Politics

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

Tuesday

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Dead outnumber the living among SNP donors

It’s a safe bet to say that, with her spectacular implosion at the beginning of the year, Nicola Sturgeon may have sounded the death knell for the SNP. But it appears that, when it comes to the independence party’s support base, that might be much more literal than anyone had imagined. Analysis of SNP donation figures reveals that in the last five years of Sturgeon’s tenure a whopping 91 per cent of funds given to the party came from the wills of deceased supporters. In the five years to February of this year, bequests to the SNP raised £1.82 million for the party coffers. Overall, the party raised just £2

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Andy Burnham goes quiet on another Old Trafford Test

Mr S likes Manchester. It’s a fun, fetching and successful city. But is it the best place for a game of cricket? On Sunday, Australia retained the Ashes after the Old Trafford Test was drawn thanks to Manchester’s infamous rain. Down south, there would have been enough sun on Sunday for England to level the series, taking it down to one final Test at the Oval and a chance to win the famous urn. That result came just days after it was announced that the Old Trafford Test will be axed for the next home Ashes in 2027 (as has Headingley in Leeds). The furthest north the players will travel

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Sunak will have to water down net zero sooner or later

The Uxbridge by-election has thrown Labour into a civil war, or at least a civil skirmish. Keir Starmer has told Sadiq Khan to think again on Ulez, and Khan has shown great reluctance to do so. But it has exposed a schism in the Conservatives, too. Yesterday, Rishi Sunak declared that efforts to reach the government’s net zero target should not be allowed to push up the cost of living for struggling families – leading some to predict that some policies, such as the ban on petrol and diesel cars from 2030, could be scrapped. This has brought out the Tories’ net zero enthusiasts to defend the target, even if it

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Just Stop Oil have finally met their match

Have Just Stop Oil finally met their match? The splendidly named counter-organisation ‘Just Stop Pissing People Off’ have pulled off two bracing publicity coups in the last week. First, in Elephant & Castle in south London last Wednesday JSPPO ‘kettled’ JSO activists who were planning one of their slow marches down the public highway, forming a human ring around them (for a whole thirty minutes). Then at the weekend, and rather more spectacularly, JSPPO infiltrated JSO and spoiled their lovely lunch at the Heritage Centre in Bow in east London, releasing balloons up to the very high vaulted roof of the building and then switching on the ear splitting panic

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Gove rows back on 2030 petrol car ban U-turn

If you U-turn on a U-turn, does that make it an O-turn? That’s the question Mr S is wondering this morning given the mess ministers have managed to get themselves into on plans to ban new diesel and petrol cars. The ban is due to come into effect from 2030 but yesterday Andrew Mitchell, the Foreign Office minister, appeared to suggest that this might not be the case. Asked by Radio 4 if the government intends to stick to the plan, Mitchell told the Today programme that ‘All I can tell you is it is in place… But I’m afraid I can’t prophesy for the future.’ Rishi Sunak then prevaricated on

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David Cameron shines at gay marriage reception

It’s ten years this month since legislation to legalise same-sex marriage was passed by parliament. So what better way to mark the occasion than a reception with the man who was Prime Minister at the time? David Cameron was on sparkling form last night at a drinks party hosted by the LGBT+ Conservatives – one of many such events being held, as Cameron was quick to note. ‘Isn’t it lovely to be at a Tory celebration? We haven’t had enough of those recently’ he quipped to the crowd. ‘I think gay marriage has now had more birthdays than a senior member of the royal family.’ Among the anecdotes that Cameron

Monday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Did some good come from the Qing’s dying century?

