Politics

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

Sunday

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Britain needs to rethink devolution

Scotland is stuck. This week has only confirmed it. SNP leader Humza Yousaf used his party conference in Aberdeen to announce a council tax freeze. It quickly emerged that he had done so without telling councils and without telling even his own cabinet. As his deputy admitted in an interview, the decision to freeze was agreed between 24 and 48 hours before the speech. Council tax was reportedly chosen because there wasn’t enough time to get expert advice on the impact of freezing other taxes. Councils are furious. Not only weren’t they consulted, but they are already making £300 million in cuts amid a two-year budget shortfall of £1.1 billion.

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Why Angela McLean’s ‘Dr Death’ jibe matters

Does it matter if the chief scientific adviser referred to Rishi Sunak as ‘Dr Death’ In a private message to a Sage adviser during lockdown? This embarrassing fact came out last week in the Covid inquiry, an apparent reference to his Eat Out to Help Out scheme. Some have argued that publishing this comment, made in a private WhatsApp message, serves to embarrass Professor Dame Angela McLean and not much else. I’d argue that it exposes one of the most important facets of the pandemic: the psychological effect on those at the top at a time of great pressure. And how this led to tribalism and an environment where facts,

James Heale James Heale

What Liz Truss did next

It was a year ago on Wednesday that Liz Truss left office. As the ministerial cavalcade rolled out of Downing Street for the short drive to Buckingham Palace, so she entered the history books as the shortest-serving Prime Minister in British history. Truss was still reeling from the events of the past seven weeks. The rejection of her mini-Budget by the world markets had been dubbed Britain’s ‘economic Suez.’ But in keeping with her character and past record, she did not follow the example of Anthony Eden and ignominiously slink off into retirement. After a short holiday – her first non-ministerial break in more than a decade – she returned

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Why are so many young people anti-Semitic?

The surest way to work up a crusade in favour of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behaviour ‘righteous indignation’ – this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats. Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow Anti-Semitism ­– the socialism of fools – is a shapeshifter supreme. The oldest hatred has taken many forms, and is enjoyed by Christians and Muslims, communists and fascists alike. Now it can add another string to its bow. Anti-Semitism has become deeply fashionable. You might

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

The Tory war on woke won’t work

Visibly desperate Conservatives are counting on their opposition to the left’s cultural revolution to save them, if not from defeat, then at least from annihilation.  The party’s deputy chair Lee Anderson forecasts that a ‘mix of culture wars and trans debate’ would be ‘at the heart’ of the party’s coming election campaign. You only need to listen to Tory ministers or read the Tory press to see that plan being followed. Left-leaning commentators have a convincing response which boils down to a simple exclamation of, ‘who the hell are you trying to kid?’ As by-election results show, the electorate will punish the Conservatives for 14 years of national decline with the anger

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Belgium’s cowardice is preventing it from tackling its terror threat

Last year, a French broadcaster asked if Belgium was in danger of becoming a narco state. The question was posed in light of the news of the cocaine flooding into the country and the growing influence of Belgium’s drug cartels.   Others believe that Belgium most closely resembles an Islamic state. The former Belgian senator Alain Destexhe accused his country this week of living in denial and allowing Belgium to become ‘a laboratory of Islamism’.  France has its own grave struggle with Islamists but at least there is an awareness of the danger Belgian has undergone a radical demographic change this century, particularly in the capital. Of Brussels’s 1.2 million

Saturday

Steerpike Steerpike

Jihad chanters let off by the Met

Oh dear. It seems that the wokest police force in all the West has done it again. In the past fortnight, pro-Palestine marches in London have attracted some unseemly elements to their cause. One such example was offered today at an event for Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir in central London. After one speaker asked the crowd ‘What is the solution to liberate people in the concentration camp of Palestine?’ a chant of ‘Jihad, jihad, jihad’ echoed out around the speaker. An incitement for holy war? Surely grounds for a police intervention… Unfortunately not, it seems. For the Metropolitan Police have now used their overactive Twitter/X account to confirm they will

Oscar Edmondson

What can we hope to learn from the Covid inquiry?

16 min listen

This week there have been some interesting developments in the public Covid-19 inquiry where scientists and mathematical modellers have been giving testimony on how prepared the government was to tackle the pandemic and how they used expert advise.  Within the sessions, WhatsApp messages revealed that Dame Angela McLean – who at the time was chief scientific advisor to Ministry of Defence – sent a secret message referring to Rishi Sunak as ‘Dr Death the chancellor’ in reference to the public health impacts of the ‘eat out to help out’ scheme. What were some of the other revelations? Did we get any clarity on how these mathematical models were produced and

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Katy Balls, Christina Lamb and Sam Leith

20 min listen

This week:  Katy Balls discusses the SNP’s annual conference and asks what will it take to hold the party together if things get much tougher over the next twelve months (01:10), Christina Lamb goes to Ukraine, only to be told that she’s ‘at the wrong war’ as events unfold rapidly in the Middle East (06:55), and Sam Leith chats to the man who heads up the tiny publishing house that regularly churns out Nobel Prize winners (12:13).  Produced and presented by Linden Kemkaran. 

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

ATACMS missiles alone won’t change the game in Ukraine

America’s ATACMS long-range missiles were a potential ‘game changer’ to the war in Ukraine to some, a potential source of escalation to others. Now, with no real sense that either has proved true following Zelensky’s confirmation this week they were used for the first time, what does that tell us? The MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) undoubtedly offers Kyiv new capabilities. It can deliver a 500-pound warhead or hundreds of cluster bomblets very accurately to a range of up to 190 miles. Unlike the Anglo-French Storm Shadows already in use, the two-ton missile is fired from a tracked HIMARS launcher rather than an aircraft and thus can respond very

Mary Dejevsky

Can the BBC World Service really go on like this?

