Politics

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

Tuesday

28 Jan 2025

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

Ross Anderson

What I learnt from playing with China’s new AI

I asked a question about the Uyghurs, and China’s new ChatGPT-competitor, DeepSeek, started to answer. In two rapidly written paragraphs, DeepSeek described the Uyghurs as a ‘Turkic ethnic group primarily residing in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in the People’s Republic of China’, and told me that they had a ‘rich heritage that includes contributions to art, music, literature, and science’, particularly given that Xinjiang had once been passed through with the famous Silk Road trading path. All good so far. But then it hit the third paragraph, starting to write that ‘the Uyghur community has been the subject of significant international attention due to reports of human rights abuses

James Tidmarsh

Diplomacy alone won’t stop Rwanda stoking war in Congo

Goma, a city of 1.5 million in Eastern Congo, has fallen to the M23 rebels, openly backed by Rwanda. Foreign governments are calling for the rebels to withdraw, and the UN Security Council has been holding crisis talks, but this is not the time to stop at diplomatic gestures: maximum pressure must be applied on Kigali immediately to shut this conflict down. Anything less risks repeating the horrors of the Second Congo War. Between 1998 and 2003, over five million people died, countless families were shattered and entire communities were erased in the world’s deadliest conflict since the second world war. The Democratic Republic of Congo, a nation the size

Gary Marcus

Has China pulled ahead in the race for AI supremacy?

The race for ‘AI supremacy’ is over, at least for now, and the US didn’t win. Over the last few weeks, two companies in China released three impressive papers that annihilated any pretence that the US was decisively ahead. In late December, a company called DeepSeek, apparently initially built for quantitative trading rather than large language models (LLMs), produced a nearly state-of-the-art model that required only roughly 1/50th of the training costs of previous models – instantly putting them in the big leagues with American companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, both in terms of performance and innovation. A couple of weeks later, they followed up with a competitive (though

Stephen Pollard

Tory Nimbys are walking into Starmer’s trap

The government has yet to formally announce its widely trailed decision to expand Gatwick, Heathrow, and Luton airports. But that hasn’t stopped six MPs from writing to Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander with a pre-emptive attack. The four Green MPs, perhaps, plus a couple of anti-capitalist hard left Labourites? Nope. Four Lib Dems and two Conservatives – one of whom is, astonishingly, Andrew Griffith, the Shadow Business Secretary. The idea of the Shadow Business Secretary campaigning against a core component of economic growth would be funny if it wasn’t so utterly damning Griffith tells Alexander that local residents’ “life is blighted every single day by the noise of take-offs and landings

Cindy Yu

Is Donald Trump warming to Keir Starmer?

16 min listen

Starmer and Trump have finally spoken, with a 45 minute phone call taking place between the two leaders. The pair reportedly discussed the ceasefire in Gaza, and trade and the economy, with Starmer attempting to find common ground by talking up his plans for deregulation. Cindy Yu speaks to Katy Balls and Kate Andrews about their relationship. Do these early signs suggest it will be wholly positive, or are there thornier issues to come? Also on the podcast, Rachel Reeves is set to deliver a speech this week outlining her plans for growth – just how important is this week for her? Produced by Patrick Gibbons and Cindy Yu.

Gavin Mortimer

Europe has no idea how to stop the spread of Islamism

Last week was surely one of the grimmest in Europe in years. The day after an Afghan migrant allegedly stabbed a two-year-old boy in Germany to death, Axel Rudakubana was sentenced to 52 years in prison for murdering Alice, Bebe and Elsie, three little English girls with a combined age of 22, in Southport. The court heard that Rudakubana told police in the immediate aftermath of the killing: ‘It’s a good thing those children are dead…I’m so glad…so happy’. What we didn’t hear enough about was the exact nature of his extremism. We know that an Al-Qaeda training manual was found in his bedroom, and that he was referred to

Steerpike

Starmer’s foreign policy doctrine revealed

It is sometimes claimed that Mark Darcy in the Bridget Jones’ Diary series is based on Keir Starmer. One is an upright, priggish human rights lawyer: the other is a character played by Colin Firth. The book and then the film were set in the 1990s, when ‘Cool Britannia’ was at its peak and New Labour orthodoxies the fashion of the day. So is it too portentous an omen to note that in the latest instalment of the film – released next month – Mark Darcy’s character is sadly no longer with us? After all, Tories jibe, Sir Keir’s onetime uber-trendy views on rights look increasingly out-of-date in a world

Nigel Jones

Starmer has much to learn from Trump’s Colombia migrant victory

During Sir Keir Starmer’s first phone call with Donald Trump since the President’s inauguration, the two leaders discussed the ceasefire in Gaza and the economy. We don’t know if Starmer and Trump touched on the topic of illegal migration during their conversation late last night, but, if not, Starmer missed a trick. He has much to learn from Trump about how to handle this thorny subject. Whether Sir Keir will learn any lessons from Trump’s short way of dealing with illegal migration is doubtful Late last week, as a first taste of the President’s pledge to send ‘millions’ of illicit migrants back to their countries of origin, two U.S. military aircraft