Politics

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

Wednesday

18 Oct 2023

Sunak unites the Commons behind Israel’s right to defence

Most of the questions to Rishi Sunak today at Prime Minister’s Questions can be usefully summarised by the point put to him late on by SNP MP Stewart McDonald. McDonald said: ‘Of course the sadism of Hamas can only be condemned and there’s no question of Israel’s right to defence and security. But international law is very clear, Mr Speaker, that acting against international law in response to terrorism is unjustified. So in all of these packages that the Prime Minister has announced vis a vis humanitarian aid, and the military package he announced last week, can he tell the House how the government will ensure that international law is

The Spectator

Europeans are rejecting the EU’s unworkable vision

The recent election in Poland has been presented by some as a triumph of liberalism over the dark forces of populism, but this is a misreading of events. It’s said that the Law and Justice party, which has ruled Poland for the past eight years, was trounced, but it won the largest share of votes (35 per cent) and the largest number of seats in parliament. It is nevertheless almost certain to lose power because three other parties – Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform (PO), the centre-right Third Way and the Left party – will likely form a coalition against it. The result does little to reverse Europe’s rightward drift, and

Timothy Garton Ash

Europe needs to step up on Ukraine

Vasyl, a burly, tattooed infantry commander who lost a leg to a Russian mine on the eastern front, sits swinging his remaining leg on the edge of the treatment table in the ‘Unbroken’ rehabilitation clinic in Lviv. He’s been inside the Russian trenches 50 times, he tells me. His stories are reminiscent of the first world war. I ask him what Ukraine needs for victory. Answer: ‘Motivated people.’ His T-shirt proclaims ‘no sacrifice, no victory’. After we shake hands and I wish him luck, he suddenly jumps off the table and starts skipping at amazing speed, his blue skipping rope whizzing around under his one foot, while he looks at

Steerpike

Watch: SNP MP defects to Tories

Party conference season is over and now it’s back to school. Ahead of Prime Minister’s Questions today, all eyes were on the former SNP MP Lisa Cameron today as she defected to the Tories. The onetime Nat officially crossed the floor at midday to a hero’s welcome from the Conservative benches. The cheers were so loud in fact, that one MP was forced to shut up and sit down halfway through his question. Lindsay Hoyle, Speaker of the House of Commons, was far from impressed. He fumed at the Tories: Can I just say to the members, the member was in the middle of asking a question. I think it’s

John Ferry

The SNP conference was full of rampant misinformation

Picture the scene around a year from now. We’ve just had a general election. The SNP has gone from 48 MPs in 2019 to, say, 30. Scotland’s First Minister Humza Yousaf announces he is starting the process of taking Scotland out of the UK in line with the policy his party adopted the previous year. Papers are published. Scottish civil servants are instructed to start preparing for secession. The new UK administration has already given its response: there is no mandate for independence and no legal basis for its implementation. Regardless, Yousaf and his team set off for London to demand Scotland’s right to break away. He’s read the history

Matthew Parris

The four big questions our politicians need to answer

Anyone would think (anyone, that is, who has followed our three main annual party conferences this autumn) that Britain’s principal political parties were proposing distinct solutions to Britain’s problems. After all, the heat if not the light emitted by domestic politics in recent years has been unremitting. Sir Keir Starmer spent more than half his conference speech in Liverpool attacking Rishi Sunak and the last 13 years of Conservative government. Mr Sunak, meanwhile, rose to a level of scorn quite untypical of this relatively polite man, when in his Manchester speech he laid into another relatively polite man, Sir Keir, and the Labour party he leads. These heightened levels of

Limor Simhony Philpott

The Gaza hospital strike changes everything

The explosion that killed hundreds in the al-Ahli hospital in Gaza has created a critical moment that may change the course of the war. Hamas claims that an Israeli air strike was behind the explosion. Israel, on the other hand, claims that the explosion was a misfired missile from the terror group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Israel has not fought a war on two fronts since 1973. While it is prepared for such scenario, it will be difficult, dangerous and costly Israel has released evidence today to support their claim, including a radar image showing that near the time of the explosion, Hamas and Islamic Jihad were firing missiles into Israel, and that

Matthew Lynn

Who would lend money to Humza Yousaf?

