Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.
35 min listen
In this episode of Americano, Simon Jenkins joins Freddy Gray to discuss his new book, A Short History of America. They explore how the United States became the world’s dominant power, the myths that shaped its identity, and why Britain has always struggled to understand its transatlantic cousin.
Yesterday His Majesty’s Prison Service released a sex offender by mistake. That would be bad enough on its own, but this particular sex offender was Hadush Kebatu, the Ethiopian migrant whose assault on a 14-year-old girl sparked weeks of protests in Epping. Kebatu was only sentenced last month, receiving a 12-month sentence for two sexual assaults which he committed just eight days after arriving in the UK. Kebatu had been held at HMP Chelmsford, and was due to be handed over to a Home Office operated immigration removal centre before his deportation from the country. Instead of doing this, the prison released him this morning. According to the Prison Service,
Now that the remaining live hostages have been freed, and the remains of those killed are slowly being located and returned to their families, we can think more on the details, the testimonies, and the traumas which we couldn’t fully comprehend as the war raged within our minds. Those former hostages now search for recovery and familiarity back home, as they emerge into a world vastly and for ever changed. The same is true for those of us who have never spent a day in a filthy, airless Palestinian tunnel. We didn’t experience the fear, the violence, the hunger or the torture they did. But our world, too, has shifted
Back-bench MPs are again discussing how to ‘strip’ Prince Andrew of his titles. The frenzy and impulse is public-facing and moral, and while motivations may differ, the method proposed is mostly constitutionally illiterate and impossible. Royal dignities are legal instruments. They are not decorative honours that parliament may remove by political motion. Each exists in law in a distinct way and must be addressed by the procedure appropriate to it. The United Kingdom has clear mechanisms for doing so, but they are formal and precise, which is exactly why they work. Prince Andrew holds three peerages: the Dukedom of York, the Earldom of Inverness and the Barony of Killyleagh. All
Is Jess Phillips okay? I can’t be the only one wondering. The safeguarding minister’s increasingly erratic, shirty performances at the despatch box would suggest she is crumbling under the scrutiny. Scrutiny that she and her government have brought entirely on themselves. This week, she lashed out at Tory and Reform MPs for daring to criticise Labour’s woeful handling of the grooming-gangs inquiry, which is disintegrating following the resignation of five victims from its liaison panel, some of whom accuse Labour of trying to engineer a ‘cover-up’. She dismissed this as ‘political pointscoring’ and told Lee Anderson to ‘question his own morality’. Despite Jess Phillips’s supposedly unimpeachable feminist credentials, her principles have
‘Parents shouldn’t be out of pocket by setting their kids up for school’. So boasted Downing Street, as the government touts its expansion of ‘free’ breakfast clubs. Except, as with everything the state provides, they’re not ‘free’. They are paid for by taxpayers. Call me a selfish, hard-hearted miser if you wish, but why should I pay for someone else’s child to eat breakfast? Isn’t that, perish the thought, the parent’s role? Call me a selfish, hard-hearted miser if you wish, but why should I pay for someone else’s child to eat breakfast? Isn’t that, perish the thought, the parent’s role? Not that we should be surprised by Labour’s latest
Last night, Dominic Cummings was interviewed at the O2 by the activist start-up, Looking for Growth. Cummings walked on stage in his trademark T-shirt and baseball cap and made a series of predictions about UK politics. A general election is unlikely before 2029, he said. ‘It won’t be earlier. The MPs will postpone the nightmare that’s coming to them.’ He warned that Keir Starmer’s time is limited. ‘If Labour keeps losing voters to the Greens, Starmer will be got rid of next year.’ He made the same prediction about the Tory leader. ‘Kemi’s going to be got rid of after the May elections.’ Cummings chuckled over the idea that, ‘the
Oh dear. NHS Fife has come under fire yet again after it emerged that the health board shared details of nurse Sandie Peggie with the Scottish government. Peggie was suspended in January 2024 after complaining about sharing a changing room with transgender medic Dr Beth Upton. The nurse then lodged a harassment complaint under the 2010 Equality Act – prompting a trans tribunal against NHS Fife – before earlier this year Dr Upton accused her of bullying and harassment. In July, Peggie was cleared of all gross misconduct allegations – and it has now emerged that NHS Fife briefings sent to SNP ministers contained unredacted details about the A&E nurse.
Who really won the by-election in Caerphilly? I know officially it was Plaid Cymru, and I wouldn’t want to diminish that funny little party’s glee. Congrats, etc. But the true victor was a far newer party. An angry party. A party of the fretful and anxious. A party so fresh it doesn’t even have a name yet. I say we call it Not Reform. Farage is now the behemoth of British politics, so much so that pretty much all elections now boil down to this question: Reform UK or Not Reform UK? I think it is pretty clear that it was this nameless entity that propelled Plaid Cymru’s Lindsay Whittle
35 min listen
In this episode of Americano, Freddy Gray speaks to Tara Reade — the former Senate aide who accused Joe Biden of sexual assault and now lives in Moscow after seeking political asylum. She discusses her allegations, why she left America, and how she views the war in Ukraine.
