Politics

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

Sunday shows round-up: ‘No peace without European partners’

Jonathan Reynolds: ‘There will be no durable peace [in Ukraine] without European partners’ Keir Starmer will meet European leaders at an emergency summit in Paris next week, after Trump appeared to be sidelining Europe in the Ukraine peace negotiations. On the BBC, Victoria Derbyshire asked Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds why Starmer had called this a ‘once in a generation moment for our national security’. Reynolds said that ‘we should welcome the fact that the US president wants to see an end to the conflict’, but added that the peace process has to include European partners, ‘particularly the Ukrainians’. Reynolds suggested that ‘there is a reasonability’ to the US’s desire for

Elon is America’s Trotsky

I never imagined that I would see a real revolution, at least not in the West. Sure, when I was a student, I fantasised, along with a number of my Edinburgh University lecturers, about a socialist revolution in the UK. Expropriate the expropriators! Ban the bosses! Nationalise everything and abolish money. But, of course, nothing so dramatic ever happens in mature liberal democracies. Except that it just has. Okay, the Trump takeover of the US government is hardly a communist revolution, and Elon Musk is not immediately obvious as a reincarnation of Leon Trotsky, but what is happening right now is revolutionary – just not quite in the way my

What we should learn from the Sandie Peggie case

Across the UK, NHS services are coming under increasing pressure. Hospital waiting lists are too long while A&E departments struggle with patient demand. Nevertheless, at an employment tribunal in Scotland this week, we have learned that health boards like NHS Fife can apparently afford to suspend a senior A&E nurse with 30 years’ experience and an unblemished record for months simply because she dared to question the presence of a transwoman doctor in the ladies changing room. Sandie Peggie’s remonstration with Dr Beth Upton was described as a ‘bullying’ incident by the junior doctor. However that did not deter nurse Peggie, who lodged a claim against both Dr Upton and the

Europe is ruling itself out of the AI race

I recently reported on a major partnership signed by a German tech startup. Or so I thought. Not long after publication, I got a message from the company: ‘You have wrongly said we were founded in Germany. In fact, we were founded in California. Please correct this.’  That’s strange, I thought. Everyone I spoke to sounded pretty German – and indeed the person I emailed was based at the firm’s Berlin offices. But they were adamant: this was a California-based business. The perception is that America has strong innovation, and Europe has strong regulation I did some digging and discovered the company had been registered in Germany at least a

Steerpike

Scottish Labour set for worst election result since devolution

Oh dear. Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar will have been hoping for some positive headlines this weekend, as his party’s 2025 conference looms next week – but it wasn’t to be. New Norstat polling for the Sunday Times, interviewing 1,026 people between 11-14 February, suggests Sarwar’s group is heading for its worst Holyrood election result since devolution. When it rains for the Labour lot, it pours… After Sir Keir Starmer’s army won a landslide victory at the general election, some in the Scottish Labour group harboured high hopes for their chances in the 2026 Holyrood election. Yet the Norstat survey reveals less than a fifth of Scots intend to back

Why the NHS is failing

The NHS is swallowing more money than ever, yet delivering worse results. Now its failings are not only hurting patients, but also weighing down the economy. Employment in healthcare, said the Bank of England in last week’s Monetary Policy Report, has surged since 2019, while productivity has dropped. The Bank downgraded its 2025 growth forecast for the country from 1.5 per cent to 0.75 per cent, blaming the public sector – which has ballooned in size and shrunk in effectiveness – and healthcare in particular. After thirty years working in medicine, I’m not surprised. I have seen a few genuine improvements, but I have also seen the NHS become far

Patrick O'Flynn

Has Nigel Farage missed the immigration vibe shift?