It runs a vast budget deficit. It keeps raising taxes way above its neighbour. It spends wildly, it is at war with its major industry, and its former leader has been arrested over an investigation into missing party funds. But, heck, never mind about that. Humza Yousaf, the leader of the Scottish National Party, has just decided the bond markets will now have the privilege of ignoring Switzerland and Norway for a few days and can lend a few billion to Scotland instead. There is just a small problem, however. Why would anyone want to lend money to Humza? It was certainly an ambitious proposal. In his conference speech, Humza

Kate Andrews

Has inflation stuck?

‘As we have seen across other G7 countries, inflation rarely falls in a straight line,’ said Chancellor Jeremy Hunt this morning in response to UK inflation data for September. We’ve seen this in the UK, too: at the start of the year, the rate of inflation rose from 10.1 per cent on the year in January to 10.4 per cent in February – before finally falling out of the double digits in April. And this morning we’ve seen another break in the line: the rate of inflation stuck at 6.7 per cent on the year in September, the same rate as August. Food and non-alcoholic beverages were the ‘largest downward

Charles Lipson

Biden failed on Iran

Did American failures contribute to Hamas’s war of terror – its unprovoked attack, its total surprise, its horrific butchering of innocent civilians simply because they are Jews? Yes, but a lesser one. The failures to discover the plans, deter the attack and, having failed at deterrence, to defeat it promptly are Israel’s. The secondary actor here is Iran, not the United States. It was the Islamic regime in Tehran that supplied its terror partner with funds, plans, intelligence and weapons. The basic mistake was a soft, accommodating policy toward Iran and its terrorist proxies Still, the US played a role – a combination of bumbling incompetence and fundamental policy errors

Gavin Mortimer

When naivety meets terror

On Monday evening a service of remembrance was held in Arras cathedral in northern France. The congregation was there to pay its respects to Dominique Bernard, the teacher who was murdered by an Islamist at his school last Friday, not far from the cathedral. The service was led by Bishop Olivier Leborgne. ‘We don’t have all the answers, but we believe that peace is our future,’ he told the congregation. As worshippers lit candles, the choir sang ‘Jesus, the Christ, the inner light, don’t let the darkness speak to me’. The Libyan who knifed to death three gay men in a park in Reading didn’t have much fraternal feeling, nor

Seth J. Frantzman

What Israel can learn from the battle for Mosul

Israel’s fight against Hamas has been compared to the war against Isis between 2015 and 2019. That war was largely waged in Iraq and Syria, and one of the most important battles was the struggle to retake Mosul from the Islamists in 2017. The city and its outlying areas were home to two million people when Isis conquered it in the summer of 2014, and Isis had embedded itself within the local population. Around two million people live in Gaza today. It’s hard to distinguish Hamas from civilians. When the Iraqi offensive against Isis in Mosul began in October 2016, there were warnings about the threat to the civilians in the city. I covered

Max Jeffery

‘It’s a necessity that the Middle East fears us’

Micah Goodman is done being nice and even-handed. He became a best-selling philosopher by telling Israelis that the Palestinians needed more freedom. He said if the West Bank had better roads and an airport and more land and fewer checkpoints, relations between Israelis and Palestinians would improve. There was a way through the stalemate, if only people worked together. But now he wants war. Goodman is rageful about what Hamas did to his Israeli brothers and sisters ‘It’s a necessity that the Middle East fears us’, Goodman says, calling from Jerusalem. ‘That Hezbollah gets a panic attack when it pronounces the word Israel. That in Iran they have a panic attack from the thought of a military interaction

