Politics

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

Friday

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

The green revolution: how technological advancements can level up Britain sustainably

59 min listen

The UK was the first major economy to set a net-zero carbon emission target. But our work is cut out for us: 23 million homes fuelled by natural gas will need upgrading, while nearly 98% of vehicles on UK roads are still powered by petrol or diesel. Reaching net-zero will require big changes, but will also need to sustain our standards of living and quality of life. As we make this transition, and start to recover from the economic damage Covid-19 has inflicted upon the world, we have the opportunity to merge the levelling up agenda with green solutions and advancements. While the government has yet to establish a clear

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Scottish devolution has been tested to destruction

The Scottish Tories are decidedly unenthusiastic about suggestions Westminster devolve further powers to the Scottish Parliament. A proposal to stave off independence by giving Holyrood additional financial powers and control over immigration, contained in a strategy memo leaked earlier this week, has been met with a chilly response from the party. I asked if they would be up for further devolution and got a blunt response from a party spokesman: ‘The Scottish Conservatives would not support more powers to the SNP.’ ‘More powers’ has been the Tory mantra for almost a decade now, despite the original devolution settlement being expansive. David Cameron transferred further powers in 2012, then agreed to

Thursday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Has Rishi Sunak performed a U-turn?

11 min listen

The Chancellor’s new economic package was much more generous than his previous plans, and when asked, Sunak insisted he was just reacting to the changing coronavirus situation. But could these pandemic developments really not be foreseen? Katy Balls talks to Kate Andrews and James Forsyth.

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The Tories’ food poverty problem

Marcus Rashford was just 12 when David Cameron took the Conservatives into government, a fact that makes the bones of most Westminster inhabitants creak. In the ensuing decade, he has learned to be not only a footballer of international renown, but also a measured and effective political campaigner. The Tories, on the other hand, appear to have learned nothing from ten years of dealing with the topic he campaigns on. Rashford’s work on food poverty is unusual, not just because unlike many in his professional field who adopt causes, he has taken a great deal of time to understand it in a way that goes far beyond his personal experience.

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Can Rishi win back the Tory backbenches?

When Rishi Sunak unveiled his winter economy plan last month, the idea was that the new financial support packages would be enough to help struggling businesses through a turbulent period. So the fact that the Chancellor appeared before the Commons today just a few weeks later to announce new measures shows that events are overtaking government plans. With a backlash growing from industries in tier two over the limited financial support available, Sunak has announced new support for workers hit by coronavirus restrictions.  The biggest change is to the job support scheme, which will replace the furlough scheme when it winds down at the end of the month. The scheme is to

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Sunak upgrades his jobs support scheme

Chancellor Rishi Sunak has upgraded the jobs support scheme with a more generous package. The new measures, which will replace furlough on 1 November, will see eligible businesses pay just 5 per cent of their employee’s non-working hours (originally 33 per cent), with the government picking up the huge bulk of the tab once again. Where employees would have needed to work 33 per cent of their hours to be eligible for the scheme, this has now dropped to 20 per cent — the equivalent of one day out of the working week. The updated job support scheme sticks with the principle of the original plan: your employees have to

Matthew Lynn

Rishi Sunak needs to start planning for the post-Covid economy

More help for bars and restaurants. Grants for businesses that are forced to close. Additional funding for the self-employed. The Chancellor Rishi Sunak has started shaking the magic money tree again, promising extra assistance to keep the economy alive during a second wave of Covid-19. There is a problem, however, and as the Chancellor runs through rescue package after rescue package it is becoming increasingly apparent. While Sunak is very good at coming up with wheezes to get through the next few weeks there isn’t yet much sign of a plan for a post-Covid economy – and that is increasingly what is needed. The problem is not the measures themselves.

Nick Tyrone Nick Tyrone

Boris Johnson is fighting on too many fronts

When Boris ran to become leader of the Conservative party – and again when he campaigned in December’s general election – he was pitched by his supporters as a unifier. Boris was going to get Brexit done and then lead the country into a new era – the spats of the previous half a decade consigned to history’s dustbin. Unfortunately for Boris and indeed everyone else in Britain, that’s not the way things have worked out. Right from the start, Johnson’s premiership has been marked by conflict. Only a few weeks in, he removed the whip from a host of Tory MPs, including the former Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: A Manchester stand-off, a Presidential showdown and a Brexit culture clash

Home After ten days spent trying to persuade Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, to accede to the city entering Tier 3 (which entails the closing of pubs and betting shops), Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, announced that it would happen anyway, from 23 October. ‘I am deeply sorry,’ he said. Manchester had wanted £65 million in support first. Liverpool complained that it was not allowed to keep gyms open when Lancashire was. The nine million people of London languished in Tier 2, forbidden to meet anyone at home or in a pub, except if they pretended it was a business meeting. Scotland hatched plans for its own tiers.