Who in Westminster is ‘right-wing’ on immigration? Which parties are actively propelling the Overton window to the right? If you listened to some mid-wit urban leftists you’d think all three parties jostling to be top of the polls – Reform, Labour and (least successfully) the Tories – are engaged in a mad political arms race on the subject. Clive Lewis, the left-wing Labour MP, this week accused ministers of ‘enabling the mainstreaming of racism’ by putting out a video of people being deported. Certainly, we have travelled a distance from the days when even attempting to create a ‘hostile environment’ for illegal immigrants was deemed unconscionable. But if there is

The Middle East’s language wars

When the Middle East gets me down, I sometimes rewatch the video of Donald Trump announcing the death of ISIS leader ‘Abooo… Bakarrrr… al-Baghdadi’ in 2019. It never fails to make me laugh when Donald declares the terrorist leader ‘died like a dog… a beautiful dog’. It’s funny to many in the West, because Trump’s words seem like crass bluster from a primitive communicator. In fact, he was deadly serious, and was not speaking for our ears alone. In essence, Trump was ‘speaking Arabic’ – not linguistically, but culturally – delivering a calculated message to the Muslim and Arab world. To call a man a dog is a profound insult

James Heale

Why JD Vance’s Munich speech matters

When was the last time a new U.S Vice President gave a truly memorable speech? The post has traditionally been regarded as being ‘not worth a bucket of warm spit’. But JD Vance is now changing all that, after two striking speeches in as many days. First, there were his comments in Paris on the EU and AI. Then, yesterday, he shocked the Munich Security Conference, by lambasting Europe’s record on free speech. Delegates arrived, thinking they would hear Vance address the key question of America’s involvement in European security, after a week of confused messaging by his cabinet colleague Pete Hesgeth. Instead, he delivered a double-barrelled assault on various

Why Labour needs to think about religion

Liberalism, as Michael Lind has argued, is under attack because it cannot deliver the promised self-correcting markets that provide for free and fair economic competition, political renewal and cultural reconciliation. The malign reality is it consolidates winners, economic monopolies, politically entrenched divides, canyons of class, geography, education and cultural echo chambers where opposition is cancelled.  The remedy is to dismantle concentrations of economic, political and cultural power and challenge meritocratic arguments that help reproduce them. This might involve new anti-trust initiatives, attack on sites of monopoly political power, such as in universities, and confront woke culture In terms of ‘postliberalism’, I get the frustrations with a liberalism conditioned by liberal

Gavin Mortimer

JD Vance is right. Europe is in peril

On Wednesday evening, a man threw a fragmentation grenade into a café in Grenoble, leaving 15 people injured. The following day, an Afghan shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ drove his car into a crowd in Munich and injured more than two dozen. The previous week in Brussels, two men strolled through a metro station firing bursts from Kalashnikovs – one of several shootings that day in the Belgian capital, which wounded three people. It is believed that Wednesday’s attack in Grenoble was the latest in the drugs war being fought across the country by rival cartels from North Africa. Last year, I described Grenoble as ‘one of the most dangerous places in

Starmer is in denial about the high cost of defence

It is hard to think of a recent prime minister whose first months in office have seen defence in the headlines more often than Sir Keir Starmer. Even John Major, coming to power in 1990 as a United States-led coalition prepared to eject Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait, was dealing with an expeditionary adventure which soon concluded. Labour has come to power against the backdrop of a grindingly bloody and entrenched war in Ukraine and furious military activity in the Middle East. Starmer had also made choices: he had committed to an immediate strategic defence review. His party’s manifesto had also tried evasively to counter the Conservatives’ pledge of more

Could Ukraine descend into civil war?

US President Donald Trump has announced that peace talks with Putin are set to begin ‘immediately’. While Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says that he has not yet seen a ready US plan for ending the war, it seems that we are moving towards the final stages of the conflict. At some point the guns will fall silent, and the leaders of Ukraine and Russia will sign a peace agreement. But what happens then? Opinions vary, and not everyone is optimistic about how the war will wrap up. In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Polish President Andrzej Duda warned that the war’s end could trigger a surge in international

Bring back shortwave!

Aeschylus is credited first for the time-worn aphorism that in war, truth is the first casualty. But in the next major conflict, truth could find itself joined by virtually all information.  As a society at war, we face becoming blind, deaf and dumb once the balloon goes up. Britain and most western countries have put all their eggs in one large basket: that of digital communications. In a time of global conflict, this could be a risky and painful prospect. The rise of digital communications has been a boon but has also opened society to grave risks through cyber war. Ukraine found this out in the first years of its

Mark Galeotti

How seriously will Putin take Ukraine negotiations?

