Politics

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

Sunday

Steerpike Steerpike

Swing seats back another election

For more than a decade, viral petitions demanding an immediate election were the preserve of Remainiacs and much of the Twitter left. So with Labour now in government, it is to no surprise then that it is now much of the right which is demanding another vote. A parliamentary petition to ‘call a general election’ has gone viral overnight, thanks to supportive posts by Elon Musk (who else?) among others. Numbers currently stand at more than 650,000 signatories: six times higher than the threshold of 100,000 required for a parliamentary debate. Wonder what the government response will be eh? Such petitions rarely, if ever, succeed in their goal and those

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Starmer’s disdain for conservatives could be his undoing

Tony Blair spent much of his time as prime minister projecting a persona that most people of a conservative mindset found quite reassuring. But Keir Starmer is no heir to Blair. The New Labour leader removed a commitment to nationalisation from the party’s constitution. He pledged to keep the tax burden under control. And he seemed to put himself on the side of those who were making a success of their lives. Starmer has done none of these things since taking office, alienating Labour voters and making life harder for millions of Brits. It is hard to see Keir Starmer’s administration finding such a path back to electoral safety It’s not

James Tidmarsh

Identity politics has corrupted France’s elite schools

Earlier this year, Sciences Po’s feminist association, Décollectif Féministe, organised a ‘non-mixed’ meeting, which explicitly excluded men and white attendees. Intended as a ‘safe space’ for women of colour, the event sparked an immediate backlash. An MP from Marine Le Pen’s National Rally called it ‘racist and discriminatory.’ Ultimately, the meeting was cancelled before it took place, but it highlights the deep rot that has set in at France’s elite universities. Sciences Po – long the training ground for presidents, prime ministers, and diplomats from Jacques Chirac to Emmanuel Macron – has seen its status plummet Sciences Po – long the premier training ground for presidents, prime ministers, and diplomats from Jacques Chirac to

Mark Taubert

What Germany can teach the UK about assisted dying

Critics of Labour’s Assisted Dying bill fear that its vagueness means we are heading for trouble. Germany, where assisted suicide is legal, shows what happens when the law fails to spell out exactly what is allowed. In 2020, Germany’s federal constitutional court decriminalised assisted suicide, deciding that a patient’s autonomy must be the overriding concern when granting them permission to go through with it. The ruling stated that every person should be allowed to decide for themselves whether they take their own life or not and that getting help from third parties would be legalised. The German government hasn’t fully made up its mind on what it thinks of the

Saturday

James Macintyre

Gordon Brown’s assisted dying intervention could be decisive

Gordon Brown, who is in the news this weekend having come out against assisted dying, occasionally has a tendency to hold back. He held back from standing against his close friend John Smith for the Labour party leadership in 1992, though that was always an unlikely prospect. More agonisingly, he held back from running against Tony Blair for the same role in 1994, sacrificing his personal ambition for the New Labour cause. He even held back from the No campaign in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, at one point telling a friend ‘They don’t need me,’ until the 11th hour when he tilted the balance and helped save the UK

Damien Phillips

The Laos methanol poisonings shine a light on a deeper tragedy

The death of British lawyer Simone White, 28, and five other tourists as a result of a suspected mass poisoning in Laos has rightly cast a spotlight on the serious methanol problem with which poorer parts of Southeast Asia are grappling. But that shouldn’t be allowed to obscure what was almost certainly another critical factor in this tragedy: the absolutely abysmal condition of the Laotian healthcare system. Laos has been stagnating for almost half a century Those unfamiliar with the country might have wondered why almost all the tourists who were poisoned with tainted alcohol were flown or driven to neighbouring Thailand, delaying urgent treatment by hours, despite falling sick

Charlie Gammell

The winds of change are blowing in Iran

The mood music from Tehran regarding Donald Trump’s election victory was a mixture of ‘don’t care,’ and ‘very much do care.’ Regime insiders remember only too well the toll Trump’s last four years took on their state; Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Commander Qassem Soleimani killed; economy shattered; regionally isolated due to Israeli-Arab normalisation. Trump is not a popular figure in the Khamenei household. But others reacted with a shrug; we’ve dealt with him before and survived. Why not now? Many ordinary Iranians welcomed the pressure he’d bring to bear on the regime, hoping it may prove decisive. Trump is well known for being an admirer of pre-revolutionary Iran, miniskirts,

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Is the Tory psychodrama over?

