Politics

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

Monday

5 Feb 2024

The cynicism behind Labour’s Race Equality Act

Labour is desperate to come across as business-friendly. Last week, the party said it will no longer reinstate a cap on bankers’ bonuses, and that it will ‘unashamedly champion’ the financial services industry. But how to square that with the party’s new Race Equality Act? Most people understand equal pay to mean exactly what was intended when it became law in 1970: that remuneration must be the same for two identical jobs within an organisation, regardless of who is in post. But since the EU’s 2006 Equal Pay Directive it has taken on a new meaning: now, it covers ‘like work’ (where the job and skills are the same or similar),

Steerpike

Watch: Rishi bets Piers £1,000 on Rwanda

Proper prime time viewing this afternoon with a PM on the ropes. TalkTV today broadcast Piers Morgan’s interview with Rishi Sunak, reprising the double act from when the pair last met in Downing Street 12 months ago. The embattled premier no doubt spoke for many when he met Morgan, greeting him with the words ‘Not you again.’ Never mind Rishi: if the polls are correct there won’t be a third encounter in No. 10 this time next year… Sunak was in his Tigger-ish form, likening himself to Gareth Southgate and suggesting that everyone likes to have a pop at his leadership. But while the PM was prepared to admit his

Tom Slater

Why don’t Tories like Gillian Keegan want to talk about asylum?

Does the Tory party have a death wish? It’s a question we have been prompted to ask again and again over recent years, as the supposed natural party of government has self-immolated before the electorate’s eyes. But if an interview with education secretary Gillian Keegan on Sky News over the weekend is anything to go by, the answer is an emphatic ‘Yes’. Many prominent Tories are up to their necks in woke identity politics Last week’s horrific alkali attack in south-west London has exposed a dysfunctional asylum system that no sane person could support. That the Afghan national Abdul Ezedi – the man suspected of disfiguring a mother and her

Katy Balls

Rishi Sunak admits to failing on NHS waitlists

11 min listen

Rishi Sunak is in Belfast to mark the return of Stormont after a two-year deadlock. With Sinn Fein now the leading party, can the government pitch this as a win? Also on the podcast, the Prime Minister admitted he’s failed to meet the NHS waitlist targets from his five pledges last year. James Heale speaks to Katy Balls and Fraser Nelson.

Patrick O’Flynn

Christians are being played for fools in asylum claims

It came as quite a shock when we learned that many of our universities had moved into the lucrative trade of selling visas to foreign nationals, with a bit of higher education attached as a legacy sideline. Now there is a new question hanging in the air: is nothing sacred? For we are having to get our heads around the idea of churches apparently participating in the immigration racket too. It seems that something of a ‘pray to stay’ ruse has been in operation for people from non-Christian backgrounds who have illegally gate-crashed into Britain. Something of a ‘pray to stay’ ruse has been in operation for people from non-Christian

Brendan O’Neill

Of course the Clapham chemical attack is about asylum

The Clapham chemical attack is ‘not really about asylum’. An actual government minister said this. Not some junior scribe for the Guardian or a right-on irritant with his pronouns and the Palestine flag in his social-media bio. No, a minister. A member of the cabinet. One of the highest officials in the land. The Tories really have lost the plot, haven’t they? It was Gillian Keegan, the education secretary. She was on Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips on Sky News. He probed her about the horrific attack in Clapham on Wednesday night when a mother and her two young daughters were doused with alkali. The suspect is Abdul Ezedi, an

Michael Simmons

Full extent of sick-note Britain revealed

We already know that Britain has a massive sick-note problem but we did not, until today, know just how large. Every three months, the ONS surveys 35,000 people and uses the results to guess how many (for example) are not working due to long-term sickness. That figure had been 2.6 million. But it has today been revised upwards by 200,000 – equivalent to the population of Norwich or Aberdeen – to 2.8 million. The chart of those too sick to work, already one of the most alarming in UK economics, now looks even worse. The Labour Force Survey – the tool that statisticians use to work out employment, unemployment and

Freddy Gray

Why shouldn’t Tucker Carlson interview Vladimir Putin?

