Politics

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

Wednesday

The Spectator

Will the collapse of councils be the next great scandal?

Last month India managed to land a spacecraft on the moon for a third of the price of refurbishing Hammersmith Bridge. This startling fact captures both New Delhi’s efficiency and the staggering incompetence of our local councils. It took two years and £9 million (in real terms) to build the bridge. It is set to cost almost £200 million to spruce it up and the work may not be complete until 2030. Hammersmith Bridge has become the perfect metaphor for what’s gone wrong with government: the carelessness, inertia and lack of concern for public money that is rife across the country. The bill for doing up Croydon council’s headquarters was

Joanna Williams

The hypocrisy of Birmingham’s council

Who is to blame for Birmingham City Council’s dire financial situation? The council has long been struggling to pay its bills and effectively declared itself bankrupt yesterday. In a brief statement, a spokesperson for the Labour-run council pointed the finger at ‘equal pay claims’ as the cause of the problem, explaining:  The council is still in a position where it must fund the equal pay liability that has accrued to date (in the region of £650m to £760m), but it does not have the resources to do so. Europe’s largest local authority has indeed paid a high price for its gender pay gap. After a 2012 legal case found in favour

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Does the public want reheated Blairism?

To understand the political journey of Sir Keir Starmer, look to Liz Kendall. This week the Blairite and one-time leadership contender was put in charge of Labour’s welfare reform policy. Her promotion has upset the party’s left-wingers, who already think Starmer is too right-wing on welfare. ‘She’ll be more hard-line than Jonathan Ashworth,’ says one shadow minister in reference to her predecessor. But her real influence started well before she was given a place at Starmer’s shadow cabinet table. Even those who were demoted or axed put on a brave face: ‘It shows Labour senses it is about to win’  Kendall’s role in the 2015 contest was to speak hard

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Starmer lays blame for the schools concrete crisis at Sunak’s door

Rishi Sunak didn’t use the same language as Gillian Keegan today when he returned to Prime Minister’s Questions. But he clearly also thinks people should be thanking the government for the good job it is doing. The session was dominated by the concrete crisis in schools, but Sunak also wanted MPs to give him some credit for the economy recovering and inflation falling. He complained that both Keir Starmer and SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn had failed to mention these in their questions, and even rather boldly proclaimed that small boat crossings were down – despite them passing the 100,000 mark this summer and despite the Bibby Stockholm fiasco.  Sunak

John Keiger John Keiger

How Africa fell out of love with France

On Wednesday last week, a new Gabonese military junta installed itself, having ousted President Ali Bongo, whose family have ruled the country since 1967. Just two days earlier, the French President Emmanuel Macron gave a speech to his ambassadors in which he spoke of an ‘epidemic of putschs’ in what was formerly France’s greatest sphere of post-colonial influence. Although most of these states have been independent for decades, Paris kept them firmly in the French orbit There have now been six coups d’état in francophone sub-Saharan Africa in three years – Mali, Chad, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Niger and now the small but wealthy nation of Gabon. France’s whole African policy

Jake Wallis Simons Jake Wallis Simons

Banning Iran’s IRGC makes more sense than cracking down on Wagner

Is the Wagner Group a terror threat to Britain? Until this morning, the thought had probably never occurred to most people as they went about their lives. The mercenary group has indeed done terrible things in Ukraine and Africa. But a threat to British subjects on our own soil? Today, however, the government will add Wagner to its list of proscribed organisations, which includes groups like Islamic State and al-Qaeda. This means that joining or supporting the organisation carries a penalty of up to 14 years in prison. Officials will be able to seize Wagner’s assets more easily, and members of the group will be barred from silencing journalists and

Melissa Kite

‘We need to start the road to rejoin’: Gina Miller on Brexit, farmers and her ambitious plans for Epsom

Gina Miller is trying to convince me that she understands why I voted Brexit. The woman who went to the High Court in 2016 to effectively try to cancel my vote by insisting the EU referendum result be referred back to a Remain-dominated parliament, plunging Brexit into years of legal and parliamentary wrangling, says she feels my pain and always has. How can this be? Well, maybe it’s just the magic of politics. ‘My case was not to do with Brexit. It was to do with parliament’ Ms Miller is attempting to turn her single-issue, referendum-wrecking fame into a broader platform, by standing in leafy Epsom and Ewell as one

