Politics

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

Thursday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Is Sadiq Khan really taking air pollution seriously?

London is killing us. That’s the conclusion of Sadiq Khan’s alarming new book, Breathe: Tackling the Climate Emergency, which he publicised last night at a 90-minute event held in the Royal Festival Hall.   The sales pitch for Khan’s book was disturbed by hecklers and protestors who blew whistles and shouted constant abuse at the mayor. ‘F*** off, Joseph Goebbels, you c***,’ was a typical insult.   Khan ignored the protests as he introduced himself at the podium and read out a page from his book. He seems perfectly accustomed to being screamed at in public by the electorate. A hapless gang of stewards tried to curb the disruptions and they

Steerpike Steerpike

Car smashes into Downing Street gates

There was drama in Whitehall this afternoon after a car smashed into the gates of Downing Street, prompting the closure of half of SW1. Police cordoned off the area after a small hatchback was seen at the entrance to the famous street, besides the great iron gates erected during Margaret Thatcher’s era. The Met Police subsequently confirmed that: At around 16:20hrs a car collided with the gates of Downing Street on Whitehall. Armed officers arrested a man at the scene on suspicion of criminal damage and dangerous driving. There are no reports of any injuries. Enquiries are ongoing. Good luck getting home from Westminster tonight…

William Moore William Moore

Ukraine’s next move

39 min listen

This week: In his cover piece, journalist Mark Galeotti asks whether Putin can be outsmarted by Zelensky’s counter-offensive. He is joined by The Spectator’s own Svitlana Morenets to discuss Ukraine’s next move. (01:08) Also this week:  Journalist David Goodhart writes a moving tribute to his friend Jeremy Clarke, The Spectator’s much-missed Low Life columnist who sadly passed away earlier this week. David is joined by Cass Pennant and Freddy Gray, The Spectator’s deputy editor, to remember the life and writing of Jeremy Clarke. (12:52)  And finally: The Spectator’s deputy features editor Gus Carter writes this week about the curious business of fertility. He is joined by Nimco Ali co-founder and CEO of The Five Foundation. (27:06) Presented

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Does Gary Lineker deserve Amnesty’s human rights award?

‘We need to be careful with the language we use,’ said Gary Lineker as he picked up an award from Amnesty International in Rome for his ‘strong commitment towards immigration and human rights issues’. It was an interesting line to take, given it was Lineker’s intemperate tweeting – particularly his referencing of 1930s Germany in relation to language used by Home Secretary Suella Braverman – that boosted his social justice warrior profile and probably helped win him the award. Having collected his gong, Lineker claimed in a waffly interview with Channel 4 to be a believer in freedom of speech. ‘But,’ the Match of the Day host said, ‘in my

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Is a referendum the answer to solving France’s migrant crisis?

Paris has a problem. The city currently houses some 5,000 migrants in hotels, much to the chagrin of the capital’s hoteliers. France’s capital is hosting two major tournaments in the next year: the Rugby World Cup in September and the Olympics next summer. An enduring headache for president Macron is where supporters will stay; hotels have been clamouring for permission to free up their rooms for tourists.  The solution Macron has come up with is to move the migrants out to the sticks, thereby freeing up those hotels. Their facilities were commandeered by the government because the numbers of homeless in Paris (the majority of whom are migrants) have overwhelmed

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

When will the Tories come clean on their migration plan?

Net annual immigration – which successive Tory manifestos promised the electorate would be brought down below 100,000 – has just topped 600,000, an all-time record. During 2022 some 606,000 more people immigrated into the UK than emigrated out of it, according to official figures from the Office for National Statistics.  As a result, we must all look around for a new major city to use as a yardstick. The places traditionally deployed to give people an idea of the enormous scale of the influx such as Hull (population approx. 320,000) or Sunderland (340,000) or Rishi Sunak’s home city of Southampton (250,000) will no longer suffice. We are moving into the

