Politics

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

Tuesday

13 Aug 2024

Is Tom Tugendhat the law and order leadership candidate?

There is still a fortnight to go until parliament returns – but one Tory contender clearly cannot wait to get back to Westminster. Tom Tugendhat this afternoon gave a speech on a theme and at a venue which suited him perfectly: an address at the RUSI military think tank on security. This speech was billed by Tugendhat’s supporters as a chance to show that he is a serious thinker. Yet while there was little here that was truly original, much of it will have had the Tory grassroots nodding along in agreement. ‘We need to end the culture of denial’, he declared, ‘the tendency to move hurriedly on from acts

Lisa Haseldine

Putin is panicking about Kursk

As Ukrainian forces continue to gain ground in the Russian region of Kursk, the humiliation for Vladimir Putin is growing. Faced with a mounting crisis, the Kremlin is responding in the only way it knows how: deflection and disinformation. A briefing by Russia’s foreign intelligence service (SVR) published this morning argued that ‘Zelensky is taking crazy steps that threaten to escalate far beyond Ukraine.’ The SVR claimed that there is growing unhappiness in the US with the Ukrainian president over the incursion and that they are looking to replace him with a more malleable candidate – supposedly one who will better represent the West’s interests at future peace negotiations. The intelligence

Steerpike

Nadine Dorries’s warning to Starmer about ‘slick’ Sue Gray

It’s not been the best start to the week for Sue Gray. Reports that there are divisions among Sir Keir Starmer’s top team have put the Prime Minister’s chief of staff under the spotlight. The Mail on Sunday splashed on claims made by Whitehall sources about Gray ‘thinking she runs the country’. An insider claimed that the former civil servant ensures even top mandarin Simon Case asks her permission to speak to the PM. Meanwhile tensions between Gray and Starmer’s adviser Morgan McSweeney are thought to be running high, and the reported friction between the pair has been dubbed the ‘battle between Gray’s girls’ gang and McSweeney’s boys’ brigade’. Good

Eliot Wilson

Labour have already made a massive mistake on defence

It is possible to have some sympathy for the Defence Secretary John Healey, despite the irritating self-serving mantra of Rachel Reeves that the Conservatives have left a £22 billion fiscal ‘black hole’. Healey, generally a straightforward and sensible politician, has inherited a department with huge cultural problems, and real financial issues. In March, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee revealed that the MoD’s Equipment Plan for the next decade had a deficit of £16.9 billion, though some have suggested it may be more like £20 billion. Spending is out of control, wasteful, and unrealistic. The most alarming aspect of this move is that it suggests a catastrophic misdiagnosis However, the way

Jawad Iqbal

Hong Kong’s justice system is an insult to democracy

Lord David Neuberger of Abbotsbury, the British lawyer who sits on Hong Kong’s highest court, needs to take a long hard look in the mirror. The territory’s court of final appeal has upheld verdicts and prison sentences against some of Hong Kong’s leading pro-democracy activists for taking part in a peaceful protest in 2019. The court ruling has been decried as ‘unjust’ by Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong before the territory was returned to Chinese rule in 1997. The court unanimously agreed to uphold the convictions of seven activists who participated in the the unauthorised 2019 protests, during which 1.7 million people took to the streets

Kristina Murkett

Can we really teach children to spot fake news?

As part of the ongoing review into the primary and secondary school curriculum, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has announced that children in England will be taught how to spot misinformation and extremist content online, so that students can arm themselves against ‘putrid conspiracy theories’. In the wake of weeks of rioting, with children as young as 12 and 13 now in court for their involvement, this announcement seems like a sensible idea, but it is not necessarily a straightforward one. You simply cannot embed critical thinking without establishing a firm foundation of factual understanding first Children and teenagers are excellent targets for fake news, but they are notoriously bad at spotting it. Research by

