Politics

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

Friday

25 Oct 2024

It’s obvious why crime is up in Britain

Yesterday, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) published its annual report on crime in England and Wales. This combines data on crimes reported to the police and the Crime Survey for England and Wales to produce the best estimate of how much crime is being committed. It makes for grim reading. While overall crime is up 10 per cent, some offences have soared. Robbery is up from an estimated 60,000 incidents last year to an estimated 139,000 this year, although the ONS say they prefer to use the police reported figures for robbery which show a rise of 6 per cent, from 77,106 to 81,931. Meanwhile, violence with injury is estimated to

Katy Balls

The Daisy Cooper Edition

35 min listen

Daisy Cooper has been a stalwart of the Liberal Democrats for over a decade. From councillor to MP, she has served as the deputy leader of the party since 2020. First elected to parliament in 2019, she came to prominence when she represented the party in two of the general election debates earlier this year. On the podcast, Daisy talks to Katy Balls about her ambition to be a conductor, how she created her first job, and whether she’d like to be leader one day. As the Liberal Democrats are now the largest third party in Parliament for 100 years – with 72 MPs – Daisy tells Katy what it’s

Thursday

24 Oct 2024

Kate Andrews

Reeves’s Budget needs to win over the market

Rachel Reeves confirmed on her trip to Washington DC that she will be changing the government’s self-imposed fiscal rules, allowing the Chancellor to borrow up to £50 billion more for infrastructure investment in Britain. The change – which will take into account the government’s assets – will further loosen what are already quite loose rules created by Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt, which aimed to get debt falling as a percentage of GDP by the end of a five-year rolling period. It’s no surprise then that international markets are a little nervous. While plans to change the fiscal rule have been floated for over a month now – giving investors

Jamie Franklin

Who does Justin Welby speak for?

Archbishop Justin Welby’s appearance on The Rest is Politics has caused quite a stir in Anglican circles. For the most part, the Archbishop came across well and gave some very insightful answers when questioned, for example, about original sin and peace-making in war-torn nations. But these good things are inevitably going to be overshadowed by Welby’s answer to Alistair Campbell’s question about gay sex. Campbell asked Welby whether he had a ‘better answer’ to the one he gave Campbell in 2017, on whether gay sex is a sin. Welby essentially refused to reply, saying he didn’t have a good answer. In this most recent interview, however, he says that he has thought

Lara Prendergast

Cambridge in crisis, Trump’s wicked humour & the beauty of AI ceramics

53 min listen

This week: Decline and Fall – how our greatest universities are betraying students.Our greatest universities are betraying students, writes David Butterfield, who has just resigned from teaching Classics at Cambridge after 21 years. What went wrong? First, class lists of exam results became private, under alleged grounds of ‘data protection’, which snuffed out much of the competitive spirit of the university. Now even the fate of examinations hangs in the balance. Grade inflation is rampant, and it is now unheard of for students to be sent down for insufficient academic performance. For students, the risks have never been lower. ‘The pace of change over the past decade has been astonishing,

James Heale

How many Tories will defect to Reform?

11 min listen

After Nigel Farage’s overture to Tory councillors to ‘defect’, one already has. Farage has also been on manoeuvres, piling on the criticism against Labour for its volunteers campaigning for the Democrats in the US. James Heale talks to Katy Balls and Freddy Gray about the latest. Tickets are still available to join Freddy Gray and Nigel Farage on Thursday 24 October for their analysis on the US election. Get your tickets here. Produced by Cindy Yu.

