Politics

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

Monday

James Heale James Heale

Jimmy Carter offered dignity in failure

He was the peanut farmer from Georgia who rose to become the leader of the free world. Jimmy Carter, who has died at the age of 100, served as president of the United States from 1977 to 1981. While his term in office was not a success, his post-presidency – the longest in American history – was unparalleled in its public service. Uniquely among America’s modern leaders, he will be remembered more for what he did after the White House than what he did in it. Carter’s long life was characterised by service: service to country as a decorated lieutenant in the US navy just after world war two, service

Steerpike Steerpike

The ten most-read Steerpikes of 2024

Farewell 2024. It’s certainly been an eventful year. Elections across the globe have taken up much of the newscycle, leaving Britain with a new Labour Prime Minister and the US seeing President Trump return for a second term. The Russian invasion of Ukraine surpassed its 1000th day, while conflict in Gaza continues to rage. Scotland saw her third First Minister in the space of 18 months, while former Dear Leader Nicola Sturgeon’s husband was charged with embezzlement of SNP funds. Quelle surprise, the Nats have had a pretty poor year yet again – with their iPad scandal, taxpayer-funded limo trips and ongoing police probe all making headlines. And the BBC

Nick Boles

Keir Starmer, conservative prime minister?

According to Keir Starmer’s critics, the Prime Minister has spent his first six months in office re-enacting Henry VIII’s plunder of the monasteries, Stalin’s liquidation of the kulaks and Herod’s slaughter of the firstborn. But while there may be good grounds to oppose the imposition of VAT on private school fees, the extension of inheritance tax to farmland and means testing of pensioners’ winter fuel allowance, revolutionary acts of Marxist Leninism they are not. The hyperbolic reporting of these modest adjustments to a few taxes and benefits affecting the better off has hidden a more surprising truth about the UK’s first Labour government for fourteen years: the soft left human rights lawyer from

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Democracy is rotting in Europe

Last Friday, America announced sanctions against Bidzina Ivanishvili, a Georgian tycoon who made his fortune in Russia in the 1990s. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he was imposing the punishment because Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream party was ‘undermining the democratic and Euro-Atlantic future of Georgia for the benefit of the Russian Federation’. Georgian Dream triumphed in October’s parliamentary elections and on Sunday a new president, allied to the party, was sworn in as street protests take place in Tbilisi. Might the ‘lawfare’ that eliminated Georgescu from Romania’s presidential election also be deployed against Marine Le Pen this spring? The West claims that it was not a free and fair election,

David Butterfield

Most-read 2024: Decline and fall – how university education became infantilised

We’re closing 2024 by republishing our five most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 2: David Butterfield’s cover piece from October on the decline of British universities. Last month, after 21 years studying and teaching Classics at the University of Cambridge, I resigned. I loved my job. And it’s precisely because I loved the job I was paid to do, and because I believe so firmly in preserving the excellence of higher education, in Britain and beyond, that I have left. When I arrived in Cambridge two decades ago, giants were still walking the earth. Students could attend any lecture, at any level, in any department; graduate and research seminars

Sunday

Steerpike Steerpike

Has 2024 been the BBC’s worst year yet?

It’s certainly been an eventful year for Britain, what with the snap election, a change in government and yet another new Tory leader. But 2024’s drama hasn’t only been political. The UK media landscape has also faced a number of challenges this year – with our public service broadcaster very often making the news rather than, um, breaking it. This year, the Beeb has come under fire over dodgy presenters, the accuracy of its own verification service and what it does and does not choose to report. Mr S has gathered some of the most memorable BBC slip-ups from the last 12 months to remind readers just how far the

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Kemi Badenoch’s attacks on Farage are backfiring spectacularly

Throughout the last parliament, Labour leader Keir Starmer and Lib Dem leader Ed Davey did not have a bad word to say about each other. In fact, they hardly even acknowledged the existence of each other’s parties. Neither did they shake hands on a formal Lab-Lib electoral pact. They just both kept pounding away at the Conservative government’s weak spots and allowed it all to happen organically. Anti-Tory voters in every constituency congregated behind the ‘progressive’ party best placed to oust sitting Conservative MPs. It worked like a dream for both. Right now Farage is having huge fun baiting Tory leader Kemi Badenoch at every possible turn and it is

