Politics

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

Wednesday

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The Sun backs Labour

Talk about an eleventh hour endorsement. This afternoon, one long-anticipated announcement dropped less than a day ahead of the general election. The Sun newspaper has now officially backed Sir Keir’s Starmer’s Labour party – just hours before polling stations are due to open. Tweeting out an image of its front page splash, Rupert Murdoch’s famed red top has officially given its seal of approval to Starmer’s army this afternoon in just five words: ‘Time for a new manager’. A play on the ongoing Euros tournament – and, perhaps, a nod to the England team’s own extraordinary last-minute turnaround at the weekend – the election special of Britain’s most-read tabloid depicts

Ian Acheson Ian Acheson

There is no quick fix for Britain’s overcrowded prisons

Imagine the scene. It’s Friday morning and the new Secretary of State for Justice, Shabana Mahmood, has just slipped into the big chair. Her predecessor has left her a note on the desk, ‘I’m afraid there is no cell space. Kind regards – and good luck! Alex.’ With prison capacity running at 99 per cent and new jails still on the far horizon, the first priority of the new Lord Chancellor is to stop the criminal justice system grinding to a halt. Keir Starmer, aware that the shelf life of ‘inherited mess’ will be brutally short, has gone on TV to prepare public opinion for the emergency early release of prisoners

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Do the Lib Dems have an intolerance problem?

Is the Liberal Democrat party really all that liberal? Mr S isn’t quite so sure – after speaking to an ex-Lib Dem staffer who is taking legal action against the party for ‘discrimination, harassment and victimisation’. The former caseworker, who is using the pseudonym Amelia Sparrow, was dismissed after three days of working for a Lib Dem MP for ‘dishonesty’ – yet believes it was down to pressure put on her boss after she didn’t keep schtum about her gender-critical views. How curious… Other staffers were less fussed about airing their views – reportedly labelling Baroness Hayter ‘transphobic’ and calling Joanna Cherry a ‘transphobe’. Having previously worked at a different party,

James Heale James Heale

Labour heading for landslide, say Tories

Labour is ‘highly likely’ to win a landslide majority tomorrow of historic proportions, according to Rishi Sunak’s own candidates. During this morning’s media round, Mel Stride was asked by the BBC if he agreed with Suella Braverman, who wrote in the Telegraph that a near wipe-out looks to be on the cards. ‘I have accepted where the polls are at the moment,’ replied the Work and Pensions Secretary. ‘That we are therefore tomorrow highly likely to be in a situation where [Labour has] the largest majority that any party has ever achieved,’ adding that he thinks it will be ‘much bigger than 1997’. But just a few hours later Sunak backtracked slightly

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JK Rowling slams David Lammy over women’s rights

The Harry Potter author strikes again. After blasting Sir Keir in a recent Times column, this time prominent women’s rights campaigner JK Rowling has hit out at Labour’s shadow foreign secretary David Lammy over past comments he made on gender issues – and she’s not pulling any punches. The renowned writer has reposted an old BBC Radio 5 Live interview with Lammy from a few years back, where the Labour man was being questioned on the trans debate. His interviewer Rachel Burden spoke of how women’s rights activists have been accused of being ‘dinosaurs’ and ‘hoarding rights, as though “rights” are some kind of pie with a finite end’. Stopping

Ross Clark Ross Clark

What Labour gets wrong about inheritance tax

What is the primary purpose of a tax: to raise revenue to fund public services or as a tool to help engineer society in a way which the government favours? It should disturb us that Darren Jones, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury who is likely to be holding the real job by Friday, seems to believe the latter. Addressing a public meeting in Bristol in March he hinted that Labour will seek to increase inheritance tax, telling his audience ‘you need to think of the inheritance tax as a way to redistribute money’. He added that a Starmer government will seek to use the tax to tackle ‘inter-generational

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Suella’s scathing attack on the Tories

