Politics Archives

Saturday

8 Jan 2022

Steerpike

Priti’s drugs war goes up in smoke

One of the many things Priti Patel brought with her to the Home Office was a renewed focus on the ‘war on drugs’. Since her appointment in 2019, the Witham MP has made her distaste for substance abuse clear, accompanying police on house raids, deporting foreign dealers, declaring war on ‘county lines’ gangs and threatening ‘tough action’ on laughing gas. But is all that being let down by Dominic Raab and his colleagues over at the Ministry of Justice? For the number of drug incidents in Britain’s prisons have skyrocketed by more than 350 per cent over the last seven years, with MOJ figures published this week showing the total recorded in Britain’s prisons has

Douglas Murray

Douglas Murray, Nyrola Elimä, Theo Hobson

27 min listen

On this week’s episode, we’ll hear from Douglas Murray on why he thinks that the Coronavirus is over. (00:51) Next, Nyrola Elimä on her family’s experiences as Uighurs living under the rule of the CCP. (08:27) And finally, Theo Hobson on why the different factions of the Church of England need to come together. (16:54) Produced and presented by Sam Holmes Subscribe to The Spectator today and get a £20 Amazon gift voucher:www.spectator.co.uk/voucher

Cindy Yu

Could the Cabinet save Boris’s premiership?

12 min listen

Despite a torrid time for the Prime Minister’s popularity over the last few months, there may be a political revival on the horizon. His decision not to lockdown over the Omicron variant seems to have paid off and won back some of the support from his party. But will the Johnson project end up a failure? A lot of the Prime Minister’s future rests on the people who work closest him. On the podcast, Fraser Nelson points to the high turnover of staff at No.10 that has been destabilising, especially for someone who usually builds a strong support system around him. ‘This is a sign, the high turnover of staff

Joel Kotkin

Welcome to the end of democracy

We bemoan autocracies in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Russia and China but largely ignore the more subtle authoritarian trend in the West. Don’t expect a crudely effective dictatorship out of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: we may remain, as we are now, nominally democratic, but be ruled by a technocratic class empowered by greater powers of surveillance than those enjoyed by even the nosiest of dictatorships. The new autocracy rises from a relentless economic concentration which has engendered a new and fabulously wealthy elite. Five years ago, around four hundred billionaires owned as much as half of the world’s assets. Today, only one hundred billionaires own that share, and Oxfam

Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson

Masks in schools: how convincing is the government’s evidence?

Why has the government changed its mind and asked children to wear masks in school? When Plan B was announced last month, there was no requirement. But that has changed. Nadhim Zahawi, the Education Secretary, was asked why on Monday. He replied that ‘we conducted a small observational study with 123 schools who had followed mask-wearing in classrooms before and saw that they made a difference’. He suggested it was quite a significant study. ‘If you just think it through, with a respiratory disease that is aerosol-transmitted, if you are asymptomatic but wearing a mask, you’re much, much less likely to infect other people.’ The government has now published an ‘Evidence Summary’

Friday

7 Jan 2022

Steerpike

Watch: Sajid Javid confronted by unjabbed NHS doctor

Since becoming Health Secretary there has been one big question Sajid Javid cannot answer: how can he justify firing a worker who has recovered from Covid, has antibodies and doesn’t want the vaccine? Javid first did this with unjabbed care home workers and now plans to fire unjabbed NHS doctors. Today he met one of them — and it didn’t go well. Javid’s answer? He didn’t have one During a visit to King’s College Hospital in south London, Javid was on camera talking to NHS staff asking them what they thought about his plans for compulsory vaccination. He presumably expected them to agree. But then along comes Steve James, an intensive care doctor who

Isabel Hardman

Labour MP Jack Dromey dies, aged 73

Jack Dromey, who has died today aged 73, was a Labour MP, a trade unionist and a campaigner. He was extremely well-liked across the House of Commons: something that those who didn’t know him will have noticed immediately in the shocked tributes that have been pouring in from Westminster figures. He was a good MP, one with a clear set of political beliefs but who never let them stop him from working with those he disagreed with. He formed firm friendships with many MPs on the other side of the house, which is not something every member manages. It is a testament to the way he operated that it is

Steerpike

Will universities declare their China funding?