Katy Balls Katy Balls

This latest mega poll is a problem for Badenoch and Farage

The next election may not be expected for another four years but that won’t stop politicos speculating as to what would happen were a vote called now. Less than six months after Keir Starmer’s landslide election victory, the Sunday Times has published a mega poll which finds that if an election was held today, Keir Starmer would lose his majority and just under 200 seats. However, Labour would still be the largest party with 228 seats – as the vote on the right would split between the Conservatives and Reform. The Tories would be in second place – six seats behind Labour on 222 seats. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage’s Reform party

Nigel Jones

Elon Musk’s AfD article has rocked German politics

Fresh from explosively disrupting the politics of the US and Britain, Elon Musk has now turned his attention to Germany. The world’s richest man has written an op-ed in the newspaper Die Welt, endorsing the hard-right populist AfD party, which he has called ‘Germany’s last faint hope’. By doing so, Musk has smashed the carefully constructed firewall which Germany’s old ruling centre-right and centre-left parties had erected against the rapidly rising AfD. The older parties have effectively refused to cooperate with it or join the AfD in local government coalitions. Germany’s establishment will not stem the rise of the right by banning the AfD or branding them as neo-Nazis With Germany

Francis Pike

We should support Donald Trump’s attempt to buy Greenland

Over Christmas, president-elect Donald Trump wrote on his Truth Social site that: ‘For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the world, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.’ Trump’s overture, while highly unwelcome to the Danes, is not a new idea. He made the proposal first in 2019. When Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen described the idea as ‘absurd’ and said, ‘Thankfully, the time where you buy and sell other countries and populations is over. Let’s leave it there’, Trump promptly cancelled his visit to Copenhagen. Frederiksen has been equally dismissive this time round. But the main response has come from

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Does Starmer really think quangos will boost economic growth?

If you wanted some ideas for how to boost economic growth, would you ask the people who run businesses or the quangos which regulate them? No prizes for guessing which of them Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves and Jonathan Reynolds have plumped for. Yes, they really do seem to think that government regulators have some useful ideas for how to boost growth. They have written a jointly-signed letter to the heads of Ofwat, the Environment Agency, the Financial Conduct Authority and healthcare regulators asking them for advice as to how the government might lighten regulation and so make the country richer. You might as well ask a bunch of turkeys what

Julius Strauss

Can Ukraine survive the coming of Donald Trump?

On the eastern marches of Europe, after nearly three years of slugging it out with its larger, more powerful neighbour for control of a string of unlovely mining towns, Ukraine is approaching exhaustion. Kyiv, which has led a fierce and unexpectedly successful defence of its realm, is contending with a waning supply of weapons, ammunition and money. Worse still, president Volodymyr Zelensky’s war effort is beginning to run out of fighting men. All men aged 25 and over – with the exception of those deemed critical to the war effort, or who have fled, gone into hiding or bribed their way out of the draft – have been dispatched east

Michael Murphy

Ireland has a serious case of ‘keffiyeh brain’

As Irish households glowed with lights and festive cheer ahead of Christmas day, the Taoiseach of Ireland made time for a cordial call with Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Authority. Simon Harris assured Abbas that the plight of Gazans weighed heavily on Irish minds, reaffirming his country’s ‘unbreakable’ support.  ‘Ireland once again calls for a lasting ceasefire in Gaza,’ read a statement from Harris’s office. ‘Despite the humanitarian catastrophe and unconscionable loss of life in 2024, peace fuelled by a two-state solution must be the goal of the world community in 2025.’ No doubt, Harris saw the conversation as a diplomatic win. Dublin nodded vaguely to ceasefires and

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Most-read 2024: How did Wolf Hall escape the attentions of the BBC’s diversity commissars?

