Politics

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

Wednesday

26 Apr 2023

The UK’s treatment of Activision shows it is closed for business

It was, admittedly, not quite as thrilling as an action sequence from Call of Duty. Even so, the statement put out by Bobby Kotick, chief executive of US video game publisher Activision, following the UK’s bizarre decision to block the company’s acquisition by Microsoft was about as bloodthirsty as any ever put out by a major corporation. The ruling ‘contradicts the ambitions of the UK to become an attractive country to build a technology business,’ he argued. Even worse, ‘it does a disservice to UK citizens, who face increasingly dire economic prospects’, and, to cap it all off, it shows that Britain is ‘closed for business’. Of course, it would

Lloyd Evans

The grudge-mongers were out in force at PMQs

Grievance fever gripped the house at Prime Minister’s Questions. The grudge-mongers were out in force. Sir Keir Starmer led the charge and asked Rishi Sunak why he refused to scrap non-dom status. The Labour leader answered his own question by explaining that the tax exemption enriches Rishi’s ‘family’. (By ‘family’ he meant ‘wife’, of course, and the encryption helped him dodge the charge that he’s turning Mrs Sunak into a public hate-figure – which is exactly what he’s doing.) Sir Keir expects us to envy and loathe the Sunaks for being successful Sir Keir expects us to envy and loathe the Sunaks for being successful. But a lot of people loathe

Stephen Daisley

Why I love Israel

Israel is marking 75 years of its existence in one of the most difficult peacetime periods the country has ever seen. Peacetime is a relative concept in the Middle East but the past six months have been extraordinarily trying for Israelis and their friends overseas. Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power 16 months after being ousted by an improbable coalition of left and right, secular and Islamist – everyone except the voters. But his comeback was only possible by doing a deal with the devil and bringing the far right into his government. Unsavoury allies like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, the Laurel and Hardy of Israeli ultranationalism, have proved comically

Douglas Murray

The pathology of anti-Semitism

One of the best ways to work out that somebody has not thought deeply about anti-Semitism is if they say that they wish to destroy it once and for all. When in a corner, even Jeremy Corbyn could be found saying that we must end anti-Semitism for good. Though he was of course unable to resist forever adding ‘and all other forms of prejudice’. As though such a day could ever come. Demonstrating that it will not, last week Corbyn’s old ally and motorcycling companion Diane Abbott could be found complaining that black people have always had it worse than other groups, and that while Jews, like gingers and gypsies,

Euan McColm

The abolition of the ‘not proven’ verdict is long overdue

When 20-year-old Francis Auld walked free from Glasgow’s High Court in December 1992, there was widespread belief that a monster had got away with murder. The evidence he had killed 19-year-old Amanda Duffy had seemed compelling: the pair had been seen together in the Lanarkshire town of Hamilton shortly before her death. A deep bite-mark on the victim’s breast had, he admitted, been inflicted by Auld. The accused’s defence – that he had left her, shortly before the time of her death as established by a post-mortem examination, in the company of another man – was flimsy. Auld walked from the dock not because the jury found him ‘not guilty’

Charles Moore

The genius of Barry Humphries

At school in the 1970s, several of us were ardent fans of the Barry McKenzie strip in Private Eye. Barry, an uncouth Australian who arrives for adventures in Britain, was our role model. We even went on a special pilgrimage to a Hampstead pub which – uniquely, we thought – stocked Foster’s, Barry’s favourite ‘ice-cold tubes’. By the time I became editor of this paper in 1984, the strip had long ceased. It was my ambition to recreate it in The Spectator’s pages, in the harsher climate of Thatcher’s Britain, with an older but not, I hoped, wiser Barry, still trying and failing to ‘feature’ (defined in the McKenzie Australian

Mark Galeotti

Can Zelensky hold back his hawks?

