Politics

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

Tuesday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Is Rishi Sunak repeating May’s mistakes?

14 min listen

Today was meant to be the day that Rishi Sunak presented his Northern Ireland Protocol plans to parliament, instead he told the cabinet that intensive negotiations continue with the EU. Is he doomed to repeat Theresa May’s Brexit mistakes? Will he need the backing of the DUP for any agreement? Also on the podcast, as prospective SNP leader Kate Forbes continues to defend her views on gay marriage, can her campaign survive? Cindy Yu speaks to Isabel Hardman and Patrick O’Flynn.  Produced by Cindy Yu and Oscar Edmondson. 

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Would Biden punish Sunak for pulling out of the ECHR?

The US government has warned British security officials that the ‘five eyes’ intelligence-sharing agreement may be at risk if the UK imperils the Good Friday Agreement by pulling out of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR). I understand that this point has been made recently, and fairly clearly, in talks between the UK and US sides. Rishi Sunak has been holding open the prospect of withdrawing from the ECHR if it frustrates his plans to deport asylum seekers who enter the UK illegally. But this would blow a hole in the Good Friday Agreement (GFA), which says that citizens of Northern Ireland will receive human rights protections based on

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Did Putin just START a nuclear arms race?

The war with Ukraine is here to stay – and Russians better get used to it. That was Vladimir Putin’s message to the Federal Assembly when he addressed them this morning for the first time in nearly two years. Kremlin watchers looking for obvious signs of where Putin wanted to take his ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine may have been disappointed. But Russia’s president did use his speech to ratchet up tensions with the United States – by announcing that Russia is suspending its involvement in the New START nuclear arms deal with America. ‘Our relations have degraded and that’s completely and utterly the fault of the US’, he thundered.

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The £5.4 billion government surplus masks a larger economic issue

There have been celebrations this morning about a government surplus of £5.4 billion last month, and people are even talking about a ‘windfall’ for Chancellor Jeremy Hunt in next month’s Budget. But all this shows is how conditioned we have become to appalling economic news – and that we will grab at anything which seems to indicate a shaft of light. Nevertheless, any talk of a government ‘surplus’ masks the very real problem the government still has While any surplus is to be welcomed – and last month’s borrowing figures are far better than the Office for Budget Responsibility predicted – we would be in serious trouble if the government had not

Nicholas Farrell

The hounding of Silvio Berlusconi

Silvio Berlusconi has been acquitted of paying bribes worth €10 million (£8.9 million) to female guests at his notorious bunga bunga parties in return for false testimony. The verdict brings to an end a series of trials that dragged on for well over a decade – and while the 86-year-old has ‘won’ this case, the damage has been done. The political effect of the bunga bunga trials as they were called has been devastating, as has the impact on the lives of those involved. They set in train a series of events that included the forced resignation of the media tycoon in November 2011 as Italy’s prime minister and made him, and Italy, a

Lucy Hunter Blackburn

Nicola Sturgeon’s gender policy failure

Nicola Sturgeon refused to discuss her record after eight years in office when she stepped down last week. There will be ‘plenty of time’ to reflect on that later, she replied soothingly. In the days since, the First Minister’s silence has continued. But not everyone can afford to take a break from the consequences of Sturgeon’s time in office. Four male murderers are being held in women’s prisons in Scotland today. This became possible under a policy introduced months before she rose to the role of First Minister and championed thereafter. This same policy made it possible last month for a rapist, Isla Bryson, to be briefly incarcerated in a

Lucy Dunn

Will public sympathy extend to the junior doctors’ strike?

Next month, junior doctors in England will walk out for three consecutive days after an overwhelming majority voted to strike over pay and conditions. Just under 50,000 doctors were entitled to vote in the British Medical Association ballot, and 78 per cent did. Of the votes cast, 98 per cent voted in favour of strike action. The term ‘junior doctor’ refers to newly qualified foundation doctors, as well as all those doctors ranked in between, up until and including senior registrars. These doctors are hoping for a 26 per cent pay rise – a figure they say would amount to ‘full pay restoration’ after the BMA concluded that junior doctors

Matthew Scott

Why did a judge praise the ‘admirable aims’ of Just Stop Oil activists?

When seven Just Stop Oil protesters were convicted of trespassing, the judge in the case had some warm words for those found guilty.  District Judge Graham Wilkinson at Wolverhampton Magistrates’ Court praised the activists’ ‘admirable aims’ after they disrupted operations at an Esso fuel terminal in Birmingham last April. Wilkinson told the group during the end of the trial last week that he was moved by their ‘deeply emotive’ explanations. This was a strange thing to say to those whose crime was not entirely victimless: the cost to the Metropolitan Police alone of the Just Stop Oil Protests over the days of the protests exceeded £425,000, to say nothing of

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Kate Forbes’s gay marriage blunder

Mistakenly, I assumed that politicians supporting Kate Forbes’ campaign to succeed Nicola Sturgeon as leader of the SNP understood she has certain views which diverge from modern orthodoxy. I assumed her pro-life credentials on the question of abortion could be accompanied by an acceptance that, whatever her personal views, the law – and debate – on abortion was settled.  If this was all, I thought, priced-in, I also assumed that Forbes would have a better answer to questions she must surely have anticipated. For reasons that are currently hard to understand, Forbes is engaging in a live experiment to see if you can become leader of a political party without

Steerpike Steerpike

Kate Forbes’s nightmare 24 hours

It seems that Kate Forbes’ stance on same-sex marriage hasn’t gone down too well with some of her more socially liberal backers. Within 24 hours of announcing her candidacy, the Finance Secretary’s campaign has actually gone backwards, managing to lose four MSPs following an interview in which she said that she would not have supported gay marriage as a ‘matter of conscience.’  That was enough for some of her SNP colleagues at Holyrood. One by one they trooped out on Twitter to deliver their lines of condemnation: As if that wasn’t enough, the candidate herself had to endure a gruelling morning media round today. On Times Radio, she was forced