We’re closing 2024 by republishing our five most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 3: James Delingpole’s article from November on the new BBC Wolf Hall. Wolf Hall is one of the few remaining jewels in the BBC’s tarnished crown. Presumably that’s why it was allowed to get off relatively lightly from the attentions of the Beeb’s resident diversity commissars. It seemed to strike an acceptable balance between verifiable historical incident and dramatic licence Yes, I recognise that I may be a terrible reactionary, completely out of tune with the times. But I think I speak for quite a few of us when I say that I was grateful in the

Saturday

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Putin’s Azerbaijan apology will have bruised his ego

Has Vladimir Putin been forced to eat humble pie? Earlier today, the Russian president felt compelled to issue an apology – of sorts – after an Azerbaijan Airlines plane crashed in Kazakhstan on 25 December, killing 38 of the 67 passengers on board. The plane had been travelling from the Azeri capital Baku to Grozny, in the Russian region of Chechnya, when it was hit by air defence systems, forcing it to crash-land hundreds of miles off course in neighbouring Kazakhstan. Speaking on the phone to the Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev, Putin called the crash a ‘tragic incident’ and expressed his condolences to the injured and families of the victims.

Steerpike Steerpike

Brits have bleak outlook for 2025

Dear oh dear. The Labour lot have not fared well in opinion polling this year and More in Common’s New Year poll has certainly not bucked that trend. The new survey, which quizzed more than 2,400 people, reveals that half of Brits believe 2025 will be worse than 2024 – while less than a quarter think it will be better. It’s yet more bad news for Starmer’s army… The new polling suggests that nearly 20 per cent of people are concerned next year will be ‘much worse’ than the last 12 months – while a quarter believe 2025 will remain the same. Even a third of Labour voters are convinced

Eliot Wilson

Keir Starmer could still walk away from the Chagos deal

When Sir Keir Starmer announced in October that he had reached an agreement with Mauritius to transfer sovereignty of the Chagos archipelago, he was met with fierce and sustained criticism. The deal essentially surrendered the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), one of the 14 remaining overseas territories, to the government of Mauritius, while salvaging a 99-year lease on the island of Diego Garcia, home to a strategically vital joint UK/US military and naval base. But the Prime Minister has unexpectedly been handed an opportunity to row back on this agreement. The question is, will he take it? When the agreement was announced, opponents argued that the Prime Minister had endangered

Miriam Cates

Taboos around incest are there for a reason

Since Tory MP Richard Holden called for first-cousin marriage to be banned in the UK earlier this month, few people have been prepared to speak in favour of the practice. While not unheard of among white British families, cousin marriage is rare and viewed as rather odd. So, when writer Charles Amos agreed to speak to GB News in defence of such relationships, we welcomed the opportunity for debate. The interview with Andrew Pierce and myself took an unexpected turn when, having argued against a ban on cousin marriage on the grounds that the state should not interfere in such matters, I asked Amos if this view extended to sibling marriage.

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

2024: Cindy Yu, Michael Simmons, Angus Colwell, Igor Toronyi-Lalic, Mary Wakefield, Fraser Nelson and Michael Gove

38 min listen

On this week’s 2024 Out Loud: Cindy Yu examined Chinese work ethic (1:13); Michael Simmons declared his love of the doner kebab (6:28); Angus Colwell reported from Israel in July (9:27); Igor Toronyi-Lalic explained the inspiration behind the cinema of Marguerite Duras (14:41); Mary Wakefield analysed the disturbing truth of the Pelicot case (20:38); Fraser Nelson signed off as editor of The Spectator (27:01); and Michael Gove revealed his thoughts as he sat down at the editor’s desk (33:15).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Francis Pike

How the Black Death helped bring prosperity to Europe

As the media alarms us about an approaching ‘quad-demic’ of diseases this winter (Covid-19, Flu, RSV, Norovirus) it is a timely moment to think about the travails of our mediaeval forebears. Their common scourges were typhus, smallpox, tuberculosis, anthrax, scabies and syphilis – all untreatable at the time. And then there was the plague. The plague tore up the foundations of society and paved the way for dramatic economic, political and social change Arriving at the ports of Venice, Pisa and Marseilles in 1347, shipboard rats carrying the Yersinia Pestis bacterium disbursed the bubonic plague in Europe. Originally it is thought that plague was brought by Genoese ships from their