Politics

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

Friday

12 Jan 2024

The delusion of the Houthi pacifists

I see ‘Not in my name’ is trending on social media. It’s in response to the US and UK strikes on Houthi positions in Yemen. The tweeting classes want to make it clear to the world that such uncouth militarism has nothing to do with them. ‘My conscience is clean’, these time-rich signallers of rectitude are really saying. Has there ever been a slogan as smug, self-satisfied and outright narcissistic as ‘Not in my name’? It is notably not a political cry. It advances no programme, makes no demands. It is a world away from the catchy mottos of the Sixties, like ‘Hands off Vietnam!’ or ‘Vietnam for the Vietnamese!’

Svitlana Morenets

What Britain’s defence deal with Ukraine means for the war

In his surprise visit to Kyiv, Rishi Sunak had two pieces of good news for Ukrainians: another £2.5 billion in military aid and an agreement to sign a bilateral defence deal. Ukraine isn’t going to join Nato any time soon, so the country’s leader Volodymyr Zelensky has been trying to build a next-best alternative: a series of deals with allies. Britain is the first. The UK says it will provide intelligence sharing, cyber security, medical and military training and defence industrial cooperation. And post-war, if Ukraine is ever attacked by Russia again, the UK will agree to provide ‘swift and sustained’ assistance. The Ukrainian government has been negotiating such agreements

Steerpike

Suella savages Sunak’s Rwanda Bill

The Rwanda Bill comes back to parliament next week which means a return of Westminster’s favourite parlour game: Tory blue-on-blue. The left of the party has had their say this week, with Matt Warman’s jibes on Tuesday and Damian Green’s warning that ‘the Prime Minister looked me in the eye and said that he doesn’t want to go any further.’ But today it’s the turn of the Tory right, with more than 50 names now signed up to Sir Bill Cash’s amendment to toughen up the Bill. And cometh the hour, cometh the Braverman as the former Home Secretary today decided to give her first television interview since her sacking.

Paul Wood

Have the Houthis gone rogue?

The US and Britain really didn’t think they had a choice about bombing Yemen in retaliation for Houthi attacks on ships in the Red Sea – one of the world’s busiest waterways, carrying almost a sixth of global shipping. But the airstrikes overnight are unlikely to stop the attacks and in the short term will probably make things worse. The decision was taken after one of the most audacious Houthi attacks yet. They sent out a swarm of one-way attack drones and fired cruise missiles into waters where the US military said dozens of ships were crossing at the time. Many of the drones and missiles were shot down by

Gavin Mortimer

Gabriel Attal and the unstoppable rise of Klaus Schwab’s ‘global leaders’

The French found out on Thursday evening that, under their new prime minister, nothing will change in the way their country is run. Gabriel Attal, the Boy Wonder who at 34 is the youngest premier of the Fifth Republic, unveiled his new cabinet – and there was a distinct lack of freshness. The controversial Gerald Darmanin remains as interior minister, despite the fact he has presided over unprecedented rises in crime and illegal immigration. Meanwhile, there is no change at the ministry of justice or the ministry of the economy. The biggest talking points concern the new minister of culture, Rachida Dati, who served as minister of justice in Nicolas Sarkozy’s

Steerpike

Watch: Drakeford clashes with Starmer on self-ID

Once, Sir Keir Starmer liked to claim that the Welsh Labour government was the ‘blueprint’ the UK. Yet now, like so much else, he has u-turned even on that, declining to repeat the promise when asked repeatedly three months ago. And perhaps that’s no surprise when one considers the record of Mark Drakeford’s ragtime regime in Cardiff Bay, running an economy which grows slower than the cars on the Welsh 20mph-roads. With his country’s NHS in crisis, the First Minister this week offered a revealing insight into his own priorities when grilled in the Senedd chamber. Drakeford will shortly be standing down from office, amid suggestions that he was ‘squeezed

Iain Macwhirter

Humza’s humiliating XL Bully U-turn

Humza Yousaf has just executed an embarrassing U-turn and effectively banned XL Bully dogs in line with England and Wales. This has inevitably unleashed a pack of bad canine puns about the SNP making a dog’s breakfast of devolution. We always thought Humza Yousaf was barking, now we know. Boom boom. This episode is another botched exercise in cross-border grievance mongering Laughter aside, this episode is another botched exercise in cross-border grievance mongering, something at which the SNP used to be so adept. When the UK government announced last September that there was to be a ban selling or breeding these aggressive animals, following a spate of attacks on people, Mr

Arash Azizi

Who are the Houthis?

