Politics Archives

Friday

30 Dec 2022

Why should we test all travellers from China?

What’s the point in asking people flying in from China to present a negative Covid test? Rishi Sunak has stepped in to order this, but he hasn’t quite explained why this is necessary or how it would help. Covid is still widespread worldwide but British resistance (through exposure and vaccination) is such that the virus is not seen as a threat to the NHS (collapsing for other reasons) or public health. Data in Singapore from travellers in China confirms Beijing’s evidence that the variants it’s dealing with are BA.5.2 and BF.7 which have been in the UK for months. They can cause mayhem in an unexposed, badly-vaccinated country like China

Ross Clark

Putin has failed to bring Europe to its knees

Unforeseen events which provoke global crises – such as Covid — have come to be known as ‘black swans’. By the same token, the end of 2022 has just been visited by a great big fluffy white swan. Over the past 24 hours the main benchmark for European gas futures – the Dutch Title Transfer Facility (TTF), for gas to be delivered in February – has crashed below 80 Euros per MWh, taking it below the level it was on 23 February, the day before Russia invaded Ukraine. This, in the dead of a winter which we have been warned many times could see Europe’s shivering masses rioting in response

Gareth Roberts

Twixmas and the truth about why people liked lockdown

We don’t have a standardised name for the little clutch of strange days between Christmas and New Year. There is an aesthetic to Boxing Day – hearty walks, reheated leftovers, scraps of wrapping paper – but from then till New Years Eve we enter an in between time. I’ve heard several informal and colloquial references to it, things like The Lull, The Interregnum, The Aftermath – but the lack of a recognised term seems fitting. There is the merest echo of the pre-modern twelve days of Christmas, or Twelvetide, though nowadays we are all back at work long before the drummers drumming make their appearance. No name means no rules,

Debbie Hayton

Why Mermaids hit the rocks

Mermaids was once, not long ago, the darling of the charity world: Starbucks sold Mermaids-branded cookies and famous faces including Emma Watson queued up to support the transgender organisation. But 2022 was the year Mermaids hit the rocks. The Charity Commission launched an inquiry into Mermaids last month after identifying concerns about its management. The charity which, a few years ago, could do no wrong in the eyes of corporations and policy makers faces an uncertain future. Despite what Mermaid’s dwindling band of supporters might say, this is good news. Susie Green, the charity’s media savvy chief executive, has been forced out following a staff revolt. Her departure a few weeks

Sean Thomas

Most-read 2022: Is an unknown, extraordinarily ancient civilisation buried under eastern Turkey?

We’re finishing the year by republishing our ten most popular articles from 2022. Here’s number two: Sean Thomas’s piece from May on Karahan Tape. I am staring at about a dozen, stiff, eight-foot high, orange-red penises, carved from living bedrock, and semi-enclosed in an open chamber. A strange carved head (of a man, a demon, a priest, a God?), also hewn from the living rock, gazes at the phallic totems – like a primitivist gargoyle. The expression of the stone head is doleful, to the point of grimacing, as if he, or she, or it, disapproves of all this: of everything being stripped naked under the heavens, and revealed to

Thursday

29 Dec 2022

Patrick O’Flynn

Why won’t the Conservatives stand up for conservatism any more?

Is it supposed to be enough for those of us of a culturally and socially conservative persuasion to know that some Tory MPs share our outlook? Are we meant to look back over the radical left’s march through the public realm during these past 12 years of Tory-led governments and think: ‘Well, at least some Conservative MPs tried to make a bit of a fuss about it, so we’d better vote Tory again?’ It should not take a genius in Conservative Campaign HQ to realise that no, it isn’t enough. Not when one of the Tory prime ministers from this long phase of nominally conservative government has just come out to say

Steerpike

SNP welcomes sex pest back with open arms

A new year beckons but old habits die hard. So it’s no surprise then that the SNP have opted to begin 2023 by welcoming one of their disgraced brethren back into the fold. Patrick Grady, the party’s former chief whip, has this morning had the SNP whip restored at Westminster – despite being found to have sexually harassed a teenage party employee. Is that what the nats meant when they talked about preserving ‘Scotland’s future’ eh? Grady was reported to have ‘resigned’ last summer from the nationalists after the Commons authorities ruled he had made an unwanted sexual advance towards a male staff member. But now Kieran Andrews – the

