Politics

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

Thursday

28 Oct 2021

Rishi Sunak’s new age fantasy and the great Tory con

Failure corrupts as much as power does, and when the powerful fail they make others pay for their disappointment. To understand why this government lashes out at all who contradict it like a drunk throwing haymakers in a pub car park, remember that, by their own standards, today’s Tory ministers are abject failures. Nothing about their time in office has turned out the way they expected. Traditionally, the left accuses Labour governments of selling out. In front of the mirror, when nobody is watching, today’s Conservative ministers can accuse themselves. To get a measure of their disappointment, dig out a copy of Britannia Unchained, a manifesto from 2012 to restore the

Steerpike

The looming showdown over Owen Paterson

Rising taxes, middling growth, the spectre of inflation – there’s much at present to get Tory MPs annoyed. But it’s not just the Budget that’s got some of them exercised this week; a damning report into Owen Paterson by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards has wound up many on the backbenches. The former Cabinet minister has hit back strongly against claims that he had ‘repeatedly’ used his position to benefit two companies who paid him as a consultant, with Paterson calling on colleagues to waive Parliamentary privilege so he can challenge the inquiry’s findings in the courts. Jacob Rees-Mogg today told MPs that the Commons will debate and vote on Paterson’s 30-day suspension from Parliament on Wednesday. Normally

Isabel Hardman

How was the Budget received?

11 min listen

The Budget was revealed yesterday, but what do Rishi Sunak’s conservative colleagues make of it? To discuss this, another row with the French about fish, and the end of the Covid travel red list, Isabel Hardman is joined by James Forsyth and Katy Balls.

Lara Prendergast

Cop out: Boris’s battle to save the climate summit

32 min listen

In this week’s episode: Can Cop26 deliver on its grand promises? In our cover story this week, Fraser Nelson assesses the state of the upcoming Cop26 summit in Glasgow and questions their very effectiveness in dealing with climate change in a world of global players with very different priorities. He is joined on the podcast by reporter Jess Shankleman, who is covering Cop26 for Bloomberg. (00:48) ‘This one’s in Glasgow, but you’d best think of it as the Edinburgh Festival for environmentalism. Lots of fun, lots of debates, lots of protests, lots of street action, but not really any much of concrete substance.’ – Fraser Nelson Also this week: Is

Steerpike

Another COP-up: MSPs can’t get beds in Edinburgh

Oh dear. Ahead of the UN climate change summit in Glasgow on Sunday, Steerpike can bring fresh news of another COP-related blunder. Plagued by strikes and rejected by Greta Thunberg, the eco-jamboree is now afflicted by a lack of affordable accommodation, with ministers in the Westminster government unable to find rooms to stay. Savvy Glaswegians have not been slow to cash in, demanding £600-a-night to rent two-bedroom houses from desperate delegates. And now it transpires that inept administrators in Edinburgh are not exempt from the perils of poor planning. Steerpike has been sent an email from the Scottish Parliament, informing MSPs and their staff that the usual hotel accommodation rules will have to

Steerpike

Sir David Amess’s dog wins Westminster dog of the year

There are few events Steerpike enjoys more than Westminster dog of the year. The competition returned today – post-Brexit and post-Covid – for the first time since 2018, with dozens of MPs entering their pooches. Hosted by the Kennel Club and Dogs Trust, it aims to raise awareness of canine-related issues and offer parliamentarians a chance to compete for the prize of top dog in SW1. This year’s event though was, understandably, overshadowed by the killing of Sir David Amess, a life-long dog lover and long-standing supporter of the awards. He entered his French bulldog Vivienne into this year’s competition just weeks before his death. His friends and fellow MPs Andrew Rosindell and Mark Francois

Matthew Lynn

Rishi Sunak has blown his premiership

The amount the state takes out of the economy will rise to the highest level in 70 years. An unreformed public sector will be showered with cash, with the health service allowed to spend whatever it likes. A tax system that was already creaking under the weight of its own complexity has just been made slightly more complicated, and it has been made a lot less competitive. The Chancellor Rishi Sunak with his usual panache sailed through his Budget yesterday. The problem, however, is this. While he might get away with pushing up taxes and spending for now, sooner or later it is going to catch up with him. And