About a month ago, a regional brigade of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the militia that undergirds the power in the Islamic Republic of Iran, held a political conference in the port city of Bushehr on the Persian Gulf. The keynote speaker was a surprise for most attendees: Salim al-Montasser, an envoy of Yemen’s Houthis, who the UK and the US targeted in airstrikes last night. The Houthis are a Shia militia that holds power in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, and is regarded as the sovereign Yemeni government by Tehran (but not by the Arab League or the international community). Al-Montasser was profuse in his endorsement of Iran’s Supreme Leader

Oscar Edmondson

Britain and US launch airstrikes against Houthis

15 min listen

Last night the US and the UK launched airstrikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen whose continued attacks are disrupting trade in the Red Sea. The decision to sanction military action has been broadly welcomed in Westminster, but some have urged the PM to hold a retrospective vote on airstrikes amid fears that the UK risks being sucked into a tinder-box region. Will these airstrikes increase tensions in the Middle East? What impact will they have on the economy? Meanwhile, Rishi Sunak is in Kyiv where he has announced a landmark new package of support for Ukraine totalling £2.5 billion. Oscar Edmondson speaks to Katy Balls and Simon Mayall, former

Andrew McQuillan

South Africa has no right to lecture Israel

As South Africa presented its case accusing Israel of genocide to the International Court of Justice, the presence of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in and around the Hague court gave a flavour of the calibre of those willing this case on. It was predictable that the South African government’s championing of this cause would ignite the ardour of the left. Quoting Nelson Mandela, the Labour MP Zarah Sultana took to X (formerly Twitter) to say with certainty that South Africa’s case against Israel was ‘devastating’. The true story of South Africa since the 1990s has been one of staggering corruption The African National Congress (ANC), which has exercised an

Kate Andrews

Will Red Sea strikes disrupt the UK economy?

November is proving to have been a lucky month in Britain. Inflation slowed significantly: from 4.6 per cent on the year in October down to 3.9 per cent on the year in November (a bigger fall than anyone predicted). Not only that: this morning we learned from the Office for National Statistics that the economy grew by 0.3 per cent, rebounding from an (unrevised) 0.3 per cent contraction in October. Unfortunately that headline growth rate was largely thanks to a handful of temporary factors. Growth in overall services, up 0.4 per cent, is mainly attributed to a reduction in strikes that month, particularly within the health and transport sectors. Furthermore,

Jason M. Brodsky

Striking the Houthis won’t stop Iran

A month before the targeted killing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) commander Qassem Soleimani in January 2020, few would have expected the US government to eliminate him in a drone strike. Fast forward to this month, and the United States and its allies have launched a military operation to degrade and deter the Houthis. Last night, they launched strikes against more than a dozen Yemeni locations, with explosions reported in the capital Sanaa, the Red Sea port of Hudaydah, Dhamar and north-western Houthi stronghold Saada. The Houthis are armed, financed, and resourced by the IRGC and have been targeting commercial vessels in the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, a sensitive global chokepoint.

Theo Hobson

Why do I keep falling for Boris Johnson’s charm?