David Abulafia

The BBC is failing impartiality with its history documentaries

A good history book generates in the mind of its readers a series of visual images of people, places and events, blurry and perhaps not very accurate, but nevertheless the sort of thing that can be held in the memory. Television history challenges this because it provides ready-made versions of many of the visuals, and they too can become locked in one’s memory of historical events. Put differently, television takes over from individual imagination in portraying the past, and that is a particular problem for documentaries that do not admit to spicing up the past, as a costume drama will inevitably do. Rather, documentaries claim to uncover the truth. And

Steerpike

The ten most-read Steerpikes of 2022

And you thought 2021 was crazy. It’s been another remarkable 12 months in British politics: three Prime Ministers, the death of the Queen, a year that began with Covid that ends with a cost of living crisis. Abroad, there’s been Putin’s war in Ukraine, China’s rumblings over Taiwan, the Qatari World Cup and soaring inflation too. Below is a round-up of Steerpike’s most read articles from 2022, with a smattering of snark alongside the serious. In January, SNP pin-up girl Devi Sridhar admitted defeat in her ‘Zero Covid’ crusade. March brought with it Emmanuel Macron’s bizarre tribute act to President Zelensky. And September saw (yet another) New York Times attack

Sam Ashworth-Hayes

How the Isle of Man can save the Tory party

If you ask a typical member of the Conservative party what they want Britain to look like, you’ll get the usual list: low taxes, high growth, strong borders, low crime, sensible regulation, green countryside. If you ask a Conservative MP how Britain might achieve these things, you’ll get a long list of excuses: it simply can’t be done, it’s a bit more complicated than that, the budget isn’t there. And yet we know for a fact that these things are possible because we can see them elsewhere. Our neighbours are wealthier than us, our politicians promise to copy Australia’s immigration system, and Singapore and Japan show that crime is not an immutable fact of life. Somewhere in

Freddy Gray

Most-read 2022: Drama queens: the return of Meghan and Harry

We’re finishing the year by republishing our ten most popular articles from 2022. Here’s number three: Freddy Gray’s piece from September on Meghan and Harry’s return to Britain. We’ve all spent months bracing ourselves for what our leaders assure us will be a dreadful winter. As the weather turns, we can look forward to ruinous energy bills, runaway inflation, collapsing health services, strikes, blackouts, more strikes, violent crime, and perhaps even – why not? – a nuclear war with Russia. As if that weren’t bad enough, Meghan and Harry are back, wafting over all the way from Montecito, California on billowy clouds of bonkers publicity, self-pity and self-help mumbo-jumbo. On

Wednesday

28 Dec 2022

Lucy Dunn

We need to stop junior doctors leaving the NHS

Quit your job, leave the country, move to Australia. This may once have sounded like a hastily-planned midlife crisis, but in 2023 these life plans are more representative of doctors’ across the country. Four in ten junior doctors plan to leave the NHS as soon as they can find another job, a survey by the British Medical Association (BMA) has found. The poll asked over 4,500 junior doctors about their plans for the future. A third want to leave the country within the next year to work abroad, Australia often being their number one destination. Over 80 per cent cited real-term pay cuts as the reason they wanted to leave

Stephen Daisley

The 2024 election will be cataclysmic for the Conservatives

I spend a lot of my time fantasising about the death of the Conservative Party. I like to picture election night 2024 and Huw Edwards struggling to keep up with the mounting Tory defeats: ‘Labour gains Chingford from Iain Duncan Smith, former leader of — Wait, I’m being told Labour has also gained Chipping Barnet. I think that’s been Tory since Reginald Maudling won it in — Goodness. We go live to Laura Kuenssberg with some significant news about Priti Patel. Laura, we understand Witham is heading for a recount…’ The fantasy reaches a crescendo with the election’s Portillo moment: Suella Braverman — out. This reverie is not motivated by

