Politics

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

Friday

Rupert Hawksley

Is Labour trying to kill the gambling industry?

It seems Labour will not rest until the gambling industry is dead and buried. In the latest attack, more than 100 Labour MPs have signed a letter to Chancellor Rachel Reeves calling for significant tax rises on ‘harmful online gambling products’. The letter, written by MPs Alex Ballinger and Beccy Cooper, both members of the All Party Parliamentary Group for Gambling Reform, suggests that the revenue should be ‘ringfenced to help address child poverty and related harms.’ We risk seeing an exodus of gamblers from mainstream bookmakers The letter follows an intervention by Gordon Brown, who described raising gambling levies as a ‘straightforward Budget choice’. The former prime minister has

James Kirkup James Kirkup

Ming Campbell was too good for politics

Sir Menzies Campbell’s death means the loss of one of the most inconspicuously interesting people I’ve known in politics, not to mention one of the nicest. Ming, who led the Lib Dems from 2006 to 2007, had naturally faded from the limelight in recent years, but there was a time when he was everywhere. He was a regular on Question Time and anywhere else that big subjects – especially foreign affairs – were discussed. The headlines on his death, at the age of 84, will naturally refer to him as ‘former Lib Dem leader’ but really that role was only a small part of his story, and one of the

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Is Nato really ready to shoot down Russian jets?

Until recently, when Russian drones strayed into Nato airspace during mass attacks on Ukraine, fighter jets would scramble, not to shoot them down, but to watch. The allies tracked the drones as they flew across the Nato border, either jammed off course or deliberately redirected to confuse Ukrainian air defences. In both cases, if the drones didn’t crash into a field somewhere in Romania or Poland, they always made it back to bomb Ukrainians, under the close watch of Nato’s best pilots on fully loaded warplanes. Is Nato so terrified of Vladimir Putin that it allows Russian drones to roam its skies freely? For Ukrainians, this was infuriating. They could

Steerpike Steerpike

The SNP’s hypocrisy over digital ID

It would be putting it mildly to say Sir Keir Starmer’s digital ID card plans have gone down like a lead balloon. The Prime Minister’s proposals to make ID cards compulsory for every British adult have raised concerns about freedom, data security and effectiveness – as it isn’t clear the policy would actually work to tackle illegal immigration if it was rolled out. Hardly the best start to conference season… Some of those criticising Starmer over his policy are – surprise surprise – Scottish nationalists. SNP First Minister John Swinney took to Twitter to rage: I am opposed to mandatory digital ID – people should be able to go about

Laurie Wastell

Nigel Farage has a point about migrants eating swans

When Nigel Farage appeared to ape Donald Trump by noting the problem of migrants mistreating British wildlife, his comments were swiftly condemned. Speaking to LBC’s Nick Ferrari on Wednesday, the Reform leader suggested that ‘swans were being eaten in Royal Parks in this country’ and that ‘carp were being taken out of ponds’. Who was to blame? ‘People who come from countries where it’s quite acceptable to do so’, he said, in particular eastern Europeans. During the US election campaign last year, Trump had provoked considerable controversy (and some enjoyable memes) after saying that Haitian migrants were ‘eating the dogs’ in Ohio. BBC Newsnight subjected Farage’s claims to a po-faced

Madeline Grant

ID cards are the perfect policy for Starmer

‘The Global Progress Action Summit’ is exactly the sort of event Keir Starmer loves. It’s a sort of Blairite seance, where all the ghouls of a dead liberal order are summoned and live again to spend 24 hours doing their favourite thing: bloviating. It’s a pretty cast-iron rule that an organisation with two words for physical movement in its title will in fact be an impotent talking shop. It was to this appalling gathering that Sir Keir – a man who famously prefers Davos to Westminster – had trotted to announce the introduction of ID cards. This little piggy had gone wee wee wee all the way to his spiritual

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Tony Blair can’t save Gaza

There’s a very short list of important questions, these days, to which the right answer is ‘Tony Blair’. I mean, a really short list. In a round of the US gameshow Jeopardy, when the host says ‘Tony Blair’, nobody is going to win a doublewide trailer by piping up: ‘Who would be the best person to be king of the Gaza Strip once all the bodies have been cleared away?’ The scheme circulating for Blair the Viceroy involve GITA entering Gaza as its ‘supreme political and legal authority’ And yet. Our former prime minister – now, though the way he carries on it’s easy to forget, a private citizen –

Tim Shipman

ID cards are back: will they work?