There is no doubt that the West supports Ukraine’s fight for its sovereignty and survival. There is equally no doubt that, for all the fulsome rhetoric, this support is both conditional and limited by a desire to prevent the war from escalating. This was amply demonstrated by recent revelations about Washington’s relationship with Kyrylo Budanov, head of HUR, Ukrainian military intelligence. Zelensky stepped in to block the operations, worried about the backlash not just from Moscow, but from other governments The Washington Post reported this week that, as the one-year anniversary of the invasion approached, Budanov told his staff to prepare ‘mass strikes’ against targets inside Russia – including Moscow – with, in the

Steven Barrett

The EU has no right to lecture the UK over its Rwanda migrant plan

The EU deigns to warn the Tories: don’t try and bypass the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) when it comes to deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda. Senior EU officials, including European commissioner for home affairs Ylva Johansson and European Commission vice-president Maroš Šefčovič, are among those to voice concern about the UK’s attitude toward the ECHR. But the sheer brass neck of the EU on this is hard to take. The EU is said to be worried that the UK intends to ignore injunctions from the ECHR. But the EU itself continues to drag its feet over its own accession to the European Convention on Human Rights which established the

Steerpike

Watch: Lee Anderson spars with Met Police chief

Has London’s top copper met his match? Metropolitan Police chief Mark Rowley got more than he bargained for when he attended parliament this morning for a session of the Home Affairs Committee. Taking to the hot seat to be quizzed on policing priorities, Rowley came in for a grilling by the notoriously straight-talking Tory deputy party chairman Lee Anderson. Half way through what Mr Steerpike could only describe as a gruelling committee session, Anderson asked the police chief if it was time he ‘got out of his ivory tower’ to ‘sort out’ the Just Stop Oil protestors that have been causing disruption in Westminster. Getting defensive, Rowley retorted: ‘You might

Freddy Gray

Is Donald Trump America’s Marine Le Pen?

‘Democracy,’ said H.L. Mencken, ‘is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.’ As we approach 2024, America seems to be proving his point. On Tuesday, a highly unpopular octogenarian President announced that he would be running for re-election next year. Most of Joe Biden’s supporters don’t want him to run and a vast majority of young Democrats would prefer someone younger stood in his place. But everybody knows the reason Biden is staggering on. It’s because his Republican opponent in 2024 will in all likelihood be the man he beat in 2020: Donald J. Trump, arguably the most divisive leader in American history. Even if Trump doesn’t win

Katy Balls

The Starmtroopers: how Labour’s centrists took back control

On a cloudy Saturday in March, a group of unlikely characters gathered in an office near London’s Old Street for political training. A scientist, a prison officer, an army veteran and four economists were among them and they all hope to be elected as Labour MPs at the next election. A great many of them are expected to succeed. If today’s polls were to become tomorrow’s election result, there would be an influx of more than 200 new Labour MPs, doubling Keir Starmer’s parliamentary contingent to 450. The quality of those politicians will decide the nature of the next Labour government. As the moderates return, the money is close behind

Steerpike

Ian Blackford’s tantrum over SNP auditor enquiries

The Mystery of the Lost Auditors becomes ever more exciting by the day. As scrutiny intensifies so does the shirking of responsibility, for it has now been revealed that the House of Commons authorities were not informed about Johnston Carmichael cutting ties with the SNP’s accounts until 13 February – a full five months after the fact. That was also incidentally three days after Stephen Flynn was informed, a mere two months after replacing Ian Blackford as Westminster leader. And last night, it was Blackford’s moment to return to the spotlight when asked if it was his responsibility to have let parliamentary finance staff know about his party’s lack of

Isabel Hardman

Sunak and Starmer turn nasty again at PMQs

Keir Starmer is very fond of giving ‘deeply personal’ interviews where he tries to bring some colour to his grey suited image. He is also increasingly keen on deeply personal attacks on Rishi Sunak at Prime Minister’s Questions, as today’s session showed. The Labour leader ramped up his attacks on Sunak as a ludicrously rich, out-of-touch leader, telling the Commons the PM was ‘clueless about life outside of his bubble’, of regarding contactless cards as being something from Mars, and of ‘smiling his way through the cost of living crisis’. He reminded MPs of the old video of a young Sunak boasting that he didn’t know any working class people,

Patrick O’Flynn

Are the Tories finally getting serious on tackling illegal migration?

