scrap free tuition

Scotland’s universities are in a crisis of Holyrood’s own making. The Scottish Funding Council is currently discussing bailout terms for the University of Dundee, while other universities, including my own alma mater the University of Edinburgh, have announced large redundancy packages to try and balance the books. This financial pressure, while exacerbated by other factors, largely results from the Scottish National party’s (SNP) zero tuition fee policy, in which domestic students pay nothing for their education. Some good may, however, yet come from this crisis, as it has increased political will to reconsider this cornerstone SNP policy. The current crisis represents an inflection point for Scotland’s higher education sector Currently,

Isabel Hardman

Rachel Reeves’s non-Budget is very bad news

Rachel Reeves framed her Spring Statement around the insistence that Labour’s Plan for Change was already working, which meant that any changes she was having to make today had to be framed as small ‘adjustments’, rather than the sort of change of course that would allow the Conservatives to claim she was delivering an ‘emergency budget’. She insisted that she was sticking to only one fiscal event a year, but the Chancellor did have to make a number of admissions in today’s speech, chief among them that the OBR had cut its growth forecast for the year from 2 per cent to 1 per cent. She said she was ‘not

Isabel Hardman

Keir tells Kemi that a phone ban in schools is ‘completely unnecessary’

Any session of Prime Minister’s Questions that takes place before a fiscal event is merely a warm-up act that everyone forgets within seconds, but today Keir Starmer made that warm-up a bit more closely connected to the Spring Statement by insisting to the chamber that ‘I have full confidence in the Chancellor’. He was answering a question from Conservative MP Jerome Mayhew, who claimed that Rachel Reeves’s ‘plans have collapsed around her ears with an emergency budget to cut that spending’. Kemi Badenoch, though, gave a nod to the Spring Statement, before focusing her questions on education. She did so in her characteristically unorthodox manner, and this time, it didn’t

Ian O’Doherty

Can Ireland prove that it isn’t a ‘tax scam’?

Howard Lutnick, former CEO of the financial firm Cantor Fitzgerald, and now Secretary of Commerce in the Trump administration, has quickly attained the status of pantomime villain in Ireland. Last year, Lutnick criticised Ireland’s tax arrangements, saying ‘It’s nonsense that Ireland of all places runs a trade surplus at our expense.’ He increased his pressure on Ireland last week when he appeared on the All-In business podcast and sarcastically referred to Ireland as his ‘favourite tax scam’ – the one he was most looking forward to ‘fixing’. This has prompted an increasingly nervous Irish government to make extra efforts to placate the Trump administration – which they previously treated with a

Coffee House

Spring Statement: Rachel Reeves says 2025 growth forecast halved

Rachel Reeves delivered some bad news in her Spring Statement: the UK’s growth forecast has been halved to 1 per cent for 2025. But the Chancellor revealed that the Office for Budget Responsibility has upgraded its longer-term growth estimates from 2026. Reeves also announced a benefits shake-up and a crackdown on tax avoidance. Here’s how it unfolded on our live blog:

Nigel Jones

The University of Sussex has learned nothing from the Kathleen Stock debacle

The University of Sussex, one of the leading temples of progressivism in academia, has been fined £585,000 for failing to safeguard free speech following the Kathleen Stock affair. Stock, a philosophy professor, was hounded out of Sussex in 2021 over her belief in biological sex. The Office for Students (OfS)’s investigation into the fallout from that debacle is damning: it criticised the university’s policy statement on trans and non-binary equality, saying its requirement to ‘positively represent trans people’ and an assertion that ‘transphobic propaganda [would] not be tolerated’ could lead staff and students to ‘self-censor’. The message that the times have changed does not seem to have got through to

Steerpike

Labour minister confuses interest rates with inflation

Happy spring statement day, one and all. Today’s fiscal event – which is definitely NOT an ’emergency Budget’ – looks set to contain more gloom and doom about Rachel Reeves’ vanishing fiscal headroom. Looks like that £40bn October tax raid didn’t help much eh? So, with inflation still running high and the growth figures revised downward, it might be a good time for ministers to reassure the markets that Labour knows what it is doing in office. Far from it. For Seema Malhotra, the minister for migration, this week took to X to illustrate her own economic credentials. She took aim at the last government, declaring that ‘Under the Tories’, there

