Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.
14 min listen
Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine has caused the prices of oil and gas to skyrocket. One of the Prime Minster’s strategies to combat this appears to be a visit Saudi Arabia this week, where he’ll ask Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman to release more oil. But what’s the chance of this working? Katy Balls is joined by James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman.
Priti Patel is not a fan of big tech. The Home Secretary has spent much of her three years in office decrying the giants of Silicon Valley, frequently railing against the likes of Facebook, TikTok and Twitter for various failings. She’s ordered them to remove posts promoting illegal Channel crossings, ‘live up to their moral duty’ by tackling online child abuse and attacked them for publishing ‘appalling hate’ on their platforms. Her department has also mooted banning online anonymity and proposed an advertising campaign which criticises Facebook for daring to use end-to-end encryption for its messages. Given all the dastardly things which occur on their platforms, just who exactly is funding such firms? Turns out the answer
Perhaps you’re of the opinion that Ukrainian refugees aren’t our problem, that the world has always been full of foreigners doing ghastly things to each-other, and we can’t be expected to change the settled migration policy of our country just because of a war. Perhaps you wonder why, if we’ve been talking about using gunboats to repel boatloads of Libyans or Syrians and were forced to be ‘realistic’ about the number of people we could accept from Afghanistan, we’re now getting sentimental about Ukrainians. Perhaps you think that taking people in sounds great on paper but someone’s going to have to pay for it – and what with the energy
Sir Keir Starmer’s interpretation of the Equality Act has caused something of a stir. The Labour leader cited the Brown-era legislation to support his assertion that ‘trans women are women’ and that this ‘happens to be the law in the United Kingdom’. This reading of the Act has drawn criticism from gender-critical feminists, including the trans writer Debbie Hayton, who states: If Keir Starmer thinks that I am a woman, I am delighted to tell him the truth. Transwomen (like me) are male, while women (like my wife) are female. Biology does not lie, male is not female, and therefore transwomen are not women. For all my many other sins,
The world seems to have got a lot more dangerous since Joe Biden took office last January. It wasn’t long after his inauguration that Russian President Vladimir Putin started massing troops on Ukraine’s border. The Kremlin believes that its American opponent is old and weak, and began testing him as soon as he took office. Now war has come to the European continent once again. Last night it was the turn of the Iranians to test Washington. According to the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) at around 1:30 a.m., 12 missiles struck near a new US consulate under construction in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. ‘The attacks resulted in no
Sir Keir Starmer – Refugees numbers should be ‘uncapped’ The Leader of the Opposition Sir Keir Starmer returned to the hot seat this week, this time with Sophy Ridge. Starmer echoed the Prime Minister’s description of Putin as a ‘war criminal’, and derided the government’s efforts to accommodate refugees as ‘too slow, too narrow, too mean’. Ridge asked for his blueprint for what a Labour government would do in this situation: Labour would levy ‘windfall tax’ on oil and gas companies The fallout from the war in Ukraine is destined to exacerbate the cost of living across the world, putting pressure on everything from the price of wheat to the
Whoops! Cripes! The government is in another mess. The cry goes out: send for Gove. Like the elegant Jeeves to Boris’s Bertie Wooster, he answers his master’s desperate call, ready to extricate him from another self-inflicted mess. Now the PM’s latest troubles are not aunts but Ukrainians and the many thousands now fleeing their country. The Home Office are predictably ineffective so it’s once more unto the breach for the oleaginous Aberdonian, the man with more jobs than George Osborne. Levelling up, saving the Union, intergovernmental relations and now processing refugees: is there anything the Gover can’t do? In his interview this morning with Sophy Ridge, the over-worked minister explained how he intends to
If you needed any sign that the Labour party is still deeply confused about gender identity and sex, look no further than the Labour leader Keir Starmer’s comments this week. Asked by the Times to define a woman, Starmer replied that: A woman is a female adult, and in addition to that trans women are women, and that is not just my view — that is actually the law. It has been the law through the combined effects of the 2004 [Gender Recognition] Act and the 2010 [Equality] Act. So that’s my view. It also happens to be the law in the United Kingdom. If Keir Starmer thinks that I am
The city of Cleveland, Ohio, is hardly considered the most cosmopolitan or globalised city in the U.S. If anything, the Rust Belt city – whose population is less than half of what it was a century ago – is a symbol of industrial decline across America’s heartland, for a region whose best days are clearly behind it. Which is why, as other major American cities like New York or Miami opened their doors to all kinds of oligarchic money out of places like Russia or Ukraine, Cleveland hardly got any attention as a destination for the kinds of illicit wealth spilling out of the former Soviet Union. Investigators searched out
After last week’s shambles over the handling of Ukrainian refugees, Michael Gove has announced a big shift in UK policy with his version of the so-called ‘Air-Refugee’ schemes that have sprung up on the continent. It’s an Airbnb-style set up where hosts register online saying they’re willing to sponsor guests. Germany’s version (website here) has so far led to 350,000 offers. But the UK system is designed with more friction. Hosts will not be paired with refugees but will have to name someone – when they do, both parties will then have to be vetted by the government. Gove says his version, while uncapped, is likely to lead to ‘tens of thousands’ of offers with hosts and refugees vetted by the government – a
On 28 October 2016, I received an email from a well-connected former senior MI6 officer who asked me if I had any material about properties in London owned by wealthy Russians. I was a natural person to ask because I had written a book about the Russian oligarchs and had become an expert on the ownership of expensive houses and luxury apartments in central London. I then discovered that the discreet inquiry was on behalf of the National Security Council who were reviewing the activities and assets of the oligarchs in the UK, including Roman Abramovich. And so I was expecting legislative action soon. After all, I also knew that
The news this week that the price of an average UK home has hit £260,000 came as a bit of a jolt for New Zealanders. Kiwis who obsessively follow such matters were left wondering how even property in London can be cheaper than buying a house over here. The average home in New Zealand costs £520,000, and significantly more again in either of our two major cities, Auckland and Wellington. When Jacinda Ardern became prime minister she promised to address our unsustainable property market which has locked out all but the most privileged youngsters from getting on the ladder. The continued spike in prices shows how little Ardern has delivered.
