Politics

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

Monday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Heathrow’s third runway won’t improve London’s air quality

Is Rachel Reeves really correct that her new-found enthusiasm for a third runway at Heathrow would be consistent with the government’s net zero targets and other environmental policies? Over the weekend she argued that a third runway would be good for air quality over London because it would mean fewer planes circling over the capital. She also asserted that ‘sustainable aviation fuel is changing carbon emissions from flying’, and that ‘there’s huge investment going on in electric planes’. It isn’t clear where Reeves sourced her evidence that a third runway could actually improve air quality, but that certainly wasn’t the conclusion of a 2017 study by consultants WSP commissioned by

Eliot Wilson

Keir Starmer can’t afford not to hike defence spending

Over the last few years, defence spending has been higher up the political agenda than at any time since the end of the Cold War. The scale, intensity and sheer cost of the war in Ukraine following Russia’s invasion in February 2022 provided a shock to the system – but it only reinforced what many of us had known for a long time: the United Kingdom’s military capabilities in every domain are underfunded, stretched beyond endurance and often non-functional. But is Keir Starmer now avoid increasing defence spending at all? Last February, the House of Commons defence committee published a report entitled Ready for War?. It had damning conclusions. The

Gavin Haynes

Britain’s railway arches are getting hollowed out

Railway arches are functional. If you want to keep a railway bridge horizontal, you’re going to need arches. Once, Network Rail owned these bits that kept the trains in the sky. But these days, they have a price on them, as retail space. There are currently around 5,200 businesses located in railway arches, and in 2018, Network Rail was convinced to part with the lot for £1.5 billion.  Now, these arches are worth at least £2 billion. This is the price that their new owners, the private equity group Blackstone, are paying. Since 2018, Blackstone owned them in collaboration with Telereal Trillium. This month, Blackstone bought out Telereal, establishing a new market

William Cash

The Davos I knew is over

Has the merry-go-round of the global elite summit – epitomised by the World Economic Forum (WEF) at Davos, which concluded this weekend – had its day? As I saw at Davos when I was editor of the finance magazine Spear’s, the WEF has been out of touch for years. Its costs of attending are now so expensive that it is increasingly difficult to justify attending what is essentially a global-class corporate ego massage circus. The first problem with Davos as a platform to ‘improve the state of the world’ is that there are now plenty of other, smaller, and more exclusive global insider CEO ‘thought leadership’ conferences. There is the

Stewart McDonald

Why the SNP should form a pact with Labour

Last year, marking the tenth anniversary of Scotland’s independence referendum, I wrote an article for The Spectator looking at the state of Scotland’s political conversation and the prospects for the cause of independence a decade on from defeat.   After setting out why I thought MSPs ought to pass a budget that crossed the nationalist-unionist divide, softening the intense tribalism that has become a hallmark of parliamentary exchange, I also cast an eye forward to next year’s Holyrood election, in which no party is likely to have overall control. Recent polling trends show that Reform UK are hoovering up support from disillusioned Conservative and Labour voters alike, with Nigel Farage’s party likely to

Robin Ashenden

Holocaust Remembrance Day isn’t enough

As Holocaust Remembrance Day comes round again, actual remembrance of the Holocaust seems fainter than ever. The arson attacks on synagogues in France and Australia, the mass-assault on Israeli football supporters in Holland last autumn, or the shocking recent scenes at the Oxford Union, where Jewish speakers were taunted, booed and sworn at by the audience, are a horrible echo from history, almost unimaginable a few decades ago. At Auschwitz, Primo Levi wrote, nothing was morally clearcut Much of this may be due to demographic change, as sworn enemies of Israel migrate in large numbers to the West. Yet as genuine survivors of the Holocaust die out – a year

Sunday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Why won’t Britain take the Covid lab leak theory seriously?

