Politics

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

Katy Balls

Beergate is coming back to bite Starmer

Labour had planned to continue its offensive on partygate and the cost of living during this week’s local elections. In recent weeks, that tactic has been yielding results: Boris Johnson has come under pressure for receiving a fixed penalty notice for attending an event in Downing Street involving birthday cake. Now it’s Keir Starmer who is facing the toughest questions about Covid rule breaches. The problem? Beergate.  This all relates to an event last year on 30 April where Starmer was pictured with a bottle of beer in the office of City of Durham MP Mary Foy ahead of the Hartlepool by-election. When it surfaced several months ago, there was an effort

Patrick O'Flynn

Starmer’s partygate hypocrisy

Awarding themselves the unearned prize for moral superiority and assuming that the electorate will do so too is a crippling fault of the modern Labour party. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has just outed himself as a severe sufferer of the syndrome via the wounded tone he has taken over being questioned about the events of so-called ‘beergate Friday’ in April 2021.  In Starmer’s eyes, the venal Boris Johnson and his lackeys mock a nation by gorging on cake but when he and his entourage gather for beer and pizza in an indoor space it is merely a ‘pause for food’ and to suggest anything else amounts to ‘Tory mudslinging’.

The nanny state is making us poorer

As household budgets face their worst squeeze for decades, one wonders whether the public health establishment feels any remorse for their role in driving up the cost of living. The kinds of taxes – on food, alcohol, tobacco, and soft drinks – that nanny statists have dedicated entire careers toward delivering are proven to have taken a greater share of income from the poor than the rich. An average family that indulges in drinking and tobacco will now spend £891 in cigarette levies and £216 in alcohol duty every year. Advocates for sin taxes argue that their tactics are progressive if they improve the health of the poor more than the rich. Others

All talk and no trousers: is Oxford really to blame for Brexit?

Attacks on British elitism usually talk about Oxbridge, but Simon Kuper argues that it is specifically Oxford that is the problem, which has provided 11 (out of 15) prime ministers since the war. So what’s the explanation? Kuper thinks it’s all the fault of the Oxford Union, which fosters chaps who are clever at debating without particularly caring which side they are on. As a result, they acquire enough rhetorical skills to enable them to beat opponents who rely on thoughtful, fact-based arguments. Such arguments are ‘boring’, and being boring in the Oxford Union is the worst crime you can commit. This wouldn’t matter if it were confined to undergraduates

Steerpike

Starmer squirms on beergate

Schadenfreude is a funny thing. Once it was Labour laughing at Boris Johnson dodging questions about food and drink: now it’s their turn to face them too. Sir Keir Starmer had a somewhat excruciating appearance on this morning’s Today programme when he was asked repeatedly about his attendance at a work event in April 2021, at which the Labour leader was photographed holding a beer. Four times the Labour leader was asked by Martha Kearney about whether Durham Police had been in touch with him about the gathering; four times he dodged the question. Starmer claimed that the picture was taken before 10 p.m and that thereafter he and other Labour campaigners resumed

Steerpike

Roe v Wade and RBG’s legacy

There are tears aplenty across America this morning as millions awake to the news that the Supreme Court is set to overturn Roe v Wade. The initial majority draft was leaked overnight, suggesting that the country’s highest court will strike down the landmark ruling that legalised abortion nationwide. With Republican legislatures passing restrictive measures across America, the decision is expected to allow each state to decide whether to restrict or ban abortion. At least it’ll give the Democrats something to run on in 2024. Already the rhetoric is ramping up across the country, with accusations flying as to who is to blame. Senator Bernie Sanders has already demanded that Congress pass legislation to

Steerpike

Boris Johnson’s Red Wall blunder

Oh dear. It seems that Boris Johnson’s passionate electioneering doesn’t extend to, er, knowing where he actually is. The Prime Minister has been out and about on the campaign trail, touring the country to drum up support for his party’s flagging fortunes, three days before voters cast their verdict on his government’s recent woes. Posting a photo of himself eating an ice cream in Whitley Bay, Johnson tweeted that it was a ‘fantastic day to be out campaigning in Teesside, where we’re delivering a massive programme of investment as part of our plan to level up the whole of the UK.’ Unfortunately, Whitley Bay is actually in Tyneside, not Teesside, prompting

Stephen Daisley

Progressives are right about our rotten prisons

When we talk about ‘under-served communities’, we typically think in terms of an absent or neglectful state. Yet one of the most under-served groups of all is one for whom the state is never absent: prisoners. Justice secretary Dominic Raab is in the headlines after he sent prison and probation staff a style guide instructing them to avoid ‘woke’ terminology such as ‘service-user’ and ‘room’ and stick to ‘inmate’ and ‘cell’. On the face of it, Raab’s orders are another salvo in the culture wars and a bit of positioning by an ambitious deputy prime minister, but the Lord Chancellor might be onto something, if perhaps inadvertently. Progressives love linguistic

Michael Simmons

Will Scotland’s census extension ruin the results?

