Politics

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

Wednesday

Steerpike Steerpike

The Guardian announces it’s leaving Twitter – on Twitter

The absurdity of the Guardian never fails to amuse. Now the lefty newspaper has decided it is too good for one of the world’s most used social media platforms and today announced it will no longer use Twitter – by posting on, er, Twitter. You couldn’t make it up… Sharing a link to an article explaining ‘why the Guardian is no longer posting on X’ on the site itself, the Grauniad editorial states rather pompously that: We think that the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives and that resources could be better used promoting our journalism elsewhere. This is something we have been considering for

Steerpike Steerpike

MSPs in winter fuel payment hypocrisy

Back to Scotland, where parliamentarians are under scrutiny over questionable expenses claims – this time on heating their second homes. It transpires that between 2023-24 Scottish politicians claimed a whopping £36,000 in energy bills for their rented homes in Edinburgh, with the Nats and Labour lot making up £26,000 of the total cost. Alright for some! John Swinney’s separatists were the biggest beneficiaries, as pointed out by the Scottish Daily Express, with almost half of the Holyrood group expensing energy costs. The Nats claimed over £25,000 from the public purse, while over £1,000 of taxpayer funds are covering Labour MSP Colin Smyth’s utility bill. Scottish parliamentarians are currently entitled to

Eliot Wilson

What can we expect from Trump’s defence pick?

As President-elect Donald Trump’s nominations to executive positions gradually emerge, it is difficult to know what to expect next. Elon Musk is set to run the ‘Department of Government Efficiency’. Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota, who organised a drugs awareness campaign under the slogan, ‘Meth. We’re on it’ and wrote in her autobiography of shooting dead her badly behaved wire-haired pointer puppy, is tapped for Secretary of Homeland Security. Trump’s choice for the critical role of Secretary of Defence is typically atypical. Pete Hegseth, a 44-year-old Minnesotan educated at Princeton and Harvard, is a presenter and commentator for Fox News. He has also worked for two conservative political advocacy

James Kirkup James Kirkup

The humiliating emptiness of David Cameron’s legacy

The humiliating post-premiership of David Cameron is the gift that keeps on giving. He might have been gone from No. 10 for more than eight years, but pretty much everything involving him that’s happened in British national life since his departure has been a reminder of the awful emptiness of his time in office.   At most, the Big Society was a woolly phrase – and the NCS The list of Cameron embarrassments is as long as the list of his accomplishments is short. There was Dave’s time as a spiv lobbyist, failing to charm former colleagues in government for Lex Greensill. There was a cameo appearance as foreign secretary, a

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The world isn’t listening to Keir Starmer’s climate preaching

Keir Starmer said he was travelling to Cop 29 in Baku intending to “lead the world on climate change”. But it must surely be obvious that he is, instead, barking at a world that is heading in the opposite direction. Last year’s grand talk about “phasing down” fossil fuels at Cop 28 notwithstanding, today’s Global Carbon Budget Report forecasts that global carbon emissions will hit another record high in 2024, reaching 41.6 billion tonnes, up from 40.6 billion tonnes in 2023. The report calls this “marginal”, but it’s actually a 2.5 per cent increase, including all carbon emissions from industry and land use, as well as fossil fuel burning. How

Yuan Yi Zhu

Keir Starmer’s choice of Attorney General should concern conservatives

Of all Keir Starmer’s appointments to government, none have been so personal or politically significant as his choice of Attorney General. The Prime Minister’s politics have been shaped, refined and hardened by his time as a human-rights barrister. The role of Attorney General – the government’s chief legal adviser and the minister responsible for the Crown Prosecution Service, which Starmer ran as director of public prosecutions – is of critical importance to him. While the PM may or may not take a close interest in who is minister for planning, veterans or food security, he will have thought very carefully about who should be his AG. The choice of Richard

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

League tables alone won’t force the NHS to change

When Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced that over half the new tax rises in her first Budget would go straight into the National Health Service, an immediate question followed: where’s the reform? The big health promise made by this government, after all, was to tie any additional money to an NHS overhaul – the biggest in its history. And it was the Prime Minister who only a few months ago, when speaking at the Kings Fund in London, said ‘hear me when I say this, no more money without reform’. Yet there in the Budget was an additional £22 billion for day-to-day spending, with seemingly no strings attached. The biggest announcement

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Why hasn’t Marco Rubio been announced as Trump’s Secretary of State yet? 

