Politics

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

Monday

Steerpike Steerpike

SNP’s social media game backfires

If there’s one thing the SNP are good at, it’s spin. But lately even the skill of self-promotion seems to have deserted Holyrood’s rulers, judging by their increasingly shaky grip on power. A perfect example of this was offered yesterday in the form of some shiny new graphics pumped out by the Scottish government’s official Twitter/X account. Run by civil servants, it is supposed to be Scotland’s voice to the world. But in Humza Yousaf’s Scotland, its relationship to the SNP increasingly resembles that of Pravda to the Kremlin. The Scottish government declared that: ‘Below-inflation funding uplifts in England impact Scotland’s budget. In the UK government’s Autumn Statement, only £10.8

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Why is the French left so willing to excuse Hamas apologists?

One hopes that the arrest of seven suspected members of Hamas last Thursday by European police has embarrassed numerous politicians in the West. Those, like Daniele Obono, of the La France Insoumise (LFI) party, who described the terror group as a ‘resistance movement’ not long after they’d slaughtered 1,200 Israeli men, women and children back in October. According to reports, the seven terrorists were arrested in Germany, Holland and Denmark as they prepared to launch attacks against several Jewish sites in Europe.   One of the most disturbing elements of the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel in a European context was the reaction of many on the political and cultural left.

Sunday

Steerpike Steerpike

Eddie Izzard loses, yet again

Oh dear. Labour’s biggest loser has done it again. Poor old Eddie Izzard has a pretty poor track record when it comes to backing political campaigns. Among the comedian’s greatest hits include Yes2AV, backing Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn in successive general elections, endorsing the Euro and Remain in 2016 and bidding to end restrictions on Westminster street performers. Such a track record has not discouraged Izzard. On the contrary, the longtime luvvie has recently begun to branch out from national campaigns to standing for high office himself. Thus far, this has included failed tilts for Labour’s National Executive Council and the party’s Sheffield Central selection. And today

Joe Bedell-Brill

Baroness Mone ‘can’t see what we’ve done wrong’ over PPE pandemic profits

Baroness Mone: ‘I can’t see what we’ve done wrong’ Laura Kuenssberg’s show this morning was dominated by her interview with Baroness Michelle Mone and her husband Doug Barrowman, who have admitted their direct involvement with PPE Medpro, a company which was awarded a huge PPE contract during the pandemic, despite years claiming the contrary. The couple said they made £60 million in profit from the deal, and Mone admitted to being a beneficiary of financial trusts where the money is held. There is an ongoing criminal investigation, but Mone suggested they had been made scapegoats while Barrowman even implied a government official had asked for a bribe in exchange for

Phoebe Hennell

Javier Milei’s radical reforms could start to heal Argentina’s economy

Argentina has spent most of its 200-year history in deficit; no other country currently owes the International Monetary Fund a greater sum of money. The new finance minister, who entered government with President Javier Milei earlier this month, has been stark in making the point: ‘Out of the last 123 years, Argentina ran a fiscal deficit in 113… we have come to solve the addiction to fiscal deficits.’  Milei’s government is wasting little time carrying out what it calls ‘shock therapy’. The official value of the peso, Argentina’s currency, has been halved against the US dollar. Why might a government want to weaken its own currency, pushing up the price

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Stella Creasy is wrong about the ‘motherhood penalty’

If you find yourself frazzled by the Christmas rush, spare a thought for Stella Creasy, MP for Walthamstow, who is struggling to balance motherhood and her hectic social schedule. The other day she tweeted: ‘As I walk past everyone going to Christmas parties and drinks on my way to get the kids from nursery, yet again acutely aware the motherhood penalty is just a gift that keeps giving…. Not just flexible working we need but flexible networking too.’ It’s tough, no? Having to put the drinks parties (and remember, half of political life is conducted on the social front) on hold to do the active parenting of two children is a trade-off. But

Iain Macwhirter

Is Kate Forbes Scotland’s answer to Giorgia Meloni?

