Politics

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

Monday

11 Nov 2024

James Snell

Why was Europe not ready for Trump?

Donald Trump has won his third presidential election and across Europe heads are exploding. This should not be the case. Many European leaders were briefed earlier this year that a Trump victory was more likely than not. But wishful thinking appears to have defeated grim experience in many minds and many civil service buildings. To hear the Europeans tell it, they are now confronted with a unique threat. The last time Trump was in office, Ukraine had been fighting Russia since 2014, but its survival was not hanging by a thread. It was not seriously likely that Russia would invade Moldova, Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania, as now seems possible. Finland

Michael Simmons

How did pollsters get Trump’s victory so wrong?

Was Donald Trump’s win unexpected? Not if you followed the betting markets, which had Trump at a two-thirds chance of winning days out from the election. The polls, on the other hand, told a different story. Analysis of polls carried out in 15 competitive states in the three weeks before last Tuesday’s election shows that whatever the method of polling used, there was a clear and consistent bias in favour of the Democrats. Pollsters spent an estimated half a billion dollars (£388 million) on this election, but most polling methods were still biased towards Kamala Harris by around three percentage points. One method – recruiting participants by mail – managed

Oscar Edmondson

Will Trump push the UK closer to the EU?

11 min listen

Keir Starmer is in France today to hold talks with Emmanuel Macron where they will discuss the impact of a Trump second term, and what it will mean for Ukraine. The Prime Minister marked Armistice Day at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe – the first time since 1944 that a British Prime Minister has been in France for the ceremony. What will come from this bilateral meeting? How does a Trump victory bring the UK and the EU closer? Elsewhere, a minor row broke out over the weekend around the UK’s Remembrance Day commemorations, with Reform UK leader Nigel Farage not being allowed to

Steerpike

SNP health secretary under fire over football

What is it with separatist health secretaries claiming from the public purse for the footie? First there was the £11,000 iPad scandal, which caused a headache for hapless Humza Yousaf and pushed former SNP health secretary Michael Matheson out of his government job. Now his successor Neil Gray is in the spotlight after the Sunday Mail revealed that the nationalist minister had been using ministerial cars to take him to sports matches. Alright for some! It transpired that Aberdeen FC-fan Gray had been chauffeured to three cup games at the national stadium, as well as a Pittodrie league match. The newest SNP health secretary declared his excursions in line with

Jonathan Miller

Keir Starmer’s pointless meeting with Emmanuel Macron

It’s extremely difficult to imagine that today’s meeting between Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron produced anything substantive beyond a photo opportunity at the Arc de Triomphe to mark the 106th anniversary of the 1918 armistice. This year is also the 120th anniversary of the Entente Cordiale and it suits both Starmer and Macron to big up the idea of Franco-British friendship, not that there has been much substance to it of late. Various bromides will certainly appear in the read-outs of the meeting but in substance nothing will have been achieved Downing Street briefed before today’s meeting that the agenda would cover the victory of Trump, and his threatened tariffs, and

Rod Liddle

Why Farage should – and shouldn’t – be UK ambassador to Trump

It is very kind of Nigel Farage to offer his services as a kind of intermediary between our government and the new American president. Keir Starmer certainly needs one, because protest though he might, nobody believes the line that Donald Trump is hugely impressed with the Labour government or that JD Vance has a new best friend in the magnificently dim David Lammy. I fear that Farage’s yearning to be in Washington DC rather than the agreeable Thames-side resort of Clacton-on-Sea spells trouble for Reform For eight years, Labour has behaved abominably towards Trump, flinging at him every conceivable insult, a number of its MPs demanding he not be allowed

Matthew Lynn

Labour is doomed if it is blamed for price rises

It emerged over the weekend that Tesco might have to start putting up prices. So, we have learned over the past few days, will Sainsbury’s, BT, and even JD Wetherspoons, a company that is usually committed to keeping prices as low as possible. One by one, many of the major consumer brands in the UK have said they will have to push up the amount they charge their customers, and are pinning the blame for that on the Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s Budget. The trouble is, the government seems unable to find a response. It is losing control of the narrative, and will soon find itself blamed for a fresh spike

