Politics

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

Sunday

Nick Tyrone Nick Tyrone

Momentum’s cunning plan would keep the Tories in power forever

Momentum, the Labour campaign group dedicated to keeping Corbynism alive, this week demanded that Keir Starmer commit to introducing a proportional voting system should he win election, replacing the current first past the post model for electing MPs. ‘A popular consensus is building across the labour movement for a change to our first past the post electoral system, which has consistently delivered Tory majorities on a minority of the vote and hands disproportionate power to swing voters in marginal constituencies,’ said Gaya Sriskanthan, Momentum’s co-chair. ‘Momentum will join the charge for PR, as part of a broader commitment to deep democratic change and alongside our strategy of building popular support

Saturday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Have we almost achieved herd immunity?

14 min listen

The government’s vaccination plan is clearly to achieve herd immunity. So why won’t anyone say that? Katy Balls talks to Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth about the disparity between the strategy and the messaging on the government’s current Covid strategy.

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Russian sabre-rattling over Ukraine demands a different response

Russian heavy armour is on the move, and Moscow is making no move to hide it. Is this the prelude to a new upsurge in fighting in south-eastern Ukraine, or especially brutal sabre-rattling? The problem is that we don’t know – and this challenges our usual responses. The war in the Donbas – neither civil war nor straightforward foreign intervention, but a messy and toxic mix of the two – has tended to flare up at the end of winter. As thick spring thaw mud begins to dry, campaign season begins. Politically, it already has. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy, both on its own merits and also, presumably, because his poll

Fiona Mountford

The necessary politics of Promising Young Woman

Last month there occurred an event so culturally seismic that it made, well, a barely perceptible dent on the news headlines. Not just one but two actual women were nominated for the Best Director Award at the Oscars, a category that has for many years now been open to five nominees. It was the first time that two women have ever made it into contention in the same year and, by their audacious presence at the top table, Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman) and Chloé Zhao (Nomadland) have at a stroke increased the number of women the Oscars have ever nominated for this prize from five to seven. (Only one,

Andrew Willshire

Starmer’s Labour fails the ‘broad church’ test

Political parties like to think of themselves as being a ‘broad church’ when tackled about conflicting views among members. It makes it all the more ironic then that it was a visit to a church which exposed a challenging split in the Labour party. Keir Starmer’s trip to Jesus House last week resulted in him apologising for associating with people who believe homosexuality to be a sin. The Labour party can ill-afford to keep excluding groups of voters. The difficulty for Starmer (and for many who wish there to be a viable alternative government) is that left-wing politics is increasingly an ‘AND’ movement. This means that to be welcome on the

David Renton

In defence of lefty lawyers

What have the Conservatives got against left-wing lawyers like me? Boris Johnson told the Commons recently that the government was ‘protect[ing] veterans from vexatious litigation pursued by lefty lawyers‘. It was far from the first time lawyers had been targeted.  The Home Office’s most senior civil servant conceded last summer that officials should not have used the phrase ‘activist lawyers’ in a video blaming them for disrupting the asylum system. But it seemed that the Home Secretary didn’t get the message.  A few weeks later, Priti Patel claimed that ‘removals (of illegal migrants) continue to be frustrated by activist lawyers’. At the Conservatives’ virtual party conference, Patel then vowed to stop ‘endless legal claims’ from

Peter Cardwell

The Good Friday Agreement’s uneasy anniversary

On the 23rd anniversary of the signing of the Belfast Agreement, it’s safe to say celebrations here in Northern Ireland will be muted at best. Over the past ten days, hundreds of rioters wielding bricks, bottles, stones and petrol bombs in Belfast have injured more than 70 police officers, most notably in the west of the city, where working-class loyalists and republicans live cheek by jowl. In terrifying scenes, a bus driver narrowly escaped injury when his vehicle was petrol bombed and left to coast down a street. The trigger for the violence was the decision by Northern Ireland’s public prosecution service not to bring charges against 24 Sinn Féin

Friday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Could Cameron’s Greensill lobbying damage Rishi Sunak?

13 min listen

The Treasury has released text messages that the Chancellor sent to David Cameron, in response to the latter’s repeated lobbying. While Labour is trying to land a blow on Rishi Sunak as a result of this, can they succeed? Cindy Yu talks to Katy Balls and James Kirkup, Spectator contributor and Director of the Social Markets Foundation.

Theo Davies-Lewis

Is Welsh devo-scepticism beginning to unravel?

Calls to abolish the Welsh parliament are nothing new: Wales rejected devolution in 1979 and voted only by the smallest of margins for partial self-government almost 20 years later. In spite of this, the Welsh political establishment have embraced the potential of devolved politics over the last two decades. And so the devo-sceptics have never had a way to deliver their mission. But they didn’t go away. Quite the opposite: abolitionists have been given a new lease of life throughout the last 12 months. They have latched on to the backward perception that the Welsh cannot govern themselves, and have attacked Mark Drakeford and Labour throughout the pandemic for making

Andrew Tettenborn

Europe’s human rights judges are right not to ban compulsory vaccines

If you think public health authorities in England are overbearing, spare a thought for the Czechs. Parents who fail to have children vaccinated face being fined or having their offspring excluded from nurseries. Now, in a landmark ruling, the European Court of Human Rights, has backed that policy. But even critics aghast at the thought of compulsory vaccinations should welcome the court’s verdict. Why? Because human rights judges should not be butting in here. The Czech law bends over backwards to accommodate welfare concerns: vaccinations are free; there are exceptions for good medical reasons; and any vaccine-generated injury is automatically compensated. Yet it was still an obvious target for human rights challenge on