17 min listen

Tim Shipman, chief political commentator at The Sunday Times, joins Katy Balls to discuss his new book, Out: How Brexit Got Done and the Tories Were Undone. The final instalment in Shipman’s Brexit quartet, the book goes behind the scenes in Westminster to reveal the warring factions at the heart of Boris Johnson’s government. Considering all of this, has the Tory party left this era of controversy and backstabbing behind? Or, with a new leader, is there a whole new chapter to come? 

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Matthew Parris, Joanna Bell, Peter Frankopan, Mary Wakefield and Flora Watkins

38 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: pondering AI, Matthew Parris wonders if he is alone in thinking (1:10); Joanna Bell meets the leader of the Independent Ireland party, Michael Collins, ahead of the Irish general election later this month (8:41); Professor Peter Frankopan argues that the world is facing a new race to rule the seas (17:31); Mary Wakefield reviews Rod Dreher’s new book Living in wonder: finding mystery and meaning in a secular age (28:47); and, Flora Watkins looks at the Christmas comeback of Babycham (34:10).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Ian Williams Ian Williams

The paper mills helping China commit scientific fraud

Few people embody the ideal of scientific excellence as much as Albert Einstein. Each year a Berlin-based foundation bearing his name hands out awards for the sort of research that might have made him proud. This week, the individual prize went to Elisabeth Bik, not a conventional boffin, but a sleuth – a dogged Dutch researcher who abandoned a career at a biomedical start-up for one exposing scientific fraud. That the Einstein Foundation chose to award Bik is testament not only to the impact of her detective work, but also to the way an epidemic of fake science is shaking the scientific establishment. ‘I have a very strong sense that

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Is Big Oil back?

Cop29 has drawn to a close with arguments over a $250 billion (£200 billion) a year ‘loss and damage’ fund, which developing countries complain is not nearly enough to match their demands. But away from the grand gestures at the summit it is worth looking at what countries are actually doing rather than what they say they are going to do. The answer to that seems to be drilling for more oil. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the global supply of oil in October rose by 290,000 barrels a day to reach 102 million barrels per day. That is just as well given that the IEA predicts that global oil

Nick Boles

What confronting my own mortality taught me about assisted dying

It was when my newly-implanted bone marrow failed to produce the blood cells that keep all of us alive that I first thought seriously about my own death. It was my second bout of cancer. The first one had been a cakewalk by comparison: a few months of chemotherapy and radiotherapy and, Bob’s your uncle, I was cured. The second, ten years later, was much nastier and involved industrial quantities of chemotherapy culminating in a bone marrow transplant. For several months it looked like the transplant had failed and I confronted the possibility that I would soon reach the end of the road.  If you don’t like the idea of

Lee Cohen

Starmer needs the royal family to help him woo Trump

Donald Trump’s historic re-election must be a particularly bitter pill for Keir Starmer to swallow. Leaders from Javier Milei to Giorgia Meloni are scrambling to curry favour, and Trump’s pal Reform MP Nigel Farage is a regular on the post-election Mar-a-Lago scene. But that’s not the style of Sir Keir and his merry band of net zero Never Trumpers: they could end up singing a different tune that would literally leave Britain out in the cold in the new ‘Drill Baby Drill’ Trump era. Yet an unexpected ally could prevent the bi-lateral relationship between Britain and the United States from unraveling further: the British Royal Family. The monarchy has long been

Friday

Oscar Edmondson

Is Keir Starmer really going to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu?

