Politics

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

Friday

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Joanna Cherry blasts SNP’s ‘culture of hate’

Another day, another drama – and this time it’s the SNP in the spotlight. Ex-Edinburgh MP Joanna Cherry has taken to the august pages of Scotland’s only pro-indy newspaper, the National, to urge her party to take a long hard look at itself after its electoral wipe-out this month. Though she has insisted she ‘intends to remain a member of the SNP’, Cherry has pulled no punches in her criticism of her colleagues. It’s quite the read… Blasting the ‘culture of hate’ that the party has ‘allowed to flourish…against those who dare to disagree’, Cherry has lamented the ‘”no debate” mantra’ coursing through the current iteration of the party. Going

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

There is nothing new about the £20bn ‘black hole’

Labour’s pro-growth reforms were fun while they lasted. Now here come the tax rises. That’s not quite how Rachel Reeves will convey the findings of the Treasury audit she plans to announce on Monday – but hikes are probably going to be the next step in filling in what the Chancellor will claim is a £20 billion hole in the public finances.  This multi-billion pound ‘discovery’ is the latest addition to Labour’s narrative, which has been building since before the election. The party wants to claim that when it discovers what’s really been going on inside government, its fiscal decisions will become even more difficult – and this could include some

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

France descends into chaos on the Olympics’ opening day

France’s Olympics could not have got off to a worse start. Hundreds of thousands of train passengers have been left stranded after the country’s high-speed rail lines were targeted by a series of suspicious fires. Rail company SNCF says it’s a ‘massive attack aimed at paralysing the network’, with security services suggesting this morning that the far left may have been behind the attack. Whoever is to blame, one thing is clear: France’s president Emmanuel Macron will be furious. The world’s eyes are on Paris tonight as the opening ceremony gets underway. Macron wanted them to see France at its best; instead, they will see a country in chaos. The

Sam McPhail

Who are the Olympics for?

For the first time since its first race in 1903, the Tour de France didn’t finish in Paris this year. The world’s best cyclists, Tadej Pogacar and Jonas Vingegaard, were banished to the south coast after a gruelling three-week race, received by a small crowd as they struggled into the Place Masséna in Nice. Their achievements were purposefully overshadowed by Emmanuel Macron’s political folly: the largest opening ceremony in the history of the Olympic Games. Macron has commandeered the Games as part of his unending mission to save France. He seeks political unity to ‘showcase the entire France’ at the Games but his left-wing opponents accuse him of hiding behind

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Macron’s Olympic delusion

All the world’s a stage and the Olympic Games in Paris is the greatest stage of all for the comedian president. Emmanuel Macron declared a political truce amidst the political nervous breakdown of France, so that his show could go on. The opening ceremony spectacle last night culminated in Macron declaring the Games open and the lighting of the Olympic cauldron. The president ordered Thomas Jolly, his personally selected director, to outdo London 2012. Off stage, France is in crisis. France doesn’t have a real government. There’s no calculus showing how one might even be possible in a fractured new National Assembly of more than a dozen factions who loathe each other. The left and

Thursday

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Ousted Reform candidate chases Farage for £8,500

Reform has managed to get 5 MPs elected, take 14 per cent of the vote share and outdo any other UK political party on campaign video views on Twitter – but it’s not all looking rosy for Nigel Farage right now. Before Farage decided he was going to stand in the election, Reform UK selected one Tony Mack to contest the Clacton-on-Sea seat. But Mack was quickly ousted when Nige chose to run – and it turns out he wasn’t all that happy about the decision. Mack has now handed Farage a staggering £8,500 bill which the former candidate claims is compensation he is due for his short-lived election campaign.

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Are we really experiencing more ‘extreme’ weather?

