Politics

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

Thursday

3 Nov 2022

Are we heading for a recession?

11 min listen

Alongside an interest rate hike of 3 per cent, the Bank of England have today warned the economy will ‘be in recession for a long period’. How much of the blame can we place on Truss’s economic policy? What will this recession look like? Also on the podcast, Rishi Sunak plans to remove the ‘legal but harmful’ censorship clause from the Online Harms Bill, what will this mean for online safety? Katy Balls speaks with Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth and Kate Andrews. Produced by Natasha Feroze and Oscar Edmondson.

Lisa Haseldine

‘Wrong visit, wrong time’: What Germany makes of Scholz’s Beijing trip

This afternoon, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz goes to China. His one-day visit to Beijing is the first by a democratic leader since the outbreak of the Covid pandemic nearly three years ago. But before he has even touched down on Chinese soil, Scholz’s trip is going down badly back home. ‘It’s the wrong visit at the wrong time,’ declared the broadsheet newspaper Die Welt. Scholz will be the first Western leader to meet with President Xi since he secured his unprecedented third term in power. For many China-watchers, Xi’s consolidated rule and zombification of the country’s Communist party marks a watershed moment for the country – not one, according to

Ross Clark

Nicola Sturgeon’s oil paradox

Is oil extraction a form of environmental vandalism which threatens life on the planet, or a source of revenue which could propel Scotland and its people to new levels of wealth? It is little use asking Nicola Sturgeon: she appears to believe it is both. Three years ago, when striking schoolchildren and Extinction Rebellion were telling us that the world must become carbon-neutral by 2025 or face massive loss of life, she told the SNP spring conference: ‘I met some of the young climate change campaigners who’ve gone on strike from school to raise awareness of their cause. They want governments around the world to declare a climate emergency. They

Fraser Nelson

Sunak drops ‘legal but harmful’ censorship clause

For some time now, The Spectator has been highlighting the danger posed by the so-called Online Safety Bill which would order social media firms to censor content regarded as ‘legal but harmful’. This was, in effect, a censorship diktat. Rather than have Orwellian figures employed by the government to censor articles, the Online Safety Bill would use the Chinese method of censorship-by-proxy and order digital giants to do this instead. A radical threat to free speech – but one only a handful of politicians spoke out against. One of them was Rishi Sunak. A new version of the Online Safety Bill is soon to be published, and we’re told it will

Steerpike

Labour steps up its game on China

Tory MPs often like to talk a tough game on China – but is it Labour who are now making the running? While the Conservatives are often at pains to wrap themselves in the flag and bang the drum for King and country, Mr S can’t help but notice in recent weeks how frequently members of the Labour party like Lisa Nandy and Stephen Kinnock are to be found urging a firmer line on Beijing. First, there was the appalling attack on the Hong Kong democracy demonstration in Manchester outside the Chinese consul, in which suspected Chinese consular officials destroyed posters and assaulted a protester. The government response was assailed

Andrew Lilico

Why should the NHS be protected from spending cuts?

The new Prime Minister has said this week that NHS funding will be ‘prioritised’ when it comes to spending decisions, while NHS bosses seek up to £7 billion in extra funding. That is wrong. In 2000, government health expenditure in the UK was equivalent to about 14 per cent of total public spending. By 2009, as the Labour government came to its end, that had risen to 16 per cent. Then came the period of Tory austerity, from 2010 onwards. Other departments were cut dramatically, but the NHS was ringfenced and NHS expenditure continued to rise. Total health expenditure reached the equivalent of 17 per cent of public spending by 2013, 18 per cent by 2018 and 19 per cent by 2019, an inexorable ratchet.

