Politics

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

Thursday

27 Feb 2025

Steerpike

BBC apologises for ‘serious flaws’ in Gaza documentary

The Beeb is better at becoming the news than making it these days. The last fortnight has seen the corporation come under fire after a rather controversial Gaza documentary – whose child narrator was, er, the son of a Hamas minister – was first released and then pulled from streaming services. Now Steerpike has had sight of a rather interesting email sent by the corporation’s CEO, Deborah Turness, about the whole affair… Writing to staff about the doc, titled ‘Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone’, Turness first admitted that these were ‘turbulent times’ for the corporation, before tacitly reminding her staff that when it comes to news stories, ‘we have

Steerpike

Reform announce Olympic gold medallist as mayoral candidate

As Prime Minister Keir Starmer is making headlines stateside after his big talk with Donald Trump, Nigel Farage is busy making news of his own. The Reform UK leader has tonight announced that Olympic boxer Luke Campbell will be the party’s candidate to become the first elected mayor for Hull and East Yorkshire. ‘He’s a knock-out candidate!’ declared Farage. Indeed. The big unveiling received whoops and cheers from the Reform supporters packing out Hull’s Connexin Live arena this evening. Hull-born Campbell – who took home the gold medal at the 2012 Olympics – spoke to the crowd about his upbringing in the area, his career and his new hope to

Katy Balls

Starmer’s Trump charm offensive gets underway

The Trump charm offensive has begun. Keir Starmer has met with Donald Trump in the Oval Office as his first White House visit gets underway. What was initially billed as a short welcome before officially talks turned into a 30-minute question and answer session with the travelling press pack. It made for a wide-ranging discussion as the US president spoke on everything from the future of Ukraine to free speech, the Chagos islands and the positives of the Prime Minister’s wife. In a sign that Starmer’s charm offensive is paying off, the conversation between the two leaders was largely warm. Trump described the Labour leader as a ‘special man’ and

Freddy Gray

The case for climate humanism

28 min listen

Robert Bryce, an energy expert and author of The Question of Power, discusses the state of global energy, electric vehicles, and government policies both in the UK and America. Freddy and Robert look at how government subsidies and mandates have driven automakers toward unprofitable EV production, what is energy humanism, and how foreign interference has shaped climate policies over the past decade.

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The true meaning of Trump’s AI Gaza video

Donald Trump’s AI-generated vision of Gaza – complete with golden statues of himself, bearded belly dancers, and a triumphant song declaring, ‘Trump Gaza, number one!’ – landed like a slap across the face of polite Western discourse. The reactions were swift and predictable. Outraged commentators called it tasteless, delusional, the fever dream of a man obsessed with his own mythology. Newspapers mocked its crudeness, its cartoonish spectacle, its lack of realism. Yet, in all the ridicule, something crucial was missed. This wasn’t just Trump being Trump. This was Trump speaking Arabic again – not linguistically, but in the deeply symbolic, visually driven language of Middle Eastern power. The video was not a policy

Lucy Dunn

Medical students are being let down

It’s allocation day for junior doctor jobs. Soon-to-be medical graduates across the UK find out what deanery they will work in upon finishing university. While it should be an exciting time for Britain’s future medics, recent changes to the system have sparked outrage as students hoping to work close to friends and family find out they have been sent halfway across the country instead. Criticism has long been directed at the way in which foundation programme jobs have been dished out. Foundation years 1 and 2 provide compulsory training to graduating doctors, completion of which leaves one a fully registered medic and able to progress further into training. You might

Cindy Yu

Can Starmer charm Trump?

12 min listen

Keir Starmer is in D.C. for what will probably be one of the most important bilateral meetings of his premiership. The goal is to charm Trump and secure some guarantees for Ukraine’s security after a negotiated peace in the war. Can he succeed? Cindy Yu talks to James Heale and Peter Quentin, Rusi Associate Fellow and former policy adviser to Ben Wallace. Produced by Cindy Yu.