Svitlana Morenets

Ukraine is looking like the loser in Russia-US peace talks

Ukraine’s worst nightmare is coming true: Vladimir Putin has presented the bill to end his war – and Donald Trump is forcing Kyiv to pay it. After 12 hours of talks with seasoned Russian diplomats in Saudi Arabia, the US delegation was so worn out and desperate for a win that they agreed to ease sanctions on Russia. In return, Moscow pledged not to bomb civilian vessels in the Black Sea and to halt strikes on energy and oil infrastructure if Kyiv does the same. But soon after the meeting ended, the Kremlin extended its list of demands. Volodymyr Zelensky says this isn’t what Ukraine and the US agreed to

Mark Galeotti

Putin’s duo are spinning ceasefire talks to Russia’s advantage

The delegation Moscow sent to ceasefire talks in Saudi Arabia was clearly well-chosen. Grigory Karasin, for example, the former diplomat (including a spell as ambassador to the United Kingdom, 2000-5) and Sergei Beseda, head of the Federal Security Service’s Fifth Service, especially responsible for penetrating and subverting Ukraine. They certainly seem to be doing a good job of advancing Russia’s interests at the talks. After Vladimir Putin reportedly acceded to a month-long moratorium on strikes against energy infrastructure (which both Moscow and Kyiv are already accusing the other side of breaking), the latest round of talks seem to have led to the acceptance of the other leg of this painfully

Ross Clark

Falling inflation may have rescued Rachel Reeves

Clothing retailers have saved Rachel Reeves from having to go naked into the debating chamber. As the Chancellor rises to deliver her Spring Statement today, she will have the comfort of knowing that the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) has fallen from 3.0 per cent to 2.8 per cent – and unexpectedly at that. The main reason is that clothing retailers cut their prices by 0.3 per cent in February – against a 2.1 per cent rise in February 2024. The fall will help ease pressure on households, but nothing like as much as it will ease pressure on Reeves herself. A revival of the cost-of-living crisis is the last thing

Steerpike

Watch: Trump aide admits group chat leak

As Denis Healey said: ‘when you’re in a hole, stop digging.’ It has been a furious day in Trumpland after White House officials accidentally added journalist Jeffrey Goldberg to a highly sensitive group chat on Signal about planned airstrikes in Yemen. Initially, the administration went on the offensive, with Defense Secretary Pete Hesketh calling Goldberg a ‘guy that peddles in garbage.’ But now, 24 hours on, Trump’s National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, has held his hands up for ‘signal gate.’ Speaking to Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, Waltz accepted responsibility for making the Signal group – while, er, continuing to deflect blame. ‘It’s embarrassing, yes. We’re going to get to the

Lisa Haseldine

The promise Putin made to Russia – and broke

When Vladimir Putin launched his bid to be elected as Russia’s president in 2000, he had already been in the role for a month and a half. His predecessor Boris Yeltsin had stepped down on 31 December 1999, appointing his young prime minister in his place to prevent political opponents from prosecuting him and his associates – on well-founded grounds – for corruption. At the time, less than a decade after the collapse of the USSR, Russia had fair elections, freedom of expression, a thriving press and a growing economy. A quarter of a century on, all of that has gone. Today marks exactly 25 years since Putin was elected

Michael Simmons

Is Reeves brave enough to give the economy the medicine it needs?

Rachel Reeves has wanted to downplay the significance of the Spring Statement this afternoon. But with every leaked proposal and briefing, the statement feels increasingly like a full-blown Budget. Soaring borrowing costs, and a growth forecast set to be slashed in half, have wiped out the Chancellor’s £10 billion headroom against her ‘ironclad’ fiscal rules. Reeves’s statement could now include civil service reforms, NHS productivity measures and an ‘austerity-lite’ stance on future spending. There will be no major tax decisions, barring a possible extension to fiscal drag. But today’s announcement is a crucial one for the Chancellor. Reeves’s didn’t expect the outlook for Britain’s economy to be so bleak. Yet