The UK climate is getting ever more extreme. We know this because the BBC keeps telling us so, most recently in today’s reporting of the annual Met Office/Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS) State of the Climate Report for 2023. ‘Climate change is dramatically increasing the frequency of extreme high temperatures in the UK,’ writes climate editor Justin Rowlatt on the BBC website. As well as experiencing more really hot days, ‘its observations suggest there has been an increase in the number of really wet days too, such as the prolonged and heavy rain Storm Babet brought to wide areas of the country in October last year.’ He comments: ‘The UK’s shifting

William Moore William Moore

The curious rise of Kamala Harris

48 min listen

This week: Kamala takes charge. Our cover piece discusses the rise of Kamala Harris, who has only one man standing in her way to the most powerful position in the world. Her’s is certainly an unexpected ascent, given Harris’ generally poor public-speaking performances and mixed bag of radical left and right-wing politics. Does she really have what it takes to defeat Trump? Kate Andrews, author of the piece and economics editor at The Spectator, joins the podcast with deputy editor Freddy Gray to discuss. (02:34) Next: Will and Lara go through some of their favourite pieces from the magazine including Damian Thompson’s article on how the upcoming Hollywood film Conclave may be

Jawad Iqbal

Don’t rush to judgement on the Manchester Airport police video

A video of an armed police officer kicking and stamping on a man’s head has plunged Greater Manchester Police (GMP), the country’s second largest force, into crisis. The incident at Manchester Airport on Tuesday night has led to widespread condemnation. Protestors have gathered outside Rochdale police station, with some in the crowd chanting: ‘GMP shame on you’. The footage showed a uniformed officer holding a Taser over a man lying on the floor before kicking him twice An officer has been suspended and the force has referred itself to the policing watchdog, the Independent Office for Police Conduct. Feelings are understandably running high locally, but investigators must be allowed time

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Could these be the online comments of young Kemi Badenoch?

The Tory leadership battle is now underway with the traditional first act: to identify a frontrunner and start blowing poison darts. Kemi Badenoch is the frontrunner and famously combative. She’s in her early 40s. So it must stand to reason that she’d have let off steam in a chatroom somewhere, surely? This is where it gets interesting. In Westminster, a link is being shared over WhatsApp between candidate teams, MPs and general Westminster watchers of ‘Naijablog’ a blog about Nigeria, where a below-the-line commentator by the name of ‘Kemi’ had plenty to say – and plenty bones to pick. The comments are direct, sometimes rude, often confrontational, making off-colour jokes

Steerpike Steerpike

Reform beat Tories among younger voters

These days when it rains for the Tories, it pours. Now it transpires that more voters under the age of 30 backed Nigel Farage’s Reform UK than the Conservatives this election – with experts convinced that recent years of economic instability is pushing younger voters away from the two largest parties. How curious… Over 35,000 voters were surveyed by YouGov – with the pollster finding that of those aged between 18 and 30 years old, 9.5 per cent backed the Farage-founded group with just 8 per cent turning to the Tories. While it’s more bad news for Rishi Sunak’s boys in blue, Reform can’t quite claim victory among Gen-Zers yet.

Matthew Lynn

We will miss 1p and 2p coins when they’re gone

It doesn’t buy anything anymore. It is not enough to put into a charity box, and it just takes up space in your pocket or a purse. On one level, it will save us all a lot of trouble when one penny and two penny coins finally become extinct. The Treasury has told the Royal Mint not to make any new ones this year; and although there are plenty behind a sofa somewhere, this means they could eventually vanish completely. We will miss them when they are gone.  Rachel Reeves, the new chancellor, is keener on increasing government budgets than reducing them. One cut that may well be made, however,

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Tory leadership race latest: who’s declared?

20 min listen

As more Conservative MPs declare their intentions to run for the Tory leadership, James Heale speaks to Katy Balls and Conservative peer Paul Goodman about the runners and riders. What can they learn from previous leadership elections? Who will play well with the members and the public at large? And what will the dividing lines be between the candidates?  Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

John Oxley

Will Britain let Keir Starmer govern?