William Moore

Inside Nigel’s gang, my day as a ‘missing person’ & how to save James Bond

38 min listen

This week: Nigel’s gang – Reform’s plan for power.Look at any opinion survey or poll, and it’s clear that Reform is hard to dismiss, write Katy Balls and James Heale. Yet surprisingly little is known about the main players behind the scenes who make up Nigel Farage’s new gang. There are ‘the lifers’ – Dan Jukes and ‘Posh George’ Cottrell. Then there are the Tory defectors, trained by Richard Murphy, a valued CCHQ veteran, who is described as a ‘secret weapon’. The most curious new additions are the Gen Zers, who include Tucker Carlson’s nephew, Charles Carlson, and Jack Anderton, known as ‘the Matrix’. Katy and James joined the podcast

Freddy Gray

Chagos – the riviera of the Indian Ocean?

Keir Starmer seemed on unusually good form as he arrived in Washington last night. He cracked quite a good joke about the United Kingdom’s new ambassador to the United States, Lord Mandelson. Maybe, just maybe, there’s a charismatic statesman lurking behind the Prime Minister’s dreary exterior. We shall see. At any rate, assuming no bizarre media blow ups in the coming hours, the odds are that the Trump-Starmer meeting today will prove to be a success. Despite his reputation, Trump tends to like people, especially British PMs (he tried and failed with Theresa May) and reports are that he responded well to his long first telephone call with Sir Keir last month.

Steerpike

Mike Amesbury avoids prison after punching man

To the curious case of Mike Amesbury. The former Labour politician for Runcorn and Helsby was on Monday handed a 10-week prison sentence after he pleaded guilty to punching a man in the street. But after appealing the sentence at Chester Crown Court today, Amesbury will now avoid prison. During the ex-Labour man’s appeal hearing today, Judge Steven Everett imposed another 10-week prison sentence – but suspended it for two years. Instead of going to jail, Amesbury will be expected to carry out 200 hours of unpaid work, undertake both a 12-month alcohol monitoring programme and an anger management course and do 20 days of rehabilitation work. Explaining his decision,

Kate Andrews

Can Starmer score an easy win with Trump on Ukraine?

Keir Stamer has landed in Washington, where he joins the succession of European leaders lining up to convince the President of the United States that he’s got it wrong on Ukraine. But will the Prime Minister be convincing? Starmer and Donald Trump will meet today at the White House, arriving just after 1pm EST (5pm GMT). The pair are set for talks, lunch, and a press conference, taking up several hours of the afternoon. The Prime Minister has arrived with some points to make about Ukraine – mainly the insistence that the US provides a ‘security guarantee’ for the country under siege – but he’s got some kind words to

Michael Simmons

The problem of Britain’s idle generation

The number of young people not doing anything with their lives has hit its highest level in 11 years. Figures released this morning by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on 16- to 24-year-olds not in education, employment or training – so-called NEETs – show that the number has reached just under one million in the last three months of 2024. Standing at 987,000, the number of NEETs is up by 110,000 since the end of 2023 – equivalent to a town the size of Oldham. The new data means that nearly one in seven Britons aged 16 to 24 are not in education, employment or training. The figures are

Stephen Daisley

Palestinians blew their best chance for peace

Every time the Palestinians rebuff a peace proposal, commentators reach for an observation by the Israeli diplomat Abba Eban: ‘The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.’ It’s pithy, and depressingly accurate, but I’ve always been more struck by another Eban aphorism: ‘Men and nations behave wisely when they have exhausted all other resources.’ Not as witty, I’ll grant you, but it gets closer to the psychology at play in this conflict. The Palestinians have been able to miss one opportunity after another because doing so has brought no lasting diplomatic consequences. The western liberal mind is a captive of the two-state solution ideology, a lethal idealism convinced