John Keiger

All is not well in Macron’s France

The relationship entertained by French elites to their homeland is very different from their English counterparts. ‘England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality’, wrote George Orwell in 1945. That derisory sentiment continues today among Britain’s urban elites. French elites by contrast – though they can be highly critical of their country among themselves – do not shy from exalting its status abroad. French nationalism, born of the French Revolution, only came to be embraced by the right a century later. From then onwards, basic patriotism crosses political boundaries. While Britain’s position is not rosy, France’s is certainly no better Elite francofilia has

Ross Clark

How Britain’s economy might bounce back in 2023

Whatever happened to the economic boom that was supposed to follow the Covid pandemic? The 2020s, some argued, would be like the 1920s, with an economy roaring its way out of recession, to be remembered as a time of unprecedented wealth and opportunity. That is not how things have turned out so far. While economic growth in the UK during 2022 is still likely to come out positive, the growth was concentrated in the first half of the year – in the third quarter GDP fell by 0.3 per cent. The economy, according to the Office of National Statistics, is now 0.8 per cent smaller than it was on the eve of

David Gunnlaugsson

Why Britain will feel the cold more than Iceland this winter

A winter of discontent is underway in Europe. Germany, France and Britain are the biggest economies in Europe: all face a battle to keep the lights on over the coming months. There are warnings of energy rationing, blackouts and the forced closure of factories as the continent weans itself off Russian gas. How did it come to this? The countries that drove the industrial revolution are out in the cold. Europe is stuck in a quagmire of its own making. But these countries could do worse than look north – to Iceland – for inspiration on how to make it through winter. As the name suggests, my home country can

Sadie Nicholas

Most-read 2022: The dos and don’ts of getting a wood-burner

We’re finishing the year by republishing our ten most popular articles from 2022. Here’s number four: Sadie Nicholas’s piece from earlier this month on wood-burners. Of all the money we’ve spent on our barn conversion since we moved in 13 years ago, the wood-burner we installed in our living room trumps bathrooms, oak flooring and even a beautiful garden room extension as our best investment. At £2,000, the neat cast-iron stove was worth every penny – and never more so than now, when the temperature is plummeting and our smart meter informs us that we’re blowing a zillion pounds a day on gas and electricity despite being frugal with the

Tuesday

27 Dec 2022

Christopher Snowdon

Why does Jamie Oliver always get an easy ride?

There are many annoying things about the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, but none of them grates my gears as much as the media’s obsequiousness towards him. I suspect that his political campaigning is largely a self-serving gimmick to keep the Jamie Oliver brand in the public eye, but that is besides the point. The point is that he would be the first to describe himself an activist and yet he is never asked the questions that activists, let alone politicians, are asked. He gets the celebrity interview when he should be getting the political interview. He has never been hauled up on the facts. He has never been given a

Patrick O’Flynn

Sunak could learn from David Cameron

Our naturally centrist and establishment-minded Conservative prime minister trails Labour badly in the polls even though the electorate is at best lukewarm about the leader of the opposition. Former Tory voters are drifting away, outraged about a perceived abandonment of sound Conservative principles and European interference in the immigration system. Economic austerity may have convinced financial markets that the PM is serious about rebuilding the battered public finances, but the tax rises and spending restraint involved are making popularity a stranger to him. With the Commons in Christmas recess, a threat is growing on the Conservative right flank which will make the next election impossible to win unless it is

Tirthankar Roy

The Raj revision: why historians are thinking again about British rule in India

Is there anything good to be said of British rule over India? The verdict of many politicians, museum curators, TV presenters and even journalists in India is clear: the Raj existed only to exploit and oppress. It caused poverty and famine in the east, and made the western world richer. The writer and politician Shashi Tharoor in a best-selling book Inglorious Empire blames the Raj for ‘depredation’, ‘loot’, ‘rapaciousness’, ‘brutality’, and ‘plunder’. He is far from alone in that withering verdict: social media posts spread similar messages with religious zeal. Oddly though historians have moved away from similar damning verdicts on the Raj. Over the last 40 years, more evidence