James Forsyth

What this Budget tells us

The Budget and the spending review gave the clearest indication yet of what the post-Covid government might look like. During the height of the pandemic, government spending exceeded 50 per cent of the economy for the first time since 1945-46. Even this year, public spending will be higher than when Denis Healey had to seek a bailout from the International Monetary Fund in 1976. Such spending has long-lasting consequences. The tax burden is now at its highest level in terms of GDP since the 1950s and is likely to stay high for some time. It will take quite an effort to return the government to its pre-pandemic size. The risk

George Osborne

My night of nostalgia with Boris and co.

Rishi Sunak had a pre-game Twix and a Sprite to prepare for this week’s impressive Budget. I used to have a cup of very sugary tea. It was a tip from our joint mentor, William Hague. It coats the throat in preparation for speaking in a rowdy chamber. Even then my voice would be hoarse by the end of an hour’s Budget statement. It’s hard to convey just how noisy it is standing there with a couple of hundred adults screaming at you from a few feet away. But on Wednesday the House of Commons seemed quieter than it used to be on these big days. I’m not sure why.

The Spectator

Rishi Sunak’s change of direction

The Conservative party has always sold itself to voters as the party of low taxation, but it has now pushed taxes higher than any post-war Labour government dared. High spending was the tool the Prime Minister reached for at every turn in the pandemic, leaving Britain with one of the biggest post-Covid bills in Europe. His recovery plan was to part-nationalise care homes, taxing the working poor to protect the assets of the wealthy. Taxes are now heading to a 70-year high. Not Conservatism, it seems, but its inversion. Rishi Sunak’s Budget this week marks a potential turning point in this narrative. It has not changed the overall fiscal direction

Katy Balls

The Tory blame game over COP26 has already started

Just a few months ago, the view inside Downing Street was that the COP26 summit would be a national morale booster. The Coldplay singer Chris Martin was mentioned as a potential headline act and there were excited discussions about giving the event a cute mascot. Now, the headlines are about rail strikes, bin men running away from rats on rubbish-strewn streets in Glasgow and the Prime Minister declaring that recycling doesn’t work. Even the mascot, Bonnie the seal, has been called ‘rat-like’ by government sources. ‘It’s hideous,’ says a member of a foreign delegation. Just as the technical climate negotiations have hit stumbling blocks, so too have No. 10’s other

Steerpike

Watch: the UN’s latest climate cringe

With the Pope out, Greta on strike and even the Queen unwell, COP26 is short of much in the way of international glam. So now desperate apparatchiks at the United Nations have come up with their latest ingenious wheeze: creating a 15-foot CGI animated dinosaur to front its apocalyptic warnings about humanity’s looming extinction. The two minute clip features a (presumably) blood-thirsty tyrannosaurus taking to the podium at the UN General Assembly to deliver a banal speech lecturing humanity on its shortcomings, somehow restraining itself from devouring the surrounding smorgasbord of plenipotentiaries. Sounding like a cheap hood from an 80s mafioso movie, the dinosaur masters the platitudinous cliche-riddled jargon so beloved of such

Wednesday

27 Oct 2021

Katy Balls

Rishi Sunak’s low tax pitch to MPs

Is Rishi Sunak a low tax chancellor? He certainly likes to tell anyone who will listen that he is. Yet his actions tend to suggest the opposite. The tax burden is currently on track to reach its highest level since the early 1950s, and while Sunak unveiled one big tax slash in the Budget in the universal credit taper rate cut, the main thrust of Sunak’s announcements was spend, spend, spend. Tonight Sunak addressed Tory MPs at a meeting of the 1922 committee. After announcing £150 billion in extra public spending, Sunak sought to convince his party that, despite this, he was committed to lowering taxes. Having said in the chamber that

Katy Balls

Verdict: Rishi Sunak’s Budget

21 min listen

Rishi Sunak’s Budget, as much as it was trailed ahead of time, still had a couple of surprises – including a return of the 0.7 per cent aid budget and a cut to the universal credit taper rate. Katy Balls talks to James Forsyth and Kate Andrews about the high and lowlights from today’s Budget.