The CIA report concluding that Covid most likely originated from a laboratory leak of a man-made, or man-enhanced, virus raises an awkward and glaring question: why on Earth isn’t Britain’s own Covid inquiry even considering the possibility of a laboratory leak? The inquiry, which still grinds on even if most people have lost interest in it, has examined the inner workings of Downing Street in great detail, listened to evidence on lockdowns, the ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ scheme and so on, yet continues to ignore the single most important matter: where the virus came from. When Michael Gove – now editor of The Spectator – did try to raise

Tom Slater Tom Slater

The dumbing down of Oxbridge

For years now, higher education has been convulsed by a never-ending hunt for racism. A certain type of academic or student activist sees it oozing out of every pore of campus life, from statues to ‘microaggressions’ to student bar fancy-dress nights. And yet, if you were looking for a clear-cut example of a racist university policy, you’d struggle to find one more outrageously racist than this: dumbing down exam practices so as to better accommodate ethnic-minority students. Welcome to 21st-century academia, where you can’t wear a sombrero but you can lowkey suggest black and brown people are stupid. This is the news, reported in the Telegraph, that Oxford and Cambridge have been

Joe Bedell-Brill

Badenoch blames lack of ‘integration’ following Southport conviction

Rachel Reeves heavily hints at third Heathrow runway As part of her upcoming speech on economic growth, Rachel Reeves is expected to announce approval for a third runway at Heathrow. Reeves refused to confirm this in her interviews this morning, telling Laura Kuenssberg, ‘You will see the plans [for Heathrow] when we set them out’. However, Reeves emphasised that the government had already ‘signed off expansion at London City airport and Stansted’, and claimed Labour were ‘getting on and delivering’. When asked by Kuenssberg whether she disagreed with Sadiq Khan’s comments on the negative impacts a third runway would have on the climate, Reeves more or less confirmed the imminent

Andrew Hankinson

In defence of working from home

Working from home has had a terrible effect on my state of mind and it’s one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. Which is why I want to defend it in a week of it being under attack. On Monday, on the BBC’s Panorama, Stuart Rose, former chairman of Asda, said he believes ‘productivity is less good if you work from home. I believe that your personal development suffers’. In the US, Donald Trump set the global social media agenda by ordering the end of ‘remote work arrangements’ for government workers. I get the sentiment, but completely disagree. In the UK it is not a problem to be fixed.

Terry Barnes

Australia Day has been hijacked by activists

Australia’s national day, which falls today, has two purposes. It is an opportunity for Australians to celebrate who they are and how fortunate we are to live in a stable democracy, thousands of miles from terror, strife and conflict. But it also marks the end of Australia’s languid summer when it’s time to get back to work and for children to start a new school year. It’s a timely excuse to have a long weekend, blessed by late summer sunshine.  Unfortunately, however, Australia Day has become an ideological plaything of Australia’s professional grievance industry. Left and Aboriginal activists rebadge it as Invasion Day, protesting the arrival of Britain’s First Fleet

Charles Hecker

Could Russia and America ever have got along?

A revealing, damning and fascinating diplomatic memorandum, sent in 1994 from the US embassy in Moscow to the State Department in Washington, D.C. has recently been declassified. It is also a gripping and lacerating read, even for the non-specialist. It comes at time of heightened tension and ongoing head-scratching: why are US-Russia relations so terminally bad? No single topic, let alone a single memo, will unlock the enduring complexity of what is broadly called East-West relations. But at least one strong voice inside the US embassy was warning that the US-Russia relationship was off to a dreadful start.  ‘We have reached a point where it is arguable that the best

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

Revealed: GPs are over-diagnosing mental health conditions

Britain is turning sadness into sickness. More than four in five GPs believe that the ups and downs of normal life are being wrongly redefined by society as mental disorders. The news, from the Centre for Social Justice’s (CSJ) report Change the Prescription, follows comments from Tony Blair, who said: ‘You’ve got to be careful of encouraging people to think they’ve got some sort of condition other than simply confronting the challenges of life.’ It seems reasonable to ask why GPs continue to prescribe pills that the vast majority of their profession consider to be inappropriate The findings in the CSJ’s report show that: The CSJ used polling company Savanta to

