Politics

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

Kate reveals cancer diagnosis

The Princess of Wales this evening revealed that she has been diagnosed with cancer, and that she is being treated with chemotherapy. Read her full video message here: I wanted to take this opportunity to say thank you personally for all the wonderful messages of support and for your understanding whilst I have been recovering from surgery. It has been an incredibly tough couple of months for our entire family, but I’ve had a fantastic medical team who have taken great care of me, for which I am so grateful. In January, I underwent major abdominal surgery in London and at the time, it was thought that my condition was

Michael Simmons

Should the ‘Waspi women’ be compensated?

13 min listen

The Parliamentary Ombudsman’s report on raising women’s state pension age in line with men’s has been published. It details that women born in the 1950s hit by the state pension age change are owed compensation and has advised that the government should ‘do the right thing’. Will the ‘Waspi women’ end up disappointed?  Michael Simmons speaks to Isabel Hardman and Louise Perry, host of the Maiden Mother Matriarch podcast. 

Steerpike

Kate Forbes isn’t ruling out another leadership bid

It’s the end of another rocky week for Scotland’s First Minister. Humza Yousaf has been dealing with national outrage over the hate crime bill and remains under pressure to sack one of his closest allies in the party over an £11,000 iPad scandal. So Kate Forbes’s latest intervention is the last thing he needs. On Thursday night, Yousaf’s onetime leadership rival admitted that the SNP lacks a ‘big vision’ and suggested that she hadn’t ruled out another leadership bid. Watch your back, Humza… At a Holyrood Sources podcast recording on Thursday night, Forbes told her audience that ‘people need to be inspired by leadership’, continuing:  As much as I back

Freddy Gray

Trump vs luxury beliefs

29 min listen

Freddy speaks to Rob Henderson, author of Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, in which he coins the term ‘luxury beliefs’. These are certain beliefs held by a section of the elite which confirm and elevate the status of those who hold them. As a consequence, they can cause harm to those lower down the social strata. Is Donald Trump the antidote to America’s ‘luxury beliefs’ complex?

Steerpike

Revealed: Reform leader issues letter of complaint to ‘out of touch’ Mail group

Richard Tice is on a mission to crack down on ‘defamatory and libellous’ slurs against his party as the election draws closer.  First, the Reform UK leader forced the BBC to issue a correction and an apology for using news agency copy that labelled Tice’s party as ‘far right’.  Now, he’s got his sights set on DMG Media — the parent group of the MailOnline, the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday. After the BBC blunder, Tice warned publications that his lawyers ‘are also in touch with other news organisations who repeated the BBC line’ — including the MailOnline, which fell foul of the same mistake and is now reportedly issuing an apology to Reform

Katy Balls

Police investigate Tory donor’s Diane Abbott comments

The Tory racism row looks set to run on for some time. West Yorkshire Police today launched an investigation into alleged racist comments made by top Tory donor, Frank Hester. Officers are to investigate reports that Hester, a Leeds businessman who has given £10 million to the Tories, said former Labour MP Diane Abbott made him want to ‘hate all black women’. Sunak has been accused of handling the situation badly The alleged comments date back to a meeting at Hester’s headquarters in 2019. Hester has since apologised for making ‘rude’ comments but insisted they were not racist as they ‘had nothing to do with her gender nor colour of

Patrick O'Flynn

Keir Starmer is right to ignore Doreen Lawrence

Is Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer right to have limited the access to and sway held over him by Baroness Lawrence, the mother of murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence? Lady Lawrence, a Labour peer who was made the party’s race relations adviser by Starmer after he became leader early in 2020, is in no doubt that this is what has happened in recent weeks. According to the Times, she told a meeting with shadow ministers and senior party officials, ‘I wish Keir listened to me’ and blamed ‘gatekeepers’ around the Labour leader for obstructing her work. Baroness Lawrence seems only to have one approach when it comes to race relations

Why is New Zealand’s deputy PM rowing with Chumbawamba?

In their musical heyday, the English anarchist punk band Chumbawamba enjoyed a reputation for having an irreverent attitude towards those in political authority. Twelve years after they musically packed it in, a political figure abroad is making even more of a name for himself for his own irreverence towards Chumbawamba. The group has asked New Zealand’s deputy prime minister, Winston Peters, to stop using their best-known song, ‘Tubthumping’, as a curtain-raiser at his rallies and in his fulminations against the woke peril. The populist politician, though, is vowing that the show will go on. It doesn’t help that the 78-year-old Peters is not only his country’s longest-serving parliamentarian but one

Nike should leave the St George’s Cross alone

England’s football kit has changed dramatically over the years but one feature typically remains unchanged: the cross of St George. Nike, which is designing the England kit for this summer’s Euro 2024 tournament in Germany, has redesigned the red and white flag in navy, light blue and purple. Why did it think doing so was a good idea? The backlash has been predictably swift: Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said the St George’s flag was a unifying symbol which should not be changed: ‘We just need to be proud of it. So I think they should just reconsider this and change it back.’ Rishi Sunak said the flag should not

Katy Balls

Will Fine Gael call an election?

