Politics Archives

Monday

25 Nov 2024

The fall of English Literature

On the edges of the City of London, a couple of miles from where I grew up, there’s a very famous cemetery: Bunhill Fields. When I was growing up, it was pretty clear who the three most famous tombs belonged to: John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe and William Blake. However, I am not sure any of these men are the most famous inhabitant any more. Instead, I think it’s Thomas Bayes. He was quite obscure in his lifetime. He was so obscure that we’re not even sure there is a correct picture of him. In the 1st edition of the Dictionary of National Biography, his father, a non-conformist preacher, featured, but

Rod Liddle

Is swimming racist?

I think we can all be delighted that, at last, the University of Leicester has taken action to end one of the real problems associated with swimming pools – the presence there of awful white people, swimming about all over the place. Odious, arrogant, pasty-faced white people with their mewling, stupid white children. White people doing the breast stroke and the crawl. White people climbing out of the pool looking horribly white. White people deliberately infecting the global swimming majority with their filthy white verrucas. The university, alongside the Unity Swimming organisation, is running segregated swimming sessions for black and ethnic minority people. Unity Swimming says its stated intention is

Patrick O’Flynn

Why the general election petition matters

Does it matter that a petition calling for another general election has gone viral online and garnered more than two million signatures within a few days? Millions of voters have simply had enough of the entire centre-left paradigm Conventional analysis would say not. After all, there are always a good few hundred thousand keyboard warriors who detest any government. Millions of bitter Remainers signed petitions calling for a second referendum to overturn Brexit for all the good that did them, as Sam Leith points out. And yet it is the very artlessness of the way a man called Michael Westwood has set out his cause which tells me that his

Nigel Biggar

What the ICC gets wrong about Israel

Legal reasoning is only as good as the ethical concepts it uses. That’s why the International Criminal Court’s decision to issue arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister and former defence minister is basically flawed. The ICC claims reasonable grounds for believing Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant guilty of the war crimes of ‘intentionally and knowingly depriv[ing] the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival’, creating ‘conditions of life calculated to bring about [their] destruction’. The grounds are these: Israel’s failure to facilitate relief ‘by all means at its disposal’ and to ‘ensure that the civilian population… would be adequately supplied with goods in need’ amounts to a

Ian O’Doherty

Why won’t Irish politicians talk about immigration?

Ireland is gearing up for its general election this Friday – and what started out as a relatively moribund campaign seems to have finally kicked into gear. The two main bones of contention remain the housing crisis and immigration. To the frustration of many voters, politicians refuse to accept these issues are linked A large part of the new energy can be pinned on Simon Harris, Ireland’s TikTok Taoiseach, who has been travelling the highways and byways of Ireland with his own dedicated social media team. Last week, he achieved his obvious aim of going viral, although not for the reasons he would have wanted. When approached on a walkabout

Ross Clark

Labour might regret its desire for vote reform

Turkeys don’t usually vote for Christmas, so just why have 43 new Labour MPs signed up to the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Fair Elections and its campaign to replace the first-past-the-post system with proportional representation? These are, after all, the beneficiaries of the most distorted UK election in modern history, where Labour won one of the largest-ever majorities on just 34 per cent of the popular vote – a lower share than any post-war governing party. To underline just how lucky they were, it took 24,000 votes to elect each Labour MP in July, but 56,000 to elect each Conservative. The electoral system has started to treat the

Matthew Lynn

Rachel Reeves deserves a rough ride at the CBI

Rachel Reeves was probably expecting to be cheered for restoring ‘stability’, for rebooting ‘growth’ and crafting a British version of Bidenomics to create ‘the industries of the future’. Instead, the Chancellor’s ‘fireside chat’ at the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) conference today is likely to be rather uncomfortable. There probably won’t be any heckling, walk-outs, boos and cat-calls. Yet the business world has made it all-too-clear that Reeves’s Budget will hit both jobs and growth hard. Reeves is going to get a rough ride this afternoon – and deservedly so. Labour’s relationship with business is now broken beyond repair The CBI made it clear this morning what it thinks of

Isabel Hardman

In praise of Shabana Mahmood

Should Shabana Mahmood be allowed to ‘impose’ her religious beliefs on everyone else? Lord Falconer doesn’t think so, arguing yesterday that the Justice Secretary was ‘motivated… by her religious beliefs’ in her opposition to assisted dying. He added: ‘I respect that religious belief but I do not think it should be imposed on everybody else.’ It’s not uncommon to hear a secular politician making this argument about those with religious belief, though perhaps Falconer should be applauded for aiming it at a Muslim politician rather than a Christian one, as is more frequently the case. Either way, suggesting that someone’s religious beliefs mean their views on key issues are in some