On Saturday, I was in a public library, waiting for an old guy to finish with the Times. But he seemed to be reading every word of every section, and sort of peering at it frowningly in an annoying way. So I did something I hardly ever do: I picked up the Daily Mail. I had forgotten that I might find Boris here. I wondered what I thought of him these days. One is meant to despise or at least disdain him, of course. But I’ve always struggled to. Oh, I often come very close. I came close the other week, when I read Rory Stewart’s memoir. Politicians should obviously be devoted

Thursday

11 Jan 2024

Angus Colwell

Britain and US launch airstrikes against Houthis

The US and the UK have launched airstrikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen whose continued attacks are disrupting trade in the Red Sea. Rishi Sunak convened his cabinet on Thursday night to discuss what action would be taken. Strikes were reported in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, and the Houthi stronghold port of Hudaydah. Downing Street said that the strikes were carried out by the Royal Air Force on military facilities. The UK’s National Security Council met on Thursday, and an emergency meeting of Cobra was convened. The Leader of the Opposition and the Speaker of the House of Commons were briefed. It’s understood that Sunak will not recall parliament on Friday

William Moore

Why Trump can’t be stopped

36 min listen

This week: can anyone stop Trump? The Spectator’s deputy editor Freddy Gray takes a look at Trump’s ‘second coming’ in his cover story. He says that despite Trump’s legal troubles, he is almost certain to receive the Republican nomination. Freddy joins the podcast alongside Amber Duke, who also writes in the magazine this week about the brides of trump: the women hoping to receive the nod as his running mate. Also this week: the old trope is that there is nothing more ex than an ex prime minister, but what about an ex MP? In the magazine this week, The Spectator’s political correspondent James Heale says that Tory MPs expecting to lose their

Katy Balls

Can the economy win Tory votes?

11 min listen

James Heale speaks to Kate Andrews and Katy Balls about Rishi Sunak’s new strategy to focus more on the economy as the election year kicks off. Can Rishi Sunak convince the public that he is the best man for the job? And how much control does the government really have when it comes tackling the economy?

Isabel Hardman

We don’t need targets to know the NHS is failing

How has the NHS missed most of its key targets for the past seven years? Some parts of the UK-wide health services (Northern Ireland and Wales) have never met the four-hour time target for A&E, for instance, while others only managed it during lockdown (Scotland) when visits plummeted. Analysis of the NHS’s own figures by the BBC found that NHS England last met the four hour A&E target in July 2015, the 62-day cancer treatment target in December 2015, and planned hospital care in February 2016. The NHS also released performance figures today showing that while its waiting lists in England have fallen for the second month in a row,

Steerpike

Zac Goldsmith slapped with temporary driving ban

They say it’s a difficult change of gear when you leave government. Still, it seems Zac Goldsmith has had no problem keeping his foot on the pedal since he resigned last year, after complaining about Rishi Sunak’s ‘apathy’ towards environmental issues. Today, the former environment minister and eco-champion was temporarily banned from driving after being caught speeding on four separate occasions. Appearing in Westminster Magistrates’ Court, Goldsmith pleaded guilty to the four counts of speeding in Chelsea, Paddington and Twickenham between April and August last year. In April, he was caught doing 29 in a 20 zone on Chelsea Embankment. In July, he was 8 mph over the limit in

Jawad Iqbal

Tories are wrong to imply that Starmer is racist

Is it really some kind of underhand racist smear for Labour to claim that Rishi Sunak ‘doesn’t get Britain’? This is the charge being laid by No. 10 staffers at the door of the Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, who made the accusation during the first Prime Minister’s Questions of the year on Wednesday. Claire Coutinho, the Energy Secretary, whose parents came from India in the 1970s, told a radio interviewer that she was prepared to give Starmer the ‘benefit of the doubt’ that the remark ‘wasn’t about race’. She then went on to add that ‘only he can know what he is implying’, while somehow making it perfectly obvious that there

Lisa Haseldine

Even in the Arctic Circle, Navalny remains uncowed

Alexei Navalny had a brutal December. At the start of the month the Putin critic abruptly disappeared from his prison colony in Vladimir, east of Moscow. For 20 days no one knew of his whereabouts until his lawyers tracked him down to the ‘Polar Wolf’ colony of Kharp, deep within the Arctic Circle. Yesterday, he was seen by the public for the first time since his transfer. Appearing over video link, the gaunt Kremlin critic held a short press conference ahead of his appointment in court to sue the Vladimir colony where he was being held until December. Standing behind a metal grille, head shaved and dressed in a prison jumpsuit, Navalny