Politics Archives

Saturday

17 Feb 2024

France’s anti-democratic streak

For the past week the airwaves in France have eulogised Robert Badinter, a name unfamiliar to many outside the Republic. He was the Justice Minister under François Mitterrand and the man who oversaw the abolition of the death penalty in 1981. On Wednesday Emmanuel Macron presided over what was billed as a national act of remembrance. Badinter, who died aged 95 last week, will be laid to rest in the Panthéon alongside the other heroes of the Republic. What most of the eulogies omitted was the fact that Badinter – universally respected as a man of conviction and humanity – abolished the death penalty against the wishes of the majority.

Friday

16 Feb 2024

Steerpike

Scottish Labour leader decries flip-flopping

Irony alert up in Scotland. Conference season is upon us again, with Anas Sarwar’s Labour party hosting their three-day soiree in Glasgow. It’s significantly busier — and bigger — than last year’s event, with one veteran declaring to Mr S: ‘This looks like a party preparing to win an election.’ And it was in that spirit that Sarwar gave his keynote speech this afternoon, with the Scottish Labour leader taking aim at the SNP’s recent U-turns. He told the party faithful: ‘It’s hard to keep track of their strategy. First it was “the general election will be a defacto referendum”. Then they scrapped the de facto referendum. Then it was

Freddy Gray

What do Republicans think of Lord Cameron?

30 min listen

Freddy Gray speaks to Americano regular Jacob Heilbrunn about Lord Cameron’s recent visit to DC, where he persuaded Congress to pass a bill sending aid to Ukraine. Jacob and Freddy also discuss why Jacob thinks Biden’s mental capacity is over exaggerated, and what Nato could look like under Trump, and the latest on his charges.

John Curtice

It gets worse and worse for Rishi Sunak

Sixteen months ago Rishi Sunak was installed as Conservative leader and prime minister in the hope that he would be able to turn his party’s fortunes around in the wake of the damage inflicted on the party’s popularity by Liz Truss’ ‘fiscal event’. However, Thursday’s by-elections confirm the message of the polls that Mr Sunak has made little or no progress in bringing that hope to fruition. True, at 21 points the fall in Conservative support in Kingswood since 2019 was less than the drops in the three by-elections the party lost to Labour last year in Mid-Bedfordshire, Selby and Tamworth. But it was still no better than the drop

Sergey Radchenko

Hope for Russia has died with Navalny

It was brave. It was foolhardy. It was almost unbelievable. After his near-fatal poisoning by the Russian Federal Security Service, Alexey Navalny returned to Russia. He was taken away as he disembarked from the plane in Moscow, and thrown into prison on a made-up pretext. After three years of torture, Navalny has been done away with. The Russian prison authorities have reported his death from an unspecified cause. Putin’s regime has murdered another opposition leader, and not just any. Navalny, like no one else in Russia, stood for the unlikely promise of change. His charisma, his humour, his clarity of vision, and, above all, his awe-inspiring disdain for Putin’s gangster

Owen Matthews

The tragedy of Alexei Navalny

I knew and greatly respected Alexei Navalny. The news (as yet not independently confirmed) that he died in prison came today as a physical blow – sickening, but at the same time tragically unsurprising. Navalny’s passion, his intelligence and his refusal to make compromises with the Putin regime made him a colossus in a world of opposition politicians filled with moral pygmies. The Soviet Communist party once claimed to be the ‘intelligence, the honour and the conscience’ of the Russian people. But that title properly belongs to Navalny, whose life and career were living proof that Putin had not yet entirely extinguished Russians’ spirit of freedom and defiance, even in

Lisa Haseldine

Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny dies in prison

Just over three years after he was imprisoned in Russia, the Putin critic Alexei Navalny has died. The news was announced by the local administration of Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service shortly before 2:30 p.m. Moscow time. In a statement, the prison service said: ‘In correctional colony No. 3 the convict A.A.Navalny fell ill after a walk and almost immediately lost consciousness. All necessary resuscitation measures were carried out, but did not yield positive results. Emergency doctors confirmed the death of the convict. The causes of death are being established.’ It was not stated when Navalny is reported to have died. Navalny’s team say they have yet to receive any official

John Curtice

Labour triumphs in by-election brace

12 min listen

Labour has the won two by-elections in Wellingborough and Kingswood, overturning big Conservative majorities in the process. Party chairman Richard Holden has brushed the results off as typical midterm by-elections where voters what to give the government a kicking. Does this argument stack up? And what can Reform take from the results? Isabel Hardman speaks to James Heale and pollster John Curtice.

Svitlana Morenets

Will the Ukrainian army retreat from Avdiivka?

The battle for Avdiivka in Donetsk Oblast is a bloodbath. The city, which is also called the ‘gateway to Donetsk’, is semi-surrounded. Some 50,000 Russian troops are trying to advance from three sides while they keep the main supply route into the city under artillery fire. At least 15 per cent of Avdiivka has been captured – and battles are being fought in urban areas. ‘We are forced to fight at 360 degrees against more and more brigades that the enemy is bringing in,’ said Andriy Biletskyi, commander of the 3rd Assault Brigade, which was deployed to rescue Avdiivka last week. Russia has sufficient manpower and artillery superiority, so its

Steerpike

Peter Bone’s partner vows to stand again

She may have lost the Wellingborough by-election by more than 6,000 votes but Tory candidate Helen Harrison is determined to show there’s no dampening her quest to become an MP. Exiting the vote count after the by-election results were announced, Harrison declared she would ‘absolutely’ run again and stand at the general election. Pressed by journalists on why she thought she didn’t win this time, Harrison acknowledged that ‘I think that Reform is a bit of a threat to us Conservatives’ but deflected the question when asked if she thought Richard Tice’s party was the reason she lost, saying ‘there are probably lots of different issues as to why I