Rubio, Rubio, wherefore art thou Rubio? How Little Marco, as Donald Trump dubbed him in 2016, must be squirming. It was reported on Monday, with great confidence, that Trump had chosen Rubio as his Secretary of State, along with Congressman Mike Waltz as his National Security Adviser.  The news came as a relief to national security establishments across the West. There had been grave concerns in the foreign policy world that Trump would choose somebody antithetical to the interests of Nato. The elevation of Rubio and Waltz also served as further evidence of the growing power of Florida in Trump’s America – Waltz and Rubio are both politicians from the

Matthew Lynn

If anyone can fix America’s bloated state, it’s Elon Musk

Perhaps he will walk through the lobby of the Pentagon with a kitchen sink. Or fire the entire IT department at the Fed, shift the IRS to Mars, while replacing traffic police with fully autonomous Tesla robo-cops. No one has any real idea yet what Elon Musk, the entrepreneur behind Tesla and SpaceX, might come up with now he has been appointed by Donald Trump to head up a new Department of Government Efficiency (or ‘Doge’). One point is certain, however. There will be some spectacular fireworks. And it will throw down a challenge to bloated governments everywhere.  Nobody gets to amass a $300 billion fortune, working in manufacturing and

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Lib Dem MP flounders on assisted dying

The Terminally Ill Adults has at last been published and MPs can finally pour over the detail. But one supporter of assisted dying who might want to brush up on her answers is Christine Jardine, the Honourable Member for Edinburgh West. Jardine – who is co-sponsoring Kim Leadbeater’s bill in the Commons – appeared on Newsnight last night to try to make the case for the legislation. Yet the Lib Dem MP came unstuck when host Victoria Derbyshire asked about coercion of patients. How, Derbyshire asked, would anyone know if someone had been coerced? Jardine babbled about ‘medical knowledge’ before her host – correctly – pointed out that ‘doctors are

Eugene Finkel

How Ukraine can survive Donald Trump

Donald Trump’s triumph in the US presidential election is seen as a tragedy for Ukraine. Trump and Ukraine certainly have a troubled history. During Trump’s first term, when he pressured president Zelensky to investigate Hunter Biden, this effort led to Trump’s first impeachment. Trump’s sympathy for, indeed admiration of, Vladimir Putin is well-known. Trump and vice president-elect JD Vance claim to have a plan to swiftly end the Russian–Ukrainian war, presumably by strong arming Kyiv to cede territory to Russia and abandon its bid for Nato membership. Is Ukraine doomed and headed toward defeat and subjugation by Russia? Putin prefers fighting to a ceasefire and will likely reject any Trump

Tuesday

Iain Macwhirter

Closing the Rosebank and Jackdaw oil fields is a net zero own goal

Environmental campaigners are hoping to announce at Cop29 that they’ve halted two major oil and gas fields in the North Sea. A crucial court battle over the fate of the the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields began in the Court of Session in Edinburgh today.  The greens smell victory over evil fossil fuel companies. But closing these two fields won’t advance net zero by a single day since we will still have to import oil and gas from abroad. Shell, Equinor and Ithaca had received consent from the North Sea Transiton Authority last September to proceed with drilling in the fields following an environment impact assessment (EIA). However, Greenpeace and Uplift, who

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How many parliamentary police are failing fitness tests?

