Politics

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

Tuesday

Iain Macwhirter

We don’t need the Supreme Court to define a ‘woman’

In a scenario straight out of Monty Python, learned judges in the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom will today start solemnly debating what a ‘woman’ is. Yes, really. After a decade of misogynistic sophistry, the most elemental fact of human existence is now in doubt and has been handed to the highest court to determine. But if they’re confused about what a woman is, you say, why don’t they just consult a school textbook on human biology? Or perhaps ask a representative sample of women. A female human surely is defined by her birth sex. But no – in our crazy, looking-glass world of identity politics, there is, it appears,

Eliot Wilson

Starmer’s anti-spiking law is a needless stunt

Keir Starmer has announced that he will introduce new legislation to make the spiking of drinks a specific criminal offence. The legal changes sound harmless, but it is entirely unnecessary.  Drink spiking is clearly illegal under section 61 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003: someone commits an offence ‘if he intentionally administers a substance to, or causes a substance to be taken by, another person’ without consent, ‘with the intention of stupefying or overpowering’ them ‘to enable any person to engage in a sexual activity’ with the victim. The offence can lead to a ten-year prison sentence, or a longer custodial term if other crimes like robbery or sexual assault are involved.

David Shipley

Why are the police allowing trans officers to strip-search women?

What is the British Transport Police playing at? Biologically male officers identifying as female will be allowed to intimately search women so long as they have a gender recognition certificate (GRC). The guidance, which was revealed by the Daily Telegraph, shows that the police aren’t quick to learn lessons when it comes to resolving the question of who should, and shouldn’t, be allowed to search female suspects. Imagine a vulnerable woman being told that an officer who is male is going to strip search her The trouble is that, while a GRC allows trans people to have their ‘acquired gender’ legally recognised in the UK, it remains the case that a person cannot change

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

The truth about Labour’s ‘class war’

Keir Starmer’s critics might have you believe that the Labour government is fighting a class war. They point to Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson’s crackdown on private schools and Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s attack on farmers. These initiatives certainly don’t appear to be just about money: whacking VAT on school fees and hitting dead farmers with inheritance tax won’t raise much cash in the scheme of things. But they will inflict totally unnecessary amounts of pain. Their targets are, supposedly, people with cash to splash, on behalf of the needy.  Labour’s disastrous first few months in office don’t resemble a class war at all But hang on: look at this government closely

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Don’t expect an end to Europe’s migrant crisis any time soon

Nearly a year ago the EU unveiled what it called its ‘New Pact on Migration and Asylum’ with much fanfare. The Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, boasted that the pact ‘means that Europeans will decide who comes to the EU and who can stay, not the smugglers’. As is the way with the bureaucratic behemoth that is Brussels, the Pact won’t start to be implemented until the summer of 2026. So there is plenty of time for the people smugglers to ferry thousands more migrants into Europe from Africa and the Middle East. The power in Europe these days lies with the courts, and they overwhelmingly lean to the

Michelle-Anna Moffat

Why I cancelled my trip to Dignitas

Nobody understands the attraction of assisted suicide like I do. In 2019, life as I knew it – a busy nurse and mum of four – stopped. Aged 39, I sustained a spinal cord injury and as a result I’m now confined to a wheelchair 24/7. I was forced to retire from the job that I loved. Many patients who register for assisted suicide say they feel they are a burden on their friends and family – and I know exactly what they mean. My husband and kids had to care for me as I once had them. I couldn’t bare it.   Life is different to before. But life is

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Nigel Farage looks like the future of right-wing politics

Nigel Farage ought to terrify the Tories. He has terrified them many times over the past decades. But until now, he hasn’t had the force of the US president, the richest man in the world, and the global online right behind him. As the struggle to become the dominant voice on the British right intensifies, Kemi Badenoch and the Conservative party look like yesterday’s news by comparison.  Who is to say Farage cannot supplant the Tories as Trump supplanted the old Republican elite or Marine Le Pen supplanted the Gaullists? The latest example of how rapidly the political weather is changing was Elon Musk’s rant that the ‘people of Britain have had

Peter Lampl

Why does Oxford not Cambridge dominate British politics?

