Politics

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

Tuesday

Winston Marshall

Laura Dodsworth: How to protect yourself from government propaganda

53 min listen

Laura Dodsworth is a photographer, artist and author. In her most recent book Free Your Mind: The New World of Manipulation and How to Resist it, Laura draws on the Nudge Unit, behavioural psychology and fact checking services to analyse the range of ways in which our minds are manipulated. On the podcast, Laura talks about the government propaganda machine and how this all relates back to issues such as climate catastrophe, the pandemic and free speech. 

Euan McColm

Humza Yousaf will be judged on Nicola Sturgeon’s mistakes

We must hope Nicola Sturgeon’s remaining supporters are, right now, judging her. That’s what she wanted, after all. In a speech back in 2015 — the year she led the SNP to its third Holyrood election victory — Sturgeon said education would be her priority during her time in office. ‘Let me be clear,’ she said, ‘I want to be judged on this. If you are not, as First Minister, prepared to put your neck on the line on the education of our young people then what are you prepared to. It really matters.’ Of course, it was easy for Sturgeon to demand she be judged because she knew she

Steerpike Steerpike

SNP splashes taxpayers’ cash on ‘How to run a government’ book

As if there aren’t enough questions about the SNP’s spending habits, it turns out the Nats have been using £55,000 of taxpayer’s money to fund their library collection. An investigation by Labour has unearthed some rather amusing revelations about the SNP’s reading list, not least that the party has been busy educating itself with books on, er, ‘How To Run A Government’. That might have come in useful 16 years ago… Public funds were used to purchase 22 copies of the book – almost enough prints for every member of Humza Yousaf’s cabinet. Mr S allowed himself a chuckle at the irony of the book’s tagline, which reads: ‘…so that

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Will Brits feel richer if inflation halves?

The government’s objective to ‘halve inflation’ by the end of the year seems to be back on track – for now. Last week’s interest rate hike was delivered with an updated inflation forecast from the Bank of England, showing the rate slowing to 4.7 per cent by the end of the year, just below Rishi Sunak’s target. The better-than-expected fall in the headline rate last month has forecasters thinking things are finally moving in the right direction. As Ross Clark reports on Coffee House, Capital Economics is expecting another major fall in the rate next week – down to 6.9 per cent on the year – when July’s figures are released.

Steerpike Steerpike

Sadiq Khan takes a pop at Lee Anderson over asylum seeker comments

Has Lee Anderson finally gone too far? Still reeling after finding out his son turned vegetarian at university (‘shocking, absolutely shocking’), the Tory party deputy chairman told the Express that illegal migrants who don’t want to be housed on barges should ‘f*** off back to France’. ‘I think people have just had enough’, he told the paper. ‘These people come across the Channel in small boats, if they don’t like the conditions they are housed in here then they should go back to France or better not come at all in the first place.’ Anderson’s remarks have predictably riled up the usual cast of characters. ‘A new low even for the Tories’, tweeted Labour MP Diane Abbott last

Lucy Dunn

The SNP is failing poor Scottish students

When she became first minister, Nicola Sturgeon told the nation that improving Scotland’s education system was at the top of her government’s priorities. She was specific about exactly what her ‘defining mission’ would be: closing the poverty-related attainment gap. ‘Let me clear,’ she told her supporters, ‘I want to be judged on this.’ Today’s results, however, show that she failed: the gap remains as wide as ever. Students across Scotland will receive their exam results today — and while the Scottish government is busy making plenty of noise about pass rates exceeding pre-pandemic levels, the real story is a murkier one about the nation’s attainment gap. This year’s results show

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Chinese cities are being sacrificed to save Beijing

Bazhou and Zhuozhou, two small cities to the south of Beijing, have been submerged in record floods since late July, when Typhoon Doksuri swept through China’s northeast. Nearly one million people have been displaced. But this is not just a natural disaster. The region has taken more than its fair share of floodwaters. All of this is a deliberate strategy to protect Beijing, the capital, and Xiong’an New Area, a project dear to Xi Jinping’s heart.  Residents are understandably furious. Yesterday, a group of Bazhou residents took to the local government building to demand compensation, for the second time in three days. The protestors were met with pepper spray and batons.

