Politics

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

Tuesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Macron’s bizarre Élysée heavy metal gig

It has been a tough few years for Emmanuel Macron. Elected on a tidal wave of optimism in 2017, the famously fickle French public has since soured towards the country’s youngest ever president. The ‘yellow vest’ movement, continued Islamist extremism and now the Covid pandemic have all damaged Macron’s approval ratings, which have hovered around the -20 mark for the past 12 months. The French vaccine roll out has been plagued with difficulties – not helped by Macron’s own jibes at the ‘quasi-ineffective’ Oxford jab – while last month an open letter was signed by a group of 20 retired generals and service personnel warning of ‘civil war’ over concessions to Islamism.  So ahead of the

Andrew McQuillan

Could Sinn Fein become the largest party in Northern Ireland?

In 2022, a year after its centenary, there is the chance that Northern Ireland could end up with a nationalist, republican, Sinn Fein First Minister. The latest survey of popular opinion in the province, polled by LucidTalk, currently has Sinn Fein as the largest party on 25 per cent, nine points clear of the DUP who have slumped to 16 per cent – from around 30 per cent at the 2019 Westminster election. Meanwhile, there has been a slight upswing in the performance of the Ulster Unionists and Traditional Unionist Voice. The middle ground Alliance party are on the same level as the DUP, while the moderate SDLP appear to

Portia Berry-Kilby

The rise of vaccine virtue-signalling

I’ve bemoaned the ‘no Tories please’ line on dating profiles many a time. Closed-minded and over-used, it’s a banal way for university freshers to virtue signal their wokeness. It’s a phase many go through, and, more’s the pity, do not all grow out of. But as of late, a new, equally lacklustre profile-essential has emerged — one’s Covid vaccine record. Across the pond in the USA, where I’m currently based, twenty-somethings seem set on flaunting their team Pfizer, Moderna, or one-shot Johnson & Johnson credentials. And this begs the question of why? Because, to be quite honest, few things would make me swipe left faster. I could do without your

Monday

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Tory MP savages ‘rotten’ BBC

It has been a bruising afternoon for the BBC in the House of Commons. An urgent question was granted on the findings of the Dyson report into the Martin Bashir affair and the subsequent cover up of how Panorama obtained its Princess Diana interview in 1995. Tory MP after Tory MP has queued up to lambast the Beeb for its failings. Memorable moments included John Redwood asking, ‘How can someone who supports Brexit, believes in the Union and loves England be persuaded that the BBC’s views of public service broadcasting in future be fair to their views?’ and Iain Duncan Smith calling for BBC bosses and Bashir to be referred to the

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

In praise of the Batley binmen

If you need someone to support your right to freedom of speech, forget the teaching unions. Don’t look to the commentariat. And don’t even bother with the Labour party, many of whose younger, angrier members will often be found in the ranks of cancel-culture mobs calling for someone or other to be erased from polite society for having blasphemed against a trendy new orthodoxy. No, it’s the binmen you want to turn to. It’s the nation’s fine refuse collectors who will back you up when your liberty to speak is being pummelled. Consider the case of the Batley Grammar schoolteacher who was suspended for showing his pupils an image of

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Britain is right to punish Belarus for its plane hijacking

Belarus forcing down a civilian airliner flying between two EU, and Nato, capitals is a grave threat to the international order. If any flight crossing the airspace of an autocratic regime is vulnerable to such an attack, the world begins to look a very different ­– and more dangerous – place. The challenge to the free world now is to hit Minsk with such a set of punishments that it doesn’t dare repeat its action and that no other autocratic country tries to pull the same trick. Dominic Raab has just announced in the Commons that Belavia, the Belarusian national carrier, has had its operating license suspended, meanings its flights

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

What will Dominic Cummings say?

