Politics

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

Friday

James Heale James Heale

How parliament is weaponised against Reform UK

A recent trend has emerged at Prime Ministers’ Questions. Each week, after Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch have had their exchange, a series of Labour backbenchers will stand up. Among the usual points about constituency matters, there is typically at least one Member who will take aim at either Reform UK or its leader, Nigel Farage. This fits with Labour’s overall political strategy of going after the Clacton MP personally, with a series of attack adverts produced last weekend. Now, for the first time, The Spectator has obtained data which shows the scale of the assault which Reform UK is facing each week. So far this year, there have been

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The BBC’s Israel problem needs investigating

When the BBC was forced to admit that a woman it featured as a starving victim of the Gaza war was in fact also receiving treatment for cancer, it was not a minor correction. It was a collapse of credibility. The image of her wasted body, presented as evidence of Israeli starvation tactics, ricocheted across global media. It was powerful and emotive. And it is part of a broader and deeply troubling pattern. Time and again, when it comes to Israel or Jews, the BBC abandons the basic obligations of journalism: verify before broadcasting, contextualise before condemning, and correct with real transparency when errors occur. The list of failures is

Elisabeth Dampier

The right-wing extremist making a mockery of Germany’s self-ID laws

The leopard-print dress, earrings, and lipstick are quintessentially feminine. The thick handlebar moustache and neck tattoos, somewhat less so. The man in court is Sven Liebich, a right-wing extremist who has been photographed wearing a Nazi-style uniform at rallies. In 2023 he was sentenced to 18 months in prison for incitement, slander, and insult. This year his final appeal was rejected and he is now due to be sent to prison. Due to Germany’s comically woke laws on transgenderism, it is a women’s prison that he will be sent to. The new law has also had a chilling effect on freedom of speech in Germany Last year, the last German

Lucy Dunn

Tory MSP quits over party’s ‘reactionary politics’

The Scottish Conservatives aren’t having the best time of it at the moment. In more bad news for the blues, this morning Jeremy Balfour MSP, the party’s social justice spokesperson, has decided to quit over its ‘reactionary politics’. In a heartfelt letter to leader Russell Findlay, the Lothian MSP takes aim at his former party for ‘no longer [having] a positive platform to offer the people of Scotland’ and being uninterested in helping those most in need in society. Balfour has served in the Scottish parliament for almost a decade and held a number of briefs during that time – including on housing, equalities and welfare – and has had

James Hanson

London’s tube strike is being driven by greed

You almost have to admire the RMT – they are a trade union from central casting. From Bob Crow to Mick Lynch, their leaders have been the baldest, the bolshiest and the most Bolshevik of the lot – and, credit where it’s due, the most effective. How else can you explain the insanity of a tube driver in London earning about £64,000 a year for a job that could be automated at a stroke? We shouldn’t be surprised that the RMT is rolling the dice on industrial action next month Into this madness, step forward Eddie Dempsey. Younger and less follically challenged than his predecessors, he nonetheless shares their appetite

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Svitlana Morenets, Michael Simmons, Ursula Buchan, Igor Toronyi-Lalic, Richard Morris & Mark Mason

37 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Svitlana Morenets says that Trump has given Zelensky cause for hope; Michael Simmons looks at how the American healthcare system is keeping the NHS afloat; Ursula Buchan explains how the Spectator shaped John Buchan; Igor Toronyi-Lalic argues that art is no place for moralising, as he reviews Rosanna McLaughlin; Richard Morris reveals how to access the many treasures locked away in private homes; and, Mark Mason provides his notes on bank holidays. Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Thursday

Andrew Lilico

What Lewis Goodall gets wrong about inheritance tax

Do you want to live in a world in which you are forbidden from giving things, such as your time, your money or your labour, to other people? It has become increasingly common in recent years for those on the left of British politics to argue that it is illegitimate for people to receive a gift after someone has died – what we call ‘inheritance’. For that is all that ‘inheritance’ is. A dead person gives you some things and you receive them. Should people be forbidden from buying a car for their children or supplying the money for a house deposit? On Thursday, clips of Lewis Goodall’s LBC show showed

Matthew Lynn

What’s the point of nationalising our steel plants?