Britain’s leading universities are just one sector having to grapple with the recent decline in UK-China relations. Barely six years ago David Cameron was speaking of a new ‘golden age’ of partnership between the two nations but all that has changed after the Hong Kong crackdown and Xinjiang atrocities. Now there is pressure in both political and academic circles for greater transparency from Russell Group universities about their funding sources, amid increasing concern about the reliance of the UK’s academic institutions on Chinese money. For Steerpike understands that Tory backbenchers are considering whether to table amendments to the Higher Education Bill to improve transparency for the higher education sector. Cross-party support would

Freddy Gray

Will Donald Trump run again?

35 min listen

2022 has only just begun but a lot of minds in American politics are already looking towards the next presidential election in 2024. For the Republicans, the big question is will Donald Trump be their nominee and if he isn’t who will fill that very large hole? Freddy Gray sits down with the editor of Modern Age, Daniel McCarthy.

James Kirkup

The energy crisis is a failure of politics

Many of the thorniest problems of politics come down to the same thing: timeframes. Big problems generally require solutions that take a long time to develop and implement. But the decision to do this must be made by politicians who work to much shorter timetables: news cycles measured in days and weeks, ministerial appointments that last months, and elections that are never more than a few years off. The approaching pain of rising energy prices is a case in point. It may well be surprising and new that European wholesale gas prices rose by 800 per cent last year. It is neither surprising nor new that the UK depends for

Patrick O’Flynn

Boris’s bending of the rules won’t bring him down

Boris Johnson is a bit of a wide boy when it comes to his personal finances and the trappings of office. Though such an observation may offend some of the PM’s most ardent supporters – the kind of people who initially claimed that his outrageous attempt to get Owen Paterson off the hook was perfectly fine – it has permeated the national consciousness. No doubt the same ardent Boris-backers will happily accept he wasn’t hinting at a quid pro quo when he mentioned a pet project of Lord Brownlow’s in the same WhatsApp message in which he asked about funds to bankroll his high-end aspirations for his personal living quarters. Many of

Kate Andrews

Get ready to start paying the cost of Covid

Forget the desirability (or lack thereof) of tax hikes: can Britain survive them? That’s the economic question that kicked off the new year in cabinet this week when Jacob Rees-Mogg was reported to have encouraged the Prime Minister and his colleagues to roll back plans to bring in the new National Insurance levy this April. A recap on the proposals: the 1.25 per cent National Insurance hike will be paid by both employers and employees, and will eventually be funnelled into social care, we’re told. But for the first few years, most of the tax revenue it raises (roughly £12 billion) will go to addressing the NHS backlog and the millions

Cindy Yu

Have Boris’s ‘lost’ texts fuelled the sleaze scandal?

11 min listen

The ‘lost’ texts sent by Boris Johnson to Lord Brownlow over his Downing Street flat refurbishment continues to dominate the headlines today. As the story unravels, it’s a sign that the Tory sleaze issues hitting Boris at the end of 2021 will continue way into the new year. ‘It’s not going to go down well when people are seriously thinking about the cost of their energy bills over the next few months: how much it costs to buy food, what supplies are in shortage, to be reminded that the Prime Minister was trying to put extremely expensive wallpaper up in his flat’ – Kate Andrews Also on the podcast, various

Steerpike

Keir’s £1,500 oil painting

Boris Johnson isn’t the only party leader doing renovations it seems. The newly updated parliamentary register of interests has been released this week, two months after the Owen Paterson scandal triggered an exodus of MPs from their second jobs. Not all though appear to have embraced the new hair shirt mentality though, with Sir Keir Starmer declaring receipt of a £1,500 oil painting from artist Tim Benson. Is he measuring up the No. 10 flat already? Let’s hope it fits with the Lulu Lytle wallpaper. Starmer wasn’t the only MP to catch Steerpike’s eye. Take the tallest MP in the House, Daniel Kawczynski, the honourable member for serial controversy. He’s now declared receiving almost