Patrick O’Flynn

The Tories should be worried about Reform

And with one bound he was free. In fact let’s make that two. A pair of whopping by-election wins in seats the Tories held at the last general election with five-figure majorities have brought to a close a torrid fortnight for Labour leader Keir Starmer. His U-turn on green policy can now safely gather dust, or perhaps moss, in the public mind. The Rochdale anti-Semitism row is more serious. But Starmer reached the right position in the end and unless the Conservatives can exploit it by performing strongly in the Rochdale by-election at the end of the month (spoiler alert: they won’t) it will come to be seen as a

Katy Balls

The Justine Greening Edition

33 min listen

Justine Greening was born in Rotherham, the daughter of a steel worker and first in her family to go to university. Campaigning for the Conservatives, she won back a Tory stronghold from Labour in the 2005 general election becoming MP for Putney. She began politics in opposition, but became a Cabinet Secretary in David Cameron’s government, and remained there for Theresa May’s premiership as Education Secretary. Now having left Parliament, Justine is never far from politics – she founded the Social Mobility Pledge and now even runs her own podcast.

Nick Tyrone

After last night Sunak is heading for electoral wipeout

And so Keir Starmer’s bad week comes to an end, just like that. Labour has won two by-elections in a single night in seats that had Tory majorities of over 10,000 after the 2019 general election. The heat now returns to Rishi Sunak, as inevitably it was always going to. To be fair, no one expected the results of these by-elections to be any different. For that we should credit No. 10 with decent expectation management, if nothing else. In fact, let’s not credit No. 10 with anything else here: most of the way these by-elections were run looked shambolic from beginning to end. There are many things to pick

James Heale

Labour triumphs in by-election brace

Labour has won both the Kingswood and Wellingborough by-elections in another night every bit as bad as expected for Rishi Sunak. The Tories saw majorities of more than 11,000 and 18,000 respectively easily overturned. It means the Conservatives have now lost ten by-elections in a single parliament, a worse run than any government since the 1960s. Labour’s double triumph mean it has taken five seats off the Tories since 2019. Kingswood declared first. Labour’s Damien Egan won with a majority of 2,500 in a place where the Tories won by more than 11,000 in 2019. He polled 11,176 votes compared to 8,675 votes for the Conservatives, on a swing of

Thursday

15 Feb 2024

Melanie McDonagh

Sadiq Khan’s dreadful new Overground line names

By and large the London transport system is pretty unremarkable in terms of names. Unlike the Paris metro on which stops are sometimes named after battles (like Sébastopol) or individuals (Franklin D Roosevelt) a line or a stop in the London network is normally noncommittal. The Northern line, self-explanatory; the Metropolitan for the oldest line. The nearest anyone got to politicising the network was Waterloo station and the naming of the Jubilee line after the late Queen’s Silver Jubilee, and the Elizabeth line also after her. That was, until now. TfL has named six of its hitherto anonymous overground lines – the twin objectives being to help passengers get round

Freddy Gray

What happened to the Democratic Party?

38 min listen

Freddy Gray speaks to author Joshua Green who wrote The Rebels: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Struggle for a New American Politics. On the podcast they discuss the three rebels in the book; how they influenced Joe Biden in office; and whether the Democratic Party has given up ‘finance-centered’ liberalism.

Kate Andrews

Britain’s economic pain started long before the recession

The Tories have had a tax problem for quite some time. But news of a recession at the end of last year has made matters much worse. It has been an uncomfortable position, for Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt, to defend the Conservative party taking the tax burden to a post-war high. The political defence has been that it was necessary to prove to markets that the UK took the state of its finances seriously, and that cutting tax was only an option when inflation meaningfully slowed down. Reasonable points – but there’s a catch. Now, in the light of a recession, Hunt is insisting the remedy is tax cuts:

Limor Simhony Philpott

Hamas can’t hide behind hospitals anymore

Israeli special forces are operating in Nasser hospital, one of the main hospitals in the city of Khan Yunis, where the Israel Defence Forces have been fighting Hamas for several weeks. IDF spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari explained that the raid is based on ‘reliable intelligence’ about terrorist activity in the hospital. According to Hagari, there is also information, based on accounts given by released hostages as well as other sources, that several bodies of Israeli hostages abducted into Gaza during the 7th October attack are being kept there. The IDF has been searching for the Israeli hostages in Gaza since the war began. It has managed to extract three

Natasha Feroze

UK tips into recession – what’s left of Sunak’s priorities?

11 min listen

This morning’s figures show that the UK went into a technical recession last year. Forecasts suggest it will be a short and shallow recession, but how badly does this reflect on the government’s priorities to increase growth and lower inflation? Also, will this make Rishi Sunak think again about his plan to meet as many rattled voters as possible on the campaign trail? Natasha Feroze speaks to Kate Andrews and James Heale.

Isabel Hardman

Who could object to the Windrush line?

Sadiq Khan has announced six new names for the previously boringly-named Overground. The practical point of it is that the Overground goes everywhere and is quite confusing to navigate if you’re an occasional visitor. Breaking up the orange (which only stayed that way because Boris Johnson liked it being the same colour when he was shown a draft map) isn’t particularly disputed, but what has excited interest is the choice of names. Lioness, Mildmay, Windrush, Weaver, Suffragette and Liberty have a certain progressive ring to them. They’ve been received in some quarters as names that are seeking a reaction rather than just reflecting London’s heritage. Interestingly, Khan isn’t the only