Politics Archives

Monday

24 Apr 2023

Mark Nayler

Real Madrid and Barcelona go to war over their links to Franco

A match-fixing scandal centred on Barcelona FC has spilled over into politics, showing that decades-old divisions die hard in Spain. Triggered by the so-called ‘Negreira Case’, which concerns payments of 6.7 million euros (about £5.9 million) allegedly made by Barca to a company linked to a Spanish refereeing official between 2001-18, Real Madrid and their greatest rival are accusing each other of links to Francisco Franco, the fascist dictator who ruled the country from 1936 to his death in 1975. The row started last week, when Barca’s president Joan Laporta claimed that if any Spanish club should be subject to suspicions of referee favouritism, it’s Los Blancos, which he provocatively

Fraser Nelson

Could Diane Abbott return to Labour?

17 min listen

Katy Balls, Fraser Nelson and Isabel Hardman discuss Diane Abbott’s suspension from the Labour party. Given her hasty apology, could Keir Starmer allow such a key figure to Labour’s left back into the party? Also on the podcast, what has been the fallout from Dominic Raab’s resignation? And how is Rishi Sunak trying to woo business leaders? Produced by Natasha Feroze.

Freddy Gray

Can Joe Biden win again?

In America last week, a 92-year-old media titan agreed to pay out a $787 million (£632 million) settlement with Dominion Voting Systems on behalf of his network Fox News. This morning, the 80-year-old Democratic president has announced that he is running for re-election next year, even though polls suggest 70 per cent of Americans don’t want him to. Joe Biden will probably end up facing the 76-year-old Donald Trump, the man at the heart of that Fox/Dominion defamation. Welcome to America, the land where dinosaurs rule. President Biden spent the weekend at Camp David running through his re-election agenda. His video campaign announcement has just aired, kickstarting another 19 months of

Theo Davies-Lewis

The backlash to ‘renaming’ the Brecon Beacons is a gift to nationalists

‘As tedious as a tired horse…worse than a smoky house’ was how Shakespeare’s Hotspur described Wales’s national hero, Owain Glyndŵr. Perhaps, as the late Jan Morris wrote of these words for The Spectator, it could be a timeless characteristic of all Welshmen. The Welsh can be defensive, melancholic and (whisper it quietly) prone to self-pity, particularly when it comes to relations with England. Having the English next door, medieval conquerors turned modern ignorant neighbours, will always transfix Welsh imagination and provoke tension. Yet how futile Anglo-Welsh relations have become that the modern-day battlefield of two nations with a rich, shared history, has been entangled into the culture war, with the ‘renaming’

Dalibor Rohac

A Chinese diplomat has let slip the truth about Beijing’s foreign policy

The off-colour comment by Lu Shaye, China’s ambassador to France, that post-Soviet countries such as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania did not enjoy ‘an effective status within international law’ was not a gaffe or a case of a Chinese official gone rogue. Instead, Shaye’s remark, which he made on Friday night on France’s LCI channel, must be seen for what it is: a telling admission of Beijing’s real thinking about international relations, which is far cruder and Hobbesian than most Europeans are willing to admit. Why should we take Lu at his word when he says that for Soviet Republics including the Baltic states ‘there’s no international accord to concretise their

Gavin Mortimer

Can Meloni and Sunak unite to tackle Europe’s migrant crisis?

The number keep rising. Italy’s Interior Ministry announced at the weekend that 35,085 migrants have arrived on their shores this year, an increase of 27,000 on the same period in 2022. In England meanwhile, 497 migrants landed on the Kent coast on Saturday, a new daily record for crossings. So the Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s visit to London this week is well timed. She and Rishi Sunak will have much to discuss, aware that to a large extent their political futures hinge on whether they can stop what some of their ministers have termed an ‘invasion’. Last week, one of Meloni’s cabinet went further. Agriculture minister Francesco Lollobrigida enraged

John McTernan

It’s time to forgive Diane Abbott

Diane Abbott is a giant figure in the modern Labour party. As the first black woman ever to be elected to the House of Commons, and the longest serving black MP, she is an inspiration to black and brown communities – especially women – across the country. Abbott also wrote a crass and offensive letter to the Observer, in which she unfortunately, and utterly unsuccessfully, sought to distinguish racism from prejudice – in the process deeply offending the Jewish, Irish, and Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller (GRT) communities. For a life-long campaigner against racism, this was an especially egregious error. It appears it is now impossible to accept a sincere apology

Sunday

23 Apr 2023

Isabel Hardman

Isabel Hardman’s Sunday Round-up – 23/04/23

11 min listen

Isabel Hardman hosts highlights from Sunday morning’s political shows. Today’s shows focussed heavily on Dominic Raab’s resignation from Rishi Sunak’s government. Whilst new deputy PM Oliver Dowden described Raab as a ‘man of his word’, Labour’s Jonathan Ashworth was less flattering, calling him: ‘Not just a bullying minister, a failing minister’. Education was also a hot topic. In the aftermath of the tragic death of headteacher Ruth Perry, questions have arisen over whether Ofsted is a positive influence on the sector. Produced Joe Bedell-Brill.

Katy Balls

Will Diane Abbott now face the same fate as Corbyn?

It’s the fate of Labour MP Diane Abbott rather than former deputy prime minister Dominic Raab that is dominating the news this afternoon. Although the Sunday papers are filled with details of the series of events that led Raab to tender his resignation following the report into allegations of bullying against him, it’s a letter from the former shadow home secretary – and key Jeremy Corbyn ally – sent in to the Observer that is now making waves. As Steerpike documents, Abbott said in response to a comment piece from last week’s paper suggesting ‘Irish, Jewish and Traveller people all suffer from racism’, that prejudice is not ‘interchangeable’ with racism.

Sam Leith

Diane Abbott’s surreal U-turn

It’s sometimes said that there’s a tweet from the surrealist Twitter user @dril to cover everything. So it has proved with Diane Abbott, whose screeching U-turn on a letter to today’s Observer immediately put me in mind of this 2017 classic: ‘issuing correction on a previous post of mine, regarding the terror group ISIL. You do not, under any circumstances, ‘gotta hand it to them.’’ That captures the comical extent of Ms Abbott’s course correction. The letter as published took issue with the writer Tomiwa Owolade for a piece in which he’d argued, under the headline ‘Racism In Britain Is Not A Black And White Issue’, that Irish, Jewish and

Joe Bedell-Brill

Sunday shows round-up: Raab ‘a man of his word’, says Dowden

Is Dominic Raab a bully? Dominic Raab resigned as Deputy Prime Minister this week, after an investigation into bullying upheld some of the allegations against him. He didn’t go quietly however, claiming some ‘activist civil servants’ had been trying to block reforms they did not like. His successor, Oliver Dowden, told Sophy Ridge he had nothing to add to the findings of the investigation, but he hoped there wouldn’t be any lessening of the high standards civil servants are held to. He described Raab as a ‘man of his word’: ‘Not just a bullying minster, a failing minister’ The Shadow Secretary for Work and Pensions was less sympathetic in his

Patrick Porter

Why China might attack Taiwan

China may well attack Taiwan. According to the CIA, President Xi Jinping has instructed his armed forces to be able to strike by 2027. Nothing is certain, and there are no signs of mobilisation for an imminent attack. But beyond that, Beijing’s behaviour is consistent with Xi’s orders. It builds up its assault forces. It strengthens its nuclear arsenal. It steps up its military drills. It increasingly molests Taiwan across the board. And it makes its economy more resilient to sanctions. We can’t know Beijing’s intent for sure. We do know it covets reunification with Taiwan as the centrepiece of its declared project to restore full Chinese nationhood and create

Iain Macwhirter

Scotland awaits the fate of the Third Woman

Scottish politics has never been more febrile. If we go a day without an arrest, a resignation, a revelation about financial mismanagement in the Scottish National Party we wonder what we’ve missed. It’s probably a little like this after a coup or in a failing Latin American state. Okay, there are no tanks rumbling along Sauchiehall St., but the political and media worlds have been holding their collective breath waiting to see if the former First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, will be arrested by police. Newspapers have their profiles ready to run. So far she has avoided the long hand of the law. Why is everyone expecting this hitherto blameless politician, this

Vivek Y. Kelkar

Pakistan has reached an inflection point

The holy festival of Eid-ul-Fitr has dawned in Pakistan, marking the end of Ramadan. Celebrations were unusually muted. The month of Ramadan has been harrowing for a large swathe of Pakistan’s populace. All through the month, through the day-long fasts, crowds thronged outside the free food distribution centres across the country, waiting for bags of flour. Sometimes they waited days. Fights were commonplace. Often, the very young or the elderly were injured or even killed in the stampedes. There are far too many of these cases to recount. Food inflation is at a record high of 47 per cent; overall inflation hovered around the 35 per cent mark through March and April. Earlier this month the country’s central bank raised interest rates to 21 per

Steerpike

Diane Abbott loses the Labour whip

Oh dear. Just when Keir Starmer looked like convincing voters that Labour had changed, along came an unwelcome reminder of the party’s not-so-distant Corbynite past. Diane Abbott, the onetime Shadow Home Secretary, has popped up in the Observer letter pages today to offer her (unsolicited) musings on the issue of, er, antisemitism. There’s a first for a Labour politician… Abbott took issue with a column written in last week’s newspaper headlined ‘Racism in Britain is not a black and white issue. It’s far more complicated’ and wrote to set out her own view: Tomiwa Owolade claims that Irish, Jewish and Traveller people all suffer from ‘racism’. They undoubtedly experience prejudice.

Ross Clark

This afternoon’s alarm test is slightly sinister

At 3 p.m. this afternoon, our phones will awaken with a screech announcing impending doom. It won’t be for real (unless a terror group decides it is an opportune moment to launch an attack) but an exercise in testing a new civil defence warning system – an updated version of the network of sirens used to warn of air raids during world war two and maintained until the 1990s. We should be worried about the long-term implications of the government seizing control of our mobile phones in order to spread emergency messages. True, were Vladimir Putin ever minded to fire one of his nuclear missiles at us it might be

Nicholas Farrell

Should Italy’s killer bear be sentenced to death?

The female bear that mauled to death a male jogger in the Italian Alps on 5th April was captured this week. Twenty-six-year-old Andrea Papi’s ravaged corpse was naked when found. His shirt and shorts lay many yards away. The killer bear, known as JJ4, is a 17-year-old mother of three cubs and the off-spring of two of the ten brown bears brought from Slovenia to the Trentino region of north east Italy in 1999-2000 under an EU rewilding scheme called Life Ursus. JJ4 was identified as the killer from a DNA match. Two weeks later forestry police captured her after following her tracks in the snow and setting up a

Simon Hunt

The EU must tread carefully in its AI crackdown

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has surged in popularity in recent months. ChatGPT alone has swelled to more than 100 million users in a matter of weeks, capturing the imagination of the world for whom the technology had previously been consigned to the realm of science fiction. Scores of companies, from software businesses to manufacturers, are racing to find fresh ways to build its functionality into their operations. But amidst the excitement, there is also a worry: are we going too far, too fast? Twitter’s owner Elon Musk warned this week that AI could lead to ‘civilisation destruction’. Regulators, alarmed at this explosion in activity, are scrambling to react. They have a

Nicholas Sheppard

Jacinda Ardern’s disappearing act

Former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern bade farewell to parliament a few weeks ago. Ardern had resigned as PM in January, saying she no longer had ‘enough in the tank’ to lead the country. After half-a-decade in charge, and regularly feted on the world stage, Ardern has all but vanished as a ubiquitous figure of the age; but more striking is the extent to which her political legacy has, too. So what has she been up to since? Ardern has been appointed a trustee of a Prince of Wales’ environment award, named the Earthshot Prize. The prize was created by Prince William to fund projects that, in a not-unimpressive mission statement,

Saturday

22 Apr 2023

Patrick West

A split within the radical green movement was inevitable

Ever since Monty Python created their internecine, bickering and ridiculous groups of freedom fighters – the People’s Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front – for their 1979 film The Life of Brian, it’s always been easy and tempting to mock and deride the fissiparous nature of ideologues and tin-pot revolutionaries. Those who believe in the purity of a cause tend to have a semi-religious mindset – and consequently one semi-divorced from reality – which brooks no heresy from orthodoxy. Thus extreme, quasi-cult movements are always prone to split into factions. And so it goes with the radical green movement, which at its worst excesses does resemble a bizarre cult: witness