Raymond Wacks

Israel isn’t an ‘apartheid state’ – and I should know

Israel’s critics want you to acknowledge its uniqueness as the only country to enjoy the triple distinction of being a colonial, genocidal, and an apartheid state. Whether Israel is, or was, colonial I leave to the historians and political scientists. The question of genocide will eventually be decided by the International Court of Justice. In respect of the third transgression, however, as someone born and bred in apartheid South Africa, I may be able to shed some light, and expose the deficiencies of this increasingly pervasive analogy. The reckless invective that labels Israel an ‘apartheid state’ is a grotesque injustice Israel is far from a paragon of virtue. But the sort

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Donald Trump and the decay of left-wing thought

‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,’ wrote Allen Ginsberg in his famous poem Howl. I thought of it the other day on reading a column by the alleged ‘comedian’ Stewart Lee in the Observer: ‘Nascent neo-Nazis are looking for confirmation bias for their worst instincts, but back in the good old days at least they had to look. Now social media, stripped deliberately of safeguards and, in Twitter’s case, re-algorithmed to steer far right, will ping lies straight on to your phone unbidden…we can’t let Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos reshape our reality, and have to encourage every friend, relative, celebrity and institution to disconnect

Julius Strauss

My week in war-weary Ukraine

In the morning darkness at the reception of our central Kharkiv hotel, 25 miles from the Russian frontlines, the night porter’s face was creased with sleep. As we made our way towards the door to catch the early express to Kyiv, he handed us a small keyring with a yellow and blue plastic ornament. They had been made by local children. The man was large, muscled rather than hammy, and had a trim beard. In the several days we had stayed at the hotel, he had not shown a trace of emotion. Now he almost looked as if he might cry. ‘Perhaps next time we meet there will be peace,’

Saturday

Steerpike Steerpike

Rachel Reeves’ ironic artwork choice

To govern is to choose. So what have Labour’s ministers chosen to hung on their walls? Raiding the Government Art Collection for the pick of the portraits is one of the perks of being a minister, along with a red box, car and driver. Mr S has done some digging and via a Freedom of Information request is delighted to tell his readers that some Starmtroopers have opted for some ironic choices in their office furnishings. First up, it’s Rachel Reeves, that well-known friend of the farmers. The Chancellor, who whacked up inheritance tax on struggling rural landowners in her first Budget, has a watercolour on her walls in the

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Elon Musk addresses AfD rally

With four weeks to go until Germany heads to the polls for its federal election, Elon Musk has just given his third public endorsement of the country’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party. Beaming into the hall live from the States at the party’s campaign launch in Halle (Saale), Saxony-Anhalt, the tech billionaire appeared to loud whoops and cheers from the crowd. Referencing Germany’s Nazi past, he declared that there is ‘too much of a focus on past guilt and we should move beyond that.’ Musk started by stating he was ‘very excited’ for the party and repeated his belief that the party is ‘the best hope’ for Germany. Praising

Katy Balls Katy Balls

What Labour and the Tories can learn from Pierre Poilievre

13 min listen

For the past fortnight, Canada’s Parliament has been empty. After Justin Trudeau resigned as Liberal leader, all the polls are pointing to the likelihood that Canada will become another example of the West’s shift to the right. This is partly due to the incumbency problem (and the ongoing internal struggles in the Liberal Party), but also the Canadian Conservatives’ firebrand leader: Pierre Poilievre. A skilled communicator who seamlessly mixes the online and offline world, Poilievre is in many ways one of the first Conservative influencers. And he has been picking up a number of admirers in the UK: Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick have visited Canada to try to learn

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Skiing is ghastly

Is anyone else getting a bit fed up of reading weepy newspaper stories about how the skiing industry is being killed off by climate change? Apparently, 80 ski resorts in the Alps have already closed for good due to a lack of snow, and according to the OECD only 400 of the 666 ski areas in the Alps will remain viable if global temperatures rise by 2º above what they were in the mid 19th century. If we lose 250 ski resorts that would be a gain for the mountains, as far as I am concerned. I suspect many people who visit the Alps in the summer will agree with me. There