They’re the redoubtable men and women who keep our legislature safe. But is the thin blue line around the Commons looking a little bigger these days? Mr S has done some digging and found a Freedom of Information (FOI) request from the Metropolitan Police on fitness tests undertaken by the Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection unit – the elite squad assigned to protect MPs. The Met sent The Spectator figures which show that the number of officers failing their JRFT – job related fitness test – doubled between 2019 and 2022. According to the Police Single Operating Platform, 771 employees took tests in 2018, of which five failed – a rate of

Danny Kruger

The Terminally Ill bill deserves to die

They tried, they really did. Dignity in Dying, the lineal descendent of the 1930s Euthanasia Society and therefore great-great-niece of its sister the Eugenics Society, has been struggling for weeks to frame a bill that’s innocuous enough to pass through parliament. Today we saw the fruit of their efforts. The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill has ‘the most stringent safeguards in the world’, says its sponsor, Kim Leadbetter MP. It’s only for the sickest people with less than six months to live; you need two doctors and a judge to confirm you’re really dying and really want to end it all early; you have to commit ‘the final

Joanna Cherry

The SNP must stop playing politics with the rulebook

There are 18 months until the 2026 Holyrood election and already talk is ramping up about who will stand. There are sure to be candidate vacancies – nobody seriously thinks that former first ministers who have had their day and fallen from favour are going to run again. Other MSPs may retire and there are sitting parliamentarians who could do with some healthy competition during the re-selection process. Fear of such competition no doubt underlies some of today’s expressions of antipathy towards SNP members of the Westminster parliament with Holyrood ambitions. Anyone paying attention knows that the unprecedented rule change was specifically designed to stop me challenging Angus Robertson for

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Welby resigns: crisis at the Church of England

18 min listen

After mounting pressure, the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has resigned. His resignation comes days after a damning report into the child abuser John Smyth who was associated with the Church of England. Welby was apparently made aware of the allegations in 2013, yet Smyth died in 2018 before facing any justice. Since the report was published, Welby and the Church have faced questions about the failure to act and the lack of urgency. The Spectator’s editor Michael Gove joins Damian Thompson to discuss what Damian calls ‘not just a shocking moment in the history of the Church of England, but in the history of English Christianity’.   Produced by

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Justin Welby quits as Archbishop of Canterbury

13 min listen

Justin Welby has announced he is resigning as Archbishop of Canterbury over his handling of serial child abuser John Smyth. In a statement, he said ‘it is very clear that I must take personal and institutional responsibility for the long and retraumatising period between 2013 and 2024’. He says he believes stepping aside ‘is in the best interests of the Church of England’. Did he have to go? And who might replace him?  Also on the podcast, the assisted dying bill was published last night, 38 pages long, and will be debated in just under three weeks’ time. Keir Starmer admitted that he hasn’t decided yet which way way he

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

How will progressives explain Amsterdam’s latest anti-semitic violence?

Since the scenes of Jews being hunted, beaten and kicked as they lay on the ground pleading for mercy in Amsterdam, antisemites have sought excuse, or that weaselly insinuator ‘context’, in the reported behaviour of a number of Maccabi Tel Aviv football hooligans, who are said to have attacked a taxi, tore down a Palestinian flag and sang anti-Arab chants. Video footage reportedly shows rioters chanting ‘kankerjoden’, Dutch for ‘Jewish cancer’ I wrote in the wake of those events that any Israeli fan who engaged in such yobbery is to be condemned but that their actions did not justify a modern-day pogrom that plunged Israelis and other Jews into a

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Who will be the next Archbishop of Canterbury?

The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has this afternoon announced he will resign from the role after days of pressure from Church of England bishops. The move follows the publication of the Makin Review’s report on the Church’s handling of ‘serial child abuser’ John Smyth – which suggested Welby did not deal with complaints rigorously enough at the time.  In a statement today, the Archbishop wrote of his ‘long felt and profound sense of shame at the historic safeguarding failures of the Church of England’, adding:‘I hope this decision makes clear how seriously the Church of England understands the need for change and our profound commitment to creating a safer

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

MPs should take their time over the assisted dying bill

You don’t need to have a strong opinion either way on assisted dying to be concerned about the latest attempt to legalise it: from a scrutiny perspective, Kim Leadbeater’s bill leaves a lot to be desired. It was published last night, 38 pages long, and will be debated in just under three weeks’ time. Most MPs only find out the implications of a bill when they see them in human form Critics who are saying MPs will get just five hours to debate the bill are referring to the second reading stage, with further detailed scrutiny available at its committee, report and third reading stages. However, once a bill passes