Henry Donovan

Russia is the big winner in Germany’s election

The real winners of Germany’s election are sitting in Moscow. Despite Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats (CDU) technically claiming victory with a meagre 28 per cent showing, the truly remarkable surge belongs to the openly pro-Russian forces that now dominate the political landscape. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the far-left party Die Linke (successor to East Germany’s communist SED) have emerged from this record 85 per cent turnout election with unprecedented strength: both unapologetically aligned with Vladimir Putin’s interests and fundamentally opposed to Germany’s Western orientation. That this Russification of German politics coincides with the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine feels less like coincidence and more like

Steerpike

Ashworth rules himself out of Runcorn by-election

With Reform surging in the polls, no one in No. 10 wants a by-election anytime soon. But thanks to ‘Iron’ Mike Amesbury, such a contest now looms in Runcorn and Helsby. The ex-Labour MP was sentenced on Monday to ten weeks in prison, triggering a recall petition. Already Nigel Farage’s ‘People’s army’ is up in Cheshire collecting signatures, following the party’s second place finish here last July. So with a difficult race on their hands, who might Labour party managers turn to in their desperation? Perhaps Jon Ashworth, the former shadow cabinet mainstay cruelly turfed out in Leicester last year. Ashworth, who now works as Chief Executive of the Labour

Steerpike

Gary Lineker defends Gaza documentary pulled by the BBC

It’s a day ending in a ‘y’ which can only mean one thing – noted geopolitics expert Gary Lineker inflicting his opinions on the Middle East on the rest of us. Gary’s latest dip into the Arab-Israeli conflict comes after the BBC was forced to pull its documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, from iPlayer while it performs a ‘due diligence’ check on the programme. This was prompted by the allegation that one of the programme’s child narrators was the son of a Hamas government minister. Since then, it has also been alleged that the programme mistranslated certain words used by its interviewees – changing the Arabic words for ‘Jew’ and

Georg Löfflmann

How to fix Germany’s broken army

On 27 February 2022, three days after the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said it was a historic turning point, or Zeitenwende, for European security. Scholz promised to transform German foreign and defence policy, and substantially modernise and rearm Germany’s armed forces, the Bundeswehr. A key element of the Zeitenwende was the creation of a €100 billion special fund for an immediate increase in defence spending, as well as the promise to meet Nato’s target of spending 2 per cent target of GDP on defence by 2024. Two years on, with the dawn of the second Trump administration, it seems that Zeitenwende was only the

Clifford Beal

Britain’s defences have been neglected for too long

Keir Starmer has now been shamed into increasing the defence budget to 2.5 percent by 2027, a welcome move but one that will barely touch the sides of the problem. With the Strategic Defence Review being released in a few months (maybe), hard choices will still have to be made on which capabilities to fund. They can’t all be supported, and reconstituting a depleted army and boosting munitions stockpiles will probably be the priority. But there’s another area that has been badly neglected for decades: air and missile defences at home. Being the first nation to be subjected to bombardment by ballistic and cruise missiles some 80 years ago, one

Christopher Snowdon

How to fight back against the nanny state

Have you ever noticed that there is no pressure group for people who want the government to leave them alone? On the face of it, this is strange because a lot of people want the government to leave them alone and there seems to be a pressure group for everything. There are organisations entirely devoted to agitating for political action against drinking, gambling, smoking, sugar consumption and even infant formula. And yet there are millions of people who use these products and would like to continue doing so without further interference from the government. Nanny state policies are popular with some people, including with a few people who use the

Colin Freeman

Ukraine wants its nuclear weapons back

Kyiv Had America and the Soviet Union ever fought the battle of Armageddon, it would have started from beneath a patch of muddy fields a few hours’ drive south of Kyiv. It’s here, in an underground base near the once-closed town of Pervomaisk, that Moscow housed 80 strategic nuclear missiles, all pointed at the US. Today it’s a museum, a dark tourism excursion, with a 120-foot long ‘Satan’ missile on display. Satan carried 10 warheads plus 40 decoys, and could have single-handedly flattened Britain. The only disappointment, for the Dr Strangeloves among us, is the base’s ‘nuclear button’ – not a red switch with a skull-and-crossbones, but a dull grey