Politics

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

Friday

Andrew Liddle

There is still hope for the Scottish Tories

As Douglas Ross and his colleagues gather for the annual Scottish Tory conference in Aberdeen this weekend, there are good reasons for the Scottish Conservatives to feel more upbeat than their counterparts elsewhere. In 1997, Scotland proved particularly emblematic of New Labour’s landmark victory. Where the Conservative Party had held 11 seats, they now held none. Their share of the popular vote fell to just over 17 per cent. Three serving cabinet ministers – Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind, Scottish Secretary Michael Forsyth and President of the Board of Trade Ian Lang – were among the more high-profile casualties. As defeats go, it was comprehensive, and reflected a UK-wide disaffection after

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

George Galloway’s Rochdale win should trouble Labour

The Rochdale by-election raises a question that Labour will find hard to duck in government: can a European left-wing party survive without a pro-Islamist foreign policy? They can’t win with one, as Jeremy Corbyn proved twice. But the shocking success of George Galloway last night shows that the arguments of the Corbyn years have not been settled. No one can pretend they do not know who the loudmouthed old ham really is after all this time. Just before Muslim voters propelled him to victory, Galloway received the endorsement of none other than Nick Griffin, the former leader of the British National Party (BNP).  Rochdale raises a question about how Labour

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Galloway heckled by Just Stop Oil during victory speech

You’ve got to hand it to Just Stop Oil: just when you think you’ve seen the last of the climate protest group, up they pop again. The eco-activists gave George Galloway a not-so-warm welcome back to Parliament, heckling the newly-crowned MP for Rochdale during his victory speech. Galloway was mid-flow in his speech, declaring bullishly, ‘Keir Starmer – this is for Gaza’, when a spray of orange confetti fluttered towards Galloway – but didn’t quite hit its target. Undeterred, a Just Stop Oil protester then began shouting: ‘George Galloway, you are a climate change denier! You said in the hustings that you want to extract oil and gas from the

Katy Balls Katy Balls

The Thangam Debbonaire Edition

35 min listen

Thangam Debbonaire was born in Peterborough to an Indian father and English mother. She has been an MP since 2015 but before Parliament spent over 25 years working to end domestic violence. She served under Jeremy Corbyn as Shadow Minister for Arts and Heritage and has served in Keir Starmer’s Shadow Cabinet since his leadership as the Shadow Culture Secretary. Thangam is no stranger to a lively debate at the dispatch box and despite a busy life as an MP, still finds time for music, playing cello in Parliament as part of the string quartet, The Statutory Instruments.

Nick Tyrone Nick Tyrone

George Galloway’s Rochdale victory is nothing to celebrate

George Galloway has won the Rochdale by-election. The new MP for the town announced the result as a ‘shifting of the tectonic plates’ in his acceptance speech, but that’s not an accurate way of describing what’s just happened. It’s more like a blip and an unpleasant one at that. No one who hopes for the best out of British politics can look at Rochdale with any joy. Certainly not celebrating this morning will be the Reform party, who came a shocking sixth, behind even the Liberal Democrats. Richard Tice was campaigning heavily in the constituency himself yesterday, with various Reform figures having talked up the candidate Simon Danczuk’s chances of

Steerpike Steerpike

Richard Tice and George Galloway in war of words

Following his triumph in the Rochdale by-election, George Galloway marked the occasion by dropping another bombshell. Speaking to reporters at the count, Galloway was asked about the criticisms of Richard Tice, Reform party leader, who said that his candidate Simon Danczuk suffered intimidation throughout the campaign. Yet, in a shock twist, Galloway responded by claiming Tice had previously asked him to a Reform candidate. He told reporters: I think Mr Tice has rather lost his balance, and Mr Farage too, and I remind Mr Tice that I have on my telephone a text from him inviting me to be the Reform UK candidate in a by-election not that long ago.