10 min listen

When Dominic Cummings appears in front of a parliamentary committee on Wednesday, the former aide is expected to attack Whitehall’s institutional structure, a lack of government transparency in the pandemic, and the Prime Minister himself. In a still growing Twitter thread, the former aide has laid out his critique of how the government handled Covid-19. He says herd immunity was ‘literally the official plan’ in March, and that a detailed response was ‘bodged amid total & utter chaos.’ But how much damage can he do the PM? The Conservatives are just coming out of a successful local election campaign, the country is on course for social restrictions to end on

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Labour MP’s conspiracy theory about Boris Johnson’s illness

Valerie Vaz’s month goes from bad to worse. The Labour MP was one of just two frontbenchers sacked by Keir Starmer a fortnight ago in the wake of the party’s Hartlepool defeat. The surprise move prompted political journalists to joke that sacking Vaz as shadow leader of the House had been just the response red wall voters were demanding. But Vaz appears to have done her career little good today after a bizarre moment on Politics Live this afternoon. The MP decided that this was the moment to speculate about the state of Boris Johnson’s health during his Covid fight at the beginning of April 2020, telling baffled panelists that the Prime Minister wasn’t as ill in intensive

Gray Sergeant

Beijing’s plan to pick the next Dalai Lama

Imagine for a moment that Cuba picked the next Pope. That is the scenario which Lobsang Sangay, the then-Sikyong (the Tibetan government-in-exile’s head of state), asked the world to consider several years ago in light of growing concerns that the Chinese Communist party (CCP) would seek to select the next Dalai Lama. Now such a possibility – that Beijing will attempt to impose their own man at the top of Tibetan Buddhism – seems increasingly plausible. Last week, China’s State Council issued a white paper on Tibet to mark 70 years since the signing of the Seventeen Point Agreement, which incorporated Tibet into the People’s Republic of China. The title

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Tala Halawa and the progressive media’s anti-Semitism blindspot

The tale of Tala Halawa has an ever-mounting horror to it: each sentence is more disturbing than the last. First we learn that this BBC journalist proclaimed during the 2014 Israel-Gaza war that ‘Israel is more Nazi than Hitler’ and that ‘Hitler was right’. Then we encounter her assertion that ‘ur media is controlled by ur zionist government’ and her sharing on Facebook the same image that saw MP Naz Shah suspended from the Labour Party in 2016, an image that advocates the ‘transportation’ of Israel to the United States to end ‘foreign interference’ in the Middle East. Next up is a graphic Halawa tweeted showing a child being burned

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Covid sufferers aren’t the only victims of the pandemic

Covid deaths are down to a trickle, but what about the indirect consequences of the pandemic: deaths that come from people failing to access timely medical treatment for other conditions? Cancer Research UK has estimated what it believes to be the backlog from disturbance to cancer services and the reluctance of some people to seek medical advice over the past year. Between the start of the pandemic and March of this year, it calculates, 45,000 fewer people started cancer treatment than would have been expected without a pandemic. Looking specifically at cancer screening programmes it estimates that 9,200 fewer people started cancer treatment after referrals from these tests. That was

Steerpike Steerpike

Are MPs set to lose their favourite bar?

Word reaches Steerpike of a dastardly plot to rob MPs of their favourite watering hole. The Strangers’ Bar is located in the heart of the Palace of Westminster and has been plying honourable members with subsidised booze for generations. But now parliamentary bosses are feared to be considering the closure or dramatic overhaul of Strangers, under the pretext of Covid.  It follows a string of scandals at the establishment including the infamous Eric Joyce assault in 2012, with one Westminster regular muttering to Mr S darkly that ‘a faction of men in tights want to kill it.’ Other boozers to have bitten the dust in recent years include Bellamy’s and Annie’s Bar off central lobby

Katy Balls Katy Balls

What will Cummings say?