Jonathan Miller

The EU’s galactically bad space programme

Europe is lost in space. Ever since the Soviets orbited Yuri Gagarin and America landed men on the moon, Europe has proclaimed the ambition to compete on the final frontier. More than half a century later, Europe is unable to compete even with India, as in October it became incapable of launching its own payloads into space. Europe’s space agency is an example of European chauvinism at its absolute worst Protected by political and bureaucratic omertà, and with little curiosity on the part of politicians and journalists, Europe’s clumsy space exploration efforts have forced it to turn for launch services to the Twitter and Tesla tycoon, the anarchist squillionaire Elon

James Snell

Why King Bibi’s return is bad news for Israel

Israel’s longest serving leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, is back. His return confirms once again an iron clad rule of Israeli politics: never write Bibi off. A few years ago, his opponents briefly thought they had vanquished him for good. Netanyahu lost an election in 2021 and two great American supporters, the late media tycoon Sheldon Adelson and former president Donald Trump, were gone. Netanyahu was under investigation for corruption in a wide-ranging criminal probe which he sought unsuccessfully to undermine. It seemed as if Bibi could soon exchange the prime minister’s residence for jail, and the TV make-up and dark suits he always wears for prison uniform. But that is not what

Charles Parton

Don’t read too much into Hu Jintao’s disappearance

Since being helped out of the Great Hall of the People at the end of the 20th Party Congress, Hu Jintao has not been seen in public. Nor is he likely to be. Retired senior party officials rarely are. Apart from at congresses and big party or state occasions, such as the 100th anniversary of the founding of the party in July last year or the military parade on the 70th anniversary of the end of the second world war, they rarely emerge. The premature departure of Hu from the closing session of the congress has provoked much speculation. Three explanations are doing the rounds: that Hu was ejected because Xi Jinping wanted to

Sam Ashworth-Hayes

Politicians haven’t been honest about immigration to Britain

What’s the most important story in Britain over the last 25 years? The financial crisis? Brexit? These events both changed our country dramatically. But neither has had such a big impact on the make-up of Britain than immigration. In 1991, Britain’s foreign-born residents made up 6.7 per cent of the population. In 2021, one in six people (16.8 per cent) living in England and Wales were born outside the UK, according to Census data released yesterday by the Office for National Statistics. The pace of change is both staggering and accelerating. Some four in ten of that foreign-born population arrived over the last decade. To put this into context, from 1981 to 1990, total net migration of non-UK citizens totalled 445,000.

Wednesday

2 Nov 2022

James Forsyth

How to balance immigration and jobs

Immigration is now at the top of the political agenda in a way that it hasn’t been since the vote to leave the European Union in 2016. Two factors have propelled it up the list, one very real (the small boats arriving across the Channel) and the other theoretical (economic modelling). The market reaction to Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-Budget made the Office for Budget Responsibility’s next forecast all the more important. In an attempt to increase economic growth, Liz Truss wanted to formalise a more liberal immigration policy. She wanted to show the OBR that her policies would produce decent growth, but her tax cuts would not be enough to do

Katy Balls

Why is Rishi now going to Cop?

13 min listen

Rishi Sunak has said that he will now attend the Cop 27 summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, which begins on Sunday. What’s behind the U-turn, and should we expect more policy reversals from the new PM? Katy Balls speaks to Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth. Produced by Oscar Edmondson and Max Jeffery.

Steven Barrett

Did Chris Bryant mislead parliament?

Labour MP Chris Bryant could not have been clearer: the ugly scenes that unfolded last month in parliament during the vote on fracking amounted to bullying: ‘I saw members being physically manhandled into another Lobby and being bullied. If we want to stand up against bullying in this house, of our staff, we have to stop bullying in the chamber as well don’t we,’ he told MPs. It was a serious allegation and the House of Commons responded by launching an immediate inquiry. The verdict is not good for Bryant. You can read the report, which was published this week, in full here. In short, it dismisses Bryant’s claims. ‘There is