Given Oxford’s well-known reputation as the nursery for Britain’s political elite, it’s no surprise to find two governmental grandees currently battling it out to become the university’s next chancellor. Frankly, though, with due respect to their accomplishments in public office, Peter Mandelson and William Hague probably wouldn’t even make it into the Premier League of Oxford’s political alumni as things stand. Being a former Labour Business Secretary or an erstwhile Leader of the Opposition is all very impressive, but there’s an awful lot of retired top dogs above them in the pecking order. All this Oxford-educated political ball-fumbling must eventually be bad for the brand The extraordinary fact is, 14

Monday

Oscar Edmondson

Should Starmer be worried about this petition?

13 min listen

Today is the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) conference, at which Rachel Reeves has laid out her plan to ‘Get Britain Working’ and prove Labour as the party of business … despite what the recent Budget and the employers national insurance increase might suggest. What’s the mood of big business today?  Also on the podcast, a petition has gone viral over the weekend calling for a general election. Various people have signed it, from Nigel Farage to Michael Caine. But should Labour actually be worried? Oscar Edmondson speaks to Katy Balls and Isabel Hardman.  Produced by Oscar Edmondson. 

David Christopher Kaufman

Trump shouldn’t boot trans people out of the military

The bogeyman that progressives feared Donald Trump would unleash upon the United States appears to have already arrived – and inauguration day is still more than 50 days away. The president-elect is reportedly planning an executive order that would kick out all transgender members of the US military. The order, which could come on 20 January, Trump’s first day back in the White House, looks set to result in the removal from the military of about 15,000 active service personnel who are transgender. Having campaigned on a strident ‘anti-woke’ agenda, Trump’s focus on identity politics comes as little surprise. But what is surprising is the swiftness and extent of the incoming

Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson

Did Covid vaccines really save 12 million lives?

The BBC reported that AstraZeneca and Pfizer are credited with together saving more than 12 million lives in the first year of Covid vaccination. To substantiate this claim, the BBC refers to Airfinity, a ‘disease forecasting company’. Models do not fit anywhere in the pathway for establishing effectiveness Airfinity used an Imperial College London study, which calculated that Covid vaccines saved 20 million lives between December 2020 and December 2021. Using a mathematical model, the Imperial team assumed that vaccination conferred protection against Covid infection (mRNA vaccines were estimated to have given 88 per cent protection against infection after the second dose) and the development of severe disease requiring hospital admission. The team also assumed

Daisy Christodoulou

The fall of English Literature

On the edges of the City of London, a couple of miles from where I grew up, there’s a very famous cemetery: Bunhill Fields. When I was growing up, it was pretty clear who the three most famous tombs belonged to: John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe and William Blake. However, I am not sure any of these men are the most famous inhabitant any more. Instead, I think it’s Thomas Bayes. He was quite obscure in his lifetime. He was so obscure that we’re not even sure there is a correct picture of him. In the 1st edition of the Dictionary of National Biography, his father, a non-conformist preacher, featured, but

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Is swimming racist?

I think we can all be delighted that, at last, the University of Leicester has taken action to end one of the real problems associated with swimming pools – the presence there of awful white people, swimming about all over the place. Odious, arrogant, pasty-faced white people with their mewling, stupid white children. White people doing the breast stroke and the crawl. White people climbing out of the pool looking horribly white. White people deliberately infecting the global swimming majority with their filthy white verrucas. The university, alongside the Unity Swimming organisation, is running segregated swimming sessions for black and ethnic minority people. Unity Swimming says its stated intention is

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Why the general election petition matters