14 min listen

Leo Varadkar resigned as Ireland’s Taoiseach this week, and as Fine Gael leader. ‘Personal and political reasons’ informed his decision, he said. Will his party now call an election? Katy Balls speaks to Ben Scallen, from Gript Media, in Dublin. 

Steerpike

Watch: Douglas Murray schools Al Jazeera journalist on Israel-Gaza conflict

When you’re interviewing an expert, it never hurts to come prepared. But when Al Jazeera journalist Jane Dutton quizzed Douglas Murray on the conflict in the Middle East, the unsuspecting interviewer quickly became the interviewee in a rather humiliating twist… ‘You’ve got to inform your viewers of the facts, and you just misled them,’ Murray told Dutton during a heated debate about the Israel-Gaza conflict. First discussing the definition of genocide, the Al Jazeera reporter quickly moved on to state that there was an illegal occupation of Gaza by Israel, adding that ‘Israel is internationally recognised as an occupying state’. ‘No, no, it’s not at all. That’s your view,’ Murray

Why is the police’s SNP probe taking so long?

Scotland’s First Minister Humza Yousaf has plenty to worry about right now with the imminent implementation of his much-criticised Hate Crime crackdown. But there is mounting anxiety within the SNP about something else: the progress, or lack of it, of the police probe into the party’s finances. Activists always put two and two together and come up with Unionist Perfidy It is nearly a year now since Nicola Sturgeon’s home was raided by police, as part of Operation Branchform, their investigation into what happened to £660,000 of donations for a referendum campaign that never took place. The nation was agog last April as stony-faced officers descended on the former first minister’s home

Ian Acheson

Only radical reform will save our overcrowded prisons

What should we do when there’s no cell space left in our disordered jails? The prison population figures published yesterday show a small drop compared to last week, with nearly 87,900 currently incarcerated. There’s precious little room for manoeuvre. We are perilously close to a time I can remember back in the mid-90s when governors refused to take convicted prisoners from court because there was no cell space left in their establishments. While numbers at the top fluctuate week by week, the trend only ever goes up, driven by courts getting rid of their backlogs and our tendency to sentence more offenders to longer spells in custody that only make

Max Jeffery

Will Reform overtake the Tories?

12 min listen

A new YouGov poll has Reform just four points behind the Conservatives. Richard Tice’s party is on 15 per cent, and Rishi Sunak’s party is on 19 per cent. What is driving the Tory decline? Max Jeffery speaks to Katy Balls and to James Johnson of JL Partners.

William Moore

War on words: is Scotland ready for its new hate crime law?

51 min listen

On the podcast: Scotland’s new hate crime law; the man who could be France’s next PM; and why do directors meddle with Shakespeare?  First up: Scotland is smothering free speech. Scotland is getting a new, modern blasphemy code in the form of the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act, which takes effect from 1 April. The offence of ‘stirring up racial hatred’ will be extended to disability, religion, sexual orientation, age, transgender identity and variations in sex characteristics. The new law gives few assurances for protecting freedom of speech writes Lucy Hunter Blackburn, former senior Scottish civil servant. Lucy joins the podcast, alongside Baroness Claire Fox, unaffiliated peer and

Steerpike

Sturgeon will campaign for SNP, says Yousaf

Since she stepped down from her role as First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon has played witness to her party’s extraordinary slump in the polls, months of SNP infighting and her own arrest as part of the ongoing police probe. But, Humza Yousaf insists, his predecessor will still campaign for the SNP in the upcoming general election. Talk about being out of touch… When asked in a ITV interview whether Sturgeon would be involved in the election campaign, Yousaf replied: ‘Oh, she definitely will — I’ve got no doubt about that.’ He went on: She’s one of the most successful politicians in Europe, she’s got a formidable track record in terms of

Matthew Lynn

The Swiss are cutting interest rates. Why can’t we?

Mortgage rates will finally start to come down again. Consumers will have a little more money in their pockets. And companies will find it cheaper to invest. Today’s cut in interest rates was a much needed boost for the economy. Oh, but hold on. That was over in Switzerland, where the central bank this morning cut rates by 0.25 per cent. By contrast, the Bank of England has today kept them on hold. This raises the question of whether the Swiss or British central banks have a better record of managing monetary policy. If most people in the markets had to put money on it they would probably place a franc