The debacle over Scotland’s census will not, it seems, have a happy ending. Nearly a quarter of households (some 604,000) are yet to complete their return, and had been facing £1,000 fines from today. It could have been a prosecution of unprecedented scale, but the deadline has been extended to the end of May. Sir Tom Devine, perhaps Scotland’s best-known historian, has said he thinks all is lost. ‘Such is the scale of the disaster the authorities have had little choice but to offer a new deadline,’ he said. ‘Will the extension work? It is very doubtful.’ The SNP has not admitted to any fault, but instead blamed (you guessed it) the

Ross Clark

Right-to-buy won’t fix Britain’s housing crisis

The biggest long-term threat to the Conservatives is neither partygate nor even the cost of living crisis – but declining rates of home ownership. As Mrs Thatcher understood, when people are able to afford their own home, they become more conservative in outlook. They put down roots in their local area and they gain a vested interest in capitalism – just look how Mrs Thatcher won and held on to aspirational areas such as the new towns. That the rate of home ownership plunged from 70.9 per cent to 62.6 per cent between 2003 and 2017 (it has since recovered slightly) goes quite a long way to explaining why Jeremy

Gavin Mortimer

How Eurosceptics seized power over the French left

In Britain it was the Tories who tore themselves apart over Europe, but in France it is the left for whom Brussels has long been a battleground. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the de facto leader of the French left following his impressive performance in last month’s presidential election, is an unabashed Eurosceptic, as are most in his La France Insoumise (LFI). The Socialist Party, on the other hand, share Emmanuel Macron’s view that Europe is the future and if France must sacrifice some of its sovereignty in the pursuit of closer integration then so be it. The former Socialist president François Hollande embodies the Europhile left and he is aghast at the

Sam Leith

Googling Neil Parish, I came across a porn website

It really is quite easy to click on internet pornography by accident. There’s a persuasive argument that the whole of the modern world, as shaped by the internet, is an accidental by-product of the insatiable global market for new, easier, cheaper, faster and more private ways of looking at bare boobies. The clean and useful bit of the web is, in this account of it, but an apologetic cluster of barnacles hitching a ride on a great grizzled baleen whale of filth. I look back on partygate (‘BJ punishment’) and the Libor scandal (‘rate pegging’) with a shudder. Far and away the most plausible thing about Neil Parish’s account of

Steerpike

Alastair Campbell rides to Labour’s rescue (again)

Milestones are always a time for reflection. So the 25th anniversary of New Labour’s election triumph this weekend has prompted an outpouring of dewy-eyed reminiscences from commentators of a certain vintage about how great it all was.  Cool Britannia, the minimum wage, PFI deals and the Millennium Dome. Truly, a golden age: things really could only get better. To mark this auspicious occasion, a familiar face from those halcyon days has re-emerged to remind voters about the best that New Labour had to offer.  Alastair Campbell, the king of spin, has popped up with a new report by Labour in Communications urging Sir Keir Starmer to revamp his approach to PR ahead of the next

Steerpike

Cathy Newman ducks the questions

Privatisation isn’t the only issue currently worrying Channel 4 bosses. The network’s eponymous news programme has been facing questions for months about its alleged use of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) amid mounting concern that they could be used to silence staff in equal pay, discrimination, harassment and victimisation cases. Campaigners, MPs and whistleblowers are among the dozens of high-profile women calling on C4 to release its ‘traumatised’ and ‘gagged’ former staff from such confidentiality agreements. Not the best look, perhaps, from a self-styled ‘progressive employer’… Not all of Channel 4’s staff though seem keen to publicly back the campaign to free the broadcaster’s former staff from their NDAs. This morning, documentary filmmaker Daisy Ayliffe – who worked on

Angela Rayner has made her defenders look like fools

In Barnsley it’s a pork pie, in Ireland it’s a beer jug and in parts of the North, we now know the word ‘growler’ can mean something else entirely. Thanks to Angela Rayner, I have learned a vulgar term for female genitalia, and something much more useful – that after 20 years of dealing with slippery politicians, I am still capable of being taken in. There I was, thinking I’d seen it all before, when along comes the deputy leader of the Labour party, privately boasting about flashing her crotch in parliament – then publicly crying sexism. And, like many others, I fell for it. It is now abundantly clear

Sunday shows round-up: No ‘culture of misogyny’ in parliament, claims minister

Large parts of the UK vote in local council elections on Thursday. In Westminster, however, the focus is on the so-called ‘pestminster’ scandal after the revelation that as many as 56 MPs are under investigation for some form of sexual misconduct. The case that has most recently sparked headlines is that of the Conservative MP Neil Parish, who has admitted watching pornography while on the parliamentary estate. Sophy Ridge spoke to the Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng about the culture in parliament, asking him if the environment was a safe workplace for women: Keir Starmer – ‘Cultural change has to be modelled from the top’ The Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer made another

Steerpike

Lib Dems take a leaf out of Labour’s book

‘Secret election pact to stitch up Boris’ roars the front page of today’s Mail on Sunday. Ahead of Thursday’s local elections, Oliver Dowden, the Conservative party’s chairman, has written an angry letter to Sir Keir Starmer. He claims Labour is standing down candidates ‘in swathes of the country’ where Lib Dem support is strong to avoid splitting the anti-Tory vote. His fellow knight, Sir Ed Davey, is accused of doing the same where Labour is dominant elsewhere. Playing politics in an election campaign? It’ll never catch on. It marks a change of course from, er, Thursday when Labour were found to have spent a small fortune on online adverts attacking the Lib Dems. Messages on