The Spectator

End the Sage secrecy

At the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis it was easy to see why the Prime Minister was so keen to be seen to ‘follow the science’. He had a pandemic plan, designed by past governments, to be guided by the medical facts and expert judgment. There was to be no role for politics. He held press briefings at which he was flanked by the chief medical officer and chief scientific officer, armed with charts and graphs, making it known that everything he did hinged on their advice. At first, we were not even allowed to know the identity of the 50 men and women who sit on the Scientific Advisory

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Boris Johnson’s high-risk Brexit strategy

There’s a reason why No. 10 is always so inclined to ratchet up the tension in any given scenario. Downing Street’s staff, and particularly the Vote Leave alumni, believe that one of their strengths is that in high-pressure situations, they stay calm while others panic. This confidence is not totally misplaced. Last autumn, Boris Johnson and his aides kept their nerve better than any other group in British politics — the result was a decisive parliamentary majority. Last October, they suggested Brexit talks were over and no deal was inevitable. They then briefed out unprecedented levels of detail from a Boris Johnson-Angela Merkel phone call before eventually doing a deal.

Carlo Rovelli

Winston Churchill’s remarkable love of science

Churchill was the first British prime minister to appoint a scientific adviser, as early as the 1940s. He had regular meetings with scientists such as Bernard Lovell, the father of radioastronomy, and loved talking with them. He promoted, with public funds research, telescopes and the laboratories where some of the most significant developments of the postwar period first came to light, from molecular genetics to crystallography using X-rays. During the war itself, the decisive British support for research, encouraged by him, led to the development of radar and cryptography, and played a crucial role in the success of military operations. Churchill himself had a scientific grounding that was hardly extensive

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Why No. 10 keeps upping the ante on Brexit

The European Council conclusions issued last Thursday were a misstep by the European Union. It is positively Carthaginian to think that in a negotiation all the concessions have to come from one side. As I say in the magazine this week, No. 10 has seized on this overreach to push, not only for concessions on the process — Michel Barnier has offered to ‘intensify’ the talks and start working on a legal text, a long-time British ask — but also a recognition that both sides will have to compromise. The Prime Minister’s appetite for risk is greater than most of his cabinet ministers Barnier offered that in a speech to

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Sir Keir Starmer let himself down at PMQs

It was Sir Tier Starmer at PMQs today. Labour’s leader bounced into the Chamber with his bonce brimful of data about the three tier restrictions. But it was all irrelevant chaff. Both leaders have broadly agreed to treat the UK population as lab-rats. The only difference is how the scurrying rodents will be managed. Boris says his flexible method will curb the bug without clobbering the economy. Sir Keir wants a jackboot lockdown, amounting to a national curfew, starting this Friday. What Sir Keir can’t predict is what will happen if his circuit-breaker doesn’t break the circuit. Will he try to smash it again? If so, how many times before

Matthew Lynn

A circuit breaker would break the economy

More jobs will be lost in the long run. Businesses will go under. And government debt will soar even higher. Labour’s Shadow Chancellor Anneliese Dodds is pushing the argument that a circuit breaker — that is a short, sharp national lockdown — will be cheaper in the long run. It will keep the virus under control, and therefore enable the economy to bounce back quicker. Channelling her inner Gordon Brown, she has even come up with a very precise figure for that. Apparently, not having a circuit breaker will cost us £110 billion. But hold on. Even leaving aside the point that precise estimates should always make us suspicious —

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Angela Rayner accused of calling Tory MP ‘scum’

Angela Rayner was accused of some extraordinary behaviour in the Commons just now. The Labour deputy, unhappy with something Conservative MP Chris Clarkson said, allegedly decided to shout the word ‘scum’ across the chamber floor. Deputy Speaker Eleanor Laing appeared none too impressed… Rayner quickly shot back, denying that she used the phrase. 

John Connolly John Connolly

Can Starmer capitalise on Boris’s lockdown woes?

11 min listen

Keir Starmer seemed unable to land a definitive blow on Boris Johnson in PMQs this afternoon, after the government imposed a tier three lockdown in Manchester. Will the Labour leader be able to capitalise on their lockdown woes? John Connolly speaks to James Forsyth and Katy Balls.

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Why is the UK copying the EU’s failed agricultural policy?

With the UK looking likely to exit transition in December without a trade deal, there has been plenty of coverage of what life outside the bloc will mean for Britain. There has been rather less coverage of what we have avoided by virtue of having left the EU. Yesterday came one of the first big EU agreements to which the UK has not been party: the latest reform of the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). In typical fashion, it resulted in a fudge engineered by powerful lobbyists and which will guarantee vast sums of public money going to waste. The whole point of the latest round of CAP reform was that it was

Calvin Robinson

Kemi Badenoch is right to take on Critical Race Theory

Schools have a responsibility to maintain political neutrality. The Education Act (1996) states that governors and head teachers have a duty to secure balanced treatment of political ideas. The Teachers’ Standards says ‘teachers uphold public trust in the profession and maintain high standards of ethics and behaviour, within and outside school, by ensuring that personal beliefs are not expressed in ways which exploit pupils’ vulnerability or might lead them to break the law.’ Why, then, have schools been getting away with teaching highly contested political ideas as if they are accepted facts? The idea of ‘white privilege’, for example, is the principal element of Critical Race Theory, which teaches that

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Devolutionary theory: How Westminster is killing the Union

Robert Conquest’s third law (which may not have been his third law) says that the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation is most easily explained if one assumes it has been captured by enemy secret agents. This maxim often comes to mind when I read about the UK government’s latest wheeze to ‘save the Union’. Ministers’ new ideas are invariably the same idea they’ve been having for a decade now: devolution has failed, let’s have more of it. The Tories have already transferred more powers to Holyrood twice, in 2012 and 2016, and both times we were assured that doing so would subdue the separatists. And that was the last we heard