Politics

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

Tuesday

28 Jan 2025

Labour’s Richard Hermer problem

13 min listen

Richard Hermer was one of the surprise announcements from Keir Starmer’s first Cabinet, and one of the most controversial since. Starmer’s old pal came with some notable baggage: his former clients include Sri Lankan refugees to the Chagos Islands and ex-Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams, as well as British-Bangladeshi Isis bride Shamima Begum. In government, Hermer has played a key role in several contentious decisions, such as the government’s withdrawal of the UK’s objections to the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, and his involvement in the Chagos Islands deal. And today he admitted that he has had to recuse himself ‘from certain matters’ due to potential conflicts

Svitlana Morenets

Why Putin is feeling more confident

At a recent closed-door session in Ukraine’s parliament, Kyrylo Budanov, the country’s spy chief, was asked how much longer Ukraine could hold on. His answer reportedly stunned the room: ‘If there are no serious negotiations by summer, very dangerous processes could begin, threatening Ukraine’s very existence.’ Ukraine’s military intelligence rushed to deny the statement, but his warning rings true. Vladimir Putin has every reason to believe he can still break Ukraine into submission later in the year, and plans to stall any peace settlement in the upcoming talks with Donald Trump. Russian troops are advancing faster than they did in 2022. Last year, they captured more than 1,600 square miles

Rupert Lowe

Rachel Reeves can’t ‘regulate for growth’

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) are under pressure to reduce red tape in the financial sector. “We’ve told our regulators they need to regulate for growth, not just for risk,” the Chancellor Rachel Reeves has said. But the idea that tweaking regulations will somehow unlock growth is a fallacy. The idea that tweaking regulations will somehow unlock growth is a fallacy The problem is that these ungoverned and rogue regulators are manned by second-rate lawyers and special interest groups who present their ideas as mainstream. They have never facilitated growth and have created a labyrinth of rules that suffocate the UK’s financial services industry, serving

Katy Balls

Will Labour MPs back Rachel Reeves’s growth plan?

It’s ‘growth week’ in government, as the Chancellor Rachel Reeves attempts to convince sceptical business leaders, bankers and voters that she has a plan to get the economy going. After a dismal start to the year in which bond market jitters saw the cost of government borrowing soar, Reeves is hoping to turn things around with a speech on Wednesday setting out the measures and choices the government is willing to make to drive economic growth. Much of the content is already out there with talk of the government supporting a third runway at Heathrow airport amongst other things. Since the reports first emerged, there have been some grumblings among

Michael Simmons

Is the UK prepared to welcome one million migrants a year?

One million people will migrate to the UK every year this decade. The result: the UK population will grow by nearly five million. Population projections, released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) this morning, show Britain’s population rising from an estimated 67.6 million now to 72.5 million in the middle of 2032 – driven almost entirely by migration. Whilst the number of births and deaths will be roughly the same (6.8 million) in the next seven years, ONS statisticians estimate 10 million people will migrate to the UK with only five million due to leave. That will put net migration at 340,000 every year from the middle of 2028.

Sam Olsen

How DeepSeek can help Britain

Sometimes a new technology comes along that immediately shakes the world. The release this week of the new Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) tool, DeepSeek-R1, is one such moment. Despite Washington’s efforts to restrict Beijing’s development of AI, including an export ban on advanced microchips, researchers in China have created an AI tool that not only exceeds the performance of American AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, but does so at a fraction of the cost. If we are to believe the hype, it took just $6 million (£5 million) to build DeekSeep-R1, compared to more than $100 million (£80 million) for ChatGPT. This is the equivalent of building the fastest Formula

James Heale

Home Office: ‘two-tier’ police claims are an ‘extreme right-wing’ narrative

You can tell a government report has gone down badly when ministers are distancing themselves before it has been officially published. Today, it’s the Home Office’s ‘Rapid Analytical Sprint,’ commissioned in the aftermath of the Southport riots last August to determine future counter-extremism policy, that is causing trouble for ministers. The leaked document claims that fears over two-tier policing are an ‘extreme right wing narrative’. It also says that grooming gangs – referred to as ‘alleged group-based sexual abuse’ – are an issue exploited by the far-right to stir hatred against Muslims. Dramatically widening the definition of extremism in this way means significantly de-prioritising Islamism Recommendations include the police increasing