Steerpike

Now Scotland’s First Minister hits out at Musk

Elon Musk’s war on the SNP was on no one’s bingo card this year – but the animosity has ramped up after First Minister John Swinney waded into the row. The SNP leader is the latest UK politician to take a pop at Musk, blasting the tech billionaire for allowing Twitter to become a ‘platform of the fomenting of hate’, adding that the language used by the Twitter boss was ‘not only reprehensible, it’s baseless’. Ouch. Honest John has gone so far as to suggest that the US businessman hadn’t removed racist posts from the social media platform because he agreed with them. Scotland’s FM fumed: I think it tells

Ross Clark

Public sector pay rises are hurting the economy

Today’s labour market figures ought to bring good news: they show that growth on earnings has moderated to 5.4 per cent, the lowest level in two years. That should ease fears of inflation – it is growth in pay which has most concerned the Bank of England in recent months – and pave the way for further cuts in interest rates. The trouble is, though, that the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has undermined this by granting pay rises of 5.5 per cent to several million public sector workers – threatening to reignite wage growth again. The public sector has become an inflationary engine chugging away in one corner of the economy

Steerpike

Do the Sussexes have a staffing problem?

The Sussexes never seem to keep out of the news for too long, and this time they’re back in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons. It now transpires that Prince Harry and his wife Meghan have managed to lose yet another staff member – taking the total to an estimated 18 since their marriage in 2018, while around nine are thought to have ditched the ex-royals since 2020. Talk about a high turnover… The renegade royal took on a new chief of staff just three months ago, with Josh Kettler described as the best man to ‘guide’ the Prince ‘through his next phase’. But, as reported in the Daily

Monday

12 Aug 2024

Fraser Nelson

In defence of Douglas Murray

Even by its own standards, Twitter has been an asylum of late with a lynch mob going after our associate editor Douglas Murray. An interview he gave months ago has been selectively edited and republished to misrepresent him and, in effect, make out that he was encouraging riots. This is how Twitter works. People respond, others respond to the response and an inverted pyramid of piffle is built. I don’t follow Alastair Campbell, but it seems he has been telling me that unless I condemn Douglas then I myself would apparently ‘stand condemned’. By no less a moral authority, it seems, then Campbell himself. Andrew Neil has rightly pointed out

Steerpike

Cleverly lays down the law on dirty tricks

Blue is the colour, winning is the game. The Premier League returns this week and it seems that one Tory leadership contender is taking notes. After the 1922 committee ruled that any candidate found engaging in ‘blue on blue’ will face the public shame of a ‘yellow card’, James Cleverly has now gone a step further. Well, as a former Home Secretary, it is only right that he taking a stern approach to laying down the law…. Steerpike understands that Cleverly has ordered his campaign team that there will be no ‘yellow cards’ for blue on blue, only straight reds. Any Tory attacks coming out of camp Cleverly will be

Ian Acheson

Why the police have lost the public’s trust

The Home Secretary has admitted a thing that has long been known to those of us without close protection officers: that in many communities, people often feel that ‘crime has no consequences’. Her remarks this morning also acknowledged another pretty obvious fact: that the country has lost respect for the police. Yvette Cooper’s words are strikingly overdue. The government’s own crime data for last year tells a sorry tale: in England and Wales, the proportion of crimes resulting in a charge was 5.7 per cent. An increasing number of cases are closed with no suspect identified – nearly 40 per cent. Nearly three-quarters of burglary cases are closed without an offender being held

Jim Lawley

How does Spain solve a problem like Carles Puigdemont?

Last week saw dramatic events in Catalonia as Carles Puigdemont, wanted for almost seven years by Spanish justice for spearheading the region’s illegal declaration of independence in 2017, reappeared in the centre of Barcelona and delivered a rousing speech to some 3,500 of his adoring supporters. Then, just as suddenly, he disappeared – to the massive embarrassment of the several hundred policemen who were standing close by waiting to arrest him (though two of them, it seems, may have connived in the escape). Puigdemont says that he’s now back in Waterloo, south of Brussels, where he’s made his home since 2017: the Belgian authorities refuse to extradite him to Spain. In

