Politics

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

Tuesday

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Labour’s Hansard howlers on Israel

Communication is everything in politics, as Labour’s overactive press office knows all too well. Earlier this month, Keir Starmer did an interview on LBC with Nick Ferrari in which the latter asked whether ‘A siege is appropriate? Cutting off power? Cutting off water?’ in Gaza. Starmer replied that ‘I think that Israel does have that right. It is an ongoing situation. Obviously everything should be done within international law, but I don’t want to step away from the core principles that Israel has right to defend herself.’ Cue much fury within the Labour party about Starmer justifying Israel’s water and electricity blockade of Gaza. His spokesman has since claimed that

Coffee House

Where is the empathy for innocent Israelis?

This open letter, signed by Simon Sebag Montefiore and others, was first published in the ‘Chronicle for Higher Education’. It has been reproduced in full below. Every Tisha B’av, the national day of communal mourning, Jews read liturgy recounting the horrors of our slaughtered ancestors throughout history and around the world. Every year, our blood runs cold rereading accounts of those nightmares. This year those nightmares became real. Earlier this month, the slaughter in southern Israel has matched the brutality of that liturgy: 1,400 people murdered at a concert, in their cars, in their homes, and nearly 200 taken as hostages. These are scenes we never thought we would see.

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Unemployment is up – but can we trust the ONS’s numbers?

The UK’s unemployment rate rose to 4.2 per cent in the three months leading up to August this year, according to new experimental data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). This is a 0.2 per cent increase compared with the previous quarter (March to May 2023), but not a big change compared to previous data sets. The new numbers tell a familiar story: that the labour market is cooling slightly yet employers remain desperate for workers. For the last five decades, the ONS has relied on its Labour Force Survey – which covers ‘tens of thousands of households across the UK’ – for its employment data. But in a blog explaining changes to

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Why does Macron think France should learn to live with terrorism?

When an Islamist extremist charged into his school in Arras, northern France, with a knife, Christian Berroyer could have hidden away. Instead, the caretaker decided to confront the killer. ‘I grabbed a chair without thinking and I went outside,’ said Berroyer. Asked why he did what he did, Berroyer said he was ‘just doing his duty as a Frenchman’. Berroyer returned to work last week, just a few days after that attack in which a teacher was stabbed to death. His bravery marks a stark contrast to the cowardice of France’s politicians. The school handyman joins a list of other Frenchmen who have ‘done their duty’ in the last decade.

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Israel’s plight exposes the truth about virtue-signalling ‘values’

Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, recently took a pop at immigrants who she accused of failing to ‘embrace British values’. But these newcomers to our shores might be forgiven for being confused about what these ‘values’ are. We live in a country, after all, in which misgendering someone can land you in hot water but chanting for ‘jihad’ on the streets of London is deemed acceptable. Britain is a place where we frequently express solidarity with victims of terror attacks and atrocities yet stay strangely silent on the plight of Israel after the slaughter of hundreds of its citizens. We hear talk of ‘values’ all the time but no one

Jake Wallis Simons Jake Wallis Simons

How the Arab world turned against Hamas

What do people think of Hamas? In recent days, this has been something of a vexed question for many in the West, particularly those on the left. Among progressives, Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘friends’ have long been romanticised as Robin Hood types. But Robin Hood didn’t burn babies, didn’t rape and mutilate young women, didn’t take toddlers hostage, didn’t execute Holocaust survivors in the manner of Islamic State. The events of 7 October brought many liberals face-to-face with an uncomfortable test: do they have the mental agility to revise their opinions?  By comparison, let’s look at how the Arab world has answered that same question. Anecdotally, it seems that the merciless, drug-fuelled

Monday

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Why did ITV give airtime to a Press TV reporter?