Steerpike Steerpike

Sir Humphrey covers up, again

Good old Sir Humphrey. Tories, Labour, Lib Dems – whoever is in power, he always seems to win. In recent years, there appears to have been a veritable explosion in the number of leaks in Whitehall and, with them, the inevitable Cabinet Office inquiries. In July 2022, one was launched by Cabinet Secretary Simon Case after Cabinet Office papers, which damaged Penny Mordaunt’s chances in the Conservative leadership race, were leaked. The year before that, another inquiry was set up to look into leaked text messages between Boris Johnson and James Dyson, detailing their conversations over ventilators during the pandemic. And, of course, there was the infamous ‘chatty rat’ leak

John Oxley

The Tories are heading for electoral evisceration

‘Whoever wins in September, the party will be stuck. Even in power it remains incapable of generating and delivering credible policies, incapable of using its resources to tackle the challenges ahead. In an uncertain world it struggles to decide what it wants to do, and struggles to implement the few ideas it has. The party has become a machine for garnering headlines and votes but is now starting to stall. Insulated by a media which also focuses on the day-to-day rigmarole of politics as soap opera, our leaders are missing the signs of short- and long-term crisis which will soon hit. They are failing to adapt, failing to plan. The

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Britain has a productivity problem

First the good news – the fall in living standards may be coming to an end, with wages starting to run ahead of inflation. Now the bad news: it is as much because wages are rising than inflation is falling – which suggests that high inflation is beginning to become embedded in workers’ expectations. Capital Economics is forecasting that next week’s inflation figures will show the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) at 6.8 per cent, down from 7.9 per cent last month. Average earnings figures, it predicts, will simultaneously rise to 7 per cent – up from 6.9 per cent last month and up from 6.1 per cent a year earlier.

Steerpike Steerpike

Nicola Sturgeon’s splurges on airport VIP services

Despite it being the SNP’s main political goal, Scotland came no closer to becoming an independent state during Nicola Sturgeon’s long tenure as First Minister. Still, for Sturgeon, the SNP being in charge had at least one perk – it allowed her to cosplay as a world leader on the global stage. Who could forget the jet setting and endless summits, complete with awkward selfies with the great and good that defined her term? Now, official spending receipts obtained by the Labour party show the extent to which taxpayers footed the bill for these foreign jamborees. According to the documents, Scottish civil servants made 58,000 bank transactions using taxpayer funded cards between

Ben Domenech

We’re living through Barack Obama’s third term

One of the big questions in Washington and across the country as Joe Biden’s very public decline has accelerated is: who’s actually running the show at the White House? There have been various answers, including former White House chief of staff Ron Klain and former National Security Advisor Susan Rice; even Kamala Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff has been touted as having outsized influence. But the one name we ought to be paying more attention to is obvious – the man who cleared the 2020 field for Joe, tapped Kamala as his running mate and now hosts regular meetings at his 8,000-square-foot house just two miles from the Oval Office he

Monday

Natasha Feroze

Should Team Truss accept resignation honours?

12 min listen

Bibby Stockholm, the government’s first migrant barge opened this morning. Intended to house up to 500 migrants, will this plan to cut the costs of putting migrants up in hotels work? Also on the podcast, Natasha Feroze speaks to Isabel Hardman and Katy Balls about the Liz Truss honours list – who are the contenders? And who may politely decline a new title…

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Scottish nationalists aren’t alone in seeing independence as an opportunity