The BBC has launched what it is calling an ‘urgent investigation’ into six journalists and a freelancer working for its Arabic-language service over accusations they had shown anti-Israel bias in their coverage and expressed support on social media for Hamas. They were said to have called the attacks that killed more than 1,400 Israelis ‘a morning of hope’ and liked posts that included approvingly captioned video footage of dead and captured Israelis.  I worked for the BBC World Service as a writer for the Russian and South-East European Service, as it then was, in the latter stages of the Cold War I will leave it for the BBC investigation to

Friday

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Macron’s worrying dilemma

For a man so keen to thrust himself onto the international stage, Emmanuel Macron has been surprisingly quiet over the last fortnight. At the beginning of 2022, the President of France shuttled across Europe in an attempt to avert conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Though his diplomatic efforts were criticised in some Anglophone quarters, Macron earned the respect of many in France for attempting to talk Vladimir Putin out of war.   Now there is another war raging but this time Macron has had little to say about the conflict between Israel and Hamas. He has offered his measured support to Israel but he has not yet followed Joe Biden, Ursula

Andrew Tettenborn

Who do the police protect?

The function of the police, one might have thought, was to protect the weak against the overbearing and the bullying. Unfortunately, a by-product of the Gaza crisis has been to suggest that, at least on the streets of London, a bit of carefully targeted thuggery against your political opponents can pay useful dividends. For some days now, the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) has been raising awareness of the plight of abducted Israelis in Gaza by driving display vans around iconic parts of London. These vans are fitted with electronic billboards on the sides and back containing the names of children taken by Hamas from Israel a couple of weeks ago,

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Pressure is mounting for Jeremy Hunt to find tax cuts 

Timing is a funny thing. The Chancellor received some good news about the public finances this morning, just when everyone is focused on fairly catastrophic election results for the Tories. A few hours after it was announced that strong Conservative majorities were overturned in the ​​Mid-Bedfordshire and Tamworth by-elections (Katy Balls analyses the results here), we also learned that there may be slightly more scope than previously thought for Jeremy Hunt to come up with some pre-election sweeteners, with the pressure on to cut taxes. Public sector net borrowing in September came to £14.3 billion – a staggering sum, yes, but £1.6 billion less than in September last year and far below the

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

How is Joe Biden handling the Israel-Palestine crisis?

27 min listen

This week Freddy speaks to Dennis Ross, former Middle East coordinator under President Clinton and current Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown University. They discuss Biden’s visit to Israel this week, how his policy towards the Middle East borrows from Trump and Obama, and how we can discern between the public posturing and private desires of Middle Eastern states. 

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Are the Tories facing a 97’ style defeat?

13 min listen

Labour has overturned the Tamworth and and Mid Bedfordshire by-election results, overturning the biggest majority in by-election history. Is there anymore road for Rishi Sunak? Isabel Hardman speaks to Katy Balls and James Heale. 

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Can Sunak convince Tory MPs to hold their nerve?

Why have the Tories lost both Mid Bedfordshire and Tamworth, seats they could normally rely on the laws of physics to be able to hold? According to Greg Hands, the party chair, the results are down to ‘legacy issues’ in the seats. They were vacated by Nadine Dorries leaving in disgust in a protracted fashion at not getting a peerage, and Chris Pincher being found to have groped two men in the Carlton Club. Sunak and a few senior Conservatives do really think there remains a route back at the next general election Hands also said this morning that he hasn’t seen much enthusiasm for Labour, despite polling expert John

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Tory voters are no longer scared of Labour

Amid all the discussion in Tory circles about whether the next election will have more in common with the narrow victory of 1992 or the landslide defeat of 1997, nobody has ever made the case for 1993. But after the Conservatives’ shattering loss of two of their nominally ‘safest’ seats to Labour in by-elections in Tamworth and Mid-Bedfordshire last night, it is time for that year to be given a podium in the debate. The election which took place in 1993 in Canada was a near-extinction level event for its Conservative party, which went from an outright majority in the House of Commons in Ottawa to just two seats. While it

Nick Tyrone Nick Tyrone

Losing Tamworth and Mid-Bedfordshire is a disaster for Sunak

What an epically horrible night for the Conservative part, one of the worst in the party’s long and storied history. Tamworth and Mid-Bedfordshire, before yesterday the 57th and 98th safest Tory seats in the country respectively, fell to the Labour party. As if that weren’t enough, these by-elections also revealed that Rishi Sunak is in an even worse position than the current polls suggest – and the current polls suggest something approaching electoral apocalypse for the Prime Minister. The Lib Dems in Mid-Bedfordshire claim that they helped Labour win the seat yesterday. The theory they have posited is that, with their tireless campaigning in the more rural portions of the

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Tamworth Tory loser storms off

Oh dear. It seems that not all have taken the by-elections results well. Tories everywhere are waking up to two of the worst defeats in the party’s history but others involved in the campaign have preferred not to stick around. Among them was Andrew Cooper, the defeated Conservative candidate in Tamworth. Moments after losing a safe seat with a majority of almost 20,000, Cooper left the hall, rather than stick around to hear the victory speech by Labour victor Sarah Edwards. By doing so, he eschewed his chance to thank those Tories who have toiled in his cause these past two months. In fairness to Cooper, it’s not exactly been