As the government puts the final touches to its social distancing review and Foreign Office ministers ponder the best response to the situation in Belarus, it’s a scheduled select committee appearance that is the subject of the most animated chatter in Westminster. Dominic Cummings is due to give evidence before the joint health and science committee inquiry into the government’s Covid response. Boris Johnson’s relationship with his senior aide has dramatically worsened since Cummings left government The session — which is due on Wednesday from 9.30 a.m. to 1 p.m. (Cummings has said he is happy to stay longer) — has been causing nerves in 10 Downing Street for some

Steerpike Steerpike

SNP councillor on Eurovision: ‘We hate the UK too’

After the UK finished bottom of Eurovision on Saturday, you might have thought British hopeful James Newman was the big loser of the night. But step forward, Rhiannon Spear, SNP Greater Pollok representative, who managed to embarrass her newly re-elected party with a late night display of classlessness. The SNP’s national women’s convenor posted: ‘It’s ok Europe we hate the United Kingdom too. Love, Scotland.’ Spear also serves as chair of Glasgow City Council’s education committee, tasked with the development of school curricula and educational attainment of children – what an example she sets them. Predictably her tweet sparked a social media backlash, with Scottish Conservative chief whip Stephen Kerr leading the charger over her

Sunday

Steerpike Steerpike

BBC journalist: ‘Hitler was right’

It has not been a happy week for the BBC. The corporation has spent the last four days grappling with the fall out from Lord Dyson’s damning report into the Martin Bashir affair and Prince William’s angry response. Now a fresh controversy has blown up in the BBC Monitoring unit. Digital journalist Tala Halawa has been closely involved in the Beeb’s recent coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict, providing additional reporting in a piece on children who have died and fronting a video about the model Bella Hadid’s views on the issue. Halawa is the Palestine Specialist in BBC Monitoring, specialising in Palestinian affairs and reporting for BBC services such as the Arabic

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: herd immunity was ‘not at all’ government policy

Priti Patel: The BBC’s reputation ‘has been compromised’ Today’s political shows were dominated by the fallout from the Dyson inquiry into the BBC and its relationship with the journalist Martin Bashir. The findings of Lord Dyson’s report have already seen Tony Hall, the BBC’s former director-general, resign his post as chair of the National Gallery. The Home Secretary, Priti Patel, spoke to Trevor Philips – who will be replacing Sophy Ridge while she is on maternity leave – about the issue: PP: The BBC itself – one of our great institutions – its reputation has been compromised… and they themselves will have to reflect upon the report, and spend a

John Ferry John Ferry

Scotland’s next constitutional fight won’t be over a referendum

Get ready for a constitutional rammy during the first half of this, the sixth session of the Scottish parliament. Just don’t expect it to be over a second independence referendum. Recent polling shows momentum has moved back in favour of those wishing to remain in the UK, while signals from the public also consistently suggest a lack of appetite for another referendum anytime soon. Nicola Sturgeon knows this, which means the phoney war over a repeat plebiscite will likely trundle on without bringing any great change to the country. The real action is elsewhere. Specifically, the upcoming review of the Fiscal Framework Agreement, which is set to be fraught and,

Saturday

Steerpike Steerpike

Can Goodwill defeat the Brady bunch?

There have been few constants in British politics this past decade but Sir Graham Brady has been one of them. Elected chairman of the 1922 committee of backbench Tory MPs in 2010, Brady has served continually ever since – barring a brief moment of madness to consider a leadership bid back in the crazy days of 2019. Tough, independently-minded, experienced – he is to many what a 1922 chair should be. But now Brady faces a challenge in the form of onetime immigration minister Robert Goodwill. The latter is seen as a more congenial figure to some, in contrast to Brady’s very public past interventions on Europe, HS2, the badger

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

What could a reformed BBC look like?

14 min listen

Politicians have buttressed Prince William and Prince Harry’s criticisms of the BBC in the wake of the Dyson report, which detailed Martin Bashir’s forgeries to get access to Princess Diana, and the BBC cover up which ensued. Cindy Yu talks to James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman about the renewed scrutiny on the broadcaster.

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Boris’s Tory enemies don’t know how lucky they are

It is often said that most Conservative MPs have a highly ‘transactional’ relationship with Boris Johnson. The inference is that in an ideal world they would not choose to be led by someone they regard as having far too many foibles and shortcomings and will only tolerate him being PM while he continues to be a winner. The Times political commentator Rachel Sylvester set this out fluently during an appearance on Channel 4 News at the height of the ‘curtaingate’ affair last month. ‘The danger for Boris Johnson is if MPs feel he is no longer a winner they will turn on him,’ she said, adding that she had been