Politics Archives

Sunday

19 Jan 2025

The UK still hasn’t come to terms with the Muslim Brotherhood

Earlier this month, the UAE announced it was sanctioning 11 individuals and eight rather obscure organisations for alleged connections to the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). The UAE proscribed the MB as a terrorist group in 2014, so you might be forgiven for thinking this was routine. But it wasn’t. All eight organisations were based in the UK. Normally this works the other way round: the UK bans or sanctions entities elsewhere. Having an Arab country – especially one we claim as a friend – do that in reverse should set alarm bells ringing. There was a brief flurry of press interest, then silence. The Muslim Brotherhood is the mothership of all modern

Gavin Mortimer

How France’s Jimmy Savile also got away with his evil

This week nine more charges of sexual abuse were levelled against Abbé Pierre, the late French Roman Catholic priest who for decades was regarded as a modern-day saint. This brings to 33 the number of charges, ranging from sexual assault to the rape of a boy, all alleged to have been committed between the 1960s and shortly before the priest’s death in 2007 at the age of 94. Among the latest complainants are a woman now 58, who detailed how she was assaulted by Abbé Pierre exactly fifty years ago. ‘Several times I’ve wanted to shout to the world that this man isn’t who he says he is,’ the woman said in an

Steerpike

Will MAGA push out Mandelson?

They do say you shouldn’t take anything for granted and it seems Peter Mandelson is beginning to realise that too. He may have thought that his new appointment as UK ambassador to the US was set in stone – but it has emerged that the president-elect is considering, um, rejecting Sir Keir Starmer’s nominee. Ouch. As first reported by the Independent, it transpires that the Trump team says it isn’t certain that Mandelson will be accepted by the Republican leader after he becomes president. For a nominee to officially take on the role, the country’s head of state has to accept the ‘letters of credence’ – and on this, Trump may

Saturday

18 Jan 2025

Freddy Gray

Trump’s plan for day one

Washington, DC On your marks, get set, executive orders. Donald Trump will be sworn back into office on Monday, from inside the Capitol Rotunda, as Ronald Reagan was in 1985. Cold weather is the official reason for moving the ceremony from outside to in, and it seems true – the 78-year-old president-elect may wish to avoid the fate of his predecessor William Henry Harrison – although there’s plenty of speculation that security is the real factor. The Donald, in benevolent king mode, also didn’t want the poor horses to freeze to death on his big day. It’s funny what goes on in that very famous orange head. Trump will then make

Katy Balls

The truth about a Tory-Reform pact

It’s been a mixed week for Kemi Badenoch. The Tory leader can – alongside Elon Musk and Nigel Farage – claim a partial win after Labour announced an audit and inquiries into grooming gangs (though stopped short of a national one). She also set out the first part of her plan for restoring trust – acknowledging that the Tories has made a series of mistakes while in office. However, an interview on the pensions triple lock was quickly weaponised by Labour, Tory MPs are hungry for a policy announcement and the Reform party is in the lead in several polls. It’s why talk of a ‘Reform-Tory pact’ is rising up

Kate Andrews

Reeves’s worst week so far?

16 min listen

It’s been a tricky week for Rachel Reeves: an onslaught of criticism for the levels of borrowing costs, GDP at 0.1 per cent, and stagflation still gripping the UK economy. Remarkably she has come out of it looking stronger – politically at least. But can she afford to celebrate? The Spectator’s Kate Andrews and data editor Michael Simmons join the podcast to discuss the economy, and go through some of the most striking graphs from The Spectator’sdata hub this week. Produced by Natasha Feroze.