A few weeks after Keir Starmer’s landslide, it may not seem like Britain is a conservative country. The left has won an enormous victory and started to push forward on its agenda. Policies are being announced: today Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, says the government will start building offshore wind turbines. But, as Labour settles into government, there are signs it may be already be getting bogged down by an institutional and cultural conservatism that has long held Britain back from doing things. Threats to Starmer’s ‘change’ are starting to emerge. The arsenal deployed against Tory plans over the years – from endless consultations to judicial reviews and human rights

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Can Robert Jenrick really do it? 

Robert Jenrick will soon submit his nomination papers to the 1922 chairman for the Tory leadership contest. When he does so, this will make him the first candidate to reach the required number of nominations – ten in total, including a proposer and seconded. Speaking this morning, Jenrick’s campaign manager Danny Kruger made clear that Jenrick’s campaign will have a focus on winning back Tory voters who moved to Reform in the election: Jenrick has been busy reinventing himself over the past year ‘To have any path back to government we must win back those voters we have lost – across the board but particularly to Reform. At the same

Steerpike Steerpike

Davidson warns Scottish Tory split would be ‘electoral suicide’

As Conservative MPs start to declare their candidacy for the Tory leadership race, north of the border conversations are heating up about who the next Scottish group leader will be. As Mr S wrote on Monday, so far the first official contender is justice spokesperson Russell Findlay – who announced his bid by penning a lengthy op-ed for the Scottish Daily Mail. But as other potential rivals consider their positions, now former Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson has waded into the matter. As debate about the future of the party continues, Baroness Davidson of London Links has warned that splitting the Scottish group from the UK party would be ‘electoral

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Has Tom Tugendhat blown up his leadership campaign at launch?

We shouldn’t be surprised by Tom Tugendhat saying he is willing to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and then his subsequent failure to back up that claim in a wishy-washy radio interview. There is, after all, a long tradition in the Conservative party of ambitious centrist politicians pretending to believe in right-wing notions when positioning for the leadership. The idea that this British-French dual national husband of a high-powered French lawyer will one day rival Farage as an ECHR leaver is simply not credible Back in 2013, Philip Hammond had started to get talked about as the coming man and then popped up on the radio to

James Heale James Heale

Tom Tugendhat enters the Tory leadership race

Tom Tugendhat last night became the second Tory candidate to declare in the Conservative leadership contest. Just like his former Home Office colleague James Cleverly, he chose to make his pitch in an op-ed for the Telegraph, declaring that he would be prepared to leave the European Court on Human Rights. It came just a few hours after nominations opened for the leadership race, with further candidates expected to declare over the coming days. Tugendhat, 51, first entered parliament in 2015 and has always, perhaps unfairly, been caricatured by some as a figure of the Tory left. A Remainer, patron of the Tory Reform Group and longtime critic of Boris Johnson, his

Eliot Wilson

Britain’s defence declaration with Germany is pure waffle

The new cabinet cannot be accused of laziness. John Healey, secretary of state for defence, has just been on a 48-hour tour of France, Germany, Poland and Estonia, all of them important military allies in different ways, trumpeting the new government’s ‘Nato-first’ defence policy. The highlight of Healey’s breakneck trip was his meeting with the German defence minister, Boris Pistorius. The two men have much in common: born 30 days apart in 1960, they worked as political advisers before achieving elected office. Both are solid, reliable, unshowy centrists within their parties. And on Wednesday, these two workhorses agreed a joint declaration on enhanced defence co-operation between the United Kingdom and Germany. It

Charles Lipson

Joe Biden delivers his own eulogy

Joe Biden delivered a eulogy for his presidency and his political career from the Oval Office Wednesday evening. It was a sad, sluggish ending to a life in politics, decades in the Senate, two terms as vice president, and finally a single term as president.   President Biden needed to accomplish three things in the speech: explain why he decided to withdraw from the race after months of insisting he would stay in and after receiving 14 million primary votes; convince the country that he is still fit to serve the remaining months of his term; and promote the candidacy of his replacement on the Democratic ticket, Kamala Harris. Polls show most Americans are genuinely