Politics

Shock quickly turned to anger in Germany when a Syrian asylum seeker was arrested for the brutal knife attack in the city of Solingen last weekend. Three people were murdered and eight more injured by a man who had no right to be in Germany.  Politicians from the coalition government reacted with a flurry of statements, demanding anything from tougher knife laws to quicker deportations of illegal migrants. But many voters want to see more than tweaks to the immigration system before they can begin to feel safe again on Germany’s streets. The message to Scholz is clear: if he wants to toughen immigration policy, he’ll have to do it without the

CNN was the lucky winner of the first sit-down media interview with Vice President Kamala Harris since she was pushed to the top of the ticket nearly 40 days ago and, well, it didn’t go great.  It was not a particularly long interview. Dana Bash confirmed nothing was cut, but we still got only about 16 minutes of speaking time from Kamala. This was made more obvious by CNN’s decision to stretch the interview like pizza dough to fit an hour broadcast. They opened with a nearly five minute teaser video that came across like an ad for the Harris campaign, with Bash calling the interview a ‘watershed moment’ in

It’s a curious political world. Few who voted Labour last month actually wanted Labour policies, or for that matter had more than the haziest idea what they were. Now the Labour leadership is returning the compliment. It is increasingly obvious that it has neither much idea what electors want, nor any great desire to provide them with it. Withdrawing the winter fuel allowance, going hell-bent for net zero (whatever the consequences), clamping down on our rights online, the list goes on. The government’s proposed extension of the smoking ban, leaked yesterday, is a further case in point. Most British people have strong views about liberty and minding one’s own business The

Anyone surprised by leaked documents showing smoking may soon be banned in beer gardens, small parks, outdoor restaurants, open-air spaces at nightclubs and outside football stadiums hasn’t been paying attention.  For a start, the UK has been on the slippery slope towards tobacco prohibition for nearly two decades: Tony Blair banned smoking outdoors, Theresa May set a target of going ‘smoke-free’ by 2030. Rishi Sunak – a man whose opposition to some of the tougher lockdown measures gave a glimmer of hope that liberalism hadn’t been entirely extinguished in the Tory party – attempted to make a generational ban on tobacco sales his legacy. All of this is a death