Steerpike

Osborne takes a pop at Jenrick’s ECHR plan

With just over a week until the victor of the Tory leadership race is announced, the contest is ramping up and endorsements are rolling in. Now the former Chancellor under David Cameron has offered his thoughts on who the next leader of the Conservative party should be on his Political Currency podcast today. Announcing his decision to podcast regulars, the ex-Evening Standard editor told listeners that he was throwing his weight behind Kemi Badenoch. ‘I’ve ticked the box, and I’m about to post it after this podcast.’ Going on, the Remainer blasted Robert Jenrick’s policy plan, lamenting: I started the campaign thinking that Robert Jenrick was going to win. But

Jawad Iqbal

Starmer can’t afford to lose the argument on slavery reparations

The Commonwealth – whose 56 nations are meeting in the Pacific island nation of Samoa – looks set to defy Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer by putting slavery reparations on the agenda. The leaders of some Caribbean countries insist it is ‘only a matter of time’ until Britain bows to demands of handing over billions of pounds in compensation. Reports suggest they are pushing for a clear agreement on plans for reparatory justice and want to publish this in the all-important final communique of the summit. Such a move would lay bare the growing divisions at the gathering. It would also amount to a damaging public setback for Starmer, who

Steerpike

Sir Keir rated worse than predecessors at same point as PM

When it rains for Sir Keir, it pours. It now transpires that the Labour leader has achieved a worse rating as Prime Minister than all of his recent predecessors – bar Liz Truss, who didn’t manage to last quite as long in the top job. It seems for Keir Starmer, things can only get, er, worse… New polling by YouGov collected between 19-21 October from over 1,600 adults shows that little more than a quarter of Brits believe the current PM is doing well in post, while almost two-thirds of the population think Starmer is performing badly. It’s in stark contrast to the ratings of the last Labour prime minister

Steerpike

MoJ protestors blast ‘ridiculous’ Labour prison scheme

To Westminster, where outside the Ministry of Justice more than 300 protestors have held a silent vigil this afternoon. Activists from a myriad of campaign groups – including Just Stop Oil, Palestine Action and Black Lives Matter – gathered in front of the department building for 90 minutes today to call for the release of political prisoners and the resignation of crossbench peer Lord Walney, an independent adviser on political disruption. The action was organised by ‘Defend Our Juries’ which slams ‘sham trials’ that, it claims, jail protestors for ‘peaceful acts of protest’ like road blocking, traffic disruption and throwing soup at 100-year-old paintings. Now climate and justice activists have

Steerpike

Tory councillor defects to Reform after Farage plea

Well, well, well. Less than 24 hours after Reform UK leader Nigel Farage wrote to Conservative councillors in a bid to persuade them to defect to his party, the first has defected. James McIvor, a councillor in Essex, has switched to the Farage-founded party – in a tweet that suggests more of his former colleagues will join him. How very curious… Taking to Twitter today, McIvor declared: It is an honour to represent my community and serve the people of Ontario and its beautiful surrounding Essex villages. In order to continue to do so to the highest standard, I’m delighted to announce I have joined Reform UK. It’s time to

Ross Clark

Why the call for slavery reparations is a scam

It would be a shame if Britain were forced to leave the Commonwealth, given the great work it has done over the decades – especially under the guardianship of the late Queen. But our departure is swiftly going to emerge as an option if grasping Caribbean governments continue with their threat to ambush Keir Starmer at the Commonwealth summit in Samoa and press for reparations for slavery. This is an issue which is not going to go away among Commonwealth countries, given that all three of the candidates to replace Baroness Scotland as the organisation’s Secretary General appear to be in favour of pressing for billions of pounds in ‘reparatory

Nigel Jones

Austria’s far right is shut out of power, again

Austria’s mainstream politicians are combining to ensure that the winners of last month’s general elections, the far right Freedom party (FPO) are kept firmly out of power. The Alpine republic’s president, Alexander Van Den Bellen – aligned with the Green party – has invited the current chancellor, Karl Nehammer, whose centre right People’s party (OVP) came second in the elections, to form a coalition explicitly excluding the FPO, which topped the polls with 29 per cent, running on an anti-immigration, pro-Putin platform. Nehammer is now likely to form a ‘grand coalition’ Austria is the latest European ‘domino’ to propel a populist radical right party to the forefront of politics after the