17 min listen

The Labour machine has whirred into gear to try and contain a certain Northern mayor’s mischievous interventions this week, by announcing a big controversial piece of policy. The news that ID cards – Tony Blair’s pet project – will be introduced has splashed all the front pages, demoting Andy Burnham to yesterday’s news. It’s a policy with broad public support, but with a passionate minority opposition including the leaders of the other major parties. The fact that it is being rebranded as a ‘Brit card’ with the aim of tackling the migration crisis has also ruffled a few feathers. Will it work politically? And, more importantly, will it work in

Steerpike Steerpike

Electoral Commission won’t investigate McSweeney over undeclared £700k

Just days before Labour politicians head to Liverpool for the party’s annual conference, a story about Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff has been dominating headlines. It emerged that the Labour Together founder’s lawyer advised Morgan McSweenet that he should mark £700,000 of undisclosed donations as an ‘admin error’, according to a leaked document from 2021 published by the Conservatives on Tuesday. But today, the Electoral Commission has announced it will not be probing the case. How interesting… Over the time McSweeney ran the think tank, more than £700,000 of donations were not properly registered – including a whopping £100,000 gifted to the think tank while McSweeney was running Starmer’s

James Heale James Heale

Starmer’s Reform solution? ID cards

It has been another difficult week for Keir Starmer. He has lost his director of communications, and his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, is under constant fire. The economy is stagnant and he faces near-constant manoeuvring from Andy Burnham. So today’s speech at the ‘Global Progress Action Summit’ in London took on an added weight. With Labour conference beginning on Sunday, many of Starmer’s MPs and members are looking for a lead after another summer of drift. The Prime Minister sought to do that in a 20-minute address. His speech sought to explain the loss of confidence which has seen the party’s poll rating slump to less than 20 per

Steerpike Steerpike

Kneecap court case collapses

To Woolwich Crown Court, where the case against Kneecap member Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh has been thrown out. The Irish rapper, who performs under the name Mo Chara, appeared on a single terror charge after being accused of pulling out a Hezbollah flag at a 2024 gig in Kentish Town’s O2 Forum. But the case collapsed today after the chief magistrate deemed that the proceedings against Ó hAnnaidh lacked the required consent of the director of public prosecutions and attorney general within the six-month statutory time limit. After explaining the technical error, Paul Goldspring told the musician: ‘These proceedings against the defendant were instituted unlawfully and are null.’ Addressing the

Travis Aaroe

When Curtis Yarvin met Alastair Campbell

A video has been doing the rounds in which a woman holds an iguana up to the glass window of an aquarium. A beluga whale emerges from the murk. For a brief moment two creatures whose very existence is incomprehensible to each other – who would never, in millions of years, have met but for this precise set of circumstances – come nose to nose. The whale then turns, and is gone. Something similar occurred on stage at the HowTheLightGetsIn festival on Sunday, where Alastair Campbell interviewed Curtis Yarvin – a ‘neo-reactionary’ blogger, tech entrepreneur and court theorist to J.D. Vance. He has argued for a form of monarchy in

John McTernan

The case against Andy Burnham

A New Statesman profile for the issue published in the week before Labour Party conference. A lengthy interview in the Daily Telegraph on the eve of a major international conference of global progressive leaders, including the newly-elected prime ministers of Canada, Australia and Norway. This is your standard press management for a party leader in the run up to the second meeting of the UK Labour family since its landslide victory in July 2024. Except it’s not Keir Starmer who is being profiled and interviewed, it’s Andy Burnham, the Labour mayor of Greater Manchester, who was already enjoying a good week as the Hillsborough Law was passed. This legislation –

Angela Epstein

What’s so bad about ID cards?