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

JK Rowling will stand the test of time

I have a problem with magic. Even as a small child with a big imagination, I found magic very hard to swallow. If a character in a story teleported using a technological aid, that was fine. If a character vanished in a magical puff of smoke after an incantation, I was having none of it.  I became aware of the Harry Potter book series quite early for a childless adult. A friend worked in a central London bookshop and was tiring of parents descending in their lunch hours enquiring ‘do you have any of these books by Harry Potter?’ Intrigued, I read the first two – the only two at

Iain MacGregor

Putin’s obsession with Russia’s ‘Great Patriotic War’ could be his downfall

Ukrainian and Russian forces have been locked in either dogged stalemate or vicious urban fighting for towns and cities in the Donbass and in the north of the country throughout winter. As the bitter Ukrainian winter thaws, the war will soon take on a more deadly momentum as the spring rains of the Rasputitsa give way to better weather for mobile units. This week marks a year since Vladimir Putin’s invasion. The campaign has been calamitous for Russia: 86,000 soldiers have been killed and wounded. The death toll will rise in the coming weeks. Yet Putin’s regime still not only manages to keep a lid on internal dissent, but continues

Monday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Is faith-based opposition to gay marriage a ‘protected characteristic’?

Kate Forbes’s run for First Minister may be short-lived but it will certainly be interesting. Her challenge: she’s a member to the Free Church of Scotland which opposes gay marriage, abortion and gender self-ID. For seven years as a parliamentarian she has avoided saying what she thinks about such issues and for obvious reasons: it would cause her problems. But today she was asked directly and gave a straight answer: she would have voted against gay marriage and would have ‘struggled’ to back Nicola Sturgeon on gender self-ID. I’m a member of the SNP and I believe that no office should be removed from any candidate on the basis of

Steerpike Steerpike

Yousaf fires back at Forbes over gay marriage

It’s less than 24 hours since the SNP leadership election became a three horse race but already there seems to be a disproportionate focus on LGBT issues. Ash Regan was out of the blocks first, saying she would dump Nicola Sturgeon’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill if she replaced her as First Minister. Then this afternoon Kate Forbes, a staunch member of the Free Church, threw her weight behind Regan’s stance and added that she would not have supported same-sex marriage had she been an MSP at the time it was debated in the Scottish parliament. And now tonight Humza Yousaf has hit back at Forbes with a barely-concealed jibe at

Steerpike Steerpike

Kate Forbes: I’m against gay marriage and self-ID

It’s day one of Kate Forbes’ bid to be First Minister and she is certainly making headlines. The Finance Minister has done a round of media interviews today, with much media attention focusing on her stance on social issues. Forbes is a member of the Free Church of Scotland, a bastion of unrepentant Christianity. And she has suggested in several Q&As today that she is not exactly signed up to some of the SNP’s more liberal social policies. Asked if she would have voted for Nicola Sturgeon’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill, she replied: I have been on record saying that I had significant concerns about self-ID and I would have had

Steerpike Steerpike

Angela Rayner gets Labour into more trans trouble

Another day, another Labour politician embroiled in a trans tangle. Keir Starmer and Lisa Nandy have both had their awkward moments over Scotland’s controversial prisoners policy and the Gender Recognition Reform Bill. And yesterday it was the turn of the party’s attention-loving deputy leader Angela Rayner. ‘Our Ange’ is being groomed by Labour spinners as the plain-speaking Prescott to Keir Starmer’s London-lawyer Blairite shtick. But it seems that all that no-nonsense ‘tell-it-like-it-is’ spiel comes to an end when Rayner gets grilled on the subject of, er, trans rapists. For the Mancunian apparently believes that it ‘doesn’t matter’ whether or not trans double rapist Isla Bryson has a penis. Is that

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Are we really seeing a ‘great resignation’?

Do over-fifties need to get back off the golf course and into work? That’s the narrative that ministers have been pushing recently, with Jeremy Hunt saying later life ‘doesn’t just have to be about going to the golf course’. Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride is conducting a review of the factors keeping people out of the workplace in time for next month’s Budget. But a report out today from pensions consultancy LCP suggests ministers might be barking up the wrong tree. LCP’s analysis points out that there are fewer people of working age who are retired now than at the start of the pandemic, and that the missing workers

James Snell

Saudi Arabia must not bring Syria’s Assad in from the cold

Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister has said the quiet part out loud when it comes to his country’s attitude towards Syria. Faisal bin Farhan Al-Saud told the Munich Security Conference that the ‘maximalist goals’ of the past in confronting Assad’s regime were no longer tenable: [We are] going to have to go through a dialogue with the government in Damascus at some point, in a way that achieves at least the most important of the objectives especially as regards the humanitarian angle, the return of refugees, etc. Yet for all these warm words about helping those afflicted by the devastating earthquake in Syria, normalising relations with the Assad regime – giving it what it wants in terms of sanctions relief, funnelling

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Joe Biden’s long history in Ukraine

It was only a matter of time before Joe Biden made a ‘surprise’ visit to Kiev. In the year since Russia’s attack on Ukraine, the choreographed walkabout with Volodymyr Zelensky has become the must-do photo-op for western global leaders. It’s the 21st century equivalent of an audience with the Pope – a symbolic news happening which shocks no one.  That’s not to say it’s not important. It signals, yet again, that America – the most powerful military and financial player on planet earth – is firmly behind Zelensky and his efforts to repel the Russian invasion. Biden may not, at this moment, be willing to provide the jets that the