Steerpike Steerpike

Ministers to curb Boris’s animal agenda

Boris Johnson is back in the news this week, with Partygate rearing its ugly head once again. And it’s in that spirit of 2021 that Mr S returns to the ill-fated animal crusade which Johnson embraced during his premiership, as part of his bid to rebrand Brexit as an eco-cause. There was the Animal Sentience Act, the Net Zero agenda and, of course, the ill-fated evacuation of Pen Farthing’s animal sanctuary: a project that has now resumed under the Taliban regime. But now word reaches Steerpike that ministers are planning to curb one of the outstanding pieces of this green agenda. The Kept Animals Bill – aimed at improving animal

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Just Stop Oil’s Chelsea Flower Show protest is a new low

You have to sink low, very low, to target the Chelsea Flower show for an environmental protest. But the boys and girls of Just Stop Oil are, it seems, up for tormenting even the most blameless and benign element of society: gardeners. One of the show gardens, designed by Paul Hervey-Brookes, was sprayed with orange powder. I’m not sure what was its offence. Hervey Brooks can’t have been sponsored by Shell. Maybe there’s a clue in what one of the protesters shouted before being marched off by security: ‘What’s the use of a garden if you can’t eat?’. Well, I agree that this particular garden wasn’t big on fruit and veg. It

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Net migration hits record high – but is significantly lower than expected

It’s three years since the UK formally left the European Union and cut off free movement, and net migration has reached a record high: 606,000 in 2022. This total (measured by the number of new arrivals, minus people emigrating from the UK) is 118,000 higher than last year. This is certainly an increase from 2021, but nothing like the estimates that had been floated in recent weeks that suggested the net figure would be at least 700,000 – possibly even as high as one million. The estimates originally came from a Centre for Policy Studies report, which calculated (based on visa approval statistics) a series of net migration scenarios. The

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

DeSantis’s presidential ambitions are crashing to earth

People imagine that the real world is similar to the dark side of the TV show Succession. For some reason we enjoy thinking that media barons and tech tycoons pull the strings of global power, creating the election-deciding narratives which the bovine public then swallows whole.  But the truth, as Elon Musk and Ron DeSantis showed so spectacularly with their disastrous campaign announcement on Twitter last night, is much more like the funnier bits in Succession. It’s cock-up not conspiracy.  His candidacy makes so much sense in theory. But he’s slipping further and further behind Trump in the polls People mocked Elon Musk last month when his big SpaceX launch

James Kirkup James Kirkup

The trouble with Britain’s net migration figure

Where to start with the net migration figures? As someone who has generally defended liberal immigration policies, I could just shout, yet again, about the economic benefits. That would no doubt annoy a few readers, get some angry clicks, and add precisely nothing to the conversation.   Or I could point out that this is what Britain voted for in 2016. The migration described in today’s figures is the result of the UK government implementing migration policies entirely of its own choosing. We took back control and this is what we did with it. This outcome is wholly legitimate: it was chosen by our democratically elected government.  Instead of continuing their decade-long pantomime

Nicholas Sheppard

New Zealand’s opposition embroiled in AI-attack ad storm

New Zealand’s opposition National party has admitted using artificial intelligence (AI) to generate fake images for its political attack ads. The ads featured AI-generated images of a group of robbers storming a simulated jewellery store, two nurses of Pacific Island descent in a Wes Anderson cinematic aesthetic, and a crime victim gazing solemnly out of a window. Another ad was an AI approximation of a poster for The Fast and the Furious franchise, the cast’s likenesses devolved into generic faces, like something you might see on sweatshirts or lunchboxes in a short-lease tat shop. Questioned on whether the images had been created by AI, National Party leader Christopher Luxon was caught flat-footed.

