Politics

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

Tuesday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Starmer’s house-building plan could prove a hit with young voters

The biggest hinderance for the Conservatives is that they have nothing to offer young voters. The Labour party, however, just might. It seems that Keir Starmer will announce in his conference speech a plan to return to the idea of post-war new town corporations, which were able to compulsory-purchase land at agricultural value. It could – just possibly – mean a sharp fall in the price of new housing, massively expanding the number of first time buyers.  The great shame is that the Conservatives couldn’t bring themselves to introduce a similar policy You don’t have to be a socialist to feel aggrieved at your inability to afford a home, something that you

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

What Britain should do about Hamas

London is, at last, beaming Israeli flags onto its most recognisable buildings. This is an improvement on how some of the city’s residents have been marking the mass murder of Jews but beyond that it’s empty symbolism, as these flag projections always are. They’ve become the most visible – and often the most substantive – western response to terrorism in the past decade or so. Perhaps it’s comforting, as you bleed out in a bullet-riddled Paris theatre or under the wheels of a truck in a Berlin Christmas market, to know that your country’s national standard will soon adorn the White House and the Palace of Westminster, but I doubt

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Is the IMF right to be this pessimistic about the UK economy?

The International Monetary fund has published its biannual World Economic Outlook report – and it’s more bad news for the UK. While the IMF’s predictions for 2023 fall broadly in line with other forecasts – which show Germany having the most economic trouble this year – the IMF predicts that the UK will be an outlier come 2024. It expects the UK to grow by 0.6 per cent next year: the weakest growth among G7 nations and a downgrade of 0.4 per cent from its previous predictions. But there are reasons to be optimistic. Revisions to UK GDP of late has been more positive. Just last month the Office for National Statistics

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

London’s ‘Free Palestine’ protest descended into farce

Central London succumbed last night to a mob of protestors celebrating the outrages perpetrated by Hamas on Saturday. That was the verdict of many news outlets. ‘Night of Fury’ ran the Daily Mail’s headline. ‘Police separate warring groups’ said the Daily Express.  The protest outside the Israeli embassy in Kensington lasted more than two hours and although it was boisterous it never, as far as I could see, turned ugly. About three thousand people blocked High Street Kensington and blew whistles, waved flags and handed out ‘Boycott Israeli Apartheid’ stickers. Pranksters attached them to the backs of policemen, for fun. The embassy itself, tucked away in a private avenue, was

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

The many, many faces of Keir Starmer

Is nomenclature destiny? If Keir Starmer had not been named for Keir Hardie, the founding father of the Labour party, but rather had his middle name ‘Rodney’ as his first, would he have still gone for the job as Labour leader? Might he have continued rather in the highly remunerative law career which made him Director of Public Prosecutions from 2008 to 2013? Instead he became an MP in 2015, leader of the Labour party in 2020 and – if he doesn’t start killing kittens while tittering on TikTok in the interim – next prime minister of the United Kingdom in 2024. But there’s just something which doesn’t yell ‘Venceremos!’

Adi Koby

‘I just want to live’: A survivor’s account of the desert rave massacre

When I arrived at the all-night rave near the border with Gaza the party was in full swing. It was 5am and thousands of revellers had gathered in the desert. A few hours later, hundreds would be dead or injured, women raped, dozens of people missing – some snatched across the border. The first sign of trouble came at 6am. We heard the gunshots before we saw the terrorists. We ran to our car to escape. Bullets flew past our heads. Already there were many wounded and dead. But our road out of hell was blocked: hundreds of cars were all trying to leave, and off-road desert paths were impossible

Sam Leith Sam Leith

How Elon Musk killed Twitter/ X

Twitter was a newswire. That, at least at first, was the point of it. Something that came with all the glamour of digital innovation was, as it turned out, immediately recognisable as a version of something that has sat on every newspaper news desk for decades: a regularly refreshed ‘feed’ of short updates, ceaselessly scrolling, with the latest at the top. It was a newswire everybody got, and everybody could contribute to. There was value in that alone. It turned into much more. It became a raucous sort of community. It did, as everybody complained, make it easier for angry inadequates to shout at strangers, but that was just part of it. It