37 min listen

In the 1800s, Qing China’s final century, European powers were expanding eastwards. The industrialised West, with its gunboats and muskets, and the soft power of Christianity, pushed around the dynasty’s last rulers. But was this period more than just a time of national suffering and humiliation for China? The British Museum’s ongoing exhibit, China’s hidden century, tells the story of Qing China’s final decades. The more than 300 exhibits tell a story not only of decline, but of a complicated exchange between China and the West about culture, fashion, politics and ideas. I reviewed China’s hidden century in The Spectator last month, and hosted a live Chinese Whispers recording about the exhibition in the British Museum a

James Esses

Labour still can’t be trusted on trans rights

Today, Anneliese Dodds, Labour’s Shadow Secretary of State for Women and Equalities, has pledged in a Guardian article that ‘Labour will lead on reform of transgender rights.’ At first glance, you could be fooled into thinking this is a positive intervention. For starters, Dodds has rowed back on the policy of self-ID, perhaps after seeing the chaotic collapse of the policy under the SNP in Scotland. Labour will also maintain the need for a diagnosis of ‘gender dysphoria’ before someone can obtain a Gender Recognition Certificate. Dodds says that the party will not seek to remove same-sex exemptions permitted under the Equality Act 2010 either.  But when you dig beneath the surface, it

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BBC finally apologises to Nigel Farage

Dogs bark, cows moo and the BBC makes a hash of it. After holding out for a week, the Corporation has today thrown in the towel and issued a belated and grovelling apology to Nigel Farage for misreporting the reason his bank account at Coutts was closed. The Beeb’s original report by its Business Editor Simon Jack claimed that the reason for the closure was that Farage’s account had fallen beneath the bank’s wealth limit.  But following last week’s revelation that Farage’s account was shut because he was not ‘compatible with Coutts… as an inclusive organisation’, the BBC has been left with a substantial amount of egg on its face once again. 

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Charlotte Owen joins the House of Lords

While golden oldies battle for the presidency, the age of those in Westminster seems to be getting younger and younger. Last week, we had a new ‘Baby of the House’ when 25-year-old Keir Mather was elected as MP for Selby and Ainsty. And today, 29-year-old Charlotte Owen is being sworn in as the youngest life peer in British history. Who says the Tories have nothing to offer millenials? The onetime No. 10 aide is to become Baroness Owen of Alderley Edge, having been awarded the gong in Boris Johnson’s honours list for her work as a parliamentary assistant and 18 months as a spad. Her appointment has been lauded by

John Oxley

Michael Gove can’t solve the housing crisis by ignoring the suburbs

Michael Gove, one of the few ministers with a track record of getting stuff done, set out the government’s new housebuilding plans this morning. But will his policies actually help solve the housing crisis?  The British Dream is largely a suburban one, and Gove’s plan fails to address it Gove’s plans have focused on streamlining the planning system in certain areas. The levelling up secretary is planning to create a dozen more Development Corporations, which take planning decisions away from local politicians and have speeded up building in areas such as Canary Wharf and the London Olympic games site. Gove is also opening the Office for Place, a department for

Housing crisis
Matthew Lynn

Elon Musk has launched X to kill Twitter

It will trash the brand. It will alienate its core users. And relaunching and rebranding a failing business almost never works. As Elon Musk drops the Twitter blue bird and swaps it for an X, we will hear plenty of arguments about why the world’s second richest man has made another critical commercial mistake. In fairness, some of them have a point. Yet Musk’s critics are making a mistake by missing the real purpose of the new name. X only exists to kill off Twitter. The rebrand was announced in a typically haphazard way. As of today, Twitter will be known simply as X. It was Musk’s boldest move yet

Mark Nayler

The unlikely new kingmakers in Spanish politics

Depending on how you look at the result of yesterday’s general election in Spain, either everyone won or no one won. It had been called five months early by outgoing Socialist prime minister Pedro Sanchez, who hoped to block a resurgent Spanish right after its emphatic victories in regional elections on 28 May. The vote drew 70.4 per cent of the population to the polls, 4.2 per cent more than in 2019. This was a surprisingly high turnout for the middle of summer, when a lot of Spaniards are either on holiday or sheltering from the intense heat.   Prolonged political freezes, sleep-walking governments and prop-up arrangements have become the norm

James Heale James Heale

Is Labour infighting a problem for Starmer?

