Politics

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

Wednesday

Eliot Wilson

Britain shouldn’t take part in joint EU defence missions

Sir Keir Starmer has vowed to ‘reset’ the United Kingdom’s relations with the European Union. But at what cost? The EU has reportedly set out part of the price the UK might have to pay to be allowed back into its good books: Brussels wants Britain to contribute to the EU’s defence missions. Foreign Secretary David Lammy travelled to Luxembourg this week to a meeting of the EU Foreign Affairs Council to address the issue of security – an important element of Starmer’s intended ‘reset’. In Monday’s meeting, the EU reportedly pressed the Foreign Secretary for UK participation in its peacekeeping and conflict prevention missions, of which there are currently

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Science Secretary grilled over latest cronyism row

Labour’s cronyism row has reared its head once again. It now transpires that Sir Keir Starmer’s government failed to disclose an official’s links with the Labour lot when trying to nab her a civil service job – omitting to add the rather significant detail on important transparency forms. As Mr S wrote in August, the appointment of Emily Middleton to the Department for Science and Technology raised ‘cash for jobs’ concerns after it emerged she was a party donor, with the former businesswoman’s consultancy firm having given a whopping £66,000 to the party in the past. With Starmer’s government already struggling with the freebie fiasco, this latest development is hardly likely

Coffee House

Who’s backing whom for Tory leader?

There have now been four ballots of MPs to decide the next leader. Following the elimination of Priti Patel, Mel Stride, Tom Tugendhat and James Cleverly, two finalists remain. Now Tory members will vote on who they want of Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick to lead their party, with the victor to be announced on 2 November. While MPs won’t have the final say in this last round of voting, endorsements now may inform the next leader’s shadow cabinet. Below is The Spectator’s guide on which of the final two candidates is backed by the 121 Conservative MPs in parliament: Robert Jenrick (23): Kemi Badenoch (23): Knocked out… James Cleverly

Damian Reilly Damian Reilly

A German managing the England team? It’s depressing

Hand back the Falklands. Why not? FedEx over the Elgin Marbles. What’s the point of any of it anymore? They have put a German in charge of the England football team. It’s over.  Can there be a more depressing, or more obvious, sign of national decline than this utterly abject capitulation at the sport we love most – the game we invented, for God’s sake – to our greatest rivals? From Munich to Frankfurt to Hamburg they today must be howling at the appointment of Thomas Tuchel as England manager from the start of next year. The humiliation is searing.  Ignore if you want to the fact that appointing a foreign

Steerpike Steerpike

Jenrick takes aim at Khan over house-building

The Tory leadership contest is gathering pace with voting due to open up to the membership in less than 24 hours. Kemi Badenoch was quick to secure a top slot in Wednesday’s Telegraph, while rival Robert Jenrick gathered supporters together in the heart of Westminster for yet another campaign event today. The ex-housing secretary went heavy on – you guessed it – housing, and was certainly pulling no punches about his political opponents… ‘We are 1.3 million homes short of the number that we need,’ Jenrick declared from London’s Old Queen Street today. He went on, blasting mayor Sadiq Khan – and his lefty Labour government – over the city’s

Jawad Iqbal

Labour’s crackdown on hereditary privilege is hard to stomach

Do our new Labour rulers ever pause to think about how something they say or do might look to others? Do they consider, even for a nanosecond, how their behaviour in office or in private stacks up with the public positions they take, or how all this might look to ordinary voters outside the confines of Westminster? The whiff of brazen political hypocrisy – one rule for us and another for everyone else – hangs like a cloud over the new government. It goes some way towards explaining why this summer’s donor scandals, involving free clothes, spectacles and tickets to Taylor Swift concerts, have resonated so strongly with the public.