Lucy Dunn

Labour’s plan to save the NHS – on a budget

Wes Streeting interprets his job as shadow health secretary as being a ‘public service role and an economic role’. ‘There is a direct relationship between the health of the nation and the health of the economy,’ he told a Policy Exchange event at the Labour party conference on Monday. Echoing the sentiment of his shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves, Streeting makes clear that while a Labour government would work to preserve the health service, it would approach NHS funding with iron discipline. And it doesn’t really seem like Labour would have much other choice. As one Tory MP remarked during the Conservative party conference: ‘What can Labour offer? They can’t offer

Monday

Angus Colwell

Netanyahu: ‘What we will do to our enemies will echo for generations’

Just a week ago, Benjamin Netanyahu was urging Israelis to take a break. He said citizens should ‘go for a walk in our beautiful country’ during the Sukkot holiday. He posed for photographs with his wife Sara in the Golan Heights, the two of them smiling as the sun set. Tonight, he prepared citizens for an immense retaliation campaign against Israel’s foes. He said that the air strikes seen so far against Gaza are ‘just the beginning’, and that ‘what we will do to our enemies in the next few days will echo for generations.’ Earlier today, his defence minister ordered a ‘complete siege’ of the Gaza strip, cutting two

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

What is driving the fraud explosion?

61 min listen

Fraud, by some margin, is the biggest crime in Britain. How did it spin out of control? Who is responsible? And who do we call to tackle and prevent the biggest menace in the digital era? The Spectator’s economics editor, Kate Andrews is joined by an esteemed panel for this discussion, kindly sponsored by TSB and hosted at Conservative Party Conference. Also on the panel: Tom Tugendhat MP, Minister of State – Minister for Security, Victoria Atkins MP, Finance Secretary, Bob Wigley, Chair – UK Finance, Richard Hyde, Senior Researcher and Lead on Fraud – Social Market Foundation and Paul Davis, Fraud Director – TSB.

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Rachel Reeves goes for growth

12 min listen

It was Rachel Reeves’s moment on day two of Labour party conference. Addressing the hall she detailed her ambitious plans for growth and vowed to stick to ‘iron-clad fiscal rules’ if in power. She also received a surprise endorsement from former governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney. Once branded ‘boring snoring’ by a BBC editor, Reeves doesn’t look boring anymore. Will she be the first female chancellor of the exchequer?  Katy Balls and Isabel Hardman. 

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Rachel Reeves is no longer ‘boring’

Rachel Reeves was once branded ‘boring snoring’ by a BBC editor. Today, she was more of a Scary Mary in her speech to conference, repeatedly casting herself as an Iron Lady whose iron discipline would make it difficult for any of her colleagues to get any money for their pet spending projects. In the decade since she was dissed as being dull, Reeves has grown in confidence and stature, and the speech she gave today was really very good: energetic and forceful to the extent that many of those shadow cabinet colleagues watching on the conference floor looking a little scared of her. In the decade since she was dissed

Matthew Lynn

Mark Carney is wrong to endorse Rachel Reeves

The timing could hardly have been better. Other Labour leaders and shadow chancellors have had to make do with endorsements from the drummer in a 90s Britpop band, or a runner up for the Booker Prize. Rachel Reeves, however, rounded off her speech to the Labour party conference today with no one other than the former Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney singing her praises. But hold on. Isn’t Carney starting to abuse his position – and possibly the Bank’s independence as well?  By taking sides so openly Carney is turning the Bank into a political body At least we know who Carney would be voting for if

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Labour’s grand plan? More borrowing

