Politics

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

Monday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Does the Met have a racism problem?

Back in the winter of 2012, a postal worker named Zac Sharif-Ali was taking a lunchtime stroll with his dog on Chiswick Common when he was stopped by a police officer named Duncan Bullock. PC Bullock was out for a lunchtime sandwich run himself, and apparently thought this might be a good opportunity to get his numbers up. Two birds with one stone, and all that. According to colleagues testifying to an Independent Office for Police Conduct investigation, he was enterprising in that way. ‘I remember that day PC Bullock had gone out for his sandwich, so I knew he would bring back a stop and search record form,’ the

Sunday

Steerpike Steerpike

Truss is ‘misinterpreted’, again

With four weeks left in the leadership race, how many more times is Liz Truss going to be ‘misinterpreted’? First, there was the U-turn over regional pay boards for public sector workers, which would see them get lower pay in line with local wages outside of London and the South East. A press release from the Truss camp suggested £8.8 billions worth of savings could be made this way ‘if the system were to be adopted for all public sector workers in the long term.’ After an outcry, Truss insisted the policy had been ‘misinterpreted’ as ‘it was never intended to apply to doctors, nurses and teachers’. Which begs the

Steerpike Steerpike

SNP ferries fiasco prompts rationing warnings

In the fevered imaginations of some Remainiacs, Britain’s supermarkets are permanently bare, as Brexit-related supply shortages prompt an absence of the bountiful goods we once enjoyed in the EU. But there is one place in the UK where such dystopian fantasies have now indeed become a reality. Unfortunately for the more boss-eyed of Boris’s critics, it’s nowhere in Leave-voting England. Rather such shortages are now happening on certain windswept Scots islands, where the long-suffering local residents are enduring the effects of the SNP government’s woeful incompetence. Today’s The Herald on Sunday splashes on the news that shops on certain islands in the Hebrides have been forced to ration essential items owing

John Ferry John Ferry

The key flaw in the SNP’s indyref ruse

This week we’ve had the bizarre occurrence of the SNP formally submitting a request to intervene in the Indyref2 Supreme Court case, even though Scotland’s top law officer, the Lord Advocate, has already put forward the Scottish Government’s written case. To recap, the Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain has referred a prospective bill on a referendum to the UK Supreme Court so that judges can rule on whether Holyrood has the power to unilaterally hold a vote. In a 51-page written submission to the court, Bain argues a referendum, which Nicola Sturgeon wants to see take place in October 2023, would merely demonstrate the views of the Scottish people regarding secession

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Truss and Sunak are blind to the coming crisis

In times of crisis in the 20th century, voters called for politicians from opposing parties to put aside their differences and unite in a national government. Such is the collapse of the Conservative party we now must beg Tory politicians to stop fighting and unite in a Tory government. Martin Lewis has said that Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson should be able to agree on a package to cover the expected 70 per cent rise in the domestic energy cap in the autumn (with more to come in January).  ‘You’re all in the same party,’ he cried. ‘You should be able to work out some unifying policy, something

Saturday

Sam Ashworth-Hayes Sam Ashworth-Hayes

How Truss plans to bring the Bank of England to heel

Liz Truss believes the Bank of England has lost control of inflation. If chosen as the country’s next prime minister, she plans to bring it back to heel: ‘I want to change the Bank of England’s mandate to make sure in the future it matches some of the most effective central banks in the world at controlling inflation’, singling out the Bank of Japan as one model to follow. In the rarified world of monetary policy discussion, this was a bit like chucking a live grenade into a ball pit. Michael Saunders, a member of the Monetary Policy Committee responsible for setting interest rates, noted ‘the foundations of the UK monetary policy

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Why Liz Truss is right to say ‘forecasts are not destiny’

‘Forecasts are not destiny,’ said Liz Truss in last night’s debate: a remark that has drawn alarm in some quarters. If she genuinely believes that, says Robert Peston, she needs to say what her understanding is of the status and point of economics and economic forecasting. ‘Are we back to Gove’s “experts are discredited”?’ he asks. ‘This stuff matters.’ It certainly does. I’d go further and say that the approach to economic forecasts is one of the biggest differences between the candidates. Rishi Sunak’s campaign is rather fatalistic: he seems to think we cannot really avoid a big-state, high-tax, low-growth future described by these forecasts. Under his plan then he’d

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Katy Balls, Rachel Johnson and Neil Clark

21 min listen

On this week’s episode: Katy Balls has written about what foreign policy would look like under a Liz Truss government (0:34). Rachel Johnson young boys and men can learn from the Lioness’s victory (06:50) and Neil Clark writes about Jim Corbett’s tiger hunting stories (12.34). Presented and produced by Natasha Feroze.

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Britain should follow Trump’s lead over Jerusalem

Liz Truss has signalled a historic shift in British foreign policy by saying she would review the location of the UK’s embassy in Israel in order to strengthen ties with the Jewish state. The announcement came in a letter sent by the Tory leadership candidate to Conservative Friends of Israel. The Foreign Secretary writes: ‘I understand the importance and sensitivity of the location of the British Embassy in Israel. I’ve had many conversations with my good friend Prime Minister Lapid on this topic. Acknowledging that, I will review a move to ensure we are operating on the strongest footing within Israel.’ The British Embassy is currently situated in Tel Aviv,

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

How ‘taking the knee’ spoiled football

Premier League footballers ‘taking a knee’ came in at the tail end of the 2019-20 season, when stadiums were empty because of the first Covid lockdown. Thus were the game’s moneyed elite spared having to initiate the fad in front of full houses. By the time supporters returned it was a fait accompli, normalised by endless self-righteous newspaper columns and political speeches on air by TV football pundits. Only one view of the matter was permitted. Any supporter who expressed dissent about the gesture of support for the Black Lives Matter campaign risked being branded a knuckle-scraping racist. Given that the gesture emerged in the United States as a show of outright