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

No, Israel isn’t deliberately killing children in Gaza

In every war, children perish. It’s the worst thing about conflict, this dragging of innocents into the swirling maelstrom of tensions they don’t even understand. In Iraq, almost 10,000 kids were maimed or killed between 2008 and 2023. In the war in Syria, a child was injured or killed every eight hours for ten infernal years. So unimaginable was the suffering of kids in the Congo wars of recent years that that benighted nation came to be called ‘the epicentre of child suffering’. The echoes of past libels against Jews are deafening now And so it is in the clash between Israel and Hamas. Children in Gaza are dying in

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Will falling inflation save Rachel Reeves’s Budget?

Inflation slowed to 1.7 per cent in the twelve months to September, taking the inflation rate to its lowest levels since spring 2021. While markets and forecasters had expected the inflation rate to drop below the Bank of England’s 2 per cent target at some point this year (market consensus for September was 1.9 per cent), the bigger-than-expected fall has come as a surprise, as core inflation also slowed to 3.2 per cent in the 12 months to September – down from 3.6 per cent in August. The largest contributions to the slowdown came from falling transport costs, while overall services fell to 4.9 per cent on the year, down

Matthew Lynn

Does Kamala Harris think black men can’t be trusted with crypto?

There have been plenty of accusations made against crypto currencies such as Bitcoin over the years. It is too flimsy, you can’t buy anything with it, and it is wildly volatile. All fair enough. But is it racist? That appears to be the view of Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for US president. The US vice president has unveiled a set of policies designed to help black men, an important group of voters who have been showing worrying signs of drifting towards her rival Donald Trump. It included pledges to improve healthcare, education, and to legalise marijuana, presumably on the grounds they think that black guys smoke a lot of

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Russian spies are intent on wreaking havoc in Germany

If ever the West needed confirmation that we have become firmly entrenched in a new Cold War with Russia, this month’s warnings from intelligence services across Europe should do it. Just a week after MI5’s Ken McCallum said that Russia’s military intelligence service is ‘on a sustained mission to generate mayhem on British and European streets’, the German security services have also raised the alarm. They have warned that the coming months would see the Russian secret services crank up the heat on acts of espionage and sabotage in Germany ‘without scruple’. Appearing for their annual grilling at the Bundestag’s parliamentary control committee on Monday, the heads of Germany’s three

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Trump’s Chicago interview was magnificently weird

Kamala Harris has been criticising Donald Trump for ducking interviews. Today, however, she avoided a sit-down with the Economic Club of Chicago. Trump, by contrast, showed up and spent an hour facing difficult questions from Bloomberg News’s editor-in-chief John Micklethwait. It was, like all the best Trump appearances, a magnificently weird occasion. Who needs LSD when you can watch him as a presidential candidate, eight years in, still melting reality live on YouTube? If Kamala Harris speaks in confusing word salads, Trump speaks in even more baffling fruit jellies Micklethwait is a brilliant man: polished, Ampleforth and Oxford, highly successful. His hair is coiffed and his loafers look expensive. For the

Steerpike Steerpike

Sir Keir faces scrutiny over Taylor Swift policing fiasco

Dear oh dear. The Home Secretary, the London mayor and even Sir Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff have all been in the firing line over the Taylor Swift security row – and now the Prime Minister is under the microscope. It transpires that after Labour figures pushed police to give special protection to the star during her London shows – on the orders of her manager and mother – the PM was not only given free tickets to her Wembley gig but even accepted backstage access to Swift at the event. Good heavens… The latest update, broken by the Sun newspaper, comes after the news that singer’s mother insisted

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Should the UK copy Europe on standardised chargers?