Andrew Liddle

The dilemma facing Scottish Labour MPs

For Scottish Labour’s significant crop of new MPs, the heady summer of electoral triumph is already a distant memory. In the days following the general election – where Anas Sarwar’s party swept the Central Belt, gaining a whopping 36 seats – it seemed Scottish Labour’s recovery was not only inevitable but already underway. In the months since that has all changed, with Scottish Labour’s popularity declining as much – if not more – than its UK counterpart. A Norstat poll in December, for instance, had Scottish Labour at its lowest ebb in three years and the SNP, remarkably, on course to once again form the Scottish Government following devolved elections

Eoghan Harris

Lockerbie and the forgiveness fallacy

It’s clear who was to blame for the Lockerbie terrorist bombing: Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi paid over a billion dollars to relatives of the 270 victims of the attack after accepting responsibility. But viewers of Sky Atlantic’s Lockerbie: A Search For Truth, might feel that the USA and UK were somehow involved. Here’s a clue as to why that might be the case: it’s co-directed by Jim Loach, son of Ken, who seems not so much a chip off the old block as a chip off the old Trot block. Swire’s story resembles what a Sinn Féin critic like me calls the forgiveness fallacy Lockerbie’s hero is Jim Swire, who lost his

Angela Epstein

Why are so many BBC broadcasters going native?

Of the many characters created by the peerless Victoria Wood, one creation in particular lingers in the mind: namely the immaculately polished, but unashamedly snobbish television continuity announcer, who, with an assassin’s smile, treated her audience with utter contempt. ‘We’d like to apologise to viewers in the North. It must be awful for them,’ was one of her more cutting remarks. The hon hon hon bonhomie of French surnames – step forward President Macrrrrrron – is hard to take seriously Coming from Manchester, Wood was clearly making mischief with counterintuitive comedy. She was taking aim at how crisp, received pronunciation can make anything sound plausible. Had she not died in 2016, at

Jim Lawley

Spain’s expat tax won’t last long

‘There are only two families in the world, as a grandmother of mine used to say: the haves and the have-nots.’ Sancho Panza’s line in Cervantes’ famous novel was echoed by socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez on Monday when he worried that Spanish society was rapidly dividing into two classes: ‘Those who inherit properties from their parents and those who have to spend their lives working to pay the rent.’ Spain certainly has a severe housing crisis. Although the fertility rate of 1.3 children per woman is far below the 2.1 needed to maintain population, mass immigration means that every year the country needs to find homes for over half

Alexander Larman

What made David Lynch cool

When one of your favourite filmmakers dies, it is hard not to feel a deeply personal sense of loss; the punch in the viscera with the knowledge that someone who has created some of the most iconic pieces of cinema from the past half-century will no longer be bringing his inimitable and unforgettable personal voice into film. And so it has been with the dreadful news that the director David Lynch died on Thursday at the age of 78: not a young age, but when the likes of Ridley Scott and Clint Eastwood are still making major work in their eighties and nineties, it is an enormous shame that he

Friday

17 Jan 2025

Matthew Foldi

Will TikTok have a second life?

TikTok is hoping that 2025 can be its year – but what comes next for the social media company is truly anyone’s guess. Will someone buy it? Will it divest from its Chinese ownership? Will it exist in America next week (the app is fully banned in China as is)? Stay tuned. The social-media app is seeking yet another revival at the 11th hour. Despite a bipartisan bill signed by President Joe Biden that restricts the ability for foreign adversaries to run social-media companies in the United States, TikTok is activating its army of supporters once more (the app is presumably hoping that its child soldiers will not threaten to kill themselves or

Yossi Melman

Why Netanyahu won’t let the Gaza hostage deal fall through

President-elect Donald Trump is poised to claim his first major foreign policy achievement just days before his inauguration on Monday. If no last-minute obstacles arise, a long-anticipated hostage deal between Israel and Hamas in Gaza could take effect as soon as this Sunday. But while Trump will emerge victorious from this situation, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on the other hand, will find himself humiliated and defeated. For nearly a year, fearing the collapse of his right-wing coalition, Netanyahu has worked hard to prevent the deal from concluding, using all sorts of excuses and hoping that Hamas would eventually derail it and be blamed for it. This has not happened.

Iain Macwhirter

Will the SNP come to its senses on North Sea oil?