Ross Clark

Councils shouldn’t be allowed to raise tax by 25%

It is easy enough to trace the point at which local authorities embarked on the sad, downwards journey which has led to several going bankrupt. It was when they renamed their town clerks ‘chief executives’. In doing so they started posing as private businesses, with salaries and bonuses to match. But their pretensions were not matched by business acumen. Twenty of them are now weighed down with a combined £30 billion of debt. Several councils have got into trouble by entering the commercial property business at a time other investors were starting to flee. Woking is in difficulty after turning property developer, trying to build a posh high-rise hotel in

Kate Andrews

Will Rachel Reeves walk the walk on going for growth?

On the face of it, the Chancellor’s big growth speech tomorrow could be one of this government’s most significant interventions yet. If Rachel Reeves is serious about starting the building process for a third runway at Heathrow – she is expected to endorse the idea formally tomorrow – she will be single-handedly overturning more than a decade of Nimby consensus under the Tories that such projects simply were politically impossible to carry out. The same goes for her pledge to finally get some homes built, and to ‘take on regulators, planning processes and opposition’ to the growth consensus. These also seemed like an impossible task for the governments that came

Jawad Iqbal

The hypocrisy of Ed Miliband’s vanity photographer

Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, comes across as something of a political nerd, determined to bankrupt the country with his distinctive brand of net zero zealotry. Miliband has devised the answer to this image problem. He is looking to hire a vanity photographer – at considerable public expense – despite previously criticising politicians who did the same thing. In 2010, Miliband condemned David Cameron, then prime minister, for hiring a ‘personal photographer’ at a time when the government was asking everyone in the country to ‘tighten their belts’. Some might think it a touch hypocritical to do the same now that he’s in government – but clearly not our Ed.

Steerpike

Kim Leadbeater U-turns again

Another week and another U-turn on Kim Leadbeater’s Assisted Dying Bill. The 23-man committee scrutinising the legislation is supposed to be calling a diverse range of witnesses. Yet Leadbeater’s panel has repeatedly come in for criticism for only inviting those on her side of the argument. Last week it was the Royal College of Psychiatrists, whom the panel initially voted 14 to 8 to not invite to give evidence. That decision was only reversed at the last-minute, thanks to a public outcry online. A week on and no lessons seems to have been learned. The committee appeared yesterday to be doubling down on not hearing from deaf and disabled people’s

Jonathan Spyer

Syria feels close to a zone of anarchy

Travelling from Syria’s Highway 42, which runs from Tabqa to the city of Homs, you can see the corpse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Getting to Homs and from there to Damascus requires driving across 300km of desert. Once, huge and imposing checkpoints festooned with the symbolism of the regime greeted travellers seeking to reach Syria’s west from its tribal and Sunni south east. Now, the last position of the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces is 370 km from Damascus. The first roadblock of Syria’s new rulers, the Sunni jihadis of Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS), is about 100km from the capital. Between the two is an uneasy no man’s land. Ever’

Simon Cook

Pensioners have never had it so good

British pensioners are wealthier than ever. New figures from the Office for National Statistics, analysed by The Spectator’s data hub, show pensioner savings soaring whilst stagnating for those in work. When the coalition government brought in the triple lock in 2011, it had a noble purpose – to protect pensioners from falling behind. The state pension had failed to keep pace with earnings, leaving many struggling. The ratchet effect – linking pensions to inflation, wage growth or 2.5 per cent, whichever was higher – promised to solve this. But almost 15 years later, has it delivered? And at what cost? Last week the ONS released its mammoth review of household wealth in Britain,