Katy Balls

Rachel Reeves faces a frosty reception at the CBI summit

At the beginning of the year, Rachel Reeves was being praised all round for her efforts repairing relations between the Labour party and business. In February, the Chancellor hosted a business conference – attended by leading figures – where she pledged to cap the headline rate of corporation tax at its current rate of 25 per cent if Labour entered government. Since her party’s election triumph, Reeves has stuck to her word on that promise – although other announcements from the Chancellor have caught the business community by surprise and led to strain. It means that Reeves will face a frosty reception when she appears at the Confederation of British

Patrick West

The trouble with Labour’s ‘respect orders’

As the Allison Pearson debacle begins to settle down, the lesson being drawn by many is that the police have no business harassing people for voicing opinions that are legal, no matter how offensive or hypothetically damaging they might be. Many of us have been urging as much for years. But taking stock now, surely most can agree that it’s not the state’s role to monitor speech, morality or the way we conduct ourselves in our private lives. ‘Respect orders’ are befitting of Blair’s moralising crusade that begat Asbos If this is indeed a growing consensus, then the Labour government seems to be veering in the opposition direction. On Friday

Sam Leith

Those signing the general election petition should know better

Every now and again, a newspaper will run – and portentously headline – a survey on the future of the monarchy. There was a fashion, a few years back, for consulting the public on the question of whether the crown should skip a generation, so that Prince William could take over from his grandmother. The correct response to all such consultations was a heavingly contemptuous Alan Partridge shrug. The whole point of having a hereditary monarchy is that it’s hereditary and that the general public don’t get a say in the matter. If we want rid, it’ll take a bit more than a poll commissioned by the Sunday Times to

Samuel Rubinstein

Why young Brits think the social contract is crumbling

Something is stirring. In WhatsApp groups and Westminster pubs, wherever wonks, spads, and other SW1 types gather, there’s a name on everybody’s lips. It’s like John Galt in Atlas Shrugged or Tyler Durden in Fight Club. It’s at once a wail of despair and a call to arms. Who is this man they whisper of? Who is “Nicolas (30 ans)”? The hard-done-by in society, on this increasingly popular account, are not Barbour-wearing farmers “Nicolas (30 ans)” is the protagonist of “Le contrat social”, a meme posted onto Twitter, as it then was, in April 2020. It was popularised by a French account which goes by the nom de plume Bouli, after an obscure

Sunday

24 Nov 2024

Katy Balls

Who are Labour’s new working-class voters? An interview with Claire Ainsley

What is a working person? This question dominated the lead-up to Labour’s first Budget in over 14 years. After Rachel Reeves stood at the despatch box and announced tax rises for farmers, business owners and entrepreneurs, it’s at least become clearer who Keir Starmer doesn’t mean when he talks about working people. Since then, the Prime Minister has had to deny that he is mounting a class war by targeting private schools and landowners. Yet class is an important part of Starmer’s political project – with the work beginning long before he entered Downing Street. ‘I thought people were looked down on for how they voted. I thought there was no

Ross Clark

Is Labour really going to crack down on benefit cheats?

I can’t fault Keir Starmer for his piece in the Mail on Sunday today promising that Labour will crack down on idlers and benefit cheats. But does anyone really believe that Labour is really going to get on top of the explosion in out of work benefits? Whenever the Conservatives announced plans to trim the benefits bill, Labour accused them of heartlessness ‘Don’t get me wrong’, the Prime Minister writes. ‘We will crack down hard on anyone who tries to game the system… There will be a zero-tolerance approach to these criminals.’ Work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall is due to announce on Tuesday measures which will supposedly achieve this and cut

Joe Bedell-Brill

Liz Kendall: those who won’t take up work may lose benefits

The number of people not in work has increased significantly since the pandemic, and the government is preparing to cut costs through changes to the welfare system. On Sky News this morning, Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall was keen to stress that it was the government’s ‘responsibility to provide… new opportunities’ for young people who were out of work, training or education. Kendall told Trevor Phillips there is a ‘lifelong consequence’ when young people do not gain skills or work experience. When pushed by Phillips, Kendall admitted that under the new system, those who ‘repeatedly refuse to take up the training or work responsibilities’ would have ‘sanctions’ on their

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

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

23 Nov 2024

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