If there’s one thing this election season hasn’t been short on, it’s surprises. Now, with less than 24 hours to go until polling stations open, former home secretary Suella Braverman has weighed in on her party’s impending implosion with an extraordinary OpEd in the Telegraph. Blasting her own side, Braverman sets about a blistering attack on the Tories, lamenting that ‘the writing [is] on the wall: it’s over and we need to prepare for the reality and frustration of opposition’. Crikey. In a scathing entry, the former cabinet minister and Rishi Sunak critic raged about her party’s decline in the polls. ‘Our vote is evaporating from both Left and Right,’

Jake Wallis Simons Jake Wallis Simons

Israel can no longer avoid a clash with its ultra-Orthodox citizens

In the imagination of the world, there could be nobody more Jewish than the ultra-Orthodox. With their black hats, sidecurls and frock coats, they are taken as the very epitome of the culture. That is why their radical fringes are appropriated by Israelophobes seeking a cover for their bigotry, as if suffering a cartoonish Jewish ally is a price worth paying to evade charges of antisemitism. Tens of thousands of young men devote their lives to taxpayer-funded study while their secular compatriots place their lives on the line This week, pictures of such apparently devout Jews clashing with Israeli police were seized upon as another opportunity to delegitimise the state

Laurie Wastell

Keir Starmer will be the perfect part-time PM

It is perhaps unsurprising that Sir Keir Starmer’s admission that he may soon be our first part-time prime minister has been seized on gleefully his opponents. ‘I haven’t finished at 6 p.m. ever’, Rishi Sunak has sniped, with the Tories accusing Starmer of wanting to work a ‘four-day week’. The Labour leader told Virgin Radio that as PM he would clock off at 6 p.m. on Fridays, ‘pretty well come what may’. Take any animating political issue and you find that Labour plans to remove it from democratic control So close to the end of his campaign, Starmer will no doubt be ruing giving Sunak the chance to attack him over personal laziness. But this

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Will there be an election upset on Thursday?

12 min listen

Tomorrow, voters will head to the polling booth to cast their vote in the 2024 general election. Will there be any surprises in store? So far, there has been little movement when it comes to the gap in vote share between Labour and the Tories. However, there’s still plenty of uncertainty across the parties as to what the exit poll will say at 10 p.m. on Thursday night. James Heale speaks to Katy Balls and James Kanagasooriam, chief research officer at Focaldata.

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Will Starmer parachute Harman into top equalities job?

It’s Election Day Eve and the likely victors are already planning for the future. Mr S wrote today about how Sir Keir’s top team have been trying to cosy up to Donald Trump – but it’s not just foreign policy they’ve been considering. Closer to home it transpires that Labour is considering appointing a new chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) – and it might ruffle just a few feathers… Starmer’s army want outgoing Labour veteran Harriet Harman to take on the top job at the equalities watchdog, the Times has revealed today. Currently the position is held by Baroness Falkner of Margravine. While her current contract

Lauren Atkins

The Tory candidate system is broken: I should know

A few weeks ago, if you’d asked me how I expected to spend my time on Thursday, I’d have answered without thinking: trying to win my seat. I was a Conservative candidate, and have poured a five figure sum of my own money into trying to get into parliament. But in the end, I didn’t get a seat, and it turns out that I’ve dodged a bullet. Even if I had won, I suspect I would have ended up in a much-reduced Conservative party that has totally lost its way, among MPs with little chance to effect change. Unlike many of those MPs, though, I don’t think it has to

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Macron has himself to thank for the rise of Jordan Bardella

The mood has taken a dark and intolerant turn in France since the National Rally’s (NR) victory in the first round of voting in the parliamentary elections last weekend. The left and Macron’s centrists have not accepted their reverse with good grace. On Sunday evening there were spontaneous protests in several cities, including Bordeaux, where police had to use tear gas to disperse an angry crowd of 200. In Cherbourg on Monday, a gang of Antifa assaulted Nicolas Conquer, a candidate for the wing of the centre-right Republicans that has allied with NR. He said later that it was another sign of the ‘normalisation of political violence by the extreme left’.

