Politics

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

Tuesday

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

Britain’s economy is struggling with so many off sick

One of the UK’s biggest economic problems is having so many people out of work – and the slowest return to pre-pandemic workforce levels in Europe. This is costly and slows growth, as taxpayers foot the bill for benefits while employers struggle to fill vacancies. Today’s figures show that it is getting better – but slowly.  The official unemployment count crept up to 3.9 per cent in the latest statistics. This is, ironically, a good sign as it shows more people are actually looking for work (about 12 per cent of the working-age population are on out-of-work benefits, although this is a figure that ministers seldom update and never publicise).

Euan McColm

Nicola Sturgeon can’t complain about polarisation

Nobody ever accused former Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon of possessing a great sense of humour but, surely, she must be joking. Writing in the Guardian about proposed justice reforms in Scotland, Sturgeon has blamed deep political divisions for some taking fixed positions before examining the evidence. This is like an arsonist explaining that while, yes, they may have petrol-bombed that Pizza Hut, they hadn’t expected the place to burn down And then the killer punchline. On the issue of polarisation, Sturgeon says she had ‘underestimated the depth of the problem’. This is like an arsonist explaining that while, yes, they may have petrol-bombed that Pizza Hut, they hadn’t expected

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

The inconvenient Palestinians

His name was Abdullah Abu Jaba and I want you to remember it because it’s the last time you’ll hear it. He was a Palestinian from Gaza, reportedly a father of six, and was killed in the latest clashes between Israel and Palestine Islamic Jihad. You haven’t heard of Abu Jaba because he was an inconvenient Palestinian, one who cannot be held up as the latest victim of Zionist aggression. Pictures of his weeping widow and confused children will not fill your social media timeline. Major media outlets will not compete to tell human interest stories about how he played with his children or how his family will cope without him. No

Monday

Steerpike Steerpike

Questions raised over SNP police raid timing

It’s not the SNP’s year is it? Just when the nationalists thought they could catch a break after the chaos of recent months, fresh revelations have been published about the infamous police raid on Nicola Sturgeon’s house. It turns out that Police Scotland put in their requests for a search warrant of the Sturgeon-Murrell property midway through the leadership contest on 20 March. But officers were left waiting for another two weeks until they got the green light on 3 April — seven days after the contest had ended. Talk about convenient timing for establishment candidate Humza Yousaf. Had those scenes of the blue forensic tent been engrained in voters’

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Prigozhin’s ‘treachery’ poses a dangerous challenge to Putin

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the businessman behind the Wagner mercenary army, likes accusing his political enemies of ‘treason’ for not backing him as much as he’d like. Now, though, he appears to have committed that very crime himself – with the revelation that US intelligence reports suggested he tried to cut a deal with HUR, Ukrainian military intelligence. These reports were part of the trove of classified materials leaked onto the Discord gaming server earlier this year. Taken on their own, they could be regarded as sneaky fakes intended to undermine Prigozhin, yet many other documents within the collection have quietly been acknowledged as real. While it still cannot be taken as

Owen Matthews

Vladimir Putin must be praying that Lukashenko survives

Belarus’s president Aleksandr Lukashenko has been missing from public view since being taken ill during a Victory Day parade in Moscow on 9 May. If Belarus’s dictator dies or is incapacitated Vladimir Putin – his neighbour, patron and only regional ally – will have a vast, even existential, problem on his hands. It was mass protests in Belarus’ capital Minsk in August 2020 after an election widely seen as stolen by Lukashenko that prompted Putin to decide that the West was irrevocably hostile to the Kremlin and was hell bent on fomenting regime change across the former Soviet Union – including in Russia itself. To Putin and his inner circle

Daniel Thorpe

How president Erdogan defied the odds – again

The results of yesterday’s election have come as a sobering shock for many in Turkey. Although president Erdogan fell just short in the first round of the 50 per cent he needed to automatically secure another term, a parliamentary majority remains within his grasp. Erdogan is now expected to comfortably win the run-off. Even before the counting was finished, he delivered a victory speech in Ankara on Sunday night. If Erdogan surpassed expectations, the opposition significantly underperformed. In the lead-up to the election, numerous polls suggested that the joint presidential candidate, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, held a lead of up to five points over his rival, giving him a good chance of