We already have Great British Energy, and of course Great British Rail. It now looks as very soon we will also have Great British Steel. The government has today stepped in to rescue another failing metal producer, Speciality Steels in South Yorkshire. It is, in effect, creating a new state-owned steel conglomerate. There is just one catch. It is the government’s incompetently designed net-zero targets that are responsible for bankrupting the industry – and all that nationalising will achieve is making taxpayers responsible for endless losses. The government is, in effect, bankrupting the companies and then stepping in to rescue them Britain’s third largest steel works, Speciality Steelworks, today collapsed into

Steerpike Steerpike

More people blame Tories than Labour for migrant hotels

Migrant hotels have been the talk of the week after the High Court granted Epping Forest district council a temporary injunction on Tuesday – meaning the asylum seeker residents of Essex’s Bell Hotel must be moved within 24 days. It’s a landmark ruling that will have significant ramifications for the rest of the country – with just under 30 other councils considering similar legal action. Talk about getting the ball rolling… Politicians have been quick to make use of the situation for political point scoring, with shadow home secretary Chris Philp attacking Labour for ‘tearing up the deterrents the Conservatives put in place’. This prompted a heated response from a

Rakib Ehsan

The small boats are a national security emergency

New immigration data published today has only reinforced what many have known for some time – the current government strategy of ‘smashing the gangs’ to resolve the UK’s small-boats emergency is failing miserably. There are growing signs that the impact of the Yemeni civil war and the Israel-Palestine conflict is spilling over into the UK’s small-boats emergency Following the recent development that 50,000 small-boat migrants had arrived in the UK under the prime ministership of Sir Keir Starmer, the fresh immigration statistics reveal that in the year ending June 2025, there were 49,341 detected so-called ‘irregular arrivals’ – 27 per cent more than in the previous year. Nearly nine in

James Snell

We need to purge the Ministry of Defence

On Afghanistan, you’ll recall, a massive data breach of vast dimensions and bitter consequences has already been revealed, after years of secrecy and lies. The state has forked out billions to transport tens of thousands of entirely unvetted people into Britain, where they and their descendants will reside at public expense. And, to top it off, there was an immense cover-up, the fabricating of official numbers and a super-injunction to muzzle the press. The only part of the whole debacle that the regime executed with any ability was the deceit and the cover-up. It is better at hiding the truth from the public than it is at doing anything else.

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Is the Blair-Cameron consensus on education over?

19 min listen

GCSE results day has brought a mixed picture; the pass rate has fallen, yet the regional gap has reduced and the gender gap is the narrowest it has ever been. Isabel Hardman and Sir Nick Gibb, former Conservative schools minister, join James Heale to discuss education policy, how changing cultural expectations may be helping the gender gap and why Labour seem determined to attack the Conservatives’ record on education. In Nick’s words, is Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson a ‘more political figure than education figure’? Plus: how the recent High Court ruling over migrant hotels could spark a crisis for the government as more councils, including Labour-controlled ones, seek an end

Steerpike Steerpike

Labour’s first year sees 111,000 asylum claims

When it rains for Sir Keir Starmer, it pours. Now it has emerged that during the Labour lot’s first year in office to June 2025, a whopping 111,000 people claimed asylum in the UK amid a surge in small boat crossings – up by a staggering 14 per cent on the previous 12 months. So much for smashing the gangs, eh? Figures reveal that the numbers of those claiming asylum during this period was 8 per cent greater than the last asylum claim peak in 2002. Half of those looking for asylum entered the UK irregularly: four in ten arrived by small boat while an additional one in ten arrived