11 min listen

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu, his former defence minister Yoav Gallant as well as – separately – for Hamas military leader, Mohammed Deif. They are all wanted for alleged war crimes, but specifically regarding Netanyahu and Gallant the ICC say that, ‘each bear criminal responsibility for … the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.’ So why have these warrants been issued now? And what are the implications for Labour’s relationship with Israel?   Oscar Edmondson speaks to James Heale and Tom Gross, commentator on the Middle East.  

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

The International Criminal Court must fall

The arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant should be the last the International Criminal Court (ICC) issues. The ICC accuses the men, whose nation is embroiled in a multi-front war against enemies sworn to its destruction, of using ‘starvation as a method of warfare’, ‘murder, persecution and other inhumane acts’, and ‘intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population’. Merely to say the charges out loud is to expose their absurdity. Not only is there no evidence that Israel is denying the Palestinians food as a military tactic, there is copious evidence to the contrary: 1.1 million tonnes, to be precise. That

Julie Bindel

The truth about the lesbian pay premium

Some lesbian and gay campaigners might have you believe that life is hard for gay people. Of course, for many it is. But my experience of being a lesbian is that it is mostly a privilege rather than an oppression. Lesbians can avoid the multiple disadvantages of navigating relationships with men, some of whom have absorbed messages of how they are superior to women. There’s another perk, too: what the Financial Times calls the ‘lesbian pay premium’. An analysis of studies from 1991 to 2018 found that lesbians typically earn 7 per cent more than their heterosexual counterparts. The LGBTQ umbrella term can be suffocating for lesbians That life is

John O'Neill

Businesses give Reeves’s Budget a ‘thumbs down’

What did businesses really think of Rachel Reeves’s Budget? Today we have one of the first economic indicators reflecting their responses to Labour’s tax and spend changes – as well as global events like the US presidential election. The Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) fell below 50 in November, which suggests the private sector economy is now contracting after a year of expansion.  Firms said that employment has been shrinking for two months and they are not replacing staff who leave voluntarily in order to offset the coming rises in the cost of workers. They also reported subdued customer demand – something shown in the retail sales figures Ross Clark examined this morning.  This

Steerpike Steerpike

Starmer’s local media round: the lowlights

It’s been another bad week for the government, with rows over farmers, ships and businesses too. So what better time for Keir Starmer to manfully undertake his media duties, sitting out this morning for a grilling with local BBC news stations? This annual ordeal can prove somewhat merciless – as Liz Truss famously found to her cost in 2022. Faced with six of the best, how did the current PM compare? First up was BBC Merseyside, where Starmer answered a question about energy bills by talking about, er, anti-social behaviour orders. The host immediately interrupted to point out that ‘we’ve drifted off the topic.’ Next, it was a trip to

Steerpike Steerpike

Republicans rage against state of UK free speech

‘Two countries separated by a common language’ is how transatlantic relations are often defined. But these days it really does seem like some in Washington are struggling to understand what is going on this side of the pond. Mr S has previously noted how British-based networks like the Center for Countering Digital Hate have enraged Congressional Republicans with their demands for a big tech crackdown. Now it seems that some on Capitol Hill are broadening out their critique still further. Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee have today criticised the UK’s Online Safety Act in the UK as part of a ‘tsunami of censorship headed towards America’. According to Congressman

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Falling retail sales shows how fragile the UK economy is

Until a few weeks ago it seemed as if the government had inherited if not a golden economic legacy then an improving economic picture. But this morning’s figures for retail sales show just how faltering the economy is. During October the volume of retail sales fell by 0.7 per cent. Worst-affected was textile and clothing sales, which plunged by 3.1 per cent. Online retail suffered along with physical stores. Not only that, the figures for September were revised downwards from 0.3 to 0.1 per cent growth. Comparing year on year, sales volumes were still up 2.4 per cent. Sales in the three months to October were also up, by 0.8