You probably know the frustration: you are sitting there trying to stuff a charging cable into your phone before realising that no, it’s the wrong one: it is left over from your last phone, or belongs to some other device. Just how many kinds of near-identical cables and sockets is it possible to produce? It was this frustration, together with the wastage which arises when old chargers are thrown away purely because they won’t fit a charging port, which led the EU to announce in 2022 that phone companies will have to use a common charging cable: the USB type C port. Apple protested that iPhones would no longer be

Hamish McRae

Working people will pay for Reeves’s NI hike

Who would pay for Rachel Reeves’s increase in employers’ National Insurance contributions? Well yes, in the first instance it is the companies that would have to hand over the cash, but the real burden would be much more widely shared. To see why, start with the simple question: what does a company do if it finds its labour costs have suddenly gone up? It can do nothing, in which case its profits fall (or even less agreeably, its losses rise) and it pays a bit less in corporation tax. It can trim its workforce to hold costs down, which will cut the government’s take from income tax, and – of

Francis Pike

Tesla is in trouble if Kamala Harris wins

In the third century BC the city of Rhodes, in celebration of the defeat of Demetrius I of Macedonia, built the Colossus, a 30-metre-high statue of the sun god Helios. It became one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Now there is a new Colossus to wonder at, not a statue but a supercomputer, reputed to be the most powerful in the world. So which American tech company built it? Apple, IBM, Google, OpenAI? Actually, none of the above. The new Colossus has been built by a US auto company… Tesla. How come? In the space of 14 years, Tesla has risen from being the manufacturer of an

Mark Solomons

Alex Ferguson was brilliant, but did he deserve £2m a year?

Manchester United have axed Sir Alex Ferguson’s contract as an ‘ambassador’ for the club, and it is not clear whether the most shocking part of this news is that he has been put out to grass by new owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe or that he was getting £2.16 million a year to shake hands with executive box customers (the ones Roy Keane famously called ‘the prawn sandwich brigade’). Sir Alex is a club legend, of course. He will be 83 at the end of this year, and is said to not be in the best health these days. He also lost his wife, Cathy, a year ago. He’s also had

Tuesday

Jawad Iqbal

Thomas Tuchel would be a divisive choice for England manager

Thomas Tuchel, the former Chelsea and Bayern Munich manager, has emerged as the favourite to succeed Gareth Southgate as England manager. The Times reports that he could be unveiled later this week. It is believed that negotiations could proceed quickly, bringing to an end the FA’s search for a successor to Southgate, who quit after England’s defeat to Spain in the Euro 2024 final in July. Tuchel is attractive, in part simply because he is available. He has been out of work since leaving Bayern Munich at the end of last season. Appointing him would mean no lengthy or expensive negotiations to prise him away from a club contract. Exact

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Why are Indian Americans so successful?

26 min listen

Indian Americans are the second-largest immigrant group in the United States. They’re also one of the most successful. That includes the election campaign; Kamala Harris, Usha Vance, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy. Freddy Gray is joined by Shruti Rajagopalan, economist at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. They discuss the buzz around Indian Americans in politics, and ask why they’re so disproportionately successful. You can find Shruti’s website here: https://shrutiraj.com/cv-and-bio/ and her substack here: https://srajagopalan.substack.com

Oscar Edmondson

National Insurance: Starmer’s first big U-turn?

14 min listen

The Budget is not due for a fortnight, yet with every day that passes its contents seem to become clearer. This morning Keir Starmer gave an interview to the BBC where he twice refused to rule out a rise in employer’s national insurance contributions in the Budget. Instead, he repeatedly stressed that Labour’s manifesto promise was specifically that it would ‘not raise taxes on working people’. Can Rachel Reeves afford a national insurance hike?  Oscar Edmondson speaks to Katy Balls and Michael Gove.  Produced by Oscar Edmondson. 

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Farage blasts Labour over Elon Musk snub

Sir Keir Starmer’s investment summit may have concluded, but the row over its invite list certainly has not. Now Nigel Farage has taken to Twitter to lambast the Labour lot for not inviting US tech billionaire Elon Musk to its big business bash. In a video post on the platform, the Reform leader questioned: ‘Why was the world’s richest man Elon Musk not invited to Labour’s UK investment summit?’ Going on, the Clacton MP raged: A huge investment summit going on Labour government and businesses all over the world. But they’re all big corporates. They don’t really invite entrepreneurs and the one person they have’t invited is the world’s most