Something significant happened in Westminster yesterday. The Immigration Minister made a speech which showed a thorough understanding of the damage done to British society by unchecked illegal migration. Given that combating illegal, or ‘irregular’, migration is Robert Jenrick’s core task, you may feel that such an occurrence should be treated as commonplace. But here’s the thing: it hasn’t happened before. To have a minister close to the PM make such a speech should be acknowledged as an important breakthrough It certainly hasn’t since the small boats phenomenon got going in earnest four years ago. The likes of Caroline Nokes, who held the post under Theresa May, or Tom Pursglove, who

Ross Clark

The Bank of England is right: Brits can’t keep demanding pay rises

Bank of England chief economist Huw Pill isn’t going to win a popularity contest. Speaking on a podcast for Columbia Law School – a medium in which he perhaps felt a little less exposed than had he said it on a British TV programme – he said: ‘Somehow in the UK, someone needs to accept that they are worse off and stop trying to maintain their real spending power by bidding up prices….What we’re facing now is that reluctance to accept that yes, we’re all worse off and we all have to take our share.’ Nurses, doctors, train drivers and everyone else contemplating striking for an inflation-beating, or even inflation-matching,

John Mac Ghlionn

The narcissism of Just Stop Oil

Just Stop Oil (JSO) activists have an insatiable appetite for mayhem. Protesters from the environmental group are slowing down traffic in London today, conducting a ‘go slow’ march through Parliament Square. This isn’t the first time, of course, that they’ve caused disruption. Cast your minds back to July last year, when five members of JSO glued themselves to the Last Supper painting in London’s Royal Academy. A few days before this rather odd demonstration, campaigners entered the National Gallery in central London and proceeded to glue themselves to the frame of John Constable’s the Hay Wain. Earlier this month, a JSO protester disrupted the World Snooker Championship in Sheffield by jumping

Jawad Iqbal

Why are so many Indian migrants crossing the Channel?

Indians now make up the second-biggest cohort of Channel migrants: 675 Indians arrived in small boats in the first three months of this year, according to Home Office figures. This amounts to almost a fifth of the total 3,793 crossings made in the first quarter of this year. The number represents a stark rise: only 683 Indians made the journey in the whole of last year. Albanians, yes, Afghans and Iraqis possibly – but the revelation that so many from India are making the dangerous crossing to England has taken many by surprise. The Indian government insists that the growth in emigration is linked to a rise in Sikhs fleeing

Philip Patrick

Do Scots support Humza Yousaf’s defence of devolution?

Devolution has largely failed in Scotland and Wales and some powers need to be returned to Westminster. This is a precis of a controversial article by Lord Frost in the Daily Telegraph last week that continues to provoke outrage. Leading members of the SNP have denounced it. Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf has vowed to ‘defend our democracy’ in the face of the attack, and Stephen Flynn, the SNP leader at Westminster, has called it evidence of ‘a deliberate, co-ordinated attempt to reverse devolution, …and force Scotland under Westminster control.’ Even some Tories and unionist commentators have slammed Frost’s piece either as outright ‘nonsense’ or a tactical error gifting the

Tuesday

25 Apr 2023

Cindy Yu

Could the UK’s new China policy prevent a second cold war?

What a difference a year makes. Three prime ministers ago, in April 2022, Liz Truss gave a characteristically punchy speech at Mansion House as Foreign Secretary. Grouping Beijing with Moscow into a club of ‘aggressors’ with ‘malign tactics’, she reiterated her pledge to create a ‘network of liberty’, bringing together like-minded, liberal and democratic countries to face down ‘the bullies’. Tonight’s speech from her successor at the Foreign Office signalled a significant softening. Foreign Secretary James Cleverly tilted towards strategy and pragmatism, reiterating the message of last month’s updated Integrated Review. He called for engagement, but only on the basis of British national interest, while arguing that security should still

Lucy Dunn

SNP Westminster leader says the party must ‘do better’

Is the truth about the ignorance of key SNP figures being exposed? Or is the party’s ‘inner circle’ even smaller than first thought? It certainly appears to have been the norm for senior figures to only become aware of party dealings after the fact. First Minister Humza Yousaf has said he didn’t know about the purchase of a £110,000 motorhome until after he became SNP leader. Former treasurer Colin Beattie initially said he didn’t know about the buy, despite his name appearing on the SNP’s 2021 balance sheet (though he has, this evening, clarified that he ‘became aware of the transaction via the 2021 annual accounts’ – still indicating that