It’s not every day a supporter of Scottish independence is in the running for a peerage, least of all from a Tory government. So no doubt the SNP will be congratulating Mark Littlewood, who could soon be Lord Littlewood thanks to Liz Truss’s resignation honours. The outgoing director of the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) has distinguished himself in the world of London think tanks, where most are as uninterested in the fate of the Union as they are uninformed about Scottish politics. Not Littlewood, who is relaxed about the prospect of the Scots breaking away.  During a February 2017 appearance on Question Time, he told the Glasgow audience: ‘I see

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Matt Hancock’s cringeworthy Barbie singalong

Can Matt Hancock sink any lower? Considering that only last year he lost the whip for abandoning his constituents to appear on I’m a Celebrity, and before that had his lockdown-busting affair exposed to the world, you would probably think not. Even so, the former Health Secretary has managed to once again plumb new depths, this time after turning his talents to lip-syncing. In a video released on his TikTok account this week, Hancock can be seen in a white shirt and shorts on a beach in an undisclosed location, singing along to the song ‘I’m just Ken’ from the recently released Barbie movie. The film sees Ken, played by

Kristina Murkett

The politics of exam results

August always means an anxious wait for results days, but this year pupils will be feeling particularly apprehensive. England’s exams regulator, Ofqual, has said that national results will be lower than last year’s and are expected to be similar to those before Covid. Some reports estimate that around 50,000 A-level students will therefore miss out on getting the A* and A grades they could have expected if they took their exams last year. They will also face intense competition for top university places given the record numbers of international students applying too. Readjusting after the grade inflation of the pandemic was always going to be painful. In 2019, 25.5 per cent of A-level results were grades

Gerry Hassan

What does Scottish Labour stand for?

North of the border, the long-anticipated by-election in Rutherglen and Hamilton West has finally been confirmed. This constituency is classic SNP-Labour swing territory, and though an SNP-held seat until recently, polls have shown that Labour support in Scotland is on the rise. The by-election will put these predictions to the test: can Labour’s candidate Michael Shanks not just win, but win well and capture the mood for change? Possibly, but for this to happen, Labour needs to present Scottish voters with a better vision — instead of continuing to rely on SNP failures. We can be assured that the longstanding SNP-Labour rivalry will come out in full force as the by-election

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Mick Lynch is stuck in the past

Mick Lynch, the general secretary of the RMT, has never felt truly English. In conversation with Iain Dale at the Edinburgh festival, he reveals that his parents moved here from Ireland during the war and settled in the Ladbroke Grove area of London where they raised him and his four siblings. His father was ‘an archetypal Paddy’ who visited the pub six times a week including Sunday afternoons after Mass. In 1971 he went on strike for nine weeks and the family were reduced to living off jam sandwiches. His parents always referred to ‘the English’ as if they were foreigners and Lynch has never held a British passport. He’s

John Oxley

Fining landlords over illegal migrants will make renting even worse

As part of a slew of measures to freeze illegal immigrants out of the economy, the Tories have announced tougher penalties for landlords who let out properties to those with no right to be in the country. This extension of the hostile environment could, however, simply worsen the lives of legitimate renters in an era where costs and competition for housing are increasing. The plans are designed to make it harder to exist in the country without a right to be here, as well as punish those who exploit and facilitate illegal immigration. Under the proposals, fines for renting out properties unlawfully will rise from £80 per lodger and £1,000

Dalibor Rohac

Nato membership for Ukraine would guarantee peace in Europe

Although Western support to Ukraine’s defence effort continues unabated, the honeymoon between Kyiv and even its staunchest allies is decidedly over. In a recent interview, President Zelensky’s advisor Mykhailo Podolyak, said that Ukraine sees Poland as its close friend ‘until the end of the war.’ Then, he added, ‘competition between the countries will begin.’ The quote, which was immediately seized upon by Russian propaganda as evidence of a fracture in Ukraine’s key relationship, came off the back of a spat between Warsaw and Kyiv over the ban on imports of Ukrainian grain to Poland. The policy is due to remain in place until at least mid-September, even as Ukraine’s maritime export infrastructure is