Scottish nationalists have always looked to Scandinavian countries as models of what a caring, social democratic Scotland would look like if only it could escape the clutches of Westminster. Not anymore. National populism, or what the left call the far-right, is on the march across the Nordic landscape. The Sweden Democrats, the True Finns and the Norway Progress party have shifted the centre of political gravity in those supposedly socialist small states.  Even in Denmark – home of the left wing TV series Borgen, which Nicola Sturgeon liked to compare her administration to – the government is aggressively repatriating asylum seekers and reportedly bulldozing ‘non-western’ neighbourhoods Of course, migration is less of

Sean Rayment

Who will rebuild Gaza?

When the last shot is fired in the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the fog of war eventually lifts, the challenge of who will rebuild Gaza will need to be addressed. While such a thought may be difficult for some Israelis to stomach, especially those who lost loved ones in the October 7th Hamas atrocity, the ‘what happens next?’ question demands both an answer and a plan. In his masterful work World Order, the late US statesman and diplomat Henry Kissinger noted that when President Harry S Truman was asked in 1961 what part of his presidency made him most proud, he said: ‘That we totally defeated our enemies and then

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Don’t cry for Shane MacGowan

Shane MacGowan’s death and his star-studded funeral captured the headlines this week. But the fawning and fanfare felt oddly dissonant to me: was I the only person in the media who never cared for him? I’m used to not holding the same opinions as most people in my profession; this is quite understandable, as only 19 per cent of British journalists were educated at comprehensive schools, as I was, and a minuscule number swerved ‘uni’, as I was blessed to. But I’m sceptical that many of those amongst my people of origin, the English working class, shared the media’s adulation for MacGowan. To us, MacGowan was a phoney: an Irish

Saturday

Peter Hitchens

Peter Hitchens, Lionel Shriver, Mary Wellesley and more

31 min listen

On this week’s episode, Peter Hitchens remembers a Christmas in Bucharest, Lionel Shriver says people don’t care about Ukraine anymore, Ed West wonders if you can ‘meme’ yourself into believing in God, Mary Wellesley reads her ‘Notes On’ St Nicholas, and Melissa Kite says she had to move to Ireland to escape the EU‘s rules.

David Abulafia

Does it matter if Hannibal is played by a black man?

It is becoming a familiar conundrum: whether to employ actors who match the ethnicity of the person they are portraying. Helen Mirren made the mistake of playing Golda Meir in a truly dreadful new film. The real mistake there was not the use of a non-Jewish actress, as some have complained, but the appalling quality of the script and production. Cleopatra was recently played by a black woman in a recent Netflix production, although the evidence strongly suggest she was fair-skinned. There is a suggestion she had some darker skinned ancestors, but the current convention seems to be that even a drop of blood is sufficient to confer blackness or

Kevin Dahlgren

Portland’s decriminalisation nightmare

In November 2020, Oregon passed Measure 110, decriminalising non-commercial drug possession. The state also significantly increased funding for recovery and harm reduction programmes. It sounded like a great plan to voters, so it passed with 60 per cent approval. The deadliest, most addictive drug in history was introduced to a vulnerable population just as the state decriminalised drugs What has occurred though over the last three years is nothing short of tragic. When Measure 110 passed, fentanyl was starting to take over our streets. For homeless addicts it began as a general curiosity, which quickly devolved into the widespread use of the deadliest drug in history. Fentanyl is 50 times stronger

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Why won’t Macron agree to an immigration referendum?