18 min listen
‘Watch this space,’ the armed force minister James Heappey said when asked whether Britain would make it easier for Ukrainian refugees to come to the country. Still, though, refugees – even those with family connections to the UK – are stuck in Calais and Paris trying to make to our shores. What more should we be doing? Would a Polish model, where refugees are welcomed first and registered later, work? The Spectator’s editor Fraser Nelson speaks to our economics editor Kate Andrews.
29 min listen
On this episode of Spectator Out Loud, Douglas Murray starts by explaining why C. S. Lewis was right about war. (00:56) Mary Wakefield is up next, looking at the founding myth that Russia and Ukraine are fighting over. (10:18) Nicola Shulman finishes the podcast, reading her piece about Philip Larkin’s big problem. (16:53)
The oil price is up by more than 40 per cent since the start of the year. It is being driven up by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the lack of investment in oil and turning the world economy on and off again: US production is still not back to pre-pandemic levels. In the immediate term, as I say in the Times today, pretty much the only way to bring the price down is to get Saudi Arabia – which has 1.5 to 2 million barrels a day of spare capacity – to pump more. The West’s relationship with Saudi Arabia has always been morally problematic. The justification for it, despite Riyadh’s appalling
When my brother was an infantry officer in the early 1990s the soldiers under his command were hard men. Most hailed from the north-east of England; in an earlier era they might have mined coal for a living. They smoked and drank and swore, and they were superb soldiers, as they proved in South Armagh and in Bosnia. It’s safe to assume these men would have struggled as infantrymen in today’s British army. Even the word ‘infantrymen’ would cause problems today. Last year, the Ministry of Defence recruited for a director of diversity and inclusion (salary £110,000 per annum, compared to the £20,000 an infantryman is paid). Meanwhile, in November, it
One of the most extraordinary (and moving) videos to have emerged since the invasion of Ukraine shows scenes at Berlin Central Station where refugees are paired upon arrival with locals offering accommodation. An unprecedented crisis has been met with an unprecedented public response – some 350,000 beds have been offered in Germany now. Over a million in Poland. People’s generosity has risen to the challenge – without government getting in the way to slow things down. Could it happen here? We risk ending up doing more than any European country to arm the Ukrainians but less than any other to help refugees Michael Gove is set to launch a British
It’s been a tough week for poor John Bercow. The release of the report by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards into his Speakership on Tuesday saw 21 counts of bullying being upheld against him. Since then there have been calls for universities to strip him of his academic posts, while Commons bosses have delivered the ultimate insult: removing his name from the parliamentary gym spin room. Talk about purging the last remnants of a hated former regime. And Steerpike can reveal that Bercow has also now quit as a trustee of Holland Park school, known as ‘the socialist Eton’. His term was due to end in November 2024. A spokesperson for the school told
11 min listen
While the world is hearing mummers that Vladimir Putin is considering using chemical weapons in Ukraine, the UK government has imposed sanctions on hundreds of Russian Parliamentarians. But will this latest move make the Kremlin pause or is it a largely symbolic gesture? Katy Balls talks with Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth.
For some time now, Covid has been rising in Scotland – there are now more Scots in hospital with Covid than at any time throughout the winter. A freak, or a sign of what’s to come nationally? The ONS survey answers that question today, confirming that Covid cases are rising nationally: some 4 per cent of England’s population, it says, would test positive. In Northern Ireland it’s closer to 8 per cent and in Scotland 5.7 per cent. Have waning vaccines created space for another wave – and do we need to worry? Just as Gauteng and South Africa then Lambeth and London were the early warning signs for Omicron’s rise