Robin Ashenden

Jim Callaghan’s greatest achievement was to be himself

The government’s recent, palpable turn to the right seems to be gaining pace. In the past few weeks, Keir Starmer has slashed overseas aid, proposed a radical downsizing of the civil service, abolished NHS England and vowed to make serious cuts to welfare. As the Labour left pick up their weapons and prepare to do battle, conservative commentators are lauding the Prime Minister as being ‘to the Right of the Tories’ and cheering him on. For all his quiet bonhomie, Callaghan never flinched from levelling with the public when it counted The situation calls to mind an earlier Labour prime minister who died exactly 20 years ago today and took his

Ross Clark

Rachel Reeves’s Spring Statement looks like a missed opportunity

The Spring Statement was supposed to be a fiscal non-event, but instead, it is shaping up to be a mini-Budget. We have been primed, however, to expect only spending cuts – not tax rises (and presumably not tax cuts either). So what can we expect? So far, Liz Kendall has announced changes to welfare benefits that are supposed to save £5 billion a year by 2029–30, the last – partial – financial year of this parliament. In addition, it has been mooted that reforms to government administration – perhaps meaning up to 50,000 job losses in the civil service – will save £2 billion by the same year. Why the

Tuesday

25 Mar 2025

David Shipley

How Paddington took over the justice system

Two RAF engineers were spared jail today, after pleading guilty to vandalising a statue of Paddington Bear in the Berkshire town of Newbury. The young, drunk servicemen broke the Peruvian bear in half and then transported his front façade back to RAF Odiham in a taxi. Later jars of marmalade, sandwiches and poems were left at the crime scene by members of the public A few decades ago perhaps the bear’s disappearance would have remained a mystery, his fate known only to those who frequented the station’sbar. Unfortunately for Daniel Heath and William Lawrence, the two guilty men, Newbury’s CCTV captured their entire escapade. They were soon apprehended, with Paddington

Druin Burch

No one is immune from a groupchat blunder

On Monday, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of the Atlantic, told the entertaining story of being added, alongside Pete Hegseth and J. D. Vance, to America’s group-chat plans to bomb Yemen. Not the most obvious stuff of comedy, perhaps. Yet the affairs of men turn farcical precisely when they’re trying to be most serious. The cast here included the US National Security Advisor, the Secretary of Defence, the Vice President, the White House Chief of Staff, the Director of the CIA, and a handful of others holding Importantly Capitalised roles. Much is already being made of the fact that those involved have previously frothed at the mouth about their opponents’ sloppiness with

Ben Domenech

The Signal leak isn’t just about Europe – it shows how powerful J.D. Vance is

This is an extract from today’s episode of Spectator TV, with Freddy Gray and Ben Domenech, which you can find at the bottom of this page: Freddy Gray (FG): America is – to use [Vice President J.D.] Vance’s words – bailing out Europe again, and [Defense Secretary] Pete Hegseth says ‘yes – it’s pathetic’ in capital letters. That clearly shows was they’re thinking about foreign policy. What did you read into it? Ben Domenech (BD): I think you’re completely right to highlight that potion because it is one of the areas where I think we can gather a bit more about their thinking than we have before… They simply do

Freddy Gray

What did we learn from the war chat leaks?

27 min listen

Jeffrey Goldberg’s story in the Atlantic is so mind-blowing it’s hard to know what to say in response. It defies belief that Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser, Mike Waltz, appears to have accidentally added a top journalist to a Signal messaging group with senior government officials – including the Vice President, Secretary of State, Defence Secretary and the Director of National Intelligence – to discuss top-secret military action. It boggles the brain that the people running the most powerful country on the planet, the Principals Committee of US national security no less, use childish emojis to discuss a bombing campaign which they helped co-ordinate in order to kill 53 people.

Oscar Edmondson

Could Cabinet turn on Reeves?

13 min listen

Hard hats on for the Spring Statement tomorrow, where at around midday Rachel Reeves will deliver her fiscal update (read: significant fiscal set piece). Aside from not spooking the markets, the Chancellor will be hoping that she doesn’t spook those within her own party. There are rumours of discontent circling around Westminster about a potential Labour split. We have already seen secretaries of state briefing out their discontent over potential departmental cuts. Ministers have also been breaking rank this week to criticise Rachel Reeves for accepting free Sabrina Carpenter tickets. Can she keep the party united? Oscar Edmondson speaks to Katy Balls and John McTernan, former political secretary to Tony

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