Drill, baby drill. The mood on Net Zero is changing in the Scottish parliament where a majority of MSPs have signed a petition calling for a reversal on the ban on new oil and gas licenses in the North Sea. This sea change in attitudes to the black stuff, if you’ll excuse the pun, could portend a dramatic reversal of the Scottish government’s opposition to fossil fuels in SNP leader John Swinney’s long-delayed energy strategy. The “presumption against offshore drilling” has been the centrepiece of SNP energy policy since Cop26 in 2021, when Nicola Sturgeon posed for selfies with Greta Thunberg. Sturgeon is gone, of course – and her clean

Kate Andrews

Will the IMF regret its backing for Labour’s Budget?

International investors may be jittery about the UK’s future, but the International Monetary Fund appears to be more optimistic. The IMF has published its World Economic Outlook report for January, which forecasts the UK will have the third-fastest growth in the G7 this year. It revises upwards its projection for 2025, by 0.1 per cent, to 1.6 per cent. The UK falling in after the United States and Canada does not make good on Labour’s promise to be the fastest growing advanced economy. But after a tumultuous week of gilt fluctuations, bad growth figures and an even worse retail sales update, it’s a good way to be ending the week.

James Heale

Trudeau’s assassin could be Canada’s next leader

Less than 24 hours after Mark Carney’s launch, Chrystia Freeland announced her bid to be the next Liberal party leader of Canada. The former finance minister – whose resignation last month triggered Justin Trudeau’s downfall – put out a pithy six word statement this morning. ‘I’m running to fight for Canada’, it said, simply. She intends to officially launch her campaign on Sunday, having already gained public endorsements from Mark Holland and Diane Lebouthillier. The leadership field has narrowed considerably this week as possible contenders Christy Clark, Dominic LeBlanc, Francois Phillipe Champagne and Mélanie Joly all ruled themselves out. It leaves Freeland and Carney as the only two serious candidates

Ian Acheson

Empty pledges won’t solve the knife crime epidemic

On 23 September last year at 6.30 p.m. in the evening in a street in Woolwich, London, Daejaun Campbell cried out, ‘I’m 15, don’t let me die’ as he bled out on a pavement after being stabbed. You probably won’t remember Deajaun but he was a one of nine children murdered by knives in London last year. He was a young black man in a city where victims and perpetrators often share the same ethnicity. An investigation by the Times has revealed that over half the 576 black people murdered by knives between 2013 and 2023 were aged between 16 and 24. London bucks a national trend that reports knife

Patrick O’Flynn

Is Badenoch bouncing back?

Conventional wisdom says the Tory leadership of Kemi Badenoch is close to crisis. This is perhaps because the prevailing political mood is much more heavily influenced by hindsight than by foresight. The manufacture of almost every opinion that gains the status of conventional wisdom depends on a time lag to allow its repetition and dispersal among mid-wit cadres. The polls seem to at least back up the view that Badenoch is in trouble; most aggregation sites put Reform above the Conservatives in terms of average ratings. Yet patterns of opinion recorded in polls are also based on a time lag, capturing the impact of events that first came to public

Annabel Denham

Why is WFH still as common as it is?

Have you seen Severance? If not, I urge you to cancel all evening plans and commit to binge-watching it for the next week. I’m not a PR for Apple TV+, or not a paid one at least, merely an optimist who believes the creators of this multi-award-winning show may have gifted mankind one of the best series of all time. It’s still early days, we’re only ten episodes in, but Severance could be proof that high-concept, done well, is unbeatable viewing. Apple certainly has a great deal riding on it: the new season’s budget was reportedly $200 million. And though the data are hard to come by, Apple TV+ is apparently watched less in one month than Netflix is

Damian Thompson

Did Muslim leaders help conceal the grooming gangs scandal? A fierce exchange of views

28 min listen

Welcome to one of the most heated exchanges of views in the history of the Holy Smoke podcast. In this episode, Damian Thompson talks to the distinguished Islamic scholar Dr Musharraf Hussain about the controversy surrounding the Muslim background of some of the accused in the crimes of Britain’s ‘grooming gangs’. Damian draws an analogy between the Catholic hierarchy’s cover-up of sex abuse by priests, and what he claims was the role of certain local Muslim community leaders in restricting debate about, and investigation of, abuse committed by men from Pakistani families. To say that there was no common ground between Dr Thompson and Dr Hussain would be putting it mildly, alas…