Steerpike

Farage: ‘Ludicrous’ for Labour to damage Trump relationship

Sir Keir Starmer’s lot have hardly had an easy start in government, what with the cronyism rows, freebie fiasco and frockgate. Now the Prime Minister is dealing with a backlash from one of the presidential candidates, after Labour activists flew stateside to canvas for Kamala Harris. This week, Donald Trump’s campaign even complained about the matter to the Federal Election Commission – alleging that the volunteering by Labour party members, alongside the reported contact between senior party figures and the Harris campaign, was ‘illegal foreign campaign contributions and interference’. Crikey. Trump ally Nigel Farage hasn’t been shy on the matter, insisting last week that ‘this is direct interference by the

Katy Balls

Farage’s next move: wooing Tory defectors

Which party should be the most worried about next year’s local elections in May? Despite winning a large majority this year, they could prove tricky for Labour – with Keir Starmer seeing his personal ratings drop to -30 in his first 100 days. But Labour blues don’t necessarily translate into wins for the Conservatives. Instead, Nigel Farage is looking to use the local elections to cement Reform’s status as the real opposition. With all 21 county councils in England up for election, the Reform party leader has written to every Tory councillor facing re-election, calling on them to defect to Reform UK. In a letter sent to the 1,352 Tory

Christopher Snowdon

Taxing the gambling industry just won’t work

Ahead of the Budget on 30 October, Rachel Reeves is being bombarded by lobbyists urging her to loot their enemies. The New Economics Foundation wants a ‘jet-setter tax’ on frequent fliers of €100 per flight. Action on Smoking and Health wants a levy on tobacco companies. Greenpeace reckons it can raise at least £26 billion a year by levying a wealth tax on the ‘super-rich’. An assortment of think tanks and pressure groups linked to the Labour donor Derek Webb think they can squeeze another £3 billion out of the gambling industry by doubling gaming and betting duties. Meanwhile in Scotland, the neo-temperance lobby are demanding a ‘levy’ on alcohol retailers who, they claim, are getting rich off

Lionel Shriver

America’s last undecided voter

This is the last column I’ll file before the American presidential election, and I’ve dreaded writing it for months. (The next one, filed on election day itself, may prove impossible. Perhaps that’s when I’ll choose to share my recipe for parsley as a side vegetable.) Meanwhile, I’ve watched fellow ‘double haters’ squirm in print. There are two models for wrestling with this dilemma, one exemplified by Andrew Sullivan. The conservative commentator ‘came out’ in a September Substack newsletter – no, not in that dated sense: everyone knows he’s gay – in support of Kamala Harris, only to lavish the overwhelming majority of that column on what a ghastly candidate she

Kate Andrews

Trump makes America laugh again

‘Tradition holds that I’m supposed to tell a few self-deprecating jokes this evening,’ said Donald Trump in his speech at the Al Smith Dinner in New York on Friday night. ‘So here it goes.’ He paused. ‘Nope. I’ve got nothing… There’s nothing to say. I guess I just don’t see the point at taking shots at myself when other people have been shooting at me.’ The crowd roared. Many of the jokes were close to the bone: ‘We have someone in the White House who can barely talk, barely put together two coherent sentences, who seems to have mental faculties of a child. It’s a person that has nothing going,

Toby Young

A British First Amendment wouldn’t save free speech

Does the United Kingdom need a First Amendment? That’s a question I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, given the government’s unrelenting assault on free speech. If Britons enjoyed the same constitutional protections as Americans, it would have been more difficult to prosecute anyone over the summer for social media posts ‘intending to stir up racial hatred’, the crime for which Lucy Connolly, the wife of a Conservative councillor, received two-and-a-half years last week. The solution is not to pass a new law, but to repeal those laws that limit our freedom of expression But I remain sceptical. For one thing, there’s no mechanism in our constitution for creating a

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Budget leaks, prisoners released and Israel kills Hamas leader

Home Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was expected to freeze tax thresholds in the Budget on 30 October, to swell government income as more working people were brought into higher tax bands. Before Labour formed a government, she had said that the Conservatives, by freezing tax thresholds, were ‘picking the pockets of working people’. Weeks of speculation on the Budget were encouraged by leaks and by constant questioning of ministers about how Labour would keep to its manifesto undertaking not to raise taxes on ‘working people’ by increasing income tax, national insurance or VAT. The International Monetary Fund raised its growth forecast for the United Kingdom to 1.1