Oh dear. It seems that another major broadcaster has slipped up in their coverage of Israel and Palestine. This time it is ITV News, which this week featured in a segment ‘a British Palestinian woman living in London’ called Latifa Abouchakra. She was invited on to talk about the Islamophobic abuse she has received in recent weeks, explaining how: I’ve been called a terrorist, I’ve been asked to go back home, I’ve had people in their cars making threatening gestures… it makes me feel as a Muslim woman in this country, that no matter how hard I work, no matter how good I can be, it will never be enough

Steerpike Steerpike

Nicola Sturgeon finally passes her driving test

It’s a red letter day for Nicola Sturgeon: she’s finally achieved something of lasting value. For the former First Minister has managed to pass her driving test at the precocious age of, er, 53. That’s just one year less than the average life expectancy of some of her male constituents under the SNP-run health service. Impressive stuff! Sturgeon praised her driving instructor for his help, writing on Instagram that ‘It was really important to me, as a 53-year-old former FM, not just to have an excellent teacher but someone I could trust and feel comfortable with.’ So clearly not Humza Yousaf then. She added that the experience of passing her test

Constantin Eckner

Will Germany’s new left-wing party challenge the AfD?

Sahra Wagenknecht, a pivotal figure of the German left, has decided to go up against her former party by launching a new protest movement. Today, Wagenknecht gave a press conference announcing that she was leaving Die Linke party to run an organisation called the ‘Sahra Wagenknecht alliance’. She argued that Germany’s infrastructure was in a bad way and warned that the country faces a loss of prosperity if, among other things, it does not give up on its dogged pursuit of green policies. ‘Things cannot continue the way they are currently going,’ she said. Over the past decade, Wagenknecht has become one of the most well-known left-wing politicians in Germany,

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Sunak declares ‘watershed moment’ in Middle East

Rishi Sunak’s update to MPs on the Israel-Hamas conflict today included the revelation that the UK security services had concluded the strike on the al-Ahli Arab hospital had come from a rocket fired within Gaza and aimed at Israel. He announced this within a section about the importance of tone and language, and pointed out that the rush to attribute blame in the reporting had a significant impact on the conflict, including the meetings organised by the US. Sunak’s statement was meatier than the one he gave last week. It included the line, which he didn’t fully elaborate on, that this was a ‘watershed moment’ for the region. What he

John R. MacArthur

What liberal America gets wrong about Trump supporters

Hillary Clinton normally speaks in carefully crafted bromides, so when I read in the New York Post about her risqué suggestion during a televised interview with CNN that ‘maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members’ supporting Donald Trump, I took notice. Had the grimly platitudinous former secretary of state suddenly developed a sense of humour? Was she workshopping new material with a comedy coach? NAFTA really did win the White House for Trump, district by district, state be state When I watched her interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, however, I detected no irony whatsoever in Clinton’s face. Indeed, she was so straightforwardly monotone that I thought perhaps

Limor Simhony Philpott

Netanyahu has good reasons to delay the ground invasion of Gaza

Israel has called in more than 300,000 reservists in the 17 days since Hamas’s monstrous attack on 7 October. Many have volunteered for service despite not being called upon. Planes full of Israeli men and women have arrived to Israel from all corners of the earth, carrying those who want to fight in the war. Israel now has more than 500,000 troops ready to be mobilised, and motivation among troops is sky high.  However, a ground offensive into Gaza is currently on hold, despite some limited raids. The IDF’s spokesperson, Admiral Daniel Hagari, has repeatedly declared that forces are ready and will carry out any mission the government will require it

Kristian Niemietz

The Renters’ Reform Bill won’t solve the housing crisis

The Renters’ Reform Bill aims to improve tenant security in the private rental sector by scrapping no-fault evictions, but it’s won’t solve Britain’s housing crisis. The Bill, which returns to Parliament this week for a second reading, was originally dreamt up in the dying days of Theresa May’s government. It could still just about make it in time for the next general election, as the government’s main electoral offer to ‘generation rent’. Yet the reality is that it fails to tackle the main cause of our housing woes: a lack of supply. The Bill’s main component is a ban on so-called ‘Section 21‘ or ‘No-Fault Evictions’. At the moment, the most common arrangement in

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Could Kate Forbes make a comeback?