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Kemi Badenoch’s growing popularity makes her vulnerable

The news is grim for supporters of Kemi Badenoch: our heroine has climbed to the top of the Conservative Home website’s monthly cabinet popularity table. This further cements her rating with the bookies as favourite to take over as Tory leader when Rishi Sunak’s race is run – and let’s be honest, that race does not seemed destined to go beyond the mid-distance.  Surely this is a happy turn of events for we Badenochians, you might think? Hardly. She might as well now have a target painted on her back. As one colleague puts it: ‘When you are seen as heir apparent, you are the person standing in the way

James Heale James Heale

Was Truss doomed to fail on day one?

‘I’m sorry for the damage and the loss. It was a scary time, and I’m sorry for that.’ Kwasi Kwarteng’s contrite apology on TalkTV last night was a striking contrast with the confidence, excitement and ambition which he and others exuded on taking up their new posts in Liz Truss’s government exactly one year ago today. Back then, there was talk from the likes of Truss’s chief of staff Mark Fullbrook about it being a ‘seven year premiership’. Yet it ended up being over in just seven weeks. How did it all go so wrong, so quickly? Loyalty to the leader was prioritised over party unity By the time the

Annabel Denham

The SNP’s four day week won’t work

Pigs will surely sooner fly over Glasgow Pollok than business will take inspiration from Humza Yousaf’s approach to running government. Nonetheless, the claim made by Scotland’s First Minister and his advisers is that moving state employees to a four-day week could be a catalyst for the private sector to follow suit. In the clearest sign yet that the SNP exists for the welfare of its public sector workers at the expense of the taxpayer, Yousaf has announced a pilot scheme in his programme for government, Holyrood’s version of Westminster’s King’s speech, despite warnings that it could ‘blow a £2.5 billion hole‘ in his budget. The SNP’s day-to-day spending is already on course

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Kwarteng apologises for mini-Budget chaos (eventually)

Happy Trussiversary. It’s a year today since Liz Truss entered No. 10. One man who probably won’t be celebrating that milestone is Kwasi Kwarteng, who marked the occasion last night with a grilling on Piers Morgan Uncensored. Morgan kicked things off by blasting the Spelthorne MP for causing ‘genuine financial harm’ to many as a consequence of the mini-Budget last Autumn. Claiming that Kwarteng and Truss would ‘go down in history…as disasters in that period’, Morgan wondered out loud why the former chancellor was finding it so difficult to ‘just say sorry’. Kwarteng said he didn’t believe his strategy in the Treasury ‘was the wrong strategy. I don’t apologise for the strategy’. Nevertheless,

Tuesday

Andy Maciver

Is Humza Yousaf’s ‘pro-growth’ stance convincing?

It may not have a title quite as resplendent as The King’s speech, but today represents the marquee day in the Scottish Parliament’s calendar. The Programme for Government (PfG), like its regal counterpart at Westminster, is the annual opportunity for Scotand’s First Minister to tell us what his or her vision is and what he or she intends to do with it. Much like The King’s speech, the PfG also gives the government a couple of days of wall-to-wall media coverage, so from the perspective of the political strategist and communicator, it is one of the top two or three moments of the Scottish political calendar. This PfG was the

Lucy Dunn

There is nothing ‘bold and ambitious’ about Humza Yousaf’s plan for Scotland

Humza Yousaf’s programme for government was the new First Minister’s chance to separate himself, once and for all, from the legacy of his predecessor. Nicola Sturgeon said herself when resigning that ‘any party that doesn’t change after two decades in power is daft’ – but do Yousaf’s proposals promise the reset the country needs? ‘We are unashamedly anti-poverty and pro-growth,’ the First Minister announced at the start of his speech, sounding eerily like his leadership race rival Kate Forbes. Drawing on the experience of his own family, Yousaf made a show of the Scottish government’s pro-business approach — despite having come under fire from opposition politicians and business owners alike