Quietly, day-by-day, the inquiry into the Southport killings is revealing how disastrous failures of the British state led to Axel Rudakubana murdering young girls in August 2024. Yesterday it was the turn of the killer’s former headteacher, Joanne Hodson, to give evidence. She first met Rudakubana in 2019 when he enrolled at the Acorns School in Lancashire, aged 13. The boy was sent there after taking a knife into his previous school. Acorns is a specialist school solely for children who have been permanently excluded from mainstream education. It’s also a good example of such a school, getting many of its pupils into work or further education after their time
16 min listen
On the face of it, the Caerphilly by-election result is a disaster, a drubbing and a humiliation for Keir Starmer’s Labour party. A once secure bastion of the Welsh Labour heartlands fell without a squeak from the governing party. Their vote collapsed to a miserable 11 per cent, while Plaid Cymru won with 47 per cent and Reform surged to second place with 36 per cent. The result suggests Labour is on course to surrender a boatload of seats at the 2029 general election, both to Reform and to whatever protest party is best suited to beat the government around the head – be it Plaid, the Greens, the Corbynites,
Never has a Welsh Senedd election seemed so interesting; the Caerphilly by election marks a true turning point in history. It is the moment when the duopoly that has ruled British politics for the past century finally crumbled. The question was never: could Labour hang on in the face of a challenge from an up-start party? Many by-elections have asked this. Rather, the question was this: which up-start party could benefit from Labour’s demise? Voters have shown that they are just as determined to do to the Labour party what they did to the Conservatives at the 2024 general election. This the Balkanisation of UK politics, and it is going
On the face of it, the Caerphilly by-election result is a disaster, a drubbing and a humiliation for Keir Starmer’s Labour party. A once secure bastion of the Welsh Labour heartlands fell without a squeak from the governing party. Their vote collapsed to a miserable 11 per cent, while Plaid Cymru won with 47 per cent and Reform surged to second place with 36 per cent. The result suggests Labour is on course to surrender a boatload of seats at the 2029 general election, both to Reform and to whatever protest party is best suited to beat the government around the head – be it Plaid, the Greens, the Corbynites,
Javier Milei never professed to be humble. But publishing a book about his presidency entitled Constructing the Miracle? Fronting a rock concert to launch it? Singing ‘I am the king’ to the crowd? He did all this on 7 October, and well, it was a step up. Perhaps Milei should be more humble. In recent weeks he borrowed some $20 billion from Donald Trump and the United States to prop up the remnants of his ‘miracle’. Despite being lauded internationally for much of his first two years as president for reining in inflation and delivering a fiscal surplus, the cracks Milei has been papering over have now become chasms. Milei
The Welsh nationalists have won almost half the vote in the Caerphilly by-election, storming to a victory in a seat that has voted Labour for more than a century. The party’s candidate Lindsay Whittle took 47.4 per cent of the vote, with Reform UK’s Llyr Powell taking 36 per cent and Labour’s Richard Tunnicliffe on a miserable 11 per cent. As expected, the Conservatives, Greens and Liberal Democrats all lost their deposits. Turnout was exceptionally high for a Senedd race: 50.4 per cent at a by-election, despite miserable conditions on polling day. Caerphilly is an ominous portent for the Welsh parliamentary elections next May. It is sometimes said that the
Well, well, well. TfL Commissioner Andy Lord has been accused of lying about graffiti on the underground, after he made comments following a clean-up operation by Looking For Growth (LFG). After footage of volunteers wiping graffiti from tube carriage walls was published, Lord claimed at a Greater London Assembly meeting earlier this year, without mentioning LFG specifically, that there was ‘evidence of people creating graffiti and then removing it’. He then went on to claim that this evidence was being ‘investigated by the relevant authorities’. Crikey! Only it transpires that TfL, er, don’t appear to have any evidence that people – whether LFG volunteers or otherwise – were vandalising public
This week I resigned from the Victims/Survivor Liaison Panel of the National Inquiry into Grooming Gangs. Victims have been fighting for an inquiry for a long time. Previous governments did not commit to a national inquiry. It’s not something Labour pushed for in opposition. As a topic, grooming gangs did not feature in any political party’s 2024 manifesto. The current government even managed to fob off a national inquiry in January and compromise on a series of local inquiries despite mounting public pressure. When it was finally announced, after undeniable supporting evidence from Baroness Casey in June, that survivors would be getting the national inquiry into the gangs that they
Have you ever wondered what a less competent Rachel Reeves would be like? If you’re a small business owner, the London Stock Exchange or Sir Keir Starmer, it’s presumably the sort of thing that keeps you up at night. Yet it isn’t just a thing of nightmares – this concept exists in the flesh in the form of Reeves’s sister Ellie. The younger Reeves makes the Chancellor look like Bismarck. The younger Reeves makes the Chancellor look like Bismarck She has recently been awarded the role of Solicitor General, which makes her sound like a very senior cottager. Although, frankly, having George Michael, John Gielgud or the bloke who played
A police officer has been sacked for gross misconduct. His offence? Racist remarks made while off duty in a pub – that traditional sanctuary of the sharp and unguarded tongue – captured by the Panorama programme filming undercover. Mr Neilson, dismissed over what were described as ‘highly racist and discriminatory remarks’ about different ethnic groups, protested that the undercover reporter had ‘breached his human rights’ and had been ‘egging me on’. He’d had eight or nine pints of Guinness – and wasn’t, he said, a ‘drinker’. His body-worn camera footage, he insisted, proved that on duty he treated everyone ‘with the utmost respect’. Racist remarks made while off duty in a pub