U-turns are seemingly all the rage right now. When it’s not Labour and the Keirleaders backtracking on policy, it’s the turn of the SNP to pick up the slack. Back in, er, March Humza Yousaf campaigned to lead the SNP on a platform of increased ‘progressive taxation’: the idea that in a cost-of-living crisis he should, er, tax successful people more. Yet now it appears that the flailing First Minister is having second thoughts… Yousaf proposed the introduction of a new tax band of 44 per cent income tax for those earning between £75,000 and £125,140. This is despite the Scottish government having previously introduced five different income tax bands,

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The Met Police’s ‘jihad’ lecture shows it has lost the plot

I knew the police had lost the plot, but even I didn’t expect them to start issuing chin-stroking theological justifications for jihad. It happened on Saturday during the ‘March for Palestine’ in London. Protestors chanted for ‘Muslim armies’ to commence ‘jihad’ against Israel. To most ears, it will have sounded menacing, threatening even. To the ears of London’s Jews it must have sounded terrifying: just two weeks after a self-styled ‘Muslim army’ invaded Israel and visited the most unspeakable ‘jihad’ upon the Jews there, including British Jews, here were people on the streets of London calling for more ‘Muslim armies’ and more ‘jihad’. The jihad dreamers were from Hizb ut-Tahrir,

Natasha Feroze

One year on: does Sunak have anything to celebrate?

12 min listen

This week marks one year since Rishi Sunak entered No.10. Faced with the weekend’s double by-election defeat, Labour’s lead in the polls and another by-election coming soon, what can Rishi Sunak still do to turn things around? Natasha Feroze speaks to Katy Balls and James Heale.

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Khan’s cannabis commission kicked into long grass

Life in London is going swimmingly right now. Whether it’s the lyrical cries for ‘Jihad, jihad, jihad!’ or Tube drivers leading chants of ‘Free, free Palestine!’ you can scarcely avoid the sounds of success these days. So it’s good to know that the capital’s mayor has his priorities in order. Back in May of last year, Sadiq Khan jetted off to California on a £34,000 trip to make the case for decriminalising cannabis, even though he, er, has no power to do so. That same month Khan announced the creation of the new-fangled ‘London Drugs Commission’ to explore the merits of such a move. But sixteen months on, Khan’s creation

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

The taxman’s dodgy data

Ten years ago, HMRC unveiled what was billed as ‘the biggest change’ to the tax system since PAYE began in 1944. The taxman mandated employers to report their workers’ pay every time they ran payroll. Introduced to support Universal Credit by providing earnings data in close to real time, it has since been used to support a raft of other public policies too, including Covid furlough. But this change to PAYE Real Time Information (RTI), as HMRC calls it, has been a disaster for households on Universal Credit, taxpayers, public finances and confidence in HMRC and the senior civil service, as the quality of tax data has effectively collapsed. At

Sunday

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Simon Case goes on medical leave

It’s a tough old time for Rishi Sunak right now. Twenty points behind in the polls, he faces by-election defeats everywhere he looks as well as having to grapple with the ongoing unrest in the Middle East. But as he bids to turn it all around, it seems that the Prime Minister’s task has now got even more difficult – with his top senior civil servant taking time off. Politico today reports that Sunak’s Cabinet Secretary is expected to be gone for ‘a number of weeks’ on medical leave. Given the absence is expected to be relatively short (ministers are due to be briefed by the Prime Minister this week)

Joe Bedell-Brill

Sunday shows round-up: ‘We are not responsible for Gaza’

‘We are not responsible for Gaza’ On Saturday the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza opened for the first time to allow a small convoy of aid trucks to pass through. Victoria Derbyshire asked former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett if more aid would be allowed in. Bennett said that the Israeli government was allowing aid in, but that it was up to the rest of the world to help the people of Gaza. He also claimed Israel was not responsible for the humanitarian situation of Gazans, despite Israel controlling the borders and water and fuel supplies for the Strip. Is more aid coming? Derbyshire also asked immigration minister Robert