Politics

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

Read: JD Vance’s full speech on AI and the EU

Vice President JD Vance told world leaders at yesterday’s AI summit in Paris that the ‘the AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety’. Here’s the full transcript. Thank you for the kind introduction, and I want to start by thanking President Macron for hosting the event and, of course, for the lovely dinner last night. During the dinner, President Macron looked at me and asked if I would like to speak, and I said, ‘Mister President, I’m here for the good company and free wine, but I have to earn my keep today’. And I, of course, want to thank Prime Minister Modi for being

Steerpike

Treasury silent on Chagos deal costs

How much does a sell-out cost? Mr S has been trying for months now to work out what the Chagos deal will mean for British taxpayers. The Financial Times originally reported an estimated total bill of £9bn – before the Mauritian prime minister suggested last week the sum would be much higher. With a sum of £18bn now being quoted by some outlets, Steerpike wants to know which government department will be footing the costs of the 99-year deal? When it comes to figures, the obvious place to start is the Treasury – Whitehall’s ‘central department’ to use Nigel Lawson’s phrase. A written question was put to Rachel Reeves, asking

Brendan O’Neill

Is Pope Francis Rory Stewart in a frock?

Imagine living in your own holy fiefdom, with some of the strictest security on earth, and lecturing other nations about how to deal with illegal immigration. That’s Pope Francis for you. There he is in the Apostolic Palace, sentries at every door, wagging his be-ringed finger at Donald Trump’s America for its ‘mass deportation’ of undocumented aliens. Even for a Pope this is some next-level cant. You can’t help but marvel at the sheer sanctimony of Francis’s position The pontiff’s latest bout of Trump Derangement Syndrome came in a letter to America’s Catholic bishops. He said he is watching closely the ‘major crisis’ unfolding in the US, by which he

Mark Galeotti

Will flattery buy Zelensky help from Trump?

For all the efforts on every side to manage expectations, there is a sense that some kind of Ukraine deal – even if more likely a ceasefire rather than some comprehensive settlement – is coming. With the risk that this is, as Vladimir Putin would prefer, a decision made between Moscow and Washington, over Kyiv’s head, the Ukrainians are scrambling to gain traction on the process. We have already had Volodymyr Zelensky’s suggestion that the United States could get priority investment access to Ukraine’s mineral wealth. Now in a set-piece interview with the Guardian, he has offered a finely-balanced mix of flattery and entreaty in the hope that even a

Steerpike

Labour MP: keep illegal migrants because of Paddington

Desperate times call for desperate measures seems to the mantra of the day in Labour HQ. First a foreign office minister insisted that ceding the Chagos Islands was essential to avoid, er, war – and now Labour MP Stella Creasy has invoked Paddington Bear to stand up for illegal migrants. You couldn’t make it up… Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, the backbench MP hit out at her own government’s plans to slash numbers of illegal migrants coming to the UK. Her intervention comes after the Home Office last night announced rules that will prevent small boat arrivals from becoming British citizens. No matter how long they’ve been in

Cheaper mortgages won’t save Britain from recession

Electricity bills are going up. Netflix is adding a couple of pounds a month to the price of a standard subscription, and council tax is going through the roof. Most of us are probably struggling with the cost of living. There is, however, one piece of good news: the sub four per cent mortgage is back. The only catch is that it won’t be around for long. Santander will this week start offering two- and five-year fixed rate mortgages at just 3.99 per cent, the first time any of the major lenders have been willing to lend money to homeowners for less than four per cent for several months. A

Why whisky may be worse for you than cocaine

Colombian President Gustavo Petro has hit out at the longstanding US ban on cocaine, in response to Donald Trump’s crackdown on the drugs trade. ‘Cocaine is illegal because it is made in Latin America, not because it is worse than whisky’, Petro argued last week, adding that ‘scientists have analysed this’. He also suggested that the global cocaine industry could be ‘easily dismantled’ if the drug was legalised worldwide. Although I was not consulted directly by Petro, I am one of the scientists he was referring to who have analysed the harms of various drugs. In 2010, I was the lead author of a Lancet paper which argued for the first

Gavin Mortimer

Why is Jean-Luc Melenchon talking about the ‘Great Replacement’ theory?

Jean-Luc Melenchon has broken a taboo in French, and Western, politics. The de facto leader of the French left, whose La France Insoumise party is the driving force of the coalition that won most seats in last July’s legislative elections, told students in Toulouse: ‘Yes, Mr (Eric) Zemmour, there is a Great Replacement! This replacement is that of a generation coming after the other and which will never resemble the previous one’. Melenchon was aiming his remarks at Eric Zemmour. The controversial journalist turned incendiary politician has came under relentless attack after he promoted the Great Replacement as a central plank of his election manifesto during his run for the

Steerpike

Labour minister: Cede Chagos to avoid war

Just when you think Labour’s Chagos saga can’t get any stranger, it does. Now foreign minister Stephen Doughty has claimed that ceding the archipelago to Mauritius is necessary to avoid sparking war. Writing in the Times today, Doughty has rather bafflingly insisted that there is a risk foreign powers like China or Russia could exploit an advisory ruling by the International Court of Justice and build intelligence centres near the Diego Garcia US military base. In fact, the foreign office minister has gone as far as to suggest that retaining the Chagos Islands could result in an international disaster on the scale of the Cuban missile crisis. Instead Starmer’s deal