It is a peculiarity of the age in France that the subject that most divides the political class is the one that most unites the people they govern. Immigration is the issue that needs to be urgently addressed, according to voters, a message they have been telling their politicians for years. In January 2013, a poll found that 70 per cent of the electorate believed there were too many foreigners in the country; that figure has remained constant over the years, rising slightly in 2023 after the riots, atrocities and Islamist attacks that have scarred the Republic this year.   A poll last week disclosed that 80 per cent of

Limor Simhony Philpott

Netanyahu has finally realised Russia is no friend of Israel

When Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a 50-minute phone call with Russian president Vladimir Putin last weekend, it was only the second time the two leaders had spoken since the war against Hamas started on 7 October. The two leaders were once close allies, but no longer: relations between Putin and Netanyahu have now fractured, perhaps beyond repair. In a statement released immediately after the call, Netanyahu criticised Russia’s close alliance with Iran. The Kremlin blamed Israel for ‘the catastrophic humanitarian situation in Gaza’ – repeating a position expressed by Putin in the past, including in a meeting with his ally and staunch Israel critic, Turkish president Recep Tayyip

Tatyana Kekic

How to rig a Serbian election 

Serbia is heading to the polls, again. On Sunday, the country will vote to elect a new national parliament and several local assemblies, including in the hotly-contested capital Belgrade.     This is the seventh time President Aleksandar Vučić has taken his country to the polls since he was first elected in 2012, and the fourth consecutive time he has called elections early. Vučić has developed a habit of holding elections every two years, and he has honed his techniques for winning. With his Serbian Progressive party (SNS) set to win again, what’s his secret?    As elsewhere in the Balkans, Serbia’s rulers depend on a political patronage system to maintain

Friday

James Heale James Heale

Will we avoid recession in 2024?

10 min listen

The big economic news of the week was that the Bank of England has held interest rates at 5.25 per cent for the third consecutive time. This was the expected outcome of the Monetary Policy Committee’s latest vote, but it wasn’t unanimous. There were six MPC votes to hold rates but three to raise it to 5.5 per cent. Should we expect a rate cut any time soon?  James Heale speaks to Katy Balls and Kate Andrews. Produced by Oscar Edmondson.

Alexander Larman

Prince Harry claims another victory in his war on the tabloids

Well, send him victorious-ish. In what amounts to an early Christmas present for Prince Harry, Mr Justice Fancourt has ruled today at the High Court that there was, in his stern description, ‘extensive’ phone hacking that took place at the Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) between 2006 to 2011, and even, hilariously, that this continued to occur ‘to some extent’ during the Leveson enquiry into media standards, suggesting the company was so entirely unabashed by the idea that they would be held up to scrutiny by the forces of the law that their murky little business continued. Still, it was not a total victory for Prince Harry, much as he might

Dean Godson

Ireland’s security freeloading is a threat to the West

Today marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Downing Street Declaration – one of the key building blocks of the Northern Irish peace process which led to the Belfast Agreement of 1998. That accord, forged between prime minister John Major and the taoiseach Albert Reynolds, is widely held to be a masterpiece of calculated ambiguity. In a memorable turn of phrase, the British government acknowledged that it had ‘no selfish strategic or economic interest’ in Northern Ireland – a formula first employed in Ulster secretary Peter Brooke’s Whitbread lecture of 9 November 1990. To much of Nationalist Ireland, the Green-sounding language was enticing: the British were saying that they had no ‘imperialistic’ reason of State to

Andrew Tettenborn

The unexpected free speech threat coming from Northern Ireland

Threats to free speech can come from unexpected places these days. A law passed in Northern Ireland has troubling implications for what can be said or reported about serious sexual misconduct, not only in Belfast, but also in London. Victims of sexual offences are granted lifetime anonymity in the UK. The law bans publications from printing anything that could publicly identify them. But since September, the Northern Ireland Justice (Sexual Offences and Trafficking Victims) Act goes way further. It extends the gag to 25 years after the victim’s death unless a court decides otherwise, and allows any relative down to a great-grandchild to petition the court to prolong it if it thinks this

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Is an impeachment inquiry good for Biden?

25 min listen

The House of Representatives has voted to open an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden, after three Republican-led committees alleged bribery and corruption during his time as vice-president. Could it actually be good news for Biden? Freddy speaks to Jacob Heilbrunn.