Edward Howell

The unholy alliance between Kim Jong-un and Putin

On 27 July, while commemorating the 70th anniversary of what North Korea perversely terms its ‘victory’ in the Korean war, Kim Jong-un proudly gave a guided tour of his intercontinental ballistic missiles, drones and missile engines. The lucky visitor was none other than Russian defence minister, Sergei Shoigu. Later that day, Shoigu stood next to the Supreme Leader as they watched North Korea’s rockets paraded across Kim Il Sung square.   Now it seems that Shoigu’s visit – the first time a Russian defence minister had come to North Korea since the collapse of the Soviet Union – has paid off. Today, it has been reported that Kim Jong-un is preparing to travel

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Sunak is embracing wind farms because of politics, not principle

Michael Gove today announced that the government was relaxing the effective ban on new onshore wind farms that was introduced by David Cameron. Under those rules, just one objection could stop a planned wind farm – but they’ve been scrapped with immediate effect.  The reason? Rishi Sunak was facing a rebellion from Tory MPs, of course. The Prime Minister held talks with the would-be rebels, led by former Cop26 president Alok Sharma, and concluded that he would have to yield to their demands. They were trying to force the government to get on with a promise that was supposed to have been fulfilled by April – and were going to use

James Heale James Heale

Who’s to blame for the concrete crisis?

13 min listen

The government is struggling to change the story. After Gillian Keegan yesterday said, about the concrete crisis, that ‘everyone else has sat on their arse and done nothing’, the story has continued to dominate the news. How can the government recover? Who should take the blame? James Heale speaks to Katy Balls and Conservative Home’s Paul Goodman.

Jawad Iqbal

Labour can’t pass the buck for Birmingham’s troubles

Whose fault is it that Labour-controlled Birmingham city council, the country’s biggest local authority, is now effectively bankrupt? The answer, according to the council’s leaders, is that it is anyone and everyone’s fault except their own. It is the fault of the government for imposing funding cuts over the last decade, the ballooning costs of rolling out a new IT system, and a historic equal pay settlement that is proving impossible to fund. In other words, it is nothing to do with those actually elected to run Birmingham. Is anyone surprised that politicians are held in such low esteem by the voters?  The bare facts are these. The council has issued

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Why Birmingham council went bust

There’s a bit too much schadenfreude from Tories over the effective bankruptcy of Birmingham Council. Its ‘Section 114 notice’ is an admission that the council (Europe’s largest) is unable to meet a £760 million equal pay lawsuit – so spending on all but essential services in Britain’s second city will stop. A Labour-run council has gone pop: a point that several Tory councillors have made. But like the school concrete fiasco, this might be the first sign of a deeper malaise – with more bankruptcies to come. Birmingham is home to the largest – and perhaps worst-run – council in Europe. Part of the mess it has found itself in is liability for

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Bring in the Gen X politicians!

American politics has become a tug-of-war between two generations. Boomers (and those older) dominate positions of power even as their capacity diminishes. Joe Biden, 80, has repeatedly displayed signs of frailty and confusion but, as far as we know, he’ll be running for re-election in 2024.  Over on Capitol Hill, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, 81, continues to freeze during public remarks and Diane Feinstein, 90, faces calls to retire from within her own party. While mental impairment is no impediment to serving in the United States Senate – if anything, it’s probably an advantage – the upper house is older than it has ever been. The average age in

Steerpike Steerpike

Kemi becomes the Tory members’ favourite

When the king abdicates, who inherits the throne? Following Ben Wallace’s departure as Defence Secretary, it seems that Kemi Badenoch has now seized his crown as the toast of the Tory grassroots. For 18 months, Wallace topped the ConservativeHome league table of party members. But his exit from the political stage means there’s a vacancy and with a satisfaction rating of +59 points, it seems that the Business and Trade Secretary has filled his place. Just in time for Tory conference too… Most of the other ratings are broadly in line with the last ConHome table, though the Prime Minister will be disappointed to see his name fall into 25th