Dalibor Rohac

Macron has no idea how to pay for ‘reindustrialisation’

Emmanuel Macron is playing the emperor again. Last week he proudly announced a grand new strategy, but without any indication of how to pay for it. The French President said that ‘“Made in Europe” should be our motto,’ and urged Europeans to ‘take back control of our supply chains, energy and innovation’. Macron’s call for Europe’s reindustrialisation reflects a new transatlantic consensus. The age of ‘globalisation’ and ‘neoliberalism’ is over. We were too naive about our trading partners during the 1990s and the 2000s, and we now need to build up national resilience. Heavy-handed industrial policy and protectionism are making a comeback in the United States and Europe alike. But

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

The problem with prison

The former prime minister Sir John Major has suggested the UK need not be banging up quite so many people. Lamenting the highest incarceration rates in western Europe, Sir John said he found it ‘hard to believe we British are uniquely criminal’. Of particular concern, he argued, was the sheer volume of non-violent offenders who end up behind bars: of the 43,000 people imprisoned between 2021 and 2022, more than 60 per cent had committed crimes with no element of violence. Sir John questioned whether custody was the correct disposal in all of those cases.  An estimated 17,000 children in the UK have a mother in prison It’s easy to criticise the

Steerpike Steerpike

Ministers block release of draft coronation playlist

It was Yes Minister which joked that open government is ‘a contradiction in terms: you can be open or you can have government.’ And it seems that the Sunak regime has now taken that maxim to new limits in its bid to avoid anything that might cause the slightest embarrassment to King and country. Back in February, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport released an official ‘Coronation Celebration Playlist’ to get everyone in the spirit. It put together an official 27-track playlist on Spotify as a suggested street party soundtrack. Among those tracks included were Come Together by the Beatles, Starry Eyed by Ellie Goulding and George Ezra’s Dance All

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Why did Braverman’s immigration speech ruffle feathers?

14 min listen

Home Secretary Suella Braverman said that there is no good reason the UK can’t train its own lorry drivers and fruit pickers in order to bring immigration rates down. Katy Balls speaks to James Heale and Isabel Hardman about why this has rubbed some up the wrong way and Keir Starmer’s speech over the weekend, outlining Labour’s vision for the future. 

Sean Thomas

Writers will lose to AI

It’s a cliché of publishing that men over the age of 40 only read military history. In my case it’s not entirely true: I still occasionally squeeze in the odd novel, some politics, even poetry if I’ve drunk too much sweet wine. But it’s true enough that my mind is probably over-furnished with historical-military examples, metaphors, and allusions. And for the last week I’ve been trying to find the correct analogy, from the annals of war, to characterise the battle recently joined by the Writers Guild of America. For anyone that has missed this particular strike, amidst our own melancholy roster of industrial actions, here’s the skinny: as of 2 May 2023 all the screenwriters of the USA, from east coast to west, from gag-smiths to

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

A Lib-Lab coalition would be hilarious

Talk of a new Labour-Lib Dem coalition is in the air. This is piquantly nostalgic to those of us whose earliest political memories were forged in the fire of the red-hot excitement of David Steel and Jim Callaghan’s short-lived Lib-Lab pact of 1977-78. My initial reaction, along with many others I’m sure, was a guttural ‘oh God no’. But a moment later a different aspect of it occurred to me, in a fine example of what the young people call ‘cope’. My banter senses started to tingle. Because, yes, it would drag out and exacerbate the country’s current despairing decline. But it would also be hilarious. PR might very well

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Suella Braverman’s immigration speech ruffles feathers

How should Rishi Sunak govern? Unfortunately for the Prime Minister, his MPs have plenty of views on the matter at the moment – and many are keen to air them publicly. In the face of disappointing local election results, a couple of hundred members of the pro-Boris vehicle the Conservative Democratic Organisation gathered in Bournemouth over the weekend (James Heale writes about the event here) where its members reminisced about the Johnson days and critiqued Sunak. Tonight Sunak is due to host a coronation garden party for all MPs, but ahead of that charm offensive a number of ministers and MPs are heading to the Emmanuel Centre in Westminster for