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Labour nightmare as George Galloway wins Rochdale by-election

George Galloway is back. The former Labour MP has triumphed in the Rochdale by-election, taking the seat from Starmer’s party with a majority of 5,697. Galloway – standing for the Workers Party of Britain – won comfortably with nearly 40 per cent of the vote at 12,335 votes. The independent candidate David Tully came in second place on 6,638, the Tories in third on 3,731 and Labour in a dismal fourth place on 2,041 votes in their former seat after Keir Starmer suspended the party’s candidate part way through the campaign. The Reform party – which put up another former Labour MP in Simon Danczuk as its candidate – came

Thursday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Why wasn’t Wayne Couzens stopped?

10 min listen

Today, the long-awaited Home Office-commissioned Angiolini Inquiry into Wayne Couzens has been published. Couzens had kidnapped, raped and murdered 33-year-old Sarah Everard three years ago. The findings were chilling, revealing that numerous opportunities to stop Couzens throughout his policing career were missed. Katy Balls talks to James Heale and Isabel Hardman about where politicians failed Sarah Everard. Produced by Cindy Yu.

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Putin wants to talk about Russia’s future, not the war

Vladimir Putin’s annual address to the Federation Council (the upper chamber of the legislature) is rarely an exciting event, but it does provide an opportunity to gauge his mood and assess his priorities. This year’s – the longest yet, at over two hours – was in many ways his stump speech for March’s presidential elections, without ever even acknowledging the upcoming vote. Early on, there was an array of the familiar talking points around his ‘special military operation’ – the invasion of Ukraine. That it was forced upon him by a ‘Nazi’ regime in Kyiv and a hostile ‘so-called West, with its colonial practices and penchant for inciting ethnic conflicts

Andy Maciver

The Scottish Tories are facing an identity crisis

Why is the only party of the centre-right in Scotland so far away from government? As the Labour Party becomes more sensible under Sir Keir Starmer and Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Conservatives are facing an increasingly existential threat. Their conference gets underway in Aberdeen this weekend — and the party must not waste this opportunity to confront what is going wrong. One of the main problems facing Douglas Ross’s Scottish Tories is that his party and the SNP are inextricably linked. Both groups are utterly dependent on the prospect of a second independence referendum being credible and real. Think about it: the SNP’s overarching narrative for the last 10 years

Tom Goodenough

John Major urges Hunt to up defence spending, not cut taxes, in Budget

John Major has called on Chancellor Jeremy Hunt not to cut taxes in his Budget next week – but to spend more on defence instead. The former prime minister said that Russia’s war with Ukraine – as well as rising tensions in the Middle East – meant that it was vital Britain ensured it allocated proper resources to defence, rather than lower the tax burden on Brits. Asked whether defence spending should be Hunt’s priority, Major said: ‘That would be my choice. We face a real difficulty, both with defence and some public services. Usually when defence spending increases, it is because a threat is evident. There is a threat

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Plan Bibi: stalemate suits Netanyahu

48 min listen

Welcome to a slightly new format for the Edition podcast! Each week we will be talking about the magazine – as per usual – but trying to give a little more insight into the process behind putting The Spectator to bed each week. On the podcast this week: plan Bibi In the early hours of Friday morning, Benjamin Netanyahu leaked his ‘Day after Hamas’ plan for post-war Gaza. But the plan is not a plan, writes Anshel Pfeffer – it is just a set of vague principles that do not stand up to the slightest scrutiny. Its sole purpose is rather to keep the ministers of Netanyahu’s fragile cabinet together to ensure

Eliot Wilson

The speech that reveals the DUP’s radical shift

The Democratic Unionist Party is nothing if not intransigent. For many years, the DUP provided a masterclass in judging the past, and tying it round the neck of the future. Its founder, Ian Paisley, was best known for uttering the same word three times: ‘Never! Never! Never!’. But now that the party has once again started the hard yards of governing Northern Ireland with Emma Little-Pengelly as deputy first minister, there are signs that the DUP is radically changing. Donaldson has not gone soft on the Union It is still not quite four weeks since the Northern Ireland Executive was appointed after the devolved assembly at Stormont had sat idle

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Penny Mordaunt slaps down Andrew Bridgen