Rachel Reeves’s speech at Labour party conference was an attempt to show how the party’s economic strategy differs from the Tories. Oddly, the shadow chancellor decided to do this by cherry-picking the showstoppers from both Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak’s highlight reels.  Reeves’s accusations were numerous, though predominantly levelled at Truss and her disastrous 49-day premiership. ‘When you pay fast and loose with the public finances’, she said, ‘it’s working families that pay that price’ – a sentiment that no doubt resonates with the many households that were acutely affected by the surge in mortgage costs last autumn. The shadow chancellor repeated one of Labour’s favourite, if not misleading, claims

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Mark Carney’s endorsement of Rachel Reeves will hurt the Tories

Listening to Rachel Reeves’s speech at Labour party conference one could be forgiven for thinking Liz Truss is still in 10 Downing Street. The shadow chancellor referenced the former prime minister more times than Rishi Sunak as she used her moment on the conference stage in Liverpool to try to depict Labour as the less risky choice on the economy. Reeves claimed that ‘Liz Truss might be out of Downing Street but she is still leading the Conservative party’. The shadow chancellor said that only a Labour government could safeguard against Truss’s Tories – and she was cheered when she mentioned her plan to introduce legislation to ensure the Office

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

How Big Brother lost touch with reality

Big Brother is back – again. The show was axed by Channel 5 in 2018 but ITV has dragged it out of the grave. Watching the show’s opening episode last night made me wonder whether we’re trapped forever in a time loop with the big TV shows of the early noughties – Strictly, I’m A Celebrity, The Weakest Link – doomed to keep coming back. But where once they were exciting and fun, now they look exhausted. Big Brother 2023 comes with all the trappings of our age. Everybody on the first show last night talked in the customary over-excited mid-Atlantic screech of the 21st century. This won’t last, because

Lucy Dunn

Douglas Ross: ‘The Scottish Tories could have a really good general election’

The SNP wasn’t the only loser last week when Labour triumphed in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election with a 20 per cent swing – the Scottish Conservatives also had reason to feel short-changed. Their vote collapse was so dire that Tory candidate Thomas Kerr only won 3.9 per cent and lost his £500 deposit. While the party insists that the Rutherglen result is not representative of Scotland more generally, it shows the tricky terrain the Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross faces. ‘You’re going to see Conservative gains at the next general election,’ he insists, when we met in Manchester at the Conservative Party Conference. Sheltering from the rain in

Limor Simhony Philpott

Israelis are furious at Benjamin Netanyahu

Israelis are livid. Their fury is directed not only at Hamas for massacring over 700 people, wounding thousands and abducting at least 130 including women and children, but also at the Israeli government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) for failing to prevent this terrorist invasion. How did Israeli security forces – among the most sophisticated in the world – not foresee Hamas’s attack? A postmortem is already underway, but what is clear is that Netanyahu’s government was caught napping, distracted by its attempts to force through unpopular judicial reforms. This stole attention away from the worsening security situation in Gaza, the West Bank and the

Steerpike Steerpike

John McDonnell: the fascists are in government

With Labour ahead in the polls by around 15 points, and the party seemingly on course to win a general election next year, you would think it would be all sunshine and smiles at the Labour conference, held in Liverpool. It appears though that some of the party are less than happy with the current situation they find themselves in. Yesterday, at a packed fringe event at conference, the Labour Assembly Against Austerity and the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs gathered to discuss ‘Socialist Solutions to the Tory Crisis’ – but predominantly seemed occupied with the dreadful thought that the party might actually get elected. Chief among the naysayers was

Jake Wallis Simons Jake Wallis Simons

Why are Jews being blamed for Hamas’s attack on Israel?

‘Victim blaming’ is one of the sins that is most deplored by the social justice movement. When it comes to the Jews, however, different rules seem to apply, at least when it comes to rape, murder and mutilation. The events of the past few days could not have been more clear-cut. This was an unprovoked assault by Islamist fanatics who rampaged across southern Israel, revelling in savagery against the innocent. The atrocities you have seen on television have been the tip of the iceberg. Women have been butchered, their bodies paraded and desecrated, while grandmothers have been kidnapped with their carers and executed. Families have been gunned down in bomb