In September, 1934, William Randolph Hearst, the most famous journalist and publisher in the world, visited Berlin and interviewed Adolf Hitler. At the time, Hearst admired Hitler, and was rather taken aback when the Fuhrer asked why he was so ‘misunderstood’ in the English-language press. Hearst replied that Americans love democracy and distrusted dictatorships, to which Hitler answered that he had been democratically elected by a vast majority of Germans. Unlike Hearst, Carlson does not think that his job is to talk to world leaders away from the cameras in order to decide what’s best for democracy Hearst then said that Americans were concerned about the treatment of a certain

Gavin Mortimer

Russia isn’t the biggest worry in Macron’s crime-ridden France

February has not started well for the European Union. On the first day of the month, furious farmers surrounded the parliament in Brussels, chanting defiance and throwing eggs at the people they blame for demeaning their industry. On Saturday, a man stabbed three people at the Gare de Lyon in Paris. The suspect in custody is from Mali but had lived legally in Italy since arriving in 2016. During questioning, the 32-year said his actions were motivated not by religion but by historical grievance, for what France ‘had imposed on his grandfather’. As has become the custom in these type of attacks, the initial explanation for the man’s rampage was

Sam Leith

How do we draw the line between gambling and gaming?

‘Skins gambling,’ anyone? No, until yesterday, me neither. It’s nothing to do with strip poker or 70s bovver boys. It’s the name given to a completely unregulated gambling industry, aggressively promoted to teenagers and estimated to be worth multiple billions of pounds a year – yes, billions with a b. One reason this isn’t a major scandal, I think, is that it will sound too far-fetched and too obscure and confusing to the sorts of people who we might hope would be scandalised into doing something about it. But so it was, too, with credit default swaps. So let’s try to explain. (I’m largely indebted for my own understanding to

Lloyd Evans

Casting an able-bodied actor as Richard III isn’t ‘offensive’

The row over Richard III rumbles on. Disability groups have objected to the Globe’s forthcoming production in which Michelle Terry will take the lead. The able-bodied Terry, who happens to be the Globe’s artistic director, has apologised ‘for the pain or harm that has been caused by the decision for me to play Richard III.’ This carefully worded statement gives the impression that some external authority reached ‘the decision’ to award her the role but was that really the case? Casting decisions at the Globe, she goes on, are made ‘rigorously’ and ‘always in dialogue with members of our many communities.’ One of the ‘communities’ she seems to have ignored

Eliot Wilson

Can Sinn Fein’s Michelle O’Neill save Northern Ireland?

The appointment of a new executive by the Northern Ireland Assembly on Saturday was a hugely significant moment. There was no government at Stormont for exactly two years from 3 February 2022 until Michelle O’Neill of Sinn Féin accepted the assembly’s nomination to be first minister at the weekend. She is the first Republican leader of Northern Ireland since the state was created in May 1921, what its inaugural prime minister, Sir James Craig, would describe as ‘a Protestant parliament and a Protestant state’. This was history being made live on television. For the national and international media, I suspect this will be the end of the story which began

Jay Mens

Performative airstrikes against the Houthis will achieve nothing

Performative sanctions have long been the last refuge of the lazy policymaker looking to ‘do something’. Take, for instance, the sanctions that are slapped on unsavoury individuals from around the world on an almost-weekly basis: Turkish assassins, Iranian guerrilla commanders, Somali pirates, and Yemeni rebels are among those who have been whacked with the sanctions stick. Unsurprisingly, nobody has repented as a result of being listed, meaning that the sanctions roster is a government naughty list and little more. After more than a decade of performative sanctions, the public is slowly cottoning onto the fact that they don’t seem to offer much. Amidst this scrutiny, policymakers are increasingly drawn to