Roger Kimball

Twitter troubles weren’t the only problem with DeSantis’s launch

Free tickets to Disney World: maybe that’s what Ron the aspiring Don should give to the clever staffer who thought of having him announce his candidacy for POTUS on Twitter Spaces.  It was only the official announcement, of course. But having him unfold the bulletin on Twitter Spaces, in an unscripted chat with Elon Musk, was supposed to transform a rote, ho-hum, so-what-I-already-knew-that non-event into a media happening. When I last checked, Tucker Carlson’s ‘We’re Back’ Twitter clip had garnered more than 132 million views (take that, Fox). How did Ron do? From where I and some friends sat, it was more or less like the Thresher’s final voyage. Or maybe like one of SpaceX’s rapid unscheduled disassemblies.

Steerpike Steerpike

DeSantis’s presidential launch flops on Twitter

Talk about a power failure. Ron DeSantis finally unveiled his long-awaited 2024 bid to become president last night in a glitch-riddled Twitter announcement plagued by technical difficulties. The Florida Governor filed a declaration of candidacy with the US federal electoral commission on Wednesday and then announced his move in an online chat with Twitter head honcho Elon Musk. But the audio stream crashed repeatedly, making it almost impossible for most of the followers to hear DeSantis speak most of the time. The event got off to a rocky start after technical issues meant there were minutes of silence, with those who endured being subsequently kicked off the feed, subject to

Wednesday

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Sunak should stop pretending that he controls inflation

The government is delighted with today’s inflation update. Rishi Sunak released a clip this afternoon, talking about his government’s efforts to ‘halve inflation’ by the end of the year. ‘I know it’s still tough’ he says, but ‘the plan is working, and we are delivering.’ The problem is that it is not in his gift to deliver on his particular pledge. The economics in this video rival his chancellor’s coffee cup video from a few months back – in that they simply don’t add up. Politicians do not control inflation. They have no reliable mechanism for doing so. Windfall taxes do not bring down inflation, as he suggests in the video; and

Sam Leith Sam Leith

In memory of Martin Amis

37 min listen

In this week’s Book Club podcast, we celebrate the life and weigh the literary reputation of Martin Amis, who died at the end of last week. I’m joined by the critic Alex Clark, the novelist John Niven, and our chief reviewer Philip Hensher – all of whom bring decades of close engagement with Amis’s work to the discussion.

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The rise of private healthcare could finish off the NHS

The number of Britons turning to private healthcare has risen by a third since the pandemic. The figures from the Private Healthcare Information Network aren’t a surprise: they show that there were more ‘self-pay’ admissions for treatment in 2022 than in any other year the organisation has data for. If long waiting lists remain, then a two-tier healthcare system will become normalised In all, 272,000 people paid for their own treatment (rather than having it financed by insurance). The top four procedures that people either forked out for themselves or had insurance cover were cataract surgery (76,000), chemotherapy (66,000), diagnostic upper GI endoscopies (38,000) and diagnostic bowel colonoscopies (31,000), while

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

What’s this? A good joke from Sir Keir?

Strange tactics by Sir Keir at PMQs. He raised the issue of broken promises on immigration, which gave Rishi Sunak a chance to sound tougher than Labour. ‘How many work visas were issued to foreign nationals last year?’ asked Sir Keir. Rishi dodged the question and blamed the unexpectedly large influx on the Ukraine war. And he mentioned his personal and very generous decision to welcome refugees into other people’s houses. Sir Keir supplied the figure Rishi had just ducked: ‘It’s 250,000. He knows the answer. He just doesn’t want to give it.’ Rishi seized his chance to accuse Labour of plotting to scrap our borders altogether. ‘He believes in

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Boris vs Rishi, round VII

The decision by the Cabinet Office to refer Boris Johnson to the police after his ministerial diary revealed visits by friends to Chequers in Buckinghamshire during the pandemic is being felt in Westminster today. Allies of the former prime minister say Johnson is considering taking legal action against the government (taxpayer-funded lawyers for Johnson – hired by the Cabinet Office – flagged the material to officials). Some of Johnson’s more vocal supporters have pointed the finger of blame at Rishi Sunak, accusing the Prime Minister of allowing a ‘witch-hunt’ against Johnson. It’s all becoming rather messy both for Johnson and the coming Covid inquiry In a bid to quell such