Steerpike

JK Rowling blasts Alastair Campbell over women’s rights remarks

Has The Rest is Politics podcast peaked? Its hosts have certainly had a rather rocky ride of late – with ex-Tory MP Rory Stewart widely mocked last week over his bullish assertion that ‘Kamala Harris will win comfortably because Biden’s admin has been solid’ before the Democrat candidate went on to lose to Donald Trump. Now Tony Blair’s former spin doctor Alastair Campbell is in the spotlight over women’s rights concerns and his, er, ignorance of the whole matter. In a recent podcast episode, Campbell spent much time opining on the trans issue – first expressing surprise at how much gender ideology concerns were cutting through with voters before confessing

Richard Ekins

The great flaw in the Human Rights Act

Our new government’s most closely-held commitment is to the primacy of human rights law. Shortly after taking office, Keir Starmer vowed that under his leadership the UK will ‘never’ leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Last month, the Attorney General, Lord Hermer KC, undertook ‘to counter the false choice, offered by some, between parliamentary democracy and fundamental rights.’ Fair enough, save that Lord Hermer has confused protection of fundamental rights with judicial application of the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA). The HRA invites judges to answer questions that they are ill-suited to answer It is true and important that Parliament enacted the HRA and has not yet repealed it. But it does not follow

Lisa Haseldine

Ukraine will be worried if Trump has called Putin

When Donald Trump won the US presidential election last Wednesday, one leader’s message of congratulation was conspicuously absent. It took the Russian president Vladimir Putin more than 24 hours to pass comment on Trump’s win. He eventually praised the President-elect as ‘courageous’ and stated he had ‘nothing against’ Trump trying to resume contact with him. Putin, however, wouldn’t be calling him. Many in Ukraine have been concerned that Trump might seek to do a deal with Moscow over Kyiv’s head Well now it appears Trump may well have made the call. It has been reported that last Thursday, the President-elect picked up the phone to Putin, warning him ‘not to

Patrick O’Flynn

Farage should have been allowed to lay a Remembrance Sunday wreath

There was a cranky call doing the rounds online last week suggesting veterans should turn their backs on Sir Keir Starmer as he laid a Remembrance Sunday wreath. Naturally I opposed it, alongside many other conservative-leaning commentators. We argued that honouring our war dead is something we should want all the main strands of political opinion to unite behind. More than one in five people who voted at the general election in July were unrepresented Of course, this scheme didn’t happen: the vast majority of armed forces veterans would never politicise a service of remembrance for fallen colleagues in that way. So all the main party leaders joined together to

Steerpike

Labour minister obfuscates over defence spend target

While Sir Keir Starmer is in France this Armistice Day to place wreaths at the Arc de Triomphe, the Prime Minister’s defence secretary is doing the UK morning round. John Healey was across the airwaves this morning discussing president-elect Donald Trump, the war in Ukraine and the small boats fiasco. But on the issue of defence spending, Healey became rather tongue-tied… Quizzed by LBC’s Nick Ferrari on whether Starmer’s army will meet its target of increasing military spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP this parliament, the defence secretary repeatedly refused to directly answer the question. Instead Healey insisted that there will be a ‘path in the Spring’ to meeting

Sam Leith

Peanut the squirrel shows Elon Musk is wrong about the mainstream media

Was it Peanut wot won it? One of the stranger and more incendiary aspects of the run-up to the recent US election was a Twitter/ X howl-round about Peanut the squirrel. The house where Peanut lived was raided, and this blameless rescue-rodent euthanised, after a complaint was apparently filed to a government agency by a neighbour. And Peanut’s story went super-viral. The shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later approach to ‘news’ can leave any or all of us riddled with bullets. Just ask Peanut Rather than seeing it as a local hard-luck story, many social media users supposed this to be a paradigmatic instance of what was at stake in the election. This wasn’t human