Julie Burchill

In praise of Kemi Badenoch

Whenever international affairs are proving particularly ‘interesting’ there’s always some clown who pipes up with ‘Oh, if only women ruled the world – it would be so peaceful!’ But females can be every bit as keen on a ding-dong or a dust-up as men; in fact, I’d say that women who try to push the theory that we have a completely different political sensibility – saintlike and self-sacrificing and not prone to sins of the flesh like that Big Bad Boris – are often slithery, self-righteous snakes with a far more sinister agenda than many nakedly ambitious male politicians. But enough about Nicola Sturgeon. For as one door slams on

Sunday

4 Feb 2024

Lucy Dunn

Are Scots tiring of devolution?

As Scottish devolution celebrates its 25th anniversary, are voters losing faith in Holyrood? A quarter of the country believes devolution has been bad for Scotland, with almost half of ‘No’ voters in the independence referendum now disillusioned. New polling for the Sunday Times finds that over a fifth of voters didn’t know if devolving powers to Scotland had been positive or negative, while 50 per cent still believe that overall devolution had been good. There was a clear split on the devolution question based on how a person voted in the 2014 referendum, while age provided another dividing line: devolution was unpopular with half of those over 75 years old

Joe Bedell-Brill

Sunday shows round-up: Sinn Fein First Minister vows to be a ‘unifier’

Sinn Fein leader Michelle O’Neill made history this week as she became Northern Ireland’s first nationalist first minister. Speaking to David Blevins on Sky News, she described herself as a ‘proud Republican’, but insisted that she ‘wants to be a unifier’. Blevins asked her about her ambitions for Irish unity, pointing out that the UK government has said that there is ‘no realistic prospect of a border poll leading to a united Ireland’, and that Northern Ireland will be part of the UK for decades. O’Neill contested this claim, saying her appointment meant she had a mandate from the public, and described the near future as a ‘decade of opportunity’

Fraser Nelson

Why Kate Forbes is right about high tax

I was on BBC1’s Question Time with Kate Forbes in Glasgow last week in which she was oddly loyal to the SNP government. She seems to have been the only member of Nicola Sturgeon’s government not to be deleting her WhatsApp during Covid and I suspect she’s appalled at the way Sturgeon & co placed secrecy at the heart of their Covid response. She said on Question Time that the way to grow Scotland’s economy was to attract people to come and work there. I put to her that having the highest tax rates in the UK (as Humza Yousaf has chosen to do) didn’t exactly scream “come to Scotland!”.

Freddy Gray

Can Trump ever get a fair trial?

15 min listen

Last week Donald Trump was ordered to pay more than seventy million dollars to E. Jean Carroll, the writer who accused him of sexual assault. Freddy speaks to Spectator columnist Lionel Shriver about some of the oddities of this case against the former president.

Colin Brazier

Why Britain’s farmers aren’t revolting

Europe’s ablaze, but not on this side of the English Channel. Paris has been besieged. Dutch politics turned upside down. Yet in the country that gave history the Peasant’s Revolt, the only thing British farmers are flailing is hedgerows. As tractors blockade the chancelleries of Belgium and Germany, why is it that the only traffic gridlock caused by British agriculture is the queue of cars outside Jeremy Clarkson’s café? Partly, it’s who we are. Battlefields of industrial strife like Peterloo and Orgreave aside, our culture of protest is different. As the comedienne Victoria Wood put it, the British do not have revolutions, preferring instead to write to ‘Points of View’.

Ross Clark

Will Londoners fall for Sadiq Khan’s election bribes?

Taxpayers are being treated to a clutch of pre-election bribes from a politician who only a few months ago was claiming there was a lack of money for anything. That will almost certainly be true of Jeremy Hunt’s budget on 6 March, but it is already true of Sadiq Khan’s London Mayoralty budget for 2024/25. Khan was in no doubt who was to blame last December when he announced that the Mayor’s precept on council tax bills in London would rise by 8.6 per cent, more than twice the rate of inflation. The government, he claimed, was starving London of money. It was ‘due to the continued lack of national investment