Steerpike Steerpike

Metro’s inglorious twelfth

Oh dear. Britain’s most read newspaper Metro caused something of an overnight storm with the first edition of its front page. Splashing on the easing of lockdown restrictions on Monday, its headline read ‘The Glorious Twelfth’ underneath a dramatic shot of projectiles being thrown at the peace wall in Belfast titled ‘Bad Old Days are Back’ ‘The twelfth’ of course has some powerful resonance in Northern Ireland, to celebrate the triumph of the Glorious Revolution and victory of the Protestants of King William III over the Catholic King James II at the subsequent Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Every 12 July the Orange Order marches its members through streets across the country

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Starmer’s Labour is following the French Socialists into oblivion

Why does Keir Starmer seem set on following the example of the French Socialist party, and leading Labour into electoral oblivion? The sad truth is that it could all have been so different. Back in September 2019, at the height of the Brexit saga, it was obvious that Corbyn’s Labour was increasingly contemptuous of Britain’s white working-classes. But instead of reaching out to Red Wall voters, Starmer has doubled down on this misguided approach. The miserable state of the French left should serve as a warning to Labour that you betray your traditional voters at your peril. In the last few years, France’s Socialist party has imploded, reduced to such penury that they

Daniel DePetris

Biden’s backhanded bid to kill Nord Stream 2

Washington, D.C. is universally known as a town divided, a place where compromise and dialogue are often sacrificed at the altar of competing agendas. But on one issue, at least, there is consensus: the 764-mile Nord Stream 2 pipeline that will pump Russian natural gas into Germany is a project that must be stopped. And the United States needs to use all of the economic and diplomatic tools at its disposal to do it. In both congressional testimony and in meetings with Nato allies, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has reiterated the official U.S. view that Nord Stream 2 is ‘a bad deal’ for Europe, a potential cash windfall

Steerpike Steerpike

The Northern Independence Party’s Hartlepool woes

Oh dear, it all seemed to be going so well for the ‘Northern Independence Party’, a Corbynite breakaway outfit standing in the Hartlepool by-election. Despite appearing to think that Norwich is a northern city, and the pretty embarrassing use of a whippet on its logo, the party had managed to field a former Labour MP in Hartlepool and was receiving some favourable coverage in the left-wing and national media. Unfortunately though there seems to be trouble at t’mill. Last night, the party announced that because it had failed to file the correct forms with the Electoral Commission on time, it would not be on the ballot paper in Hartlepool. Instead,

Andy Shaw

A handy guide to vaccine passports

Soon, we will have to show vaccine passports to pass through covid checkpoints placed outside workplaces, football grounds, theatres and pubs. Until recently, we only needed to flash a passport when we entered a foreign country. Now, it seems, that the outside world will become foreign to us, unless we can prove that we’ve had the jab.  When we leave the house, it will feel like we’re going on a little adventure. Will we be stopped? Has my lateral flow test result registered on my app? Will we all get into the pub? Vaccine checks might add some spice to a Friday night pub crawl. Will some of our mates be

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

A windfall tax would only hurt our weakened economy

The calls for tax hikes is ramping up. Last December the Wealth Tax Commission recommended a ‘one-off’ 5 per cent levy on the assets of Britain’s wealthy to pay for the growing costs of Covid-19. In January Oxfam followed suit, using its yearly inequality report to call for big taxes on wealth and high incomes. Now, it’s the International Monetary Fund’s turn, recommending not only a temporary income tax hike for high earners, but also a windfall tax — that is, a tax on ‘excess profits’ — on businesses that faired well and profited during the pandemic. The concept of wealth taxes on individuals is bad enough. Over the past

Thursday

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Roadmap to nowhere: will life ever return to normal?

38 min listen

Will life ever return to normal? (00:50) Is the government pandering to statue protestors? (14:30) And what’s Prince Harry’s new job? (27:55) With Kate Andrews, the Spectator‘s economics editor; Spectator columnist Matthew Parris; Spectator contributor Alexander Pelling-Bruce; Historic England CEO Duncan Wilson; Dominic Green, deputy editor of the Spectator‘s US edition; and Sam Leith, literary editor of the Spectator. Presented by Lara Prendergast. Produced by Max Jeffery, Cindy Yu and Arsalan Mohammad.

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

The complicated background to the Belfast unrest

15 min listen

Last night violence in Belfast escalated – petrol bombs were thrown, a bus was hijacked and children as young as 13 were reportedly getting involved. Cindy Yu talks to James Forsyth and Katy Balls about why Northern Ireland is experiencing this renewed wave of violence.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Boris will need Labour support for vaccine passports

No prime minister wants to be dependent on the opposition to get the government’s business through the House of Commons. But this is the position Boris Johnson will likely find himself in when it comes to ‘Covid status certificates’, I argue in the magazine this week. Labour are sounding sceptical of vaccine passports at the moment More than 40 Tory MPs have already signed a pledge to oppose vaccine passports, and the government’s majority is 80. ‘It is just down to Starmer. If he whips against, Boris will lose,’ says one of the leaders of the Tory rebellion. The policy has hit a nerve in the Conservative party. Tory opponents

Steerpike Steerpike

John Bercow joins Cameo

Where Farage leads, Westminster follows. Last month it was revealed that the former Brexit party leader had joined paid for video app Cameo, where he charges £75 to record a clip of your choice. Now Steerpike can reveal that former Commons Speaker John Bercow has signed up too and is billing £82.50 for fans of the undersized, but never undersold, onetime parliamentarian. The former Buckingham MP has already recorded his first lengthy clip which demonstrated that since standing down some 16 months ago, the loquacious former Tory has lost none of his verbosity. Bercow is listed on Cameo as replying within the hour with a bio that claims: ‘As Speaker I served