James Heale James Heale

The Epping ruling is the last thing Yvette Cooper needs

It is another scratchy, difficult week for the government. Inflation is up, to 3.8 per cent in July – the highest level since January 2024. Asylum applications are now at record levels with 111,000 applying during Keir Starmer’s first year in office. But the real body blow is the interim High Court injunction to stop migrants from being accommodated at The Bell Hotel in Epping. Unsurprisingly, dozens of councils of the country are now poised to launch similar action. That creates a very difficult dilemma for Yvette Cooper. The Home Secretary has sought to downplay and depoliticise the housing of asylum seekers, pointing, not unfairly, to the industrial scale under

Matthew Lynn

Why is Dale Vince comparing Tesla to the Ku Klux Klan?

Perhaps its cars automatically run down people of the wrong colour? Or its batteries will only charge if you put a white hood over the socket? It is hard to know what exactly the green energy tycoon Dale Vince is thinking by comparing Tesla to the Ku Klux Klan. The comparison is so ridiculously over-the-top, it suggests that Vince has something else in mind. He is terrified of Elon Musk’s company giving him some real competition in the British market – and instead of competing on price or service is trying to block him from the market instead.  Tesla has applied to Ofgem for an electricity supply licence that will

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Israel will have to dig deep for its Gaza City offensive

Since the renewal of ground operations in March this year under the Southern Command, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) have entered a defining phase of their campaign in the Gaza Strip. Under the framework of Operation ‘Gideon’s Chariots’, Israeli troops have achieved what military officials describe as operational control over approximately 75 per cent of the territory. This advance has laid the foundation for the IDF’s current positioning on the outskirts of Gaza City and the launch of the next phase of the war: a concentrated assault on the remaining Hamas strongholds in the urban core. There is an undercurrent of exhaustion across the Israeli public The gains under Operation

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Why are white children doing worst at GCSEs?

That’s the trouble of trying to measure everything through the metric of race: sooner or later you will arrive at a situation very different from that which you intended. Namely, that in some cases it is white people who appear to be at some kind of disadvantage. At least Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson is not trying to cover up the glaring disparity in GCSE results between ethnic groups. She has admitted that white working-class children are underperforming and suggests that the state has ‘failed them’. But she doesn’t really go on to ask herself how or why.   What is it about being white, for example, that makes pupils underperform in

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

Britain is being pulled under by debt

Britain is slowly drowning in debt. Figures just released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that in the financial year to July the state had to borrow £60 billion to tread water. That’s £6.7 billion more than by July last year and the third highest borrowing total for this period of the year since records began 32 years ago. Statisticians also managed to find almost another billion pounds in debt payments that now need to be added to the previous month’s figures.  When the Bank cut interest rates, something alarming happened in the borrowing markets There was better news, though, when looking at the month of July alone, with

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Israel risks rewarding Hamas’s kidnapping

What weapon is stronger than F-16s, drones, targeted strikes, disciplined and war-hardened ground troops, and even nuclear weapons? Hostages. Despite its formidable armed forces and weapons capabilities, in the long and bitter struggle between Israel and its enemies, no tool of war has proven more effective in bending the will of the Jewish state than the abduction of its own citizens. Missiles can be intercepted, tanks can be destroyed, but a single captive Israeli can paralyse decision-making at the highest levels of government, as we are seeing today. From the earliest wars, prisoner exchanges followed the conventions of armed conflict. After 1948 and again in 1967, soldiers were exchanged for

George Cottrell

Dirty tricks have gone too far

Last week, John Power reported on Labour’s alleged ‘dark arts’ strategy: a cynical ploy to damage Nigel Farage and his allies not through debate, but through reputational sabotage. As a target of such smears for many years, I was not hugely surprised to see my name mentioned in the piece. I can attest to the venom of the attacks on Reform – in stark contrast to the ‘kinder, gentler politics’ once promised from Labour.  We should expect robust debate where ideas clash, but instead what we often encounter is a reliance on smears and innuendo. In this week’s Spectator, James Heale notes that my lawyers have written to Labour. Downing Street sources have