Does it matter that a petition calling for another general election has gone viral online and garnered more than two million signatures within a few days? Millions of voters have simply had enough of the entire centre-left paradigm Conventional analysis would say not. After all, there are always a good few hundred thousand keyboard warriors who detest any government. Millions of bitter Remainers signed petitions calling for a second referendum to overturn Brexit for all the good that did them, as Sam Leith points out. And yet it is the very artlessness of the way a man called Michael Westwood has set out his cause which tells me that his

Nigel Biggar

What the ICC gets wrong about Israel

Legal reasoning is only as good as the ethical concepts it uses. That’s why the International Criminal Court’s decision to issue arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister and former defence minister is basically flawed. The ICC claims reasonable grounds for believing Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant guilty of the war crimes of ‘intentionally and knowingly depriv[ing] the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival’, creating ‘conditions of life calculated to bring about [their] destruction’. The grounds are these: Israel’s failure to facilitate relief ‘by all means at its disposal’ and to ‘ensure that the civilian population… would be adequately supplied with goods in need’ amounts to a

Ian O’Doherty

Why won’t Irish politicians talk about immigration?

Ireland is gearing up for its general election this Friday – and what started out as a relatively moribund campaign seems to have finally kicked into gear. The two main bones of contention remain the housing crisis and immigration. To the frustration of many voters, politicians refuse to accept these issues are linked A large part of the new energy can be pinned on Simon Harris, Ireland’s TikTok Taoiseach, who has been travelling the highways and byways of Ireland with his own dedicated social media team. Last week, he achieved his obvious aim of going viral, although not for the reasons he would have wanted. When approached on a walkabout

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Labour might regret its desire for vote reform

Turkeys don’t usually vote for Christmas, so just why have 43 new Labour MPs signed up to the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Fair Elections and its campaign to replace the first-past-the-post system with proportional representation? These are, after all, the beneficiaries of the most distorted UK election in modern history, where Labour won one of the largest-ever majorities on just 34 per cent of the popular vote – a lower share than any post-war governing party. To underline just how lucky they were, it took 24,000 votes to elect each Labour MP in July, but 56,000 to elect each Conservative. The electoral system has started to treat the

Matthew Lynn

Rachel Reeves deserves a rough ride at the CBI

Rachel Reeves was probably expecting to be cheered for restoring ‘stability’, for rebooting ‘growth’ and crafting a British version of Bidenomics to create ‘the industries of the future’. Instead, the Chancellor’s ‘fireside chat’ at the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) conference today is likely to be rather uncomfortable. There probably won’t be any heckling, walk-outs, boos and cat-calls. Yet the business world has made it all-too-clear that Reeves’s Budget will hit both jobs and growth hard. Reeves is going to get a rough ride this afternoon – and deservedly so. Labour’s relationship with business is now broken beyond repair The CBI made it clear this morning what it thinks of

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

In praise of Shabana Mahmood

Should Shabana Mahmood be allowed to ‘impose’ her religious beliefs on everyone else? Lord Falconer doesn’t think so, arguing yesterday that the Justice Secretary was ‘motivated… by her religious beliefs’ in her opposition to assisted dying. He added: ‘I respect that religious belief but I do not think it should be imposed on everybody else.’ It’s not uncommon to hear a secular politician making this argument about those with religious belief, though perhaps Falconer should be applauded for aiming it at a Muslim politician rather than a Christian one, as is more frequently the case. Either way, suggesting that someone’s religious beliefs mean their views on key issues are in some

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Rachel Reeves faces a frosty reception at the CBI summit

At the beginning of the year, Rachel Reeves was being praised all round for her efforts repairing relations between the Labour party and business. In February, the Chancellor hosted a business conference – attended by leading figures – where she pledged to cap the headline rate of corporation tax at its current rate of 25 per cent if Labour entered government. Since her party’s election triumph, Reeves has stuck to her word on that promise – although other announcements from the Chancellor have caught the business community by surprise and led to strain. It means that Reeves will face a frosty reception when she appears at the Confederation of British