Michael Simmons

The Covid inquiry asked the wrong questions of Neil Ferguson

SPI-M-O are at the Covid inquiry this week. They’re the shadowy group of mathematical modellers who contributed – more than most – to the evidence that backed up lockdown. On Monday we heard from Professor Mark Woolhouse of Edinburgh University. Surprisingly – for an inquiry that seems from the outset to be focused on the deaths of the vulnerable and how we should have ‘locked down sooner’ – Professor Woolhouse focused his evidence on the mistakes of lockdown. Lockdown was ‘disproportionate, unsustainable and not as effective as was being claimed’, he told the inquiry. He also said they were ‘a failure of public health policy’. Blame lay with the government, who

Tuesday

17 Oct 2023

Angus Colwell

Both sides deny being behind Gaza hospital strike

Who is responsible for the bombing of a hospital in Gaza? This evening as many as 500 people are thought to have been killed in one terrible act in a medical building in Gaza. Thousands of civilians were reportedly sheltering there, after fleeing their homes following an Israeli order to evacuate the northern part of the Gaza strip. Israel were quick to deny having a role in the attack, blaming Palestinian militants – and a misfired Palestinian rocket barrage – for the disaster. It follows an incident earlier on Tuesday, when – according to the UN – a school in central Gaza where 4,000 people were sheltering was hit, killing

Iain Macwhirter

Humza Yousaf’s election strategy? Keep the spending taps open

Humza Yousaf’s main objective at this week’s SNP conference, his first as leader, was to free himself from the constitutional millstone placed round his neck by his predecessor Nicola Sturgeon: the ‘de facto’ referendum. He has united the party in ditching that phrase, though the phoney plebiscite remains in spirit. The new policy states that if the SNP win a majority of seats at the next election the Scottish government will ‘begin immediate negotiations with the UK government to give democratic effect to Scotland becoming an independent country’. The Labour party and the Conservatives will negotiate by empty chair and, if the SNP lose seats next year as expected, will say

Lucy Dunn

Will Humza Yousaf’s conference promises save the SNP?

Humza Yousaf took SNP politicians and activists to the blistering cold of Aberdeen this week to host his first party conference as SNP leader. Yousaf was under great personal stress with his wife’s family currently trapped in Gaza and the event had a sombre tone to it, not helped by an audience turnout that didn’t quite manage to fill the main hall. Off the back of a disappointing defeat in the Rutherglen by-election, a defection of one of his own MPs to the Tory party and polling predicting that Yousaf’s party might lose over half of their Westminster seats to Labour next year, there was a lot hinging on the

Ross Clark

Neil Ferguson wasn’t a lockdown fanatic

Is the Covid inquiry running out of steam? Today, it saw one of Covid’s biggest stars take the ‘witness stand’: Professor Neil Ferguson, of Imperial College, whose paper in March 2020 was instrumental in persuading Boris Johnson to call a lockdown. Ferguson, of course, went on to achieve notoriety by breaking the very lockdown rules he inspired by meeting his lover, leading to his resignation from Sage. For the duration of Ferguson’s evidence, which spanned several hours, the number of people watching the live feed rarely reached more than 600. But for those who did take the trouble to listen, what did they learn? Ferguson, it turns out, was initially

Katy Balls

Has Humza Yousaf turned things around?

15 min listen

At his first speech as SNP leader at the party’s conference, Humza Yousaf gave a policy-filled address. He hasn’t had an easy start to his leadership, but can he turn things around? Katy Balls talks to Lucy Dunn and Iain Macwhirter. Produced by Oscar Edmondson and Cindy Yu.

David Shipley

Alex Chalk has bought the prison service a little time – that’s all

In his House of Commons speech yesterday, Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor Alex Chalk shifted the blame for problems with our prison system, announced liberalising reforms and promised a bright future. Ultimately though he’s only bought a little time. Chalk began by reaffirming the government’s commitment to public protection. In a significant shift rapists will now spend their entire sentence in prison, as opposed to half of it or two-thirds. While this headline will probably prove popular, it does carry some risk: under this arrangement they will be released without any supervision from probation. There’s a chance they will be more likely to reoffend as a result, but that problem