Steerpike

Truss’s Foreign Office bankrolling Stonewall

Looking back, it wasn’t a great 2021 for LGBT+ group Stonewall. There were the allegations it misrepresented the law in its advice to Essex University, accusations from founder Matthew Parris that it was trying to delegitimise critics and the ongoing exodus of Whitehall departments from its much-criticised diversity scheme. But despite all this controversy, the charity’s latest accounts reveal a still-reliable stream of income from one reliable source: the taxpayer. Stonewall received £1.25 million in taxpayer-funded grants in just 18 months to March 2021, according to documents published this week. This figure is a near-67 per cent increase on the £748,000 they received in their previous accounts, which covered the 12 months up

Sean Thomas

What the Capitol riots and the plot to stop Brexit have in common

It’s not often that browsing the genteel aisles of Waterstones reminds you of madmen storming the Capitol in buffalo-horn helmets, but that’s the buzz I got as I briskly scanned the History shelves. I happened on a slender volume called How To Stop Brexit, written by Nick Clegg. I’d never heard of the book (a realisation that probably attaches to quite a lot of books by Lib Dem leaders) so I pulled it out, with curiosity. The text, I thought, must be a new thing, written since we finally Brexited and Clegg joined Facebook. But no: it was published in 2017. It seems I was holding a kind of revolutionary pamphlet, advising

Thursday

6 Jan 2022

William Moore

Rip it up: the vaccine passport experiment needs to end

38 min listen

In this week’s episode: Is it time to rip up the idea of vaccine passports? In The Spectator’s cover story this week, our economics editor Kate Andrews writes about her disdain for the idea of vaccine passports after being exposed to their flaws first hand. She joins the podcast along with Professor Julian Savulescu from the University of Oxford. (01:01) Also this week: Is Covid putting a spotlight on understudies? In this week’s Spectator, Sarah Crompton champions the understudy as one of the heroes of the pandemic. These are the community of stand-in actors who have kept productions alive during Covid. She is joined on the podcast by Chris Howell,

Steerpike

Is Molly-Mae a Thatcherite?

She is the glamorous blonde who’s the talk of the town. Enterprising, ambitious, sharp-elbowed, with a career that embodies the Fiat 500 Tory dream. A charismatic, self-made woman whose free market philosophy of selfish individualism will make her the toast of Thatcherites everywhere. No, not Liz Truss; but rather Love Island contestant Molly-Mae Hague. For the Foreign Secretary isn’t the only liberty-lover able to make a splash they days. Mr Steerpike’s favourite reality TV star has caused something of a ferocious backlash this week with her comments on a podcast preaching the virtues of hard work and equal opportunity. Hague has managed to spark the ire of the social media socialists by declaring that: You’re given one

Isabel Hardman

Who let the Mogg out?

10 min listen

In yesterday’s Cabinet debate, Jacob Rees-Mogg called on Boris Johnson to abandon the planned hike in national insurance, amid warnings of a looming cost of living crisis. This is not the first time the leader of the Commons has criticised the government following his opposition to tougher Covid restrictions. Might this be a sign that Rees-Mogg is going to jump before he is pushed? ‘After the Patterson affair, there is now a clear distance between No.10 and the whips office. As we both know Isabel, when that is the case, that is when Parliament begins to unravel quite quickly’ James Forsyth. Also on the podcast, the decorations to the Downing

Andrew Tettenborn

Have we reached peak human rights?

After the Colston debacle, you might be forgiven for having missed the other legal story that broke this week. The European Court of Human Rights has dismissed the complaint in the Ulster ‘gay cake’ case, so the decision in favour of the baker will stand. In case you need reminding, seven years ago a Belfast gay rights activist called Gareth Lee asked Ashers, a high-class bakery, to produce a cake inscribed with the phrase ‘Support Gay Marriage’ for an event he was organising. The bakery owners refused, citing Presbyterian religious scruples, whereupon Lee sued for discrimination. He lost. Our Supreme Court held that he had not been discriminated against because he