Steerpike Steerpike

Trump campaign lead blasts Labour meetings as ‘fake news’

Oh dear. As election campaigns draw to a close, Sir Keir Starmer has found himself under scrutiny at the eleventh hour. A Telegraph article about his ‘pragmatic’ approach to US relations that states Labour has been talking to Donald Trump’s team on a ‘daily basis’ has been slammed as ‘fake news’ – by none other than top GOP strategist and Trump’s own campaign manager himself. Oo er. The Telegraph piece states that ‘staff working for David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, have been in near-constant talks with Trump’s team for weeks, since he met the former president’s campaign manager Chris LaCivita in Washington in May’.  But Chris LaCivita took to

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Boris and Gove give the perfect Tory requiem

The high point of the Tory rally last night were the superb speeches from Michael Gove and Boris Johnson. ‘Is it not the height of insanity, if these polls are right, that we are about to give Labour a supermajority?’ said Johnson. After all, voters ‘sent Jeremy Corbyn and his then-disciple Keir Starmer into orbit’ in 2019 and then saw the UK develop the vaccine first and has now beaten the ‘post-Covid inflation’. Reform UK voters will end up with ‘exactly the opposite of what they want’ – the ‘Kremlin crawlers’ who ‘make excuses for Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine… don’t let the Putinistas deliver the Corbynistas’. Gove listed Tory

Catriona Stewart

Will the Tories manage to hold on to rural Scotland?

South of the border, a Labour majority is a foregone conclusion. Yet in Scotland, in almost all 57 seats, contests are predicted to be tight. ‘Knife-edge,’ is the phrase heard on repeat, most recently from First Minister John Swinney. While the Scottish central belt has drawn intense interest – given polls have consistently suggested there will be a Labour resurgence with even Glasgow looking to turn red – rural Scotland has received a little less attention. Sir Keir Starmer’s party is less a player, with key battlegrounds here a race between the SNP and the Tories. There is a long held Scottish narrative that boasts Scotland is more left-leaning than the

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Why the Tories can’t count on the Hong Kong vote

On a high street in suburban London, a curious message appeared recently. Written on a stand-up whiteboard in traditional Chinese, it read: ‘Thank you to Chris Patten, who fought for British residency for Hong Kongers. 4 July – please vote Conservative’. In the last few years, the leafy commuter town of Sutton, to the south of London, has seen thousands of new arrivals from Hong Kong since the government opened up a route to citizenship for those with British Nationals (Overseas) passports. In total, 140,000 have arrived in the UK since 2021, most of them given the right to vote. In a number of constituencies, they make up a significant

Charlotte Henry

The Liberal Democrats should be more liberal

The Lib Dems have had a much more enjoyable campaign than their rivals. Sir Ed Davey has been splishing and splashing all over the country. On Monday he jumped off a crane attached to a bungee cord while imploring people to ‘do something you’ve never done before: vote Liberal Democrat!’ A few days before he was at a theme park. We will see in the early hours of Friday morning if his stunts have paid off. We can see where the Lib Dems’ comfort zone is, and the party still retreats there when it can It hasn’t all been bungee jumping and rollercoasters. Alongside all that, the Lib Dems have remained

Jay Mens

How Trump and Starmer could form an unlikely alliance against Iran

The incoming Labour government has pledged a more robust Iran policy than the Conservative party has had over the last decade. The bar is low. Somehow, nothing new came of Iran’s women’s movement, support for Russia, assassination attempts on British soil, and attacks on all our regional partners – or the unprecedented cross-party consensus this all generated. Tehran may never have a better window for building a bomb Labour is apparently planning a pivot that includes proscribing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), cracking down on Iran’s domestic networks, and more robust deployments to the Middle East and Mediterranean. Whether Keir Starmer’s party will implement these plans is another question. The key difference is that

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Boris swoops in late to help out Tories

Boris Johnson has tonight made a surprise appearance at a ‘stop the supermajority’ Conservative rally to warn of the dangers of Keir Starmer. The former prime minister, who has spent most of the election campaign on holiday, came on stage in Central London to chants of ‘Boris! Boris’ and told the crowd of party activists that: ‘I’m really, absolutely clear that I was glad when Rishi asked me to help. Of course, I couldn’t say no, and I’m here for one reason and one reason only, which is the same reason as all of you, all of us are here. We’re here because we love our country.’ He warned that