Jake Wallis Simons

Israel faces an agonising decision

In those awful first weeks after 7 October, someone came up with a slogan that was taken as a rallying cry for those of us on the right side of the argument. As editor of the Jewish Chronicle at the time, I bought a job lot of stickers emblazoned with the slogan and handed them out to staff. It was this: ‘F**k Hamas’. On Saturday, when the jihadi group released Ohad Ben-Ami, 56, Or Levy, 34, and Eli Sharabi, 52, in an appallingly emaciated state, that slogan was an adequate description for how the nation of Israel felt. When waif-like Sharabi was paraded on the propaganda stage, he was ‘interviewed’

What Gen Z gets wrong about ‘racist’ Britain

Nearly half of Generation Z believes that Britain is a racist country, and a similar proportion say that they aren’t proud to be British. This is the grim finding of a study published in the Times yesterday, based on a YouGov survey and research by the opinion consultancy Public First of 18- to 27-year-olds. The revelation sits in stark contrast with a study undertaken by the Times twenty years ago, in which 80 per cent of young people said that they were proud to be British. The discrepancy is even more stark when contrasted with a general consensus that Britain has become a less racist and more racially-aware place in

Trump has backed Hamas into a corner

Donald Trump’s second meeting with a Middle Eastern leader in the Oval Office – this time with King Abdullah of Jordan – was even more striking than his first with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. If last week’s encounter signalled a seismic shift in US Middle East policy, yesterday’s developments confirmed it: the balance of power has decisively tilted in Israel’s favour. The image of King Abdullah, visibly uneasy, twitching as he unexpectedly declared that Jordan would accept 2,000 sick Gazan children, was a moment of profound significance. It suggested that Trump’s relentless pressure – both public and private – was beginning to bear fruit. The message from Trump and

Could Russian sanctions soon be lifted?

Markets are rife with rumours of impending talks between presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin on a ceasefire for the war in Ukraine. Even before Trump told the New York Post last week that he had spoken with Putin over the telephone and that the Russian president wanted to end the war, stock market traders were rushing to buy stocks from the businesses associated with Ukraine. Ukrainian sovereign bonds, shares in the Austrian bank Raiffeisen, the Ukrainian mining company Ferrexpo and global steelmaker Arcelor Mittal have all posted record gains over the past week. The markets are betting on a prompt ceasefire and for sanctions against Russia to be eased. However, Moscow

Syria’s civil war is far from over

In recent years, the green plains of Idlib province have seen some of the heaviest fighting in Syria’s protracted civil war. Since the Assad regime collapsed in December, the fighting here has stopped – but the dangers of war are far from over. People in Syria are still dying. A 100-mm Soviet-made artillery shell lies on the ground at the side of a field being ploughed. If detonated, its shrapnel can travel up to half a kilometre. Workers from the British charity Halo Trust approach the shell carefully through a cleared ‘safe corridor’. They place large sandbags around it and plant a small TNT charge. Once at a safe distance

Stephen Daisley

The question that should be asked about the West Bank

In all the argle-bargle over Donald Trump’s proposal for Gaza, there have been countless questions about legality, morality and feasibility. Isn’t the population transfer he suggests tantamount to ethnic cleansing? On what legal basis would the United States assert sovereignty over Gaza and enter into contracts with developers and investors? How could a country that fought a revolutionary war in the same of self-determination tell Gazans they must leave territory on which their families have been settled for generations? How would a redeveloped Gaza be paid for, governed, policed and populated? Would the Palestinians themselves benefit from it?  There is another question, a practical one, that seems to have been

Freddy Gray

Could Trump target Britain with tariffs?

25 min listen

Angus Hanton, author of Vassal State: How America Runs Britain, joins Freddy Gray to talk about the economic relationship between Britain and America. As the world adjusts to the new US administration, every day seems to bring news of new potential tariffs. Is the UK a prime target for Trump? What could the impact of tariffs be? And what are the long-term questions facing British politicians about both the economic and political relationship with the US? Produced by Megan McElroy and Patrick Gibbons.

Steerpike

Watch: Sue Gray enters the Lords

And there we have it. Baroness Gray of Tottenham has entered the House of Lords. Sir Keir’s former chief of staff Sue Gray has today become a Labour peer after a whirlwind seven months under Starmer’s government. The political peerages document dropped in December after the nominations from the PM, Kemi Badenoch and Sir Ed Davey were formally approved by King Charles III – and readers were quick to spot the Starmer ally on the list. It’s quite the controversy. The ex-civil servant was made the Prime Minister’s chief staffer in July but rather quickly fell out of favour with his top team after being accused of cronyism, ‘subverting’ Cabinet

Lara King

Is this London’s most anti-car borough?

In a city at war with the car, there’s plenty of competition. Lambeth has hiked the cost of residents’ parking permits by as much as 400 per cent, Islington has installed wavy kerbs to deter drivers and more than half of Hackney is covered by Low-Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs). But Labour-run Hammersmith and Fulham, in west London, must surely have a claim to being London’s most anti-car borough.  Not content with raking in £11.8 million in a year from drivers breaching the ‘South Fulham Clean Air Neighbourhood’ that has left local businesses losing money, the council recently created one of Britain’s smallest LTNs – a 350ft stretch that critics have warned could