Gawain Towler

Farage must be prepared to pack the Lords

One thing that is absolutely vital for Reform UK to do before the next election is to write a comprehensive manifesto. Anything the party and Nigel Farage would like to do in the five years after Labour’s near inevitable fall must be spelt out. There is no room for waffle, no room for complacency. Nothing should be, as Labour is doing now, brought in but not pre-announced. Ermine goes very well with tweed The reason for this urgency is the constitutional set up of the country, our bicameral system. Due to a combination of bad faith, spite and personal moral horror, nobody from parties run by Nigel Farage over the

Monday

27 Jan 2025

Isabel Hardman

Ministers are clearly concerned about school reform row

You could tell from this afternoon’s Education Questions in the Commons that ministers are worried about the row over their school reforms: they’d planted loyal questions from backbenchers to help them fend off criticism. Even before the Conservatives had raised the latest concerns about the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, Labour backbencher Luke Akehurst had popped up to ask Bridget Phillipson about child protection. The Education Secretary seized the opportunity to describe the Bill as ‘the single biggest piece of child protection legislation in a generation’, adding: ‘That’s why it’s a shame that the Conservative government – the Conservative opposition – have played silly games on this subject.’ Akehurst helped

Freddy Gray

How is round one of Trump’s deportations plan going?

33 min listen

Colombia has agreed to accept military aircraft carrying deported migrants from the US – avoiding a trade war between the two countries. Donald Trump had threatened sanctions on Colombia to punish it for initially refusing military flights following a rapid immigration crackdown. What are the challenges of deportation flights, and what’s Trump’s vision for Latin America? Freddy Gray is joined by Todd Bensman, Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, and author of ‘Overrun’.

Steerpike

Full list: Labour MPs who opposed Heathrow expansion

There are just two days to go until Rachel Reeves’ big growth speech. The Chancellor is expected to turn her fire on Nimbys – Not In My Back Yard residents – and give Heathrow’s third runway the long-awaited green light. Naturally, a bigger airport is not something Reeves herself would support near her own constituency: in 2020 she opposed Leeds Bradford’s £150 million expansion on the grounds it would ‘significantly increase air and noise pollution’. Awkward. Still, at least Reeves can claim to having always been a long-time supporter of increased capacity at Heathrow. That is something which cannot be said of many of her colleagues, dozens of whom voted

Louis-Vincent Gave

Has DeepSeek popped the AI bubble?

The arrest of Huawei’s chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou in Canada in 2018, and the ensuing United States ban on high-end semiconductor exports to China, transformed Donald Trump’s “trade war” into a “tech war”. At the time, the US clearly felt it had a comparative advantage in technology, and that if it had to fight a battle against China, then picking tech as the battlefield made good sense. In September 2021, US commerce secretary Gina Raimondo, declared that: “If we really want to slow down China’s rate of innovation, we need to work with Europe”. As a result, Europe was roped into a cold war most European businesses – not

Steerpike

Navy rebrands HMS Agincourt to appease French

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more. Trump might be back in the White House but here in Whitehall, woke remains the prevailing orthodoxy. Officials have reportedly now approved a Royal Navy request to change the name of HMS Agincourt to avoid offending the French. Yes, that’s right: military triumph is now apparently something to be ashamed of in Labour Britain. No wonder they don’t want to hike defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP…. The vessel in question is an Astute-class submarine which in 2018 became the fleet’s sixth vessel to be named after the 1415 English victory over the French in the Battle of Agincourt.

Jonathan Sacerdoti

There is no justice in the Gaza hostage deal

Imagine waking up to the news that Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, the brutal killers of British soldier Lee Rigby, were being released from prison. Picture the outrage as the British public remembers the images of Rigby being hacked to death on a Woolwich street in broad daylight, his killers unapologetic and defiant even during their trial. Imagine, too, if Axel Rudakubana – the teenage terrorist who stabbed three young girls to death during a Taylor Swift-themed dance class – walked free, boasting about his satisfaction with the murders. These scenarios are unthinkable. Yet, in Israel, they are a grim reality. This is a deal that ensures the cycle of