Patrick O’Flynn

Starmer’s plan to ‘smash the gangs’ won’t work

We are approaching the fifth anniversary of British prime ministers promising to stem the tide of illegal migration across the English Channel. It was in late August 2019 that Boris Johnson did a piece to camera in which he warned potential new waves of illegal immigrants: ‘We will send you back.’ In the event, hardly anyone got sent back anywhere. Next up was Rishi Sunak, who hyped up the Rwanda removals plan that he had sought to block on value for money grounds when Johnson first proposed it. Sunak promised nothing less than to ‘stop the boats’ via the creation of the Rwanda deterrent. The boats were not stopped. In

Andrew Lilico

The problem with clamping down on ‘fake news’

In the aftermath of misinformation spread via tech platforms during the recent riots, there is talk of the government requiring tech platforms to remove ‘fake news’ – as well as introducing a duty to remove ‘legal but harmful’ content as part of a review of the Online Safety Act. ‘Fake news’ could presumably take a number of forms. There could be specific ‘crisis-triggering’ fake news, such as malicious false claims about the identity of a murderer (risking lynch mobs or riots), about bank runs (triggering financial crises), about vaccine side effects (deterring urgently-required vaccinations – such as during a pandemic) or about terror attacks (triggering panic). Then there could be broader,

James Heale

Labour goes to war with the Nimbys

13 min listen

Over the weekend we have had some news on Labour’s housing policy. The Times have splashed on the news that in order to meet their pledge to build 1.5 million houses by 2030, councils will be given the power to buy up green belt land. Will this actually get Britain building? Elsewhere, the Tory leadership race continues to trundle along with Kemi Badenoch giving her first interview. Is she the candidate that Labour fear most? James Heale speaks to Fraser Nelson and Liam Halligan. Produced by Oscar Edmondson.

Steerpike

Stop the War disgraces itself, again

Oh dear. It seems that the clowns at ‘Stop the War’ are it again. In the wake of Kyiv launching its surprise counter-offensive on Tuesday, Russia has been forced to evacuate parts of the Kursk and Belgorod regions in the face of Ukraine’s advancing troops. It is the first time that Russia has been invaded since the Second World War and comes more than two years after Putin launched his illegal invasion. Arguably not a moment too soon… So it was left then to ‘Stop the War’ – the most inappropriately-named movement since ‘Queers for Palestine’ – to disgrace themselves once again. One of the group’s useful idiots took to

Lisa Haseldine

Ukraine’s Kursk attack shows no signs of slowing down

It has been seven days since Ukraine began its attack on the Russian region of Kursk – with Ukrainian soldiers launching the first successful cross-border invasion of Russia since the second world war. Still, Ukraine is showing no signs yet of slowing down. This morning, local authorities in the neighbouring Russian region of Belgorod announced that the evacuation of civilians from the area had begun. This is the second Russian region to evacuate since Kyiv’s invasion began last Tuesday. It is not just Russian resources that are being spread more thinly Addressing the escalating situation in a video on his social media channels, Belgorod governor Vyacheslav Gladkov wrote: ‘This morning is an

Ross Clark

In defence of Labour’s ‘communist land grab’

We will find out in Rachel Reeves’ first budget on 30 October whether Labour really does intend to wage a war on wealth. It is all too easy to see the Chancellor playing to her gallery by imposing punitive taxes which are designed more to achieve social engineering than to raise revenue, and which stifle entrepreneurism and make the country poorer in the process. But there is one issue on which I am afraid I will not be joining the barricades. The government is reported to be considering capping the price which landowners in the green belt can receive when selling their land to feed Labour’s proposed house-building boom. Landowners, in

James Heale

Why aren’t the Lib Dems being taken more seriously?

In four weeks’ time, the Liberal Democrats will descend on Brighton for their annual conference. It’s likely to be the most enthusiastic such gathering in recent years, with the party celebrating the record 72 seats they won at last month’s election. The Lib Dems gained 61 more MPs than the paltry 11 they took in 2019, toppling four sitting cabinet ministers and winning virtually all their southern targets. It was the highest number of seats for the Liberals since H.H Asquith in 1923. Given all the dire pronouncements about the Lib Dems’ future after the 2019 election, should there not be more recognition of the turnaround? Yet such has been