Thursday morning in parliament brings with it Business Questions and the chance for Penny Mordaunt to slap down another opponent from the despatch box. Today though, her stand-out moment came not against her regular SNP opponents but rather a former colleague. Andrew Bridgen, the sage of North West Leicestershire, called for a debate on capital punishment in a not-so-subtle way of obtaining a clip for his vaccine-hating fan-base. He said to Mordaunt: I’ve always opposed capital punishment on the principle that it’s wrong to take a life so it can’t be right for the state to take a life in revenge. Events have caused me to reconsider my position. So,

Julie Bindel

Shame on the Met Police for hiring Wayne Couzens

Three years after the murder of Sarah Everard, the long-awaited Home Office-commissioned Angiolini Inquiry into Wayne Couzens has been published – and it is damning of the Metropolitan Police. Those who turned a blind eye, ignoring the attitudes and actions of the officer, should hang their heads in shame. Former Met Commissioner Cressida Dick’s description of him as a ‘bad apple’ is inappropriate; it would appear that the whole barrel is rotten. The country was shocked to the core when it was revealed that a serving police officer had abducted, raped and murdered 33-year-old Everard, before disposing of her body. To get her into his vehicle, Couzens used his warrant

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Migration is too high, says party in charge of migration for 14 years

When Rishi Sunak made ‘stopping the boats’ one of his five priorities after entering No. 10, he ensured that immigration (legal and illegal) would become one of the big issues heading into an election. It seemed, for a while, that the government thought the emphasis on migration would work in its favour. It hasn’t exactly turned out that way. The migration crackdown announced by James Cleverly at the end of last year is designed to reduce the headline number of net migrants to the UK, after it was reported that in 2022 that net migration reached a record high of 745,000. The policy instruments announced by the Home Secretary to

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Putin’s nuclear doctrine has been revealed

Secret documents have been leaked that reveal Russian scenarios for war games involving simulated nuclear strikes. They shed light on Moscow’s military thinking and its nuclear planning in particular, but ultimately only reinforce one key factor: if nuclear weapons are ever used, it will be a wholly political move by Putin. The impressive 29 documents scooped by the Financial Times date back to the period of 2008 (when Vladimir Putin was technically just prime minister but still effectively in charge) to 2014 (after the sudden worsening in relations with the West following Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity and the annexation of Crimea). Although this means that they are a little dated,

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Something the Tories can learn from Canada’s conservatives

When contemplating the scale of the Tories’ expected drubbing in the coming general election, some commentators reach for the example of Canada’s Progressive Conservatives. The 1993 federal election saw the governing centre-right party, which had been in power since 1984, lose all but two of its seats in the House of Commons. It never recovered and became defunct within a decade. The comparison is particularly tempting given one of the factors behind the Progressive Conservatives’ demise was the emergence of a rival right-wing party called Reform. If the fate of the Progressive Conservatives is an object lesson in how even major political parties can die when they lose their way,

Jawad Iqbal

Why is a West End theatre putting on ‘black only’ performances?

Why would the producers of a new West End play think it a good idea to put on select performances for all-black audiences, effectively telling white theatregoers they’re not welcome on those nights? The idea of Black Out nights (as they have become known) amounts to segregation by race and skin colour. Yet this is exactly what will take place when Slave Play, written by American playwright Jeremy O Harris, starts its run at the Noël Coward Theatre this summer. Is he suggesting black people can only feel safe with other black people? Two nights – 17 July and 17 September – have been allocated to all-black audiences to watch

John Oxley

The Tories have no excuse to whine about The Blob

The last few weeks have served as a reminder of the sort of conspiratorial, self-excusing hole the Conservative party could well go down in opposition. Speaking in the United States, Liz Truss blamed her premiership collapsing on the ‘wokenomics’ of the ‘deep state’, giving succour once more to the idea that the Tory party could have done what it wanted, could have governed better, were it not for The Blob. It’s a seductive argument, but a dubious and self-defeating one if the party wants to gain power again. Blaming the levers of government for a lack of change is a poor argument that makes the party weak and pointless When