Sunday

10 Nov 2024

Isabel Hardman

Evangelicals have questions to answer over the John Smyth scandal

Justin Welby has said he considered resigning as Archbishop of Canterbury over the findings of the Makin Review into the serial abuser John Smyth. That report, which emerged this week, found the Church of England had, from 2013, missed opportunities to bring Smyth to justice: from that point onwards, Welby and other senior figures knew about the abuse that Smyth exacted on his victims in the late 1970s and early 1980s. That line, ‘you will protect the work?’, is particularly telling Smyth, a barrister and Christian leader, was accused of beating and abusing boys in the shed in his garden in Winchester. Instead of ever being brought to justice, Smyth

Vazha Tavberidze

Georgia is in an existential fight

Georgia is defined by its fight for survival. Lying in the shadow of Russia, Turkey and Iran, it has navigated – not always successfully – between the great powers for centuries, longing for freedom. The 26 October parliamentary elections were billed as the latest existential chapter in this centuries-old struggle – a choice between returning to the West or sliding further into Russia’s orbit. Instead, it became yet another interlude to Georgia’s political crisis, with high-stakes actors in Moscow, Brussels, and Washington watching on as both sides apparently pull their punches, waiting for one another to make the first mistake. Bidzina Ivanishvili, the billionaire Georgian Dream founder widely seen as

John Keiger

What the First World War can teach us about the Third

It is our duty on Remembrance Sunday to honour the fallen. But to do justice to their sacrifice, we should also remember why the world descended into war in 1914. The history of the Great War has captivated and divided historians since Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip fired that fateful shot at Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914. Only later did we come to realise the full significance of that date. British military historian of the First World War and Conservative cabinet minister, Alan Clark, recorded the moment in his diary on Tuesday, 28 June 1983, with characteristic wit: ‘Today is the sixty-ninth anniversary of the assassination of the

Alexander Larman

The Royal Family must be careful with Kate

If this year’s Remembrance Sunday was unusually affecting, it was in large part due to the presence of both the King and the Princess of Wales at the service. After one of the hardest years for the monarchy in living memory, surpassing even the so-called ‘annus horribilis’ of 1992, there is hope that, as 2024 draws to a close, business as usual has been resumed – as far as it can be. The King has been dutifully pursuing his obligations for some time now – including a high-profile recent visit to Australia – but it was Catherine’s appearance that most people have been eagerly anticipating. Catherine may be the Firm’s

Steerpike

Could Streeting’s smoking ban breach Brexit terms?

Labour ministers are very keen to be good Europeans. But could the cause of closer continental ties come at the price of Wes Streeting’s smoking ban? Tobacco firms are perplexed as to how proposals to ban tobacco products for younger Brits will work in Northern Ireland. Under the terms of the UK’s revised Withdrawal Agreement, EU law continues to apply in certain respects here. Among the provisions of EU law is the snappily-named TPD2 – the EU’s second Tobacco Products Directive. This was implemented in the UK in 2016 and continues to apply now to Northern Ireland. Under the UK’s post-Brexit deal, Article 4 obliges the government to give the

Ian Williams

Will Trump and Musk fall out over China?

Xi Jinping was quick with his congratulations, urging Donald Trump to ‘forge the right path for China and the United States to get along in the new era’. After the previous election in 2020, the Chinese president was one of the last world leaders to message Joe Biden on his victory. His speed this time is perhaps testament to the fragility of the Chinese economy and an awareness in Beijing of the potential consequences of further sanctions. UBS has calculated that Trump’s threatened 60 per cent tariffs on all Chinese exports to the United States would more than halve China’s already faltering growth rate. Beijing was careful to appear neutral

David Christopher Kaufman

Trump’s plan to make America safe again

Donald Trump’s critics like to paint his supporters as hardcore right-wingers. The truth is rather plainer: many of those who voted for Trump are refugees from the conservative establishment desperate for a leader unafraid to speak their truth. We Americans are scared. Literally Shamed by the elites, mocked for their beliefs – sidelined by rising ‘wokeness’ and DEI-culture for being white or straight or male – they saw in Trump a man-of-action sympathetic to their back-to-basics worldview. Tired of being told what to say and how to feel, Trump’s supporters were ready to reclaim their voices in the safest space possible: the ballot box. The anti-elitist populism that swept Trump