Lloyd Evans

PMQs: Starmer’s astonishing Nigel Farage imitation

The small boats have landed. PMQs was dominated by the migration issue and the flotillas of dinghies struggling across the channel each day. So far this year over 40,000 doughty oarsmen have braved the seas in inflatable rafts. And they’re not just desperate to flee France with its rude waiters, pretentious language and over-complicated cheese menus. There’s another motive. We were about to hear it in plain language from the despatch box. Sir Keir started it. At first he merely sought to destabilise Suella Braverman and reinforce the clamour for her removal. ‘The Home secretary says our asylum system is broken. Who broke it?’ he asked. Rishi Sunak, usually lightening-quick,

Kate Andrews

Why windfall taxes come at a great cost

There is no such thing as free money. This was learned the hard way last month, when investors made clear after Liz Truss’s mini-Budget that the era of cheap money was over. Mass borrowing for day-to-day spending was going to have a big premium attached: a bill so large that no government would want to pay. Rishi Sunak understood this delicate dynamic, and said so many times over the summer. His willingness to admit the truth – that the government’s many promises can’t be delivered for free – is what, eventually, landed him in No. 10. But now in power, Sunak and his chancellor Jeremy Hunt risk making another ‘easy

James Forsyth

Sunak and Starmer clash over ‘broken’ asylum system

Short questions are always best at PMQs – and Keir Starmer’s first one was very short indeed. He asked Rishi Sunak if the asylum system is broken as the Home Secretary had said – and if so, who broke it? (I wonder if Starmer got the idea from Nick Robinson’s interview with Sunak over the summer, in which he used a very similar device.) Sunak responded by arguing that Labour had voted against measures that would help deal with the problem and accused the party of having no plan to tackle immigration. But the Tories need to show that they are gripping this problem. The situation is now such that

Ross Clark

Why is Rishi Sunak going to COP?

Whoever Rishi Sunak is taking his advice from, evidently it isn’t me. Last Friday I wrote here supporting his decision to skip COP27 in Egypt, arguing that it is futile trying to persuade the big carbon emitters like China and the US to follow our example and make a legal commitment to eliminating net carbon emissions by 2050 or by any other date – unlike us they simply aren’t going to take a blind leap into a green future without first knowing how they are going to achieve it without ruining their economies. The fact that this year’s COP is being held in a resort on the Red Sea just

Julie Bindel

The police service is rotten to the core

A report published today by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services for England and Wales should come as no shock to those of us that campaign to end male violence, such as rape and domestic abuse. The report was commissioned following the case of Sarah Everard who was kidnapped, raped and murdered in 2021 by serving Metropolitan police officer Wayne Couzens. The Everard case could have been written off as a rare and extreme example of police violence and misogyny, which is what the former Met Commissioner Cressida Dick tried to do when she said that there was an occasional ‘bad un’ in the job. But it has long

Katy Balls

Rishi Sunak’s first U-turn as PM

Just over a week into Rishi Sunak’s premiership and the new prime minister has performed his first government U-turn. After Downing Street initially said Sunak would not attend the COP27 climate summit as he was too busy preparing for the 17 November Autumn statement, he will now go. Announcing the decision on social media, Sunak said: ‘There is no long-term prosperity without action on climate change. There is no energy security without investing in renewables. That is why I will attend COP27 next week: to deliver on Glasgow’s legacy of building a secure and sustainable future’. So, what’s behind the change of heart? There have been signs since the weekend

Anshel Pfeffer

It looks like Bibi is back from the dead

Could it really be over? As Israeli political reporters stand before their cameras or hunch over their keyboards, their brains screaming with caffeine, that is the one question they’re asking. As are millions of voters, who remarkably turned out on Tuesday in impressive numbers, despite their election fatigue. As I write this, there are still a quarter of the votes in Israel’s general election waiting to be counted. Many of the ballot boxes come from Bedouin communities in the Negev desert and other Arab communities. Who knows, perhaps they could still change the outcome? Mathematically it’s certainly possible. Israel’s multi-party proportional-representation election system is a machine with a lot of