Patrick West

Let’s stop pretending the culture wars aren’t real

Are the culture wars real? Some assume that they’re an imaginary affair, or, at best, a distraction from the real, pressing bread-and-butter concerns of today. As Matthew Syed put it in the Sunday Times yesterday: ‘The culture wars…may be seen not as genuine debates but as a form of Freudian displacement. The woke and anti-woke need each other to engage in piffling spats as a diversion from realities they both find too psychologically threatening to confront.’ We are familiar with this line of thinking, both from left and right. The culture wars about race and gender are irrelevant and ‘piffling’, so some say. It’s all fuss and nonsense. Many on

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Is Macron finally taking on the cult of net zero?

Hell hath no fury like an environmentalist scorned and Emmanuel Macron has felt a wave of green wrath since his declaration last week that France has gone far enough in pursuit of net zero. ‘We are ahead, in regulatory terms, of the Americans, the Chinese and of any other power in the world,’ said Macron in a speech at the Élysée. ‘We must not make any new changes to the rules, because we will lose all the players,’ he continued.   Calling for a ‘pause’ of more EU environmental red tape, Macron said member states required stability if they were to attract future investment.  One could argue that 21st century western workers

Steerpike Steerpike

Brit-bashing Eurovision entry finishes second bottom

It’s fair to say there was some controversy about the selection of Mae Muller as Britain’s entry to this year’s Eurovision song contest. Muller is a 25-year-old Corbyn supporting Twitter devotee, whose past efforts include posted a number of messages on Twitter critical of Boris Johnson, including one post in which she declared ‘I hate this country’. In others she wrote ‘fuck the Tories’, called the governing party ‘racist and elitist’ and sneered at the then Prime Minister being admitted to an ICU in April 2020 for Covid: ‘The same nurses that can’t even afford protective wear, and are literally dying because of you. Boris does not have my sympathy

Steerpike Steerpike

Varadkar red-faced after his boyfriend’s coronation messages leak

Oh dear. It was all meant to be going so well for British-Irish relations. Earlier this month both the Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and the Republic’s president, Michael D. Higgins, flew out to London for King Charles’ coronation – the first Irish nationalist leaders to attend a British coronation in over a century. Even Sinn Fein’s Michelle O’Neill, Northern Ireland’s First Minister, managed to swallow her pride and make the visit, saying ‘I am an Irish republican. I also recognise there are many people on our island for whom the coronation is a hugely important occasion.’ It appears that some did not treat the ceremony with quite the same respect though.

Owen Matthews

Erdogan faces runoff vote in the Turkish elections

Turkey is a strange kind of democracy. But nonetheless it is a democracy where an apparently invincible strongman can – in theory at least – be deposed after two decades in power by the will of the electorate. With over 99 per cent of the votes of Sunday night’s presidential vote counted, it looks like neither the 69-year-old Erdogan nor his challenger, the 74-year-old veteran leader of the Republican People’s party (CHP) Kemal Kilicdaroglu, have managed to break the required 50 per cent threshold to prevent a runoff. Erdogan is currently on 49 per cent, according to estimates by the official Anadolu Agency, while Kilicdaroglu is on 45 per cent.

Sunday

Joe Bedell-Brill

Sunday shows round-up: Ousting Boris was a mistake, says Rees-Mogg

‘Managed decline’, or ‘steely determination’? The fallout from the Conservatives’ disastrous local election results continued this week, with the inaugural conference of the rebellious Conservative Democratic Organisation. During the conference, former home secretary Priti Patel accused Rishi Sunak of presiding over the ‘managed decline’ of the Tory party. Energy Secretary Grant Shapps was determined to spin his party’s predicament in a more positive light however, telling Sophy Ridge there was an atmosphere of ‘steely determination’ among his fellow MPs:  Shapps – ‘Sunak’s pledge was to grow the economy and we’re starting to see it grow’ Shapps rejected the notion that the Conservatives needed to make significant changes. He told Laura