Michael Mosbacher

Why Jesus College shouldn’t have returned its Benin bronze

Jesus College Cambridge can claim a world first. It is the first institution, at least in the twenty-first century, to return a so-called Benin Bronze because it was looted in a British punitive raid in 1897 on the historic Kingdom of Benin, now part of the territory of Nigeria. The College’s Master Sonita Alleyne has today handed over its Okukor – a brass statue of a cockerel that took pride of place in the college’s dining hall peering over generations of students – to Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments. Germany announced in May that its public museums would return their hundreds of Benin artefacts; Dan Hicks — Curator

Lloyd Evans

Would the real Rishi Sunak please stand up?

It was a tale of two chancellors at today’s high-spending Budget. Rishi Sunak began by embracing the big-state profligacy pursued by Cameron and May, and maintained by their successors, Boris and Carrie. The Chancellor reeled off stacks of figures indicating that the economy is roaring back to life. ‘Growth up! Wages up! Employment up!’ he shouted. And he announced that government spending sprees will also surge by £150 billion. He plans to restore the 0.7 per cent spending target for foreign aid by the end of this parliament. And he has ordered civil servants across Whitehall to find more stuff to buy. ‘A real-terms rise in spending for every single

Stephen Daisley

Sunak backs the Union with cash, not love-bombs

Devolution has done so much to fracture the UK that, in Scotland, Rishi Sunak’s Budget is an event of the second order. Scottish interest in Budget day is typically limited to whisky duty, support for North Sea industries and the Barnett formula: the additional spending Scotland gets when the Chancellor splurges on England. Today’s Budget was for all of Britain. Not just Scotland, but Wales and Northern Ireland were weaved throughout Rishi Sunak’s speech. Quite apart from the fiscal or economic merits of the policies announced, the Chancellor’s speech was good politics. Not long after Sunak was promoted to the Treasury, I was told Scotland was a weak spot for him

James Forsyth

The significance of the Universal Credit taper rate cut

Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak have always been keen to stress that they are low-tax Conservatives — declarations that have previously sounded a bit like St Augustine’s prayer for the Lord to make him virtuous, but not yet. But the Budget announcement that the Universal Credit taper rate will be cut from 63 to 55 pence is a significant tax cut and one aimed at those most in need of it. When the Tories were in opposition, David Cameron railed against the 96 per cent marginal tax rate facing people moving from welfare into work. Universal Credit, introduced by the coalition government, was meant to solve this problem. It did

Kate Andrews

Six things we learnt from the Budget

Another big fiscal event for Rishi Sunak today, as he delivered his Budget and the details of a three-year spending review. For the first time, Covid-19 wasn’t in the spotlight. Instead it was framed as a big-spending event, confirming plans briefed before the Budget — £7 billion in capital spending for the NHS, end of the public sector pay freeze — and announcing a series of new plans, including the return of increased foreign aid spending at 0.7 per cent of GDP by 2024-25. But break down the numbers and there are even more surprises in store. Here are the six things we learnt from today’s Budget: The tax take

Isabel Hardman

Rishi Sunak is a problem Labour can’t solve

Given Rishi Sunak spent so much of his Budget pointing out how high spending was – and given he announced some very Labour-friendly measures, such as a surprisingly big cut in the taper rate of Universal Credit from 63 per cent to 55 per cent – whoever responded on behalf of the Opposition was going to have a tricky job. Sir Keir Starmer should have been performing this thankless task, but thanks to his sudden self-isolation after a positive Covid test, it was the Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves who had to do it instead. It’s not clear how much of the speech was her own and how much of it