Sam Ashworth-Hayes Sam Ashworth-Hayes

Ukraine’s fate may rest on a mild winter

Russia is once again relying on ‘General Winter’. Instead of freezing German advances on Moscow, the plan today is to freeze German pensioners in Berlin. Western sanctions are crippling the Russian economy, driving up inflation and unemployment. In turn, Russian restrictions on gas are driving energy prices in Europe through the roof. Putin’s gamble is that Russia’s willingness to bear economic hardship is higher than the West’s. By winter, Europe could find itself in a literal cold war. Russia is currently throttling gas flows through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which is operating at just 20 per cent capacity. Restricted supply is driving energy prices up across Europe, while the threat

Friday

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: protesters crash Tory hustings

Liz Truss has often been accused of ‘dressing up’ or ‘cosplaying’ as Margaret Thatcher. And her team has done little to dispel that impression this campaign, releasing images this afternoon of Truss standing in front of the world’s largest Union Jack, just as the Iron Lady once did. But it was tonight’s Tory hustings in Eastbourne that offered the Foreign Secretary the chance to channel her political heroine after protesters disrupted her opening remarks. The unwelcome guests were there to protest Truss’s previous employment at Shell and received a predictably hostile reaction from the disgruntled Tory audience after yelling ‘Shame on you!’. And while Truss didn’t quite go full Mrs

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Rishi Sunak is not stealing from the poor to give to the rich

Until this morning this had been Rishi Sunak’s week. While Liz Truss found herself trying to talk her way out of her rapidly-abandoned policy for regional pay boards – which she accused others of misrepresenting but couldn’t seem to explain herself – Rishi Sunak emerged the surprise winner from a show of hands among Sky’s hand-picked audience last night. But no sooner had Sunak started his comeback than he was knocked down with an embarrassment of his own: the New Statesman obtained footage of him boasting to an audience in Tunbridge Wells last Friday that: I managed to start changing the funding formulas to make sure that areas like this

Steerpike Steerpike

Backbenchers embrace blue on blue

It’s been a pretty bad-tempered leadership race thus far but at least most of the scrapping has been done by high profile ‘outriders’ of the two main candidates. Now though it seems that this penchant for ‘blue-on-blue’ attacks has spread to the backbenches too as Tory MPs take to Twitter to attack each other’s campaigns. First up this morning was Michael ‘Fabbers’ Fabricant launching one of his by-now routine attacks on Rishi Sunak, suggesting that everything about his campaign is ‘stage managed, preplanned, and never authentic.’ It prompted Simon Hoare, the standbearer of the Tory left, to fire off a terse response that seemingly poked fun at Fabricant’s infamous blonde

Steerpike Steerpike

Peers blighted by Whitehall tech failings

When it comes to technology, it’s no secret that our ruling masters in Westminster and Whitehall have had their issues. From the NHS ‘supercomputer’ to disk files being regularly lost; gross mismanagement of resources to poor cyber security, problems with computers, software and equipment have bedeviled the inhabitants of SW1 for years. And now another venerable name can be added to the list of long-suffering institutions facing such difficulties: the House of Lords. But this being the Upper House – where the average age of membership is 69 –  the technology is decidedly more old school than the newfangled kind of kit coming out of Silicon Valley these days. For the

Thomas Lorman

Viktor Orbán’s Texas rodeo

Say what you want about Viktor Orbán, but he gives a good speech. His address on Thursday in Dallas on the opening day of CPAC, the annual jamboree of the American right wing, was wide-ranging, hard-hitting and quite funny. One of his best jokes – paraphrasing Pope Francis – was ‘that Hungary was the official language of heaven because it takes an eternity to learn’. It also happens to be nonsense. Hungarian is recognised as considerably easier to learn than Arabic or Mandarin, but Orbán doesn’t do nuance. In fact, the entirety of his speech was about drawing an unbridgeable distinction between the ‘Judeao-Christian’ values of himself and his audience on one

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Will there be blackouts this winter?

The debate about energy has, understandably, concentrated on what is going to happen to households bills. The numbers are alarming. The energy price cap is now predicted to peak at £3,649 in April 2023, meaning that the average household bill will be above £3,000 for more than a year. As I say in the Times today, this is going to require a response from whoever is prime minister. As Covid showed, in times of crisis contracts across borders are not always honoured But less attention has been paid to the question of whether there’ll be sufficient energy this autumn and winter. National Grid is suggesting that the UK will avoid

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Is the next PM ready for the coming economic crisis?

13 min listen

The Bank of England’s announcement to raise interest rates comes as the UK is predicted to fall into recession this year – with the lowest downturn expected since 2008. Are Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss ready for what’s ahead? The two candidates went head-to-head once again last night in the Sky News studios. This time, the audience, made up of Conservative party members, grilled contenders and Kay Burley followed with some hard-hitting questions. By the end, most of the audience were persuaded by Rishi. Could the tide be turning? Katy Balls speaks to James Forysth. Produced by Natasha Feroze.

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Bring on the housing crash!

It has been a long time coming, given that shares and bonds have been falling for most of the year, but this morning there are the first signs of a slide in house prices. Don’t get too excited: the Halifax House Price Index fell by just 0.1 per cent month on month, and prices are still up 11.8 per cent year on year.  But it is an indication that things might finally be changing in a market which has seemed to defy logic ever since the arrival of Covid. Yes, the deepest recession in recorded history was accompanied by a boom in house prices. Even when interest rates began to