13 min listen

Katy Balls and Fraser Nelson speak to James Heale about Labour’s infighting over issues such as ULEZ and the child benefits cap. Whilst not in government yet, is this something Keir Starmer will need to get a grip on in order to become the next Prime Minister? Produced by Natasha Feroze.

Jim Lawley

When will Spain’s political paralysis end?

Sunday’s general election in Spain was supposed to answer the question: will Spain be governed for the next four years by a right-wing coalition or by a left-wing coalition? If the question was easy to understand, the answer certainly isn’t. Like the four previous general elections, this one was inconclusive – only even more so.  The right-wing Partido Popular won 136 seats and Vox, even further to the right, won 33, giving a Partido Popular/Vox coalition a total of 169 seats – fewer than most polls had predicted. Unfortunately for the just over 11 million Spaniards who voted for these two parties, this leaves them seven seats short: in a

Steerpike Steerpike

Minister calls in the banks after Farage account closed

It’s a month since the Farage Coutts row blew up and there’s no sign of it calming down any time soon. The asinine decision of the bank to close the Brexiteer’s account because they didn’t like his politics and then to tell the BBC that it was down to commercial reasons now looks to be the financial equivalent of Pearl Harbour. NatWest boss Alison Rose – the Djimi Traore of the banking world – was last week forced to issue a grovelling apology after the bank’s own goal. But that’s not enough for City Minister Andrew Griffith, who will summon Rose and eighteen other bank chiefs to give assurances that customers

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Immigration and a government in a state of post-hypnotic suggestion

Hurrah! The government, it was reported yesterday, is working on getting some more migrants. To plug a million-strong post-Brexit labour shortage in the hospitality sector, Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick have been instructed by Downing Street to start talks to open the doors to young French, German, Spanish and Swiss nationals. If it goes well, the plan is to perhaps invite a few more to help out with farming, fish processing and all sorts of other sectors of the economy that are looking a bit peaky. ‘European baristas and au pairs could return to Britain under government scheme’, read the headline. Just like the good old days, eh?   What’s wrong with, say, Lithuanian au

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Drones strike Moscow in fifth attack since May

For the fifth time in three months, Moscow has once again been targeted by drones. In what is fast becoming a regular occurrence, the Russian ministry of defence reported that two drones attacked the city in the early hours of this morning. Despite the ministry’s claims to have intercepted and jammed the drones, they were still able to inflict damage on two buildings in the south west of the city. According to the government news agency TASS, one of the drones hit a non-residential building on Komsomolsky Prospekt, a mere two miles from the Kremlin and just over the river from Moscow’s famous Gorky Park. This isn’t the largest drone

Sunday

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Targeting Odesa marks a new turn in the war

The world is waking up to pictures of fresh destruction in the Ukrainian port city of Odesa, which has been under constant Russian fire since the grain export deal collapsed last week. At least one person has been killed and 19 more injured following missile strikes overnight. The roof of the recently-rebuilt Transfiguration Cathedral has partially collapsed, and there have been films of local residents trying to rescue icons and other sacred artefacts. The footage is striking – but a tiny part of what’s now at stake. Back in July 2022, Russia agreed not to destroy Ukraine’s grain-exporting infrastructure given how important the foodstuff is to Africa and world food

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Sadiq Khan needs to #HaveAWord with himself

When a public figure is in danger of annoying me so much that it risks impinging on my quality of life, there’s an easy trick I play on myself in order to put the irritant back into their box and into perspective. Rather than take them seriously, I simply reframe them as a comic creation in the style of David Brent of The Office fame. This strategy worked a treat with Meghan Markle when I had to watch the Netflix mockumentary for work. With the latest mis-step in Mayor Sadiq Khan’s anti-sexist #HaveAWord campaign, the time has come to view him too through the prism of Ricky Gervais’ supreme buffoon.