Back in 2009, when the Labour government piloted a voluntary biometric identity card, I signed up immediately. In fact – claim to fame – since the scheme was actually launched in my hometown of Greater Manchester, I was one of the first in the country to acquire this pioneering piece of ID. Mine for just 30 quid. Why the enthusiasm? It simply seemed a pragmatic thing to do. No rooting around for dog-eared gas bills to prove I wasn’t a phoney. Or living in fear of losing my passport when travelling across Europe. I didn’t for a moment consider whether the card could compromise my privacy or expose my darkest secrets. Apart

Yossi Melman

Do not dismiss Trump’s Gaza plan

The recent moves by Donald Trump to promote a plan to end the two-year war between Hamas and Israel in Gaza appear this time to be more serious and promising than in the past. The American administration, led by Steve Witkoff, the President’s special envoy for international conflicts, has been formulating for several weeks a detailed outline, whose main points are: The plan, which includes 21 clauses, was discussed this week at a highly important meeting of Arab state leaders on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York with President Trump. Also attending the meeting were Turkish President Erdoğan and representatives from Pakistan – a country that

Joanna Williams

Labour women must stop crying sexism

Does the Labour party have a problem with women? It’s not just Conservatives – who enjoy comparing their own three female prime ministers with Labour’s failure to get any woman into the top job – who seem to think so. It turns out many on the left think their side of the aisle is riddled with sexism. Women on the left need to wake up to the fact that not all criticism directed their way is ‘sexism’ As Labour members head to Liverpool for this weekend’s party conference, all eyes are on the battle between Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson and former Leader of the Commons, Lucy Powell, for the position

Anthony Browne

Why Brits are no good at learning foreign languages

The British media has got into one of its regular funks about Britons not learning foreign languages. As the only monoglot in a family of polyglots, it is an issue I have had a lifelong sensitivity about. But as always, the national hand-wringing displays more ignorance than insight. The wailing follows a regular pattern – we Brits are lazy, it damages our international reputation, and is bad for the economy. But given that our children are leading the Western world in reading, writing and arithmetic, it is unlikely that they are noticeably more lazy than those of other countries. A slightly more sophisticated argument points out that since our mother

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Matthew Parris, Stephen J. Shaw, Henry Jeffreys, Tessa Dunlop and Angus Colwell

31 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Matthew Parris reflects on the gay rights movement in the UK; faced with Britain’s demographic declines, Stephen J. Shaw argues that Britain needs to recover a sense of ‘futurehood’; Henry Jeffreys makes the case for disposing of wine lists; Tessa Dunlop reviews Valentine Low’s Power and the Palace: The Inside Story of the Monarchy and 10 Downing Street; and, Angus Colwell reviews a new podcast on David Bowie from BBC Sounds.  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Thursday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Digital IDs are a nightmare of Tony Blair’s making

Is Tony Blair pulling the strings of Keir Starmer’s government from beyond the political grave? Only two days ago the Tony Blair Institute released a report calling for digital ID cards. Now Starmer is expected to announce that the UK public will indeed have digital IDs forced upon them. The juxtaposition of these two things cannot have been an accident unless you believe firstly that Blair had no prior knowledge of what Starmer was going to announce, and secondly that Starmer decided to go ahead regardless of Blair’s intervention, knowing full well what it would look like. Has Starmer really thought through the practical consequences of digital ID cards? He

James Heale James Heale

Labour unveils its Reform fightback

After a summer of drift, Labour today launches a fresh fightback against the rise of Reform UK. Leading the charge is Steve Reed, the recently promoted Minister for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG). In an interview with Michael Gove for The Spectator’s YouTube channel, he explained the thinking behind his department’s new ‘Pride in Place’ programme. A reported £3.4 billion will be pumped into struggling communities over the next decade to try and to resurrect the British high street. You can watch the full interview below. Reed’s argument is simple: if communities are stronger, they are less likely to turn away from Labour and vote for Reform. ‘Nigel Farage weaponises