We have no idea whether Vladimir Putin is serious about peace negotiations with Ukraine. He may simply be going through the motions while enjoying the spectacle of the West engaging in mutual recrimination and performative outrage, or he may genuinely feel there are grounds for some kind of agreement. More likely, given his track record as a tactician rather than a strategist, he is simply seeing what opportunities emerge. Nonetheless, his choices of format, venue and representatives may give us some sense of his intentions. His lead negotiator at abortive talks in Istanbul in 2022, for example, was Vladimir Medinsky. A former minister of culture, his main claim to fame

Donald Trump has blown apart America’s failing status quo

Political science uses anaemic jargon. The ‘Overton Window’ frames all topics that at any given moment are deemed to be politically respectable. It moves. However, since Trump’s inauguration on 20 January we need more robust imagery. Potus47 – Mr Trump – is the captain of an ice-bound ship and he has been dynamiting the pack ice to get it free. Sequenced, linked charges have been exploded to create open water leads. The shock waves have global importance. Tariff threats were one stick of dynamite that detonated, particularly those levied on China to push back its gaming of the era of globalisation since the PRC was admitted to the WTO in 2001.

James Heale

James Heale, Andrew Kenny, Lara Prendergast, Ysenda Maxtone Graham and Nina Power

41 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: James Heale wonders what Margaret Thatcher would make of today’s Conservatives (1:28); Andrew Kenny analyses South Africa’s expropriation act (6:13); Lara Prendergast explores the mystery behind The Spectator’s man in the Middle East, John R Bradley (13:55); Ysenda Maxtone Graham looks at how radio invaded the home (30:13); and, Nina Power reviews two exhibitions looking at different kinds of rage (35:13).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Read: JD Vance’s full speech on the fall of Europe

Here’s a full transcript of the speech that JD Vance gave at the Munich Security Conference this afternoon. One of the things that I wanted to talk about today is, of course, our shared values. And, you know, it’s great to be back in Germany. As you heard earlier, I was here last year as United States senator. I saw Foreign Secretary David Lammy, and joked that both of us last year had different jobs than we have now. But now it’s time for all of our countries, for all of us who have been fortunate enough to be given political power by our respective peoples, to use it wisely

James Heale

The UK’s balancing act over Trump’s ‘Ukraine peace plan’

13 min listen

Leaders from around the world are gathering at the Munich Security Conference, with the UK represented by Foreign Secretary David Lammy. All attention has turned to Ukraine, given statements this week by President Trump that he had spoken to Putin (and later Zelensky) about ending the Russia-Ukraine war. Trump’s statements, for example that NATO membership should be off the table, put him at odds with European allies. The UK signed a joint statement with leaders from France, Germany and others, that Ukraine’s independence and territorial integrity are unconditional. Is the UK walking a tight-rope between the US and Europe? Where does this leave the NATO alliance? And, with a strategic

Steerpike

Vance: Free speech ‘in retreat’ in UK

To Germany, where the Munich Security Conference is in full swing. The city is hosting a number of political bigwigs – although Prime Minister Keir Starmer didn’t make an appearance – including US Vice President JD Vance. Addressing the conference this afternoon, the VP gave a rather punchy speech, first taking aim at Nato before claiming that ‘in Britain and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat’. Crikey. Using the example of abortion buffer zones to describe how the ‘religious liberties’ of Britons were being curbed, the VP stressed his concerns about the role of the state in European countries and the UK. Going on, Vance told the

Feminist coding and Armenian fashion week – my findings from Spaff

The Spectator Project Against Frivolous Funding, or Spaff, has been launched this week to shine a light on government waste. To help track down examples of frivolous spending, The Spectator has created a search engine that allows anyone to look at government transactions, foreign aid projects and procurement contracts all in one place for the first time. If you’re like me, and your eyes light up at the idea of rooting out government profligacy, the search engine is a treat. Here’s what I’ve found so far: Let’s start with the Arts Council, which has burnt through a tremendous amount of taxpayer cash. Particular funding highlights are a feminist creative coding