Politics Archives

Saturday

18 Mar 2023

This week’s Privileges Committee could decide Boris’s fate

Boris Johnson was reselected on Thursday night as the Conservative candidate for Uxbridge and South Ruislip constituency. Yet the future of his parliamentary career could be decided this week when he appears before the Privileges Committee. The former prime minister is facing a Commons inquiry into whether he knowingly misled parliament over partygate, the alleged Covid rule breaches in Downing Street during lockdown. If the committee finds against Johnson, he could soon face a big parliamentary problem On Wednesday afternoon, Johnson will appear before the seven MPs who make up the committee. The panel is led by Labour’s Harriet Harman along with four Tory MPs – Charles Walker, Bernard Jenkin,

Stephen Daisley

The whole SNP project is now in danger

And so the Nicola Sturgeon years end with neither a bang or a whimper but with one pitiful desk-clearing after another. Peter Murrell, Sturgeon’s husband and the chief executive of the SNP, has announced his resignation. It comes after Murray Foote, the party’s chief spin doctor, walked on Friday. He had been rubbishing media reports that the party’s membership rolls had shrunk by 30,000 since 2021. Then, Ash Regan, a candidate in the leadership contest to replace Sturgeon, questioned the integrity of that process and demanded the membership numbers be made public. Backed into a corner, SNP HQ released the figures, which showed a drop in members of 32,000 over

Lucy Dunn

SNP chief executive Peter Murrell stands down amid party crisis

First, it was Nicola Sturgeon. Now her husband Peter Murrell has resigned as SNP chief executive after a scandal about covering up a fall in party membership numbers. He quit after being told that unless he did so by midday he’d face a confidence vote. That this happened on a Saturday lunchtime shows the disarray now engulfing the SNP hierarchy. It started yesterday when Murray Foote resigned as SNP parliamentary communications director. He said he had been misled (perhaps by Murrell himself) when he rubbished reports – calling them ‘drivel’ – that SNP membership had slid from 103,884 to 72,186 amidst frustrations about Sturgeon’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill. If Foote

Daniel Korski

Poland, 1968: the last pogrom

‘Are you Jewish?’ the officious-looking Dutch diplomat asked my dad. ‘Yes’, he said, realising at that very moment, everything had changed. He was no longer Polish; the culture he had been born in, the citizenship he held, the language he spoke, the country he loved – it all meant nothing. He was just Jewish. He couldn’t be both. The diplomat stamped my father’s papers and he left for a new life in western Europe. Up to 20,000 Jews, including my mother, were hounded from Poland at the end of the 1960s. They were accused of supporting Israel in a virulent anti-Semitic campaign led by the communist government. This anti-Jewish campaign

Fraser Nelson

Mental health: an anatomy of a very British crisis

No victory is ever final in politics – and the wrecking-ball of lockdowns now seems to have destroyed almost every success of the 2012-20 welfare reforms. The workless numbers are again as bad as they they were under Labour. People who stopped working during lockdowns never quite got back into it and the UK has done a worse job than almost any other country at rebuilding its post-pandemic workforce. In 2009 I was filling Coffee House with attacks on the Labour government for keeping so many on benefits. And the story now? See below. Remember, this joblessness is not induced by recession and layoffs but incubated by welfare to produce

Mark Hollingsworth

Is this the man who will one day take over from Putin?

Boris Ratnikov, a former KGB officer and retired chief advisor to Russia’s security service, gave a remarkable interview back in 2016. Ratnikov, who died in 2020, claimed his boss had penetrated and read the mind of Madeleine Albright while she was US Secretary of State in the mid-1990s. Ratnikov said his superior officer used a photograph to penetrate Albright’s subconscious where he discovered her secret thoughts about the priority of removing Siberia and the Far East from Russian territory. The senior intelligence official in question was Georgy Rogozin, a top KGB officer between 1969 and 1992, who became deputy chief of president Yeltsin’s security service. Rogozin conducted secret experiments trying to use

Katy Balls

Should the SNP be worried about falling membership?

12 min listen

The SNP has confirmed that its membership has fallen to 72,000 – a loss of over 30,000 since 2021. This has prompted an open letter from leadership candidates Kate Forbes and Ash Regan, calling for transparency when it comes to membership numbers. Why are so many leaving? Also on the podcast, Humza Yousaf has committed yet another public gaffe when he went to visit a group of female Ukrainian refugees. Is he still the firm favourite? Katy Balls speaks to Michael Simmons, Lucy Dunn and Fraser Nelson. Produced by Oscar Edmondson.

Cindy Yu

Cindy Yu, Leah McLaren and Hannah Tomes

15 min listen

This week: Cindy Yu discusses Britain’s invisible East Asians (00:51), Leah McLaren discloses the truth about single motherhood (06:02), and Hannah Tomes reads her notes on dining alone (12:08). Produced and presented by Oscar Edmondson.

Friday

17 Mar 2023

Steerpike

SNP spin doctor Murray Foote resigns

Well, well, well. It’s been a tumultuous time for the SNP recently, and no one knows that better than their own spin doctor Murray Foote. But it all seemed to prove too much this evening as he announced his shock resignation. Standing down after four years of spinning for the party, Mr Foote issued a rather, erm, coded statement. Acting in good faith and as a courtesy to colleagues at party HQ, I issued agreed party responses to media enquiries regarding membership. It has subsequently become apparent there are serious issues with these responses. Consequently, I concluded this created a serious impediment to my role and I resigned my position

Nigel Jones

What has Putin done with Ukraine’s missing children?

Vladimir Putin’s crimes against Ukraine are often facilely compared with those committed by Hitler’s Nazis during World War Two. As Gary Lineker has crassly demonstrated, the unique crimes of National Socialism are the gold standard of evil that careless people reach for all too easily when they wish to comment on, or criticise, a contemporary issue. In one under-reported way, however, Putin is indeed imitating the hideous crimes Nazi Germany carried out in Eastern Europe’s badlands 80 years ago: by abducting Ukraine’s children from their parents and taking them abroad. An arrest warrant has today been issued against Putin by the International Criminal Court in the Hague. Among the war

Natasha Feroze

Will Boris vote on the NI protocol?

11 min listen

A look ahead to next week where MPs will vote on parts of the Northern Ireland Protocol. What would a win look like for the government? The vote has been conveniently placed on the same day Boris Johnson is already in parliament for the privileges committee hearing. The lone rebel of the protocol will have to put his money where his mouth is – which way will he vote? Natasha Feroze speaks to Fraser Nelson and Katy Balls.

Kate Andrews

Welcome to Big State Toryism

A million pounds is very small change in the context of wider government spending – especially compared to the £20 billion of extra giveaways Jeremy Hunt has announced for the next few years. But sometimes that small change tells you more about a government’s priorities, and its sense of direction, than the big announcements. I suspect that was true in this week’s spring Budget. Alongside billions dished out for freezing fuel duty and extending the Energy Price Guarantee for another three months, the Chancellor also announced a government-sponsored prize, to run for the next ten years, ‘to the person or team that does the most ground-breaking British AI research’. What’s so

Annabel Denham

Who will pay for Hunt’s ‘free’ childcare hours?

People love free stuff. Why wouldn’t they? Free healthcare, free education, free childcare – what’s not to like? Expanding free childcare hours doesn’t change the fact that a full-time nursery place costs around £15,000 a year Of course, government provides nothing for free. When the economist Milton Friedman appropriated the adage ‘there’s no such thing as a free lunch’ for his 1975 text of the same name, he was describing in layman terms the concept of opportunity cost. For every choice made, there is another which cannot be. When ‘our’ NHS absorbs nearly half of day-to-day public service spending, it is money that could have been deployed elsewhere. And when the

Jawad Iqbal

Pakistan deserves better than Imran Khan

Democracy and the rule of law have always struggled to take hold in Pakistan, a country in which no elected prime minister has yet completed a full term in office and where the military has been in power for nearly half of its history. The latest antics of Imran Khan, the former prime minister, do little to instil confidence that rules count for much in Pakistan. There were violent clashes between Khan’s supporters and police when they came to arrest him this week for failing to appear in court on charges of illegally selling state gifts during his four-year rule. The police operation was called off temporarily while the authorities

Andrew Tettenborn

Justin Welby’s gay marriage troubles could be about to get worse

After the hash the Church of England has made of the issue of same-sex marriage, a group of MPs led by long-standing churchman Ben Bradshaw has hatched a plan to pull the Anglican chestnuts out of the fire. His scheme is undoubtedly well-meaning: unfortunately, it is more likely to push them further in, to be reduced to ashes. The current church fudge, prepared by the bishops after years of politely pious wrangling and approved by Synod last month, is easy enough to criticise. The teaching that marriage proper is between one man and one woman remains: the church will thus will have no part in marrying same-sex couples. However, it

Katy Balls

The Ash Regan Edition

33 min listen

Ash Regan is the MSP for East Edinburgh who has served as minister for community safety. Since Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation, she has put herself forward to be the next First Minister for Scotland. Born in Biggar, Ash moved to England as a child and grew up in Devon. She surprised her family during the referendum for Scottish Independence, deciding she would vote to leave. Ash began her foray into politics as a campaigner before running for elected office. She was little known outside of the Holyrood bubble until she quit as community safety minister over plans to allow people to self-identify their gender. On the podcast, Ash talks about life

Robin Ashenden

Is Putin’s security service under attack?

Few people in Rostov-on-Don will weep over the news that a local FSB building in the city caught fire yesterday. Just the mention of the acronym for the Security Services (formerly KGB) was, when I lived there, enough to still and silence a room. When a girl in one of my classes announced rather proudly that her boyfriend worked for the service, there was a ripple of discomfort in the room and, subsequently, fellow students once expansive got notably more guarded. At a local pipe club I attended, one of the members worked for them too, a well-built man with brushed back hair, a Stalin moustache, and a set –

Thursday

16 Mar 2023

Steerpike

Boris gets a boost as local Tories reselect him

It’s a big week for Boris Johnson as he prepares to give evidence before the Privileges Committee next Wednesday. So it will have been to some relief tonight that he easily won re-adoption as the candidate for the Uxbridge and South Ruislip seat which he currently represents in parliament. The association have now released the following statement: Tonight the Uxbridge & South Ruislip selection committee re-adopted Boris Johnson as our parliamentary candidate. We look forward to continuing to work alongside him to deliver for the residents and communities within the constituency, where he has strong connections and involvement. His commitment to deliver a new Hillingdon Hospital for Uxbridge & South

Isabel Hardman

No new cash for NHS pay deal

The money for the NHS pay agreement isn’t new cash, I’m told. This is going to cause a real ruckus with the trade unions, who came away from today’s talks believing that the £2.5 billion deal was extra money from the Treasury. But talking to my sources in government, I now understand that while there won’t be cuts to frontline services, the money could come from efficiencies elsewhere in the NHS, or possible underspend in Department of Health and Social Care budgets. I’’ve also been pointed to the fact that there was no new money for pay announced in yesterday’s Budget, even though there might be some forthcoming in

John Ferry

Will the new first minister finally solve Scotland’s ferries fiasco?

Rising NHS waiting lists, a widening attainment gap in education and falling support for independence: Scotland’s next first minister will have a bulging in-tray when he or she assumes office in coming weeks. However one issue in particular seems set to be an early thorn in the side of Scotland’s new leader: the increasingly scandalous debacle of the ferries fiasco. The latest development is today’s Scottish Government announcement of yet another delay in completing the vessels. The first of the boats, Hull 801, otherwise known as the Glen Sannox